17.10.2001

Capital and the ruination of land

K Kautsky - The agrarian question - London 1988, pp 453 (two volumes)

Along-time member of the US Communist Party said to one of the editors of this volume: ?It took me 40 years to discover that Karl, and not Renegade, was Kautsky?s given first name.? I suppose that joke could equally well have come from the Trotskyist movement as the ?official communist? movement, and I guess the general view of Kautsky is rather similar in both.

In fact Kautsky was the foremost theoretician of pre-World War I German social democracy, and of the Second International itself. Of course many people have pointed to the theoretical and programmatic weaknesses in the Marxism of the Second International - and with considerable justification, of course.

Mechanical materialism in the sphere of philosophical generalisations, which, applied in practice, came up with conceptions that were basically reformist. The ?statification? of capital leads to socialism almost by an automatic process and there are a whole range of notions derived from that false conception. This kind of flawed Marxism has deservedly got a bad reputation.

However, it would be wrong to consider that Kautsky?s works and those of the Second International theoreticians in general are simply a barren desert, unworthy of study. Reading this book, nothing could be further from the truth. There is a lot worth studying, a wealth of material from Kautsky which would really repay critical study today. But it must be a critical study.

We have the advantages of hindsight, of knowing what subsequently happened historically. But we should not assume, in studying these thinkers, that the last word in Marxist criticism of them has already been elaborated. There is much that is positive still to extract.

Reviewing this work in 1899 immediately after its publication, Lenin wrote: ?Kautsky?s book is the most important event in present-day economic literature since the third volume of Capital. Until now Marxism has lacked a systematic study of capitalism and agriculture. Kautsky has filled this gap.? So Lenin regarded this work as well worth studying and I will attempt to cover key aspects of it.

Regarding the contemporary relevance of The agrarian question, there were several parts which stuck a chord with me. For instance, the recent crisis of British farming has brought this issue somewhat to the fore: the question of agriculture, the question of the rural petty bourgeoisie and even the rural bourgeoisie, and of course the rural working classes, is something we must address in the current period.

Kautsky?s study had a single starting point. At the time he was writing it was a well known fact, and a very recent fact, that peasant and rural populations had more than once been mobilised for reactionary purposes. Which rings some bells considering the Countryside Alliance today. It was the Russian and other peasant armies that crushed the revolutions in central Europe in 1848. And of course, in the great French revolution, peasants were successfully mobilised on the side of counterrevolution in various provinces. Kautsky realised that it was necessary to understand the material circumstances that gave rise to this, with the hope of avoiding such occurrences in the future.

He analysed in some depth the similarities, and indeed the differences, between the growth of capitalist industry in general, particularly in the towns on the one hand, and on the other hand the growth of capitalist development in agriculture, his aim being to draw attention to the essential factors behind their respective forms. In so doing, he explores the relationship between the large-scale estates and the small-scale and ?dwarf? land holdings - and the ?semi-proletariat?. He contrasts this to the class antagonism between workers and the bosses in the towns, between the city bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Kautsky analyses how it is that economic pressures, and the growth of capitalism and commodity production, actually force people who own small tracts of land into grotesque overwork, and effectively self-exploitation, on a level which would be considered excessive by the urban working class. Enormously long working days on their own piece of land, supplemented by work on someone else?s to make ends meet. Kautsky goes into some considerable depth about how this mechanism works, and how it impoverishes and turns the peasant into a ?starveling? - his word - as an integral part of the growth of capitalism in agriculture.

In relation to this, Kautsky discusses the rather misleading view held in some circles that with the growth of capitalism the disappearance of small-scale farms and their replacement by large-scale capitalist farming is inevitable. Kautsky?s analysis is subtle and complex. The availability of labour-power in the countryside is denuded by the flight of workers from countryside to towns - which generally, as capitalism grew up in the cities, sucked in the most skilled and energetic workers, who obviously had every incentive to leave, to find a better life for themselves.

Kautsky explains that the role of small farms in capitalist agriculture - the role that emerges through competition, etc - is not really that of competitors to the large farms at all, but rather that of supplying them with labour-power. They act as a means of controlling labour. It often happens that small farmers own holdings, but have to work additionally for large farms in order to survive.

This gives rise to the peculiar situation whereby, when the number of small farms actually falls, when there is a danger that small farms will be driven out of existence, the bourgeois parties tend to intervene to shore up their position, supposedly at the expense of the large capitalist farms. The preservation of small property is potrayed by the capitalist elements in the countryside as preserving an idyll of tradition and social stability. Basically, though, it is not done out of benevolence or sentiment to defend the lot of the small farmer; it is a means of preventing the emergence of a fully-fledged rural proletariat, for the simple reason that free proletarians tend to leave the countryside. So what they are actually doing when going on about rural values and mores is safeguarding the supply of labour, semi-proletarian labour in particular. They are acting to moderate the effects of large farming, but at the same time, in the end, protecting its interests by preserving this semi-proletarian workforce, which, if it were to abandon the countryside, would destroy the prospects for capitalist farming.

