Socialism As It Is

W >> William English Walling >> Socialism As It Is

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45

As in the case of the farmers and small shopkeepers, everything here
depends upon the economic and political program which the working class
develops and offers in competition with the "State Socialism" of the
capitalists. If it were true that the ownership of the smallest amount
of property brings it about that Socialism is no longer desired, not a
small minority of the population will be found aligned with the
capitalists, but all the four million owners of farms, and the other
millions with a thousand dollars or so invested in a building and loan
association, an insurance policy or a savings bank deposit, a total
numbering almost half of the occupied population. A bare majority, it is
true, might still be without any stake in the community even of this
modest character. But neither in the United States nor elsewhere is
there any hope that a majority of the absolutely propertyless, even if
it becomes a large one, will become sufficiently large within a
generation, or perhaps even within a century, to enable it to overthrow
the capitalists, unless it draws over to its side certain elements at
least, of the middle classes, who, though weaker in some respects are
better educated, better placed, and politically stronger than itself.
The revolutionary spokesmen of the international Socialist movement now
recognize this as clearly as do the most conservative observers.

The outcome of the great social struggle depends on the relative success
of employers and employed in gaining the support of those classes which,
either on account of their ownership of some slight property, or because
they receive salaries or fees sufficiently large, must be placed in the
middle class, but who cannot be classified _primarily_ as small
capitalists That this is the crux of the situation is recognized on all
sides. Mr. Winston Churchill, for instance, demands that everything be
done to strengthen and increase numerically this middle class, composed
of millions of persons whom he claims "would certainly lose by anything
like a general overturn, and ... are everywhere the strongest and the
best organized millions," and his "State Socialism" is directed chiefly
to that end. He believes that these millions, once become completely
converted into small capitalists, would certainly prevent by an
overwhelming resistance any effort on the part of the rest of the people
to gain what he curiously calls, "a selfish advantage."

Mr. Churchill says that "_the masses of the people should not use the
fact that they are in a majority as a means to advance their relative
position in society_." There could not be a sharper contrast between
"State Socialism" and Socialism. To Socialists the whole duty of man as
a social being is to persuade the masses to "use the fact that they are
in a majority as a means to advance their relative position in society."
Mr. Churchill seems to feel that as long as everybody shares _more or
less_ in the general increase of prosperity from generation to
generation, and, as he says, as long as there is "an ever increasing
volume of production and an increasing wide diffusion of profit," there
is no ground for complaint--whether the relative division of wealth and
opportunity between the many and the few becomes more equal or not. But
he realizes that his moral suasion is not likely to be heeded and is
wise in putting his trust in the middle-class millions. For these are
the bone of contention between capitalism and Socialism.

While the new middle class (that is, the lower salaried classes,
corporation employees, professional men, etc.) is increasing numerically
more rapidly than any other, large numbers within it are being deprived
of any hope of rising into the wealthy or privileged class. As a
consequence they are everywhere crowding into the Socialist ranks--by
the hundred thousand in countries where the movement is oldest. Even in
the organized Socialist parties these middle-class elements everywhere
form a considerable proportion of the whole. Practically a third of the
American Party according to a recent reckoning were engaged either in
farming (15 per cent) or in commercial (9 per cent) or professional
pursuits (5 per cent).

It is plain that certain sections of the so-called middle class are not
only welcomed by Socialist parties, but constitute their most dependable
and indispensable elements. Indeed, the majority of the Socialists agree
with Kautsky that the danger lies in the opposite direction, that an
unreliable small capitalist element has been admitted that will make
trouble until it leaves the movement, in other words, that Socialist
friendship for these classes has gone to the point of risking the
existence of their organization. Surely their presence is a guarantee
that Socialists have not been ruled by the working class or proletarian
"fetish," against which Marx warned them more than half a century ago.

FOOTNOTES:

[207] The _American Magazine_, October, 1911.

[208] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 389.

[209] _Die Neue Zeit_, Oct. 27, 1911.

[210] Speech just before Congressional Elections of 1910.

[211] Speech delivered by Mr. Roosevelt, Dec. 13, 1910.

[212] John Spargo, "Karl Marx."

[213] Edward Bernstein, "Evolutionary Socialism," p. 143.

[214] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," pp. 58-59.

