The agricultural censuses taken in the United States in 1900 and
1910 are the last word in social statistics in this sphere of
the economy. It is the best material of any available in the
advanced countries, covering millions of farms and allowing
precise well-founded conclusions on the evolution of agriculture
under capitalism. One other particular reason why this material
can be used to study the laws of the evolution is that the
U.S.A. has the largest size, the greatest diversity of relationships, and the greatest range of nuances and forms of
capitalist agriculture.

We find here, on the one hand, a transition from the slave-holding—or what is in this case the same, from the
feudal—structure of agriculture to commercial and capitalist agriculture; and, on the other hand, capitalism
developing with unusual breadth and speed in the freest and most
advanced bourgeois country. We observe alongside of this
remarkably extensive colonization conducted on democratic
capitalist lines.

We find here areas which have long been settled, highly
industrialized, highly intensive, and similar to most of the
areas of civilized, old-capitalist Western Europe; as well as
areas of primitive, extensive cropping and stock-raising, like
some of the outlying areas of Russia or parts of Siberia. We
find large and small farms of the most diverse types: great
latifundia, plantations of the former slave-holding South, and
the homestead West, and the highly capitalist North of the
Atlantic seaboard; the small farms of the Negro share-croppers,
and the small capitalist farms producing milk and vegetables for
the market in the industrial North or fruits on the Pacific
coast; “wheat factories” employing hired labour and the
homesteads of “independent” small farmers, still full of naïve illusions about living by the “labour of their own
hands”.

This is a remarkable diversity of relationships, embracing both
past and future, Europe and Russia. The comparison with Russia
is especially instructive, by the way, in regard to the question
of the consequences of a possible transfer of all land to the
peasants without compensation, a measure that is progressive but
undoubtedly capitalist.

The U.S.A. offers the most convenient example for the study of
the general laws of capitalist development in agriculture and
the variety of forms these laws assume. A study of this kind
leads up to conclusions which may be summed up in the following
brief propositions.

In agriculture, as compared with industry, manual labour
predominates over machinery to an immeasurably greater extent. But the machine is steadily advancing, improving farming
techniques, extending the scale of operations and making them
more capitalist. In modern agriculture, machinery is used in the
capitalist way.

Hired labour is the chief sign and indicator of capitalism in
agriculture. The development of hired labour, like the growing
use of machinery, is evident in all parts of the country, and in every branch of agriculture. The growth in the
number of hired labourers outstrips the growth of the country’s
rural and total population. The growth in the number of farmers
lags behind that of the rural population. Class contradictions
are intensified and sharpened.

The displacement of small-scale by large-scale production in
agriculture is going forward. This is fully proved by a
comparison of the returns for 1900 and 1910 on total farm
property.

However, this displacement is understated, and the condition of
the small farmers is shown in bright colors because statisticians in America in 1910 confined themselves—as in
fact they did almost everywhere in Europe—to grouping the
farms by acreage. The wider and faster the intensification of
agriculture, the higher is the degree of this understatement and
the brighter the colors.

Capitalism grows not only by accelerating the development of
large-acreage farms in extensive areas, but also by creating in
the intensive areas enterprises on smaller tracts whose
operations are on a much larger scale and are much more
capitalist.

As a result, the concentration of production in the large
enterprises is actually much greater—and the displacement
of small-scale production actually goes farther and deeper—than is indicated by ordinary data about farms
grouped by acreage. The returns of the 1900 Census, compiled
with greater care and in greater detail, are more scientific and
leave no doubt at all on this score.

The expropriation of small-scale agriculture is advancing. In
the last few decades, the proportion of owners to the total
number of farmers declined steadily, while the growth in the
number of farmers lagged behind population increase. The number
of full owners is declining absolutely in the North, the most
important section, which yields the largest volume of farm
products and has neither any vestiges of slavery nor any
extensive homesteading. In the last decade, the proportion of
farmers reporting livestock in general decreased; in contrast to
the increased proportion of owners reporting dairy cattle there
was an even greater increase in the proportion of operators
without horses, especially among the small farmers.

On the whole, a comparison of corresponding data on industry and
agriculture for the same period shows that although the latter
is incomparably more backward, there is a remarkable similarity
in the laws of evolution, and that small-scale production is
being ousted-from both.