(Friedrich Engels)
Engels wrote this piece in 1894 as a perspective paper for the French and German Social Democratic Parties that were contemplating addressing the plight of small peasants in their election manifesto, and to forge an alliance of workers and peasants. It was a rebuttal of various French Socialists like Vollmar and the agrarian program adopted in Marseilles in 1892 and supplemented in Nantes in 1894 (Frankfurt Congress of German Social-Democrats). Engels clearly takes a view that small peasants (or for that matter even big peasants), cannot survive the intense competitive pressures of capitalism that pushes them into indebtedness and pauperization. He suggested that the Party should organize them into cooperatives and eventually convince them for nationalization of their landed property but never collectivize the property forcefully.
The bourgeois and reactionary parties greatly wonder why everywhere among Socialists the peasant question has now suddenly been placed upon the order of the day. What they should be wondering at, by rights, is that this has not been done long ago. From Ireland to Sicily, from Andalusia to Russia, and Bulgaria, the peasant is a very essential factor of the population, production and political power. Only two regions of Western Europe form an exception. In Great Britain proper, big, landed estates and large-scale agriculture have totally displaced the self-supporting peasant; in Prussia east of the Elbe, the same process has been going on for centuries; here, too, the peasant is being increasingly “turned out”, or at least economically and politically forced into the background.
The reclusive and disengaged peasant life with respect to national politics makes way for various kinds of parliamentary corruption from Roman times to present day Paris or Russian despotic rule. Since the rise of the working-class movement in Western Europe, the bourgeois succeeded in creating suspicion of the socialist workers in the minds of the peasants. Socialists are blamed as people who want to “divide up”, as lazy, greedy, city dwellers who have an eye on the property of the peasants. The hazy socialist aspirations of February 1848 Paris Commune were rapidly disposed of by the reactionary ballots of the French peasantry. The peasant, who wanted peace of mind, lost in the legacy of Napoleon, bandied as the emperor of the peasants, and created the Second Empire. We all know what this one false step of the peasants cost the people of France; it is still suffering from its aftermath.
But much has changed since then. The development of the capitalist form of production has cut the life-strings of small production in agriculture; small production is irretrievably going to rack and ruin. Competitors in North and South America and in India have swamped the European market with their cheap grain, so cheap that no domestic producer can compete with it. The big landowners and small peasants alike can see ruin staring them in the face. And since they are both owners of land and country folk, the big landowners assume the role of champions of the interests of the small peasants, and the small peasants by and large accept them as such.
Meanwhile, a powerful socialist workers’ party has sprung up and developed in the West, which is able to push obscure social and political presentiments to the background and the broader and deeper scope of a program to meet all scientific requirements of society. The presence of Social Democratic parties is steadily growing in the German, French, and Belgian parliaments. The conquest of political power that began in towns should go to the country. This party has capacity to have a clear insight into the interconnections between economic causes and political effects and long ago perceived the big landowner –the wolf in the sheep’s clothing, who try to champion the peasant cause. Hope this party may not leave the doomed peasant in the hands of his false protectors who shall turn this passive member into an active opponent of the industrial worker. This brings us right into the thick of the peasant question.
The rural population in which we can address ourselves consists of quite different parts, which vary greatly with the various regions. In the west of Germany, as in France and Belgium, there prevails the small-scale cultivation of small-holding peasants, the majority of whom own and the minority of whom rent their parcels of land. In the northwest — in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein –we have a preponderance of big and middle peasants who cannot do without male and female farm servants and even day labourers. The same is true of part of Bavaria. In Prussia east of the Elbe, and in Mecklenburg, we have the regions of big landed estates and large-scale cultivation with hinds, cotters, and day laborers, and in between small and middle peasants in relatively unimportant and steadily decreasing proportion. In central Germany, all of these forms of production and ownership are found mixed in various proportions, depending upon the locality, without the decided prevalence of any particular form over a large area.
Besides, there are localities varying in extent where the arable land owned or rented is insufficient to provide for the subsistence of the family, but can serve only as the basis for operating a domestic industry and enabling the latter to pay the otherwise incomprehensibly low wages that ensure the steady sale of its products despite all foreign competition. Which of these subdivisions of the rural population can be won over by the Social-Democratic party?