[215] The _Outlook_, March 13, 1909.

[216] Karl Kautsky in _Vorwaerts_ (Berlin), Feb. 7, 1909.

[217] Quoted by Jaures, "Studies in Socialism," p. 103.

[218] Karl Kautsky, "Erfurter Programm," p. 258.

[219] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," pp. 48-49.

[220] The _International Socialist Review_ (Chicago), October, 1911.

[221] H. G. Wells, "This Misery of Boots," p. 34.

[222] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," p. 51.

CHAPTER II

THE AGRICULTURAL CLASSES AND THE LAND QUESTION

I have pointed out the relation of the Socialist movement to all classes
but one,--the agriculturists,--a class numerically next in importance to
the industrial wage earners.

On the one hand most agriculturists are small capitalists, who, even
when they do not own their farms, are often forced to-day to invest a
considerable sum in farm animals and machinery, in rent and interest and
in wages at the harvest season; on the other hand, a large part of the
farmers work harder and receive less for their work than skilled
laborers, while the amount they own, especially when tenants, scarcely
exceeds what it has cost many skilled workers to learn their trade. Are
the great majority of farmers, then, rather small capitalists or
laborers?

For many years Socialists paid comparatively little attention to the
problem. How was it then imagined that a political program could obtain
the support of the majority of the voters without presenting to the
agricultural population as satisfactory a solution of their difficulties
as that it offered to the people of the towns? On the other hand, how
was it possible to adapt a program frankly "formulated by or for the
workingmen of large-scale industry" to the conditions of agriculture?

The estimate of the rural population that has hitherto prevailed among
the Socialists of most countries may be seen from the following language
of Kautsky's:--

"We have already seen how the peasant's production [that of the
small farmer] isolates men. The capitalists' means of production
and the modern State, to be sure, have a powerful tendency to put
an end to the isolation of the peasant through taxation, military
service, railways, and newspapers. But the increase of the points
of contact between town and country as a rule only have the effect
that the peasant farmer feels his desolation and isolation less
keenly. They raise him up as a peasant farmer, but awake in him a
longing for the town; they drive all the most energetic and
independently thinking elements from the country into the towns,
and rob the former of its forces. So that the progress of modern
economic life has the effect of increasing the desolation and
lonesomeness of the country rather than ending it.

"The truth is that in every country the agricultural population is
economically and politically the most backward. That does not imply
any reflection on it; it is its misfortune, but it is a fact with
which one must deal."[223]

Not only Kautsky and Vandervelde, but whole Socialist parties like those
of Austria and Germany, are given to the exploitation of the supposed
opposition between town and country, the producer and the consumer of
agricultural products. At the German Socialist Congress of 1911, Bebel
declared that to-day those who were most in need of protection were the
consumers of agricultural products, the workingmen, lower middle classes
and employees. He felt the day was approaching when the increased cost
of living would form the chief question before the German people, the
day when the German people would raise a storm and tear down the tariffs
on the necessaries of life as well as other measures that unduly favor
the agriculturists--while the proposal of socialization would come up
first in the field of agriculture.

While, in view of the actual level of prices in Germany, there is no
doubt that even the smallest of the agriculturists are getting some
share of the spoils of the tariffs and other measures Bebel mentions,
there can also be little question that in such a storm of revolt as he
predicts the pendulum would swing too far the other way, and they would
suffer unjustly. It is true that the agriculturist produces bread, while
the city worker consumes it, but so also do shoe workers produce shoes
that are consumed by garment workers, and certainly no Socialist
predicts any lasting struggle between producers of shoes and producers
of clothing. It is true also that if the wage earner's condition is to
be improved, some limit must be set to prices as wages are raised. But
the flour manufacturer and the baker must be restrained as well as the
grain producer. Nor do Socialists expect to accomplish much by the mere
regulation of prices. And when it comes to their remedy, socialization,
there is less reason, as I shall show, for beginning with land rent than
with industrial capital, and the Socialist parties of France and America
recognize this fact.

