Frederich Engels on The Agrarian Question

 

Frederich Engels on The Agrarian Question

Gaurang Sahay

Introduction

In the late nineteenth century, the question of agriculture and peasantry had become an object of discussion and political programme particularly among socialists including Marxists not only in France and Germany but also in many European countries such as Belgium, Italy, Denmark and, of course, Russia. Frederich Engels’ The Peasant Question in France and Germany’ can be considered as the first theoretical intervention in the debates. The article was published in 1894 in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), just before Engels’ death. The article had the definitive intervention by a theoretical mentor in the debates within the party over the agrarian programme. It was appended to the Erfurt programme of the party. In relation to the question of agriculture and peasantry the first additions to the analysis of Marx and Engels were made by two significant Marxist texts written in 1890s – Kautsky’s Die Agrarfrage and Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia.

In essence, the agrarian question was a political question and it acquired importance with the rise and growth of the parties associated with the Second International. Though the agrarian question was a general one, the economic and political conditions were not the same in all the countries where the question was discussed. The Germany of the 1890s was already among the most developed industrial economies and only a third of its population then lived in rural areas. By contrast, the majority of the French population at that time lived in rural areas. Moreover, the countries of Western Europe in which the agrarian question was raised and discussed were mostly parliamentary democracies of one kind or another. In fact, in those countries the rise of parliamentary democracy and the posing of the agrarian question were closely related. But conditions in Russia were much different. Though there was no parliamentary democracy in Russia the interest in agriculture and peasantry was, nonetheless, political. Only two regions of Western Europe formed an exception: Great Britain and Prussia east of the Elbe. In Great Britain big landed estates and large-scale agriculture had totally displaced the self-supporting peasant; in Prussia, too, the peasant was being increasingly "turned out", or at least economically and politically forced into the background.

Peasants, Political Apathy and Rustic Life

Engels opined that the peasant has so far largely manifested himself as a factor of political power only by his apathy, which has its roots in the isolation of rustic life. This apathy on the part of the peasants has been the strongest pillar of the parliamentary corruption and despotism. However, it is by no means insuperable.

Engels argued that since the rise of the working-class movement in Western Europe, the bourgeoisie political parties made the socialist workers suspicious and hateful in the minds of the peasants as lazy, greedy, city dwellers people who want to divide up the peasants and have an eye on their property. The parties also made the peasants to dispose of the socialist aspirations of the revolution of February 1848 by casting their votes in reactionary way and by digging up from their treasured memories of the legend of Napoleon, the emperor of the peasants, and the creator of the Second Empire..

However, the development of the capitalism has cut the life-strings of small production in agriculture; small production was once and for all going to rack and ruin. The big landowners assumed the role of champions of the interests of the small peasants, and the small peasants by and large accepted them as such.

Meanwhile, powerful socialist parties have sprung up and developed in the West. A steadily growing number of Socialist parties fought for tangible demands in the German, French, and Belgian parliaments. Engels opined that for the conquest of political power, these parties must first go from the towns to the country, must become a power in the countryside. It must not leave the doomed peasant in the hands of his false protectors.

1. Class Differentiation among the Peasantry

According to Engels, the rural population consists of quite different groups of peasants, which vary greatly within the various regions.

In the west of Germany, as in France and Belgium, there prevailed the small-scale cultivations by small-holding peasants. In the northwest Germany — in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein — and Bavaria there has been a preponderance of big and middle peasants who cannot do without male and female farm servants and even day labourers. In Prussia east of the Elbe, and in Mecklenburg, there have been 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.

Engels poses a question: Which of these subdivisions of the rural population can be or should be won over by the Social-Democratic party?

Foe Engels, the small peasant is the most important group and is also the critical case that decides the entire question. He defines small peasant as 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.

As such, a small peasant ought to lend a ready ear in socialist propaganda. However, as Engels argued, he is prevented from doing so by his deep-rooted sense of property. The more difficult it is for him to defend his endangered patch of land the more desperately he clings to it, and 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. The question is: How is Social-Democracy to overcome this prejudice? What can it offer to the doomed small peasant without becoming untrue to itself? In this regard, Engels refers two Congresses of French Socialist party in his paper.

The Marseilles Congress of 1892

The Marseilles Congress of 1892 adopted the first agrarian programme of the French Socialist Party, a programme which is the more noteworthy as it comes from the classical land of small-peasant economy.

It demanded for propertyless rural workers: 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 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 paid by means of a special tax on big landed estates.