So the relationship between large and small farms is quite a complicated question that demands concrete study not stock, preset answers.

Kautsky expands considerably on Marx?s observations about the problems caused by the gulf between town and country under capitalism. For example, the industrialisation of agriculture under capitalism tends to create forms of breeding that are more productive and profitable than ever before. But this also creates the conditions for a massive increase in instances of pests and epidemics among animals. Denaturised breeding, as Kautsky points out, tends to counteract natural immunity and resistance to pests and disease, and create new varieties of animals and plants whose resistance was low. There are very striking parallels here with recent phenomena like BSE and the still ongoing foot and mouth epidemic.

The refusal of the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, along with the bulk of the farming community itself, to countenance anti-foot and mouth vaccination highlights the inherent contradiction in capitalist agriculture. Vaccination is the obvious way to stem foot and mouth disease. But since such a step would inevitably have had a drastic effect on the marketability of British livestock it will not be done. From a scientific point of view, the use of vaccination to restore immunity was the self-evident solution, but perceptions of market forces and the inherent irrationality of the system meant otherwise.

Kautsky points out that the root cause of this madness is the separation of town and country life, the creation of a situation where farming is adapted to produce for a massive but alien market, where more and more of the population tend to live, and which is completely separated in terms of culture and increasingly distant from where they get their food intake. It is this complete separation that gives rise to the need for the most denatured varieties and processes as a substitute for accessibility.

Kautsky, following on from Marx, also points out that capitalism creates a situation where the waste products of the cities play very little role in agriculture. There is no metabolic exchange between what people eat and what they flush away. This fact reinforces the need for more and more artificial products in agriculture, more and more artificial means of production to drive the mass production necessary for the mass urban markets. As a result there is a vicious circle: more and more is produced on this separated basis, which in turn expands the role of the cities, and the separation becomes more and more pronounced.

Kautsky has many other insights. He embarks on an analysis of the different varieties of land tenure, and the question of inheritance of land, which itself is quite revealing. He analyses forms of rural economy, and the evolution of these forms in a number of countries, including England, Germany, Russia, France and the United States, in quite some considerable detail. In drawing together the strands, he notes that the conflict between private ownership and the productive forces that grows up under capitalism is much more immediate, and therefore much more destructive, in agriculture than in industry. The reason he gives for this is the unique fixed and immovable character of land, compared with other forms of property under capitalism.

Land is a natural monopoly, and its private ownership under capitalism gives rise to what Marx analysed in the third volume of Capital: the phenomenon of land rent, of which there are two different kinds - differential and absolute. Differential rent can produce a profit above the average, because of the simple fact that some land is more fertile than other land, and the owner of the more productive holdings can therefore produce much more cheaply than those who own poorer land. Yet they can nevertheless sell their goods at the average going rate, despite the fact that their costs are lower. From the resultant excess profit differential rent can be extracted.

But there is also get another form of surplus profit in agriculture: absolute rent. Eg, land is to lie fallow until the price of food can be forced up enough to be able to make a surplus profit. Then this land can be pushed into production, food sold at the increased price and the difference pocketed. That is another form of surplus profit that it is available to landowners.

The point is that none of this surplus profit results from increased valorisation or an increase in value. What these rents involve is redistributing existing surplus value. The landowning classes are actually using their monopoly position to redistribute surplus value from other sections of the ruling class, from those who invest in productive industry or whatever. This has the potential to produce major tensions within capital for that reason and that is one aspect of how private property in land produces a detrimental effect for capital as a whole.

Kautsky goes on to explore the effect of inheritance. As said, land is a natural monopoly; it is something that cannot be reproduced or moved. Unlike industrial enterprises, it cannot be dismantled and reassembled somewhere else. Therefore if a landed family has more than one child due to inherit they have a problem. They can either disinherit all but the eldest child, or they can divide the land equally between them. Kautsky describes what tended to happen when this situation came about: in order to preserve the unity of the large estates the younger children would be compensated for being disinherited by being given an elevated salaried position in some government department.

Obviously only the wealthy benefited from this. Inheritance was for the owners of small farms a source of ruin. Either they had to disinherit the younger children of the family or split the farms into ever smaller and smaller parcels. Kautsky points out that this is one of the causes of the impoverishment of the rural population. Private property in land leads to fragmentation, which has an absurdly irrational effect on agriculture.

Logically, the contradiction between private property and agricultural production points to the nationalisation of land. The obvious solution, for the ruling class as well as for the semi-proletarians in the countryside, is to take land entirely out of the sphere of private property, thus effectively abolishing ground rent, and with it all the irrational consequences. That would be in the interests of a ?rational? capitalism. But the problem is obvious. Nationalisation is a massive negation of private property. So in practice the nationalisation of land, however rational, is shunned, because it sets an enormously dangerous precedent for the bourgeoisie.

In pointing this out, Kautsky develops further Marx?s analysis of land rents, which is present in volume three of Capital. He shows in some considerable detail how these irrationalities are examples of the forms of property coming into conflict with the growth of the forces of production.