By small peasant we mean here the owners or tenant — particularly the former — of a patch of land no bigger, as a rule, than he and his family can till, and no smaller than can sustain the family. This small peasant, just like the small handicraftsman, is therefore a toiler who differs from the modern proletarian in that he still possesses his instruments of labor; hence, a survival of a past mode of production. There is a threefold difference between him and his ancestor, the serf, bondman, or, quite exceptionally, the free peasant liable to rent and feudal services. First, in that the French Revolution freed him from feudal services and dues that he owed to the landlord and, in the majority of cases, at least on the left bank of the Rhine, assigned his peasant farm to him as his own free property.
Secondly, in the post-revolution France, the dismantling of Mark community system1 not only granted the freedom for the small peasant but at the same time cut loose from the patronage benefits. This deprives the small peasant the possibility of feeding his draft animals without buying fodder. The number of peasants unable to keep draft animals of their own is steadily increasing. Economically, however, the loss of the emoluments derived from the Mark by far outweighs the benefits accruing from the abolition of feudal services.
Thirdly, the peasant of today has lost half of his former productive activity. Formerly, he and his family produced, from raw material he had made himself, the greater part of the industrial products that he needed; the rest of what he required was supplied by village neighbors who plied a trade in addition to farming and were paid mostly in articles of exchange or in reciprocal services. The family, and still more the village, was self-sufficient, produced almost everything it needed. It was natural economy almost unalloyed; almost no money was necessary. Capitalist production put an end to this by its money economy and large-scale industry. But if the Mark emoluments represented one of the basic conditions of his existence, his industrial side line was another. And thus the peasant sinks ever lower. Taxes, crop failures, divisions of inheritance and litigations drive one peasant after another into the arms of the usurer; the indebtedness becomes more and more general and steadily increases in amount in each case — in brief, our small peasant, like every other survival of a past mode of production, is hopelessly doomed. He is a future proletarian.
As such, he needs to listen to the socialist program. But he is prevented from doing so by the culture of petty bourgeois prejudice. With no real friends, it is even more difficult for him to defend his endangered patch of land, the more desperately he clings to it the more he regards the Social-Democrats, who speak of transferring landed property to the whole of society, as just as dangerous a foe as the usurer and lawyer. How can Social-Democracy overcome this prejudice? What can it offer to the doomed small peasant without becoming untrue to itself? Here we find a practical point of support in the agrarian programme of the French Socialists of the Marxian trend, a programme which is the more noteworthy as it comes from the classical land of small-peasant economy.
The Marseilles Congress of 1892 adopted the first agrarian programme of the Party. It demands on behalf of property-less rural workers (that is to say, day laborers and hinds): minimum wages fixed by trade unions and community councils; rural trade courts consisting half of workers; prohibition of the sale of common lands; and the leasing of public domain lands to communities which are to rent all this land, whether owned by them or rented, to associations of propertyless families of farm laborers for common cultivation, on conditions that the employment of wage-workers be prohibited and that the communities exercise control; old-age and invalid pensions, to be defrayed by means of a special tax on big landed estates.
For the small peasants, with special consideration for tenant farmers, purchase of machinery by the community to be leased at cost price to the peasants; the formation of peasant co-operatives for the purchase of manure, drain-pipes, seed, etc., and for the sale of the produce; abolition of the real estate transfer tax if the value involved does not exceed 5,000 francs; arbitration commissions of the Irish pattern to reduce exorbitant rentals and compensate quitting tenant farmers and sharecroppers (me’tayers) for appreciation of the land due to them; repeal of article 2102 of the Civil Code which allows a landlord to on the distraint crop, and the abolition of the right of creditors to levy on growing crops; exemption from levy and distraint of a definite amount of farm implements and of the crop, seed, manure, draft animals, in short, whatever is indispensable to the peasant for carrying on his business; revision of the general cadastre, which has long been out of date, and until such time a local revision in each community; lastly, free instruction in farming, and agricultural experimental stations.
Part of the proposed program has already been realised elsewhere. The tenants’ arbitration courts follow the Irish prototype by express mention. Peasant co-operatives already exist in the Rhine provinces. The revision of the cadaster (land record system) has been a constant pious wish of all liberals, and even bureaucrats, throughout Western Europe.