It demanded 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 to reduce exorbitant rentals and compensate quitting tenant farmers and sharecroppers; the abolition of the right of creditors to levy on growing crops; free instruction in farming, and agricultural experimental stations.

The Nantes Congress (1894)

Though the Party did a good business with the Marseilles programme 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 — not the peasant as a future proletarian, but as a present propertied peasant — without violating the basic principles of the general socialist programme? In order to meet this objection, the Nantes Congress (1894) made some new practical proposals prefaced by a theoretical preamble, which seeks to prove that it is in keeping with the principles of socialism to protect small-peasant property from destruction by the capitalist mode of production, although one is perfectly aware that this destruction is inevitable.

The preamble begins as follows:

Producers can be free only as far as they are in possession of the means of production.

1. Whereas in the sphere of industry these means of production have already reached such a degree of capitalist centralisation that they can be restored to the producers only in the collective or social form, but in the sphere of agriculture this is by no means the case, the means of production, namely, the land, in very many localities are still in the hands of the individual producers as their individuals possession;

2. Even if small-holding ownership is going to be irreversibly doomed in the age of capitalism, still it is not for socialism to hasten its doom, as its task does not consist in separating property from labor but, on the contrary, in uniting both of these factors by placing them in the same hands;

3. Whereas, on the one hand, it is the duty of socialism to put the agricultural proletarians again in possession — collective or social in form. It is, on the other hand, no less its imperative duty to maintain the peasants themselves tilling their patches of land in possession of the same as against the usurer, and the encroachments of the big landowners;

4. Whereas it is expedient to extend this protection also to the producers who as tenants or sharecroppers 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.

Engels’ Observations on the French Socialist Party Programme

Engels argued that the statement in the French programme that freedom of the producers presupposes the possession of the means of production must be supplemented only as collective possession of the means of production that must be fought for by all means at the disposal of the proletariat. The common possession of the means of production is the sole principal goal to be striven for.

Possession of the means of production by the individual producers nowadays no longer grants these producers real freedom. 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. Any 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.

The preamble thus imposes upon socialism the imperative duty to carry out something which is impossible. It charges it to "maintain" the small-holding ownership of the peasants although it itself states that this form of ownership is "irretrievably doomed".

Engels argued that we are entering upon ground that is passing strange by saying that tenants or sharecroppers should also be protected even if they are exploiting day labourers because of the exploitation to which they themselves are subjected. Socialism is particularly opposed to the exploitation of wage labor. When the big and middle peasants of Germany come to ask the French Socialists 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?

Let us say here, at the outset, that it is a direct violation of the fundamental principle of socialism in general.

The concluding words of the preamble are also quite misleading. According to which it is the task of the Socialist Workers' Party "to bring together all the elements of rural production, all occupations which, by virtue of various rights and titles, utilize the national soil, to wage an identical struggle against the common foe: the feudality of landownership".

Engels flatly denied 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.

Along with the 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.

Upon closer examination, Engels opined that the general assurances are self-contradictory (promise to maintain a state of affairs which is irretrievably doomed) and that the various measures are either wholly without effect (usury laws), or are general workers' demands or demands which also benefit the big land-owners are of no great importance by any means in promoting the interests of the small peasants.

He argued that we shall not have emancipated the peasant if we can make them a promise which we ourselves know we shall not be able to keep. That is, a promise to protect their property in any event against all economic forces, to relieve them of the burdens which oppress them, to transform the tenant into a free owner and to pay the debts of the owner succumbing to the weight of his mortgage. If we could do this, we should again arrive at the point from which the present situation would necessarily develop anew.

But it is not in our interests to win the peasant overnight, only to lose him again tomorrow if we cannot keep our promise. We have no more use for the peasant as a Party member, if he expects us to perpetuate his property in his small holding.

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 programme 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 on our part.

Secondly, it is just as evident that when we are in possession of state power, we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants, as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to cooperative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose. We shall have ample means of showing to the small peasant prospective advantages that must be obvious to him even today (Denmark example).

The peasants of a village or parish were to pool their land to form a single big farm in order to cultivate it from common account and distribute the yield in proportion to the land, money, and labor contributed. It will make part of the labor power employed hitherto superfluous. It is precisely this saving of labor that represents one of the main advantages of large-scale farming. Employment can be found for this labor by increasing the size of peasant co-operative, or engaging in industry. In either case, their economic position is improved and simultaneously the general social directing agency is assured the necessary influence to transform the peasant co-operative to a higher form, and to equalize the rights and duties of the co-operative as a whole as well as of its individual members with those of the other departments of the entire community. We may be in a position of offer these co-operatives yet further advantages: assumption of their entire mortgage indebtedness by the national bank with a simultaneous sharp reduction of the interest rate; advances from public funds for the establishment of large-scale production and other advantages.