Kautsky looks at the evolution of agriculture in various countries, including tenant farming in England. In the late 19th century overseas competition was driving sectors of agriculture to the wall in many European countries. But one of the unique aspects of competition from the United States was the peculiar nature of its land ownership. You could argue that land was stolen from the native population, but in terms of bourgeois land ownership basically for a very long period there was none. As a result farmers did not see any necessity to preserve the soil through the use of fertilisers. When the soil was exhausted they could just move on.

As a result American costs were significantly lower than anywhere in Europe. The book carries quite an interesting elaboration of what happened as American land ownership became normalised - that is, as the continent became occupied by people who laid a permanent claim to the land. As virgin lands dried up the peculiar advantages of US agriculture gave way to the normalised ones of scale.

The final third of the book consists of a programmatic section, which is subtitled ?Does social democracy need an agrarian programme?? Kautsky?s answer is yes, obviously it does. He raises a whole series of demands for the protection of the rural proletariat in particular. Things like freedom of combination and movement; freedom to migrate to the towns; the end of what were called servant ordinances, which tied individual peasants to individual masters, and imposed on them duties to perform various labour services in the master?s household. He proposed strict regulation of child labour, which was a major problem in the countryside, and he related it to free compulsory schooling. There are demands like low-cost housing provided by the state, and state regulation of tenancy agreements on the land. These are questions that are highly relevant for today.

In addition Kautsky advocates a range of other measures, including opposition to all remaining feudal privileges such as hunting, and the consolidation of scattered holdings. What that means is where people owned microholdings cut off from one another these should be brought together in a rational way through the exchange of land, providing that there were measures to prevent the process of consolidation being used as an excuse for the appropriation of smallholders. Kautsky talks about cooperatives as not being socialist in any sense: the cooperatives that had been growing up in the countryside at that point were part of the transition to capitalism.

He advocates the nationalisation of forests and water, and various forms of state assistance, including insurance against pests, disease, floods and all the various calamities that have affected farmers and still do. But he was not in favour of state subsidies - that is something he was quite emphatic about. While he was for the state playing a role in facilitating more rational forms of agriculture, he was against what amounted to the working class subsidising peasant capitalism - that would be regressive.

Kautsky?s emphasis was on opposing subsidies that would tend to preserve forms of property that were archaic. The question of how subsidies would work under a more rational - ie, a socialist - system would be rather different. He was against propping up small property and even larger forms that were in the end historically anachronistic. This is a question that can ultimately only be elaborated through practice, but certainly continual subsidies are clearly distinct from the situation where it is essential to bale people out in the face of some kind of natural disaster.

The book contains a section on the protection of the rural population, which contains some formulations which I think are rather dubious, such as ?the transformation of the police state into a cultural state?. It is very unclear what is meant by that. It comes across as almost an anticipation of some of the reformist conceptions that Kautsky advocated later. On the other hand he raises a series of democratic demands like the democratic self-administration of state, province and district, which is fairly elementary. ?Against militarism, for a people?s militia?: Kautsky is effectively advocating what we put forward in our minimum programme. The free administration of justice, abolition of indirect taxes, progressive taxation, poor relief, nationalisation of private monopolies and cartels, and of schools and roads. This too has many of the aspects of our minimum programme.

Just to cap off the programmatic section, there is ?The social revolution and the expropriation of landowners?, which concludes the whole work. It is quite interesting in the light of subsequent historical events - I am not talking about Kautsky?s own evolution, but about the Soviet Union. He almost seems to anticipate the debates caused by Stalin?s actions, about the relationship between the state and the peasantry.

He states emphatically that the transition from capitalism to socialism does not involve expropriating the landholding peasants. He insists that is not what socialists are advocating. That small peasants not only have nothing to fear from socialism. They will be the beneficiaries of it - in some ways more so than sections of the proletariat itself. As I have said, market conditions had created a smallholding class that was even more downtrodden. Nationalisation of mortgage companies, etc, would mean that smallholders and semi-proletarians could deal with the state, and not with these private bloodsuckers.

Such things as changing money payments into payment in kind would bring massive relief to smallholders, and the state would found cooperatives with the large-scale provision of modern equipment. This would provide a massive practical incentive for the peasants to participate in them. In this context any idea of the expropriation of the peasantry is, in Kautsky?s words, ?inconceivable?. In fact he makes the point that even under socialism some areas and branches of production in agriculture may still be better served by small private enterprise. In any case state loans at very low interest rates would be available to facilitate rational forms of cultivation.

I want to end with a quote from Kautsky that sums up the benefits of socialism for the peasantry. He says: ?In present-day society a peasant is constantly faced with the dilemma either of resisting progress, which means general decline, or of being swept away by the expropriating force of capital. Only socialism offers the possibility of participating in social progress without falling victim to expropriation. Socialism will not only not mean expropriation, but also offers the most certain protection from the threat of expropriation presently constantly hanging over the peasant.?

The supersession of small, petty bourgeois forms of private property in a voluntary and rational way is something that we, as Marxists, are in favour of, and such an approach was implicit in what Kautsky advocated.

Ian Donovan