The Party did such a good business with this program among the peasants in the most diverse parts of France. It was felt, however, that this would be treading on dangerous ground. How was the peasant to be helped –as a future proletarian or a present propertied peasant ? To decide we need certain conceptual clarity, particularly when capitalist system inevitably destroying its mode of production. Let us now examine more closely the demands made in the preamble adopted by the Nantes Congress in September of this year.
The preamble begins as follows:
– Producers can be free only in so far as they are in possession of the means of production;
– While industry attained a degree of capitalist centralization, that they can be restored to the actual producers in the collective social form; but in the sphere of agriculture –at least in present-day France, for lack of such centralization, land is still in the hands of the individual possession;
– In this state of affairs characterized by small-holding ownership is irretrievably doomed, it is not for socialism to hasten its doom, as its task does not consist in separating property from labor. But, on the contrary, lies in uniting both of these factors of production by placing them in the same hands; the separation would produce servitude and poverty of the workers when reduced to proletarians;
– The duty of socialism is to put the agricultural proletarians again in possession –collective or social in form, not merely in the maintenance of present small patches of land as against the fisk, the usurer, and the encroachments of the newly-arisen big landowners;
– It is expedient to extend this protection also to tenants or sharecroppers (me’tayers) who may exploit day laborers, but are compelled to do so to certain extent because of the exploitation to which they themselves are subjected;
– Therefore the Workers’ Party — which unlike the anarchists, does not count on an increase and spread of poverty for the transformation of the social order but expects labor and society in general to be emancipated only by the organisation and concerted efforts of the workers of both country and town, by their taking possession of the government and legislation. It has to adopt an agrarian program to bring together all the elements of rural production and utilise the national soil, to wage an identical struggle against the feudality of landownership.
Now, let’s examine closely the premises of these goals.
The common possession of the means of production should the sole principal goal for industry as well as agriculture. According to the program, individual possession never and nowhere obtained generally for all producers; for that very reason, and because industrial progress removes it anyhow, socialism is not interested in maintaining but rather in removing it; because where it exists and in so far as it exists it makes common possession impossible.
Mere possession of the means of production by the individuals does not grant any real freedom under capitalist market mechanism. Handicraft has already been ruined in the cities; in metropolises like London. It has already been superseded by large-scale industry, by organizing labour in sweatshops and miserable poor. The self-supporting small peasant is neither in the safe possession of his tiny patch of land, nor is he free. He, as well as his house, his farmstead, and his new fields, belong to the usurer; his livelihood is more uncertain than that of the proletarian, who at least does have tranquil days now and then, which is never the case with the eternally tortured debt slave. Strike out Article 2102 of the Civil Code, provide by law that a definite amount of a peasant’s farm implements, cattle, etc., shall be exempt from levy and tax; yet you cannot ensure him against a distress sale of his cattle “voluntarily”, in which he must sign himself away, body and soul, to the usurer and be glad to get a reprieve. Your attempt to protect the small peasant in his property does not protect his liberty but only the particular form of his servitude; it prolongs a situation in which he can neither live nor die. It is, therefore, entirely out of place here to cite the first paragraph of your program as authority for your contention.
The preamble notes that in present-day France, land –the means of production, largely still is in the hands of small and individual producers. However, the task of socialism is not to separate property from labor, for the heck of it, but, on the contrary, is to unite the two by placing them in the same hands. Its task is to transfer the means of production to the producers as their common possession. If we lose sight of this, the above statement becomes directly misleading in that it implies that it is the mission of socialism to convert the present sham property of the small peasant in his fields into real property — that is to say, to convert the small tenant into an owner and the indebted owner into a debtless owner. Undoubtedly, socialism is interested to see that the false semblance of peasant property should disappear, but not in this manner.
At any rate, we have now got so far that the preamble can straightforwardly declare it to be the duty of socialism, indeed, its imperative duty, “to maintain the peasants themselves tilling their patches of land in possession of the same as against the fisk, the usurer and the encroachments of the newly-arisen big landowners.”
The preamble thus imposes upon socialism the imperative duty to carry out something which it had declared to be impossible in the preceding paragraph. It charges it to “maintain” the small-holding ownership of the peasants although it itself states that this form of ownership is “irretrievably doomed”. What are the fisk, the usurer, and the newly-arisen big landowners if not the instruments by means of which capitalist production brings about this inevitable doom? What means “socialism” is to employ to protect the peasant against this trinity, we shall see below.