The main point is, and will be, to make the peasants understand that we can save, preserve their houses and fields for them only by transforming them into co-operative property operated co-operatively. It is precisely the individual farming conditioned by individual ownership that drives the peasants to their doom. If they insist on individual operation, they will inevitably be driven from house and home and their antiquated mode of production superseded by capitalist large-scale production. That is how the matter stands. Now, we come along and offer the peasants the opportunity of introducing large-scale production themselves, not for account of the capitalists but for their own, common account. Should it really be impossible to make the peasants understand that this is in their own interest, that it is the sole means of their salvation?

Neither now, nor at any time in the future, can we promise the small-holding peasants to preserve their individual property and individual enterprise against the overwhelming power of capitalist production. We, of course, are decidedly on the side of the small peasant; we shall do everything at all permissible to make his lot more bearable, to facilitate his transition to the co-operative should he decide to do so, and even to make it possible for him to remain on his small holding for a protracted length of time to think the matter over, should he still be unable to bring himself to this decision. The greater the number of peasants whom we can save from being actually hurled down into the proletariat, whom we can win to our side while they are still peasants, the more quickly and easily the social transformation will be accomplished.

Accordingly, we can do no greater disservice to the Party as well as to the small peasants than to make promises that even only create the impression that we intend to preserve the small holdings permanently. It would mean directly to block the way of the peasants to their emancipation. On the contrary, it is the duty of our Party to make clear to the peasants again and again that their position is absolutely hopeless as long as capitalism holds sway, that it is absolutely impossible to preserve their small holdings for them as such, that capitalist large-scale production is absolutely sure to run over their impotent antiquated system of small production as a train runs over a pushcart. If we do this, we shall act in conformity with the inevitable trend of economic development, and this development will not fail to bring our words home to the small peasants.

We now come to the bigger peasants. Because 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, who has retained his old patrimony intact or even added to it. Where the middle peasant lives among small-holding peasants, his interests and views will not differ greatly from theirs; he knows, from his own experience, how many of his kind have already sunk to the level of small peasants. But where middle and big peasants predominate and the operation of the farms requires, generally, the help of male and female 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 servants 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-holding peasants of continuing permanently to be such, it would border on treason were we to promise the same to the big and middle peasants.

It goes without saying that we are more interested in male and female servants of the big and middle peasants and day laborers. If these peasants want to be guaranteed the continued existence of their enterprises, we are in no position whatever to assure them of that. We are economically certain that the big and middle peasants must likewise inevitably succumb to the competition of capitalist production, and the cheap overseas corn, as is proved by the growing indebtedness and the everywhere evident decay of these peasants as well. 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 these peasants realize the inevitability of the doom of their present mode of production and draw the necessary conclusions they will come to us and it will be incumbent upon us to facilitate, to the best of our ability, also their transition to the changed mode of production. Otherwise, we shall have to abandon them to their fate and address ourselves to their wage-workers, among whom we shall not fail to find sympathy. Most likely, we shall be able to abstain here as well from resorting to forcible expropriation, and as for the rest to count on future economic developments making also these harder pates amenable to reason.

Only the big landed estates present a perfectly simple case. Here, we are dealing with undisguised capitalist production and no sense of right and wrong need to restrain us. Here, we are confronted by rural proletarians in masses and our task is clear. As soon as out Party is in possession of political power, it has simply to expropriate the big landed proprietors, just like the manufacturers in industry. The big estates, thus restored to the community, are to be turned over by us to the rural workers who are already cultivating them and are to be organized into co-operatives. They are to be assigned to them for their use and benefit under the control of the community. Nothing can as yet be stated as to the terms of their tenure. At any rate, the transformation of the capitalist enterprise into a social enterprise is here fully prepared for and can be carried into execution overnight. And the example of these agricultural co-operatives would convince also the last of the still resistant small-holding peasants, and surely also many big peasants, of the advantages of co-operative, large-scale production.

Thus, we can open up prospects here before the rural proletarians as splendid as those facing the industrial workers, and it can be only a question of time, 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.

Frederich Engels, 1894, The Peasant Question in France and Germany