It is likewise “expedient to extend this protection also to the producers who, as tenants or sharecroppers (Metayers), cultivate the land owned by others and who, if they exploit day laborers, are to a certain extent compelled to do so because of the exploitation to which they themselves are subjected”.
Here, we are entering upon ground that is passing strange. Socialism is particularly opposed to the exploitation of wage labor. And here it is declared to be the imperative duty of socialism to protect the French tenants when they “exploit day laborers”, as the text literally states! And that because they are compelled to do so to by a certain “the exploitation to which they themselves are subjected”!
How easy and pleasant it is to keep on coasting once you are on the toboggan slide! When now the big and middle peasants of Germany come to ask the French Socialists to intercede with the German Party Executive to get the German Social-Democratic Party to protect them in the exploitation of their male and female farm servants, citing in support of the contention the “exploitation to which they themselves are subjected” by usurers, tax collectors, grain speculators and cattle dealers, what will they answer? What guarantee have they that our agrarian big landlords will not send them Count Kanitz (as he also submitted a proposal like theirs, providing for a state monopoly of grain importation) and likewise ask for socialist protection of their exploitation of the rural workers, citing in support “the exploitation to which they themselves are subjected” by stock-jobbers, money lender, and grain speculators?
Let us say here, at the outset, that the intentions of our French friends are not as bad as one would suppose. They may have to address even a special case like in Northern France, just as in our sugar-beet districts, land is leased to the peasants subject to the obligation to cultivate beets, on conditions which are extremely onerous. They must deliver the beets to a state factory at a price fixed by it, must buy definite seed, use a fixed quantity of prescribed fertilizer, and on delivery are badly cheated into the bargain. We know all about this in Germany, as well. But if this sort of peasant is to be taken under one’s wing, this must be said openly and expressly. If the program is to cover every case, it may lose the fundamental principle of socialism.
The preamble also talks of ‘bringing together all elements of rural production to wage a struggle against the common enemy, i.e.,‘the feudal landowner’.But I flatly deny that the socialist workers’ party of any country is charged with the task of taking into its fold, in addition to the rural proletarians and the small peasants, also the idle and big peasants and perhaps even the tenants of the big estates, the capitalist cattle breeders and other capitalist exploiters of the national soil. To all of them, the feudality of landownership may appear to be a common foe. On certain questions, we may make common cause with them and be able to fight side by side with them for definite aims. We can use in our Party individuals from every class of society, but have no use whatever for any groups representing capitalist, middle-bourgeois, or middle-peasant interests.
The program has several demands which are all not in the interests of small peasants. A single progressive tax over and above 3,000 francs, abolished of land tax for small peasant, subsidized farming machinery, lowering of transport charges, or subsidizing fertilizers are all fine, even if some of them they benefit mostly large farmers. But such demands gives false comfort about small peasantry. In brief, after the tremendous theoretical effort exhibited in the preamble, the practical proposals of the new agrarian programme are even more unrevealing as to the way in which the French Workers’ Party expects to be able to maintain the small peasants in possession of their small holdings, which, on its own territory, are irretrievably doomed.
In one point our French comrades are absolutely right: No lasting revolutionary transformation is possible in France against the will of the small peasant. Only, it seems to me, they have not got the right leverage if they mean to bring the peasant under their influence. They appear to be making risky assurances based on hasty theoretical considerations, in desperation to win the elections.
Let us say it outright: can we win the small peasants by protecting their properties against rising tide of indebtedness and pauperization? Can we transform the tenant into an owner-cultivator by paying off his debts? Even if we do so, as a small petty producer, can he survive further? It is improper to show short term improvement in the face of impending long term disaster. It is not in the interest of the Party to perpetuate the petty bourgeois expectations of small peasants on property rights, which is no different than that of small handicraftsman’s desire to become a master. What, then, is our attitude towards the small peasantry? How shall we have to deal with it on the day of our accession to power?
To begin with, the French program is absolutely correct in stating: that we foresee the inevitable doom of the small peasant, but that it is not our mission to hasten it by any interference or otherwise on our part. Secondly, even when the Party comes to power, it should not forcibly expropriate the small peasants, even by some compensation. One should try organising them into cooperatives, show the limits of private enterprise, so that he realizes the inevitability of socialization.
Almost 20 years ago, the Danish Socialists, which had only one city, with large countryside filled with large number of small farms, were pooling them into single big farm, reap the benefits of scale, finance, cost saving and better management. By leasing land of the big, additional employment can be created. Peasant cooperatives can further be integrated with industry, generate synergy, transform the cooperatives technologically, and distribute the dividends, raise consciousness entitlements and duties of members to run them with a cooperative spirit.
Individual small farming is what spells their doom, if they insist to continue, large scale farming would swallow it. In their own interest it is imperative to form a collective. While forming them into a collective is inescapable, they should never be threatened or compelled to give up their holdings. Under capitalist mode of production, foul play of the state is seldom apparent. The Social Democratic Party, however, should unambiguously back the small peasants and facilitate the cooperatives, even when the process is protracted. This saves the small peasant from falling victim to capitalist penetration, makes him our natural ally in the eventual political action, as prolitarianization is completed in other sectors.
The cost of this reorganization should be made from the state exchequer, since it is an excellent investment for the social reorganization.
We now come to the bigger peasants. Here as a result of the division of inheritance as well as indebtedness and forced sales of land we find a variegated pattern of intermediate stages, from small-holding peasant to big peasant proprietor. Where the middle lives among small-holding peasants, using more of his family labour, his situation will not differ greatly from theirs. But where middle and big peasants predominate and the operation of the farms requires, generally, with farm servants, it is quite a different matter. Of course a workers’ party has to fight, in the first place, on behalf of the wage-workers — that is, for the male and female servantry and the day laborers. It is unquestionably forbidden to make any promises to the peasants which include the continuance of the wage slavery of the workers. But, as long as the big and middle peasants continue to exist, as such they cannot manage without wage-workers. If it would, therefore, be downright folly on our part to hold out prospects to the small, middle and big peasants alike.
We have here again the parallel case of the handicraftsmen in the cities. True, they are more ruined than the peasants, some of them still make apprentices do all the work. Many of them realized that their mode of production is inevitably doomed, are coming over. The same applies to the big and middle peasants who likewise inevitably face competition of capitalist production, and the cheap overseas corn, and the growing indebtedness. We can do nothing against this decay except recommend here too the pooling of farms to form co-operative enterprises, in which the exploitation of wage labor will be eliminated more and more, and their gradual transformation into branches of the great national producers’ co-operative with each branch enjoying equal rights and duties can be instituted. If they don’t listen, they can be left to their fate.
Only the big landed estates present a perfectly simple case. Their land has to be expropriated and nationalized, with or without paying compensation, which depends on the question how we get into power. The bottom line is that the land has to be obtained at cheapest price.
Thus, we would create the possibilities of socialist production for rural proletarians no sooner than for the urban, and of only a very short time, before we win over to our side the rural workers of Prussia east of the Elbe. But once we have the East-Elbe rural workers, a different wind will blow at once all over Germany. The actual semi-servitude of the East-Elbe rural workers is the main political constituuency of Prussian Junker dominance and overlordship in Germany. In fact, even Junkers are facing the ruination from the competition, as a reaction they are becoming bigots, haughty, supporters of militaristic nationalism of Reich. Even though they own distilleries and beet-sugar refineries, they are scattered and are failing to muster protection. In spite of state assistance, they are unable to save their economic slide. The semi-serfdom sanctioned by law and custom making unlimited exploitation of the rural workers possible to barely keep the drowning Junkers above water. Sow the seed of Social-Democracy among these workers, give them the courage and cohesion to insist upon their rights, and the glory of the Junkers will be put to an end. The great reactionary power, which to Germany represents the same barbarous, predatory element as Russian tsardom does to the whole of Europe, will collapse like a pricked bubble. The “picked regiments” of the Prussian army will become Social-Democratic, which will result in a shift of power that is pregnant with an entire upheaval. But, for this reason, it is of vastly greater importance to win the rural proletariat east of the Elbe than the small peasants of Western Germany. We shall win it nevertheless.
Endnote
1 The mark system is a social organization that rests on the common tenure and common cultivation of the land by small groups of freemen. Both politically and economically the mark was an independent community, and its earliest members were doubtless blood relatives. In its origin the word is the same as mark or march, a boundary. (Wikipedia – Mark System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_system)