But it is the practical result of this supposed opposition of town and
country rather than its inconsistency with Socialist principles that
must hold our attention. Certainly no agricultural program and no appeal
to the agricultural population, perhaps not even one addressed to
agricultural laborers, can hope for success while this view of the
opposition of town and country is maintained; for all agriculturists
want what they consider to be reasonable prices for their products, and
their whole life depends directly or indirectly on these prices. When
the workmen agitate, as they so often do in Europe, for cheap bread and
meat, without qualifying their agitation by any regard for the
agriculturists, all hope of obtaining the support of _any_ of the
agricultural classes, even laborers, is for the time being abandoned.

The predominance of town over country is so important to Kautsky that he
even opposes such a vital piece of democratic reform as direct
legislation where the town-country population is the more numerous than
that of the towns. "We have seen" he says, "that the modern
representative system is not very favorable to the peasantry or to the
small capitalists, especially of the country towns. The classes which
the representative system most favors are the large owners of capital or
land, the highly educated, and under a democratic electoral system, the
militant and class-conscious part of the industrial working class. So in
general one can say parliamentarism favors the population of the large
towns as against that of the country."

Far from being disturbed at this unjust and unequal system, Kautsky
prefers that it should _not_ be reformed, unless the town population are
in a majority. "Direct legislation by the people works against these
tendencies of parliamentarism. If the latter strives to place the
political balance of power in the population of the large towns, the
former puts it in the masses of the population, but these still live
everywhere and for the most part in a large majority, with the exception
of England, in the country and in the small country towns. Direct
legislation takes away from the population of the large towns their
special political influence, and subjects them to the country
population."[224]

He concludes that wherever and as long as the agricultural population
remains in a majority, the Socialists have no special reason to work for
direct legislation.

Of course Kautsky and his school do not expect this separation or
antagonism of agriculture and industry to last very far into the future.
But as long as capitalism lasts they believe agriculturists will play an
entirely subordinate role in politics. "While the capitalist mode of
production increases visibly the difficulties of the formation of a
revolutionary class (in the country), it favors it in the towns," he
says. "It there concentrates the laboring masses, creates conditions
favorable to every organization for their mental evolution and for their
class struggle.... It debilitates the country, disperses the
agricultural workers over vast areas, isolates them, robs them of all
means of mental development and resistance to exploitation."[225]

Similarly Vandervelde quotes from Voltaire's essay on customs a sentence
describing the European peasantry of a hundred and fifty years ago as
"savages living in cabins with their females and a few animals," and
asks, "who would dare to pretend that these words have lost all their
reality?" He admits that "rural barbarism has decreased," but still
considers the peasantry, not as a class which must take an active part
in bringing about Socialism, but as one to which "conquering Socialism
will bring political liberty and social equality."[226]

Kautsky says that either the small farmer is not really independent, and
pieces out his income by hiring himself out occasionally to some larger
landowner or other employer, or else, if entirely occupied with his own
work, that he manages to compete with large-scale cultivation only "by
overwork and underconsumption, by barbarism, as Marx says."

"To-day the situation of the city proletariat," Kautsky adds, "is
already so superior to the barbaric situation of the older peasants,
that the younger peasants' generation is leaving the fields along with
the class of rural wage earners." There can be no question that small
farms, those without permanent hired labor, survive competition with the
larger and better equipped, only by overwork and underconsumption. But
the unfavorable comparison with city wage earners and the repetition
to-day of Marx's term "barbarism" is no longer justified. Where these
conditions still exist, they are due largely to special legal obstacles
placed in the way of European peasants, and to legal privileges given to
the great landlords,--in other words, to remnants of feudalism.
Kautsky's error in making this as a statement of general application
would seem to be based on a confusion of the survivals of feudalism, as
seen in some parts of Europe, with the necessary conditions of
agricultural production, as seen in this country.

Kautsky himself has lately given full recognition to another factor in
the agricultural situation--the horrors of wage slavery, which acts in
the very opposite manner to these feudal conditions and _prevents_ both
small agriculturists and agricultural laborers from immigrating to the
towns in greater numbers than they do, and persuades them in spite of
its drudgery to prefer the life of the owner of a small farm.

"Since labor in large-scale industry takes to-day the repulsive form of
wage labor," he says, "many owners of small properties keep holding on
to them with the greatest sacrifices, for the sole purpose of avoiding
falling into the serfdom and insecurity of wage labor. Only Socialism
can put an end to small production, not of course by the forceful
ejection of small owners, but by giving them an opportunity to work for
the perfected large establishments with a shortened working day and a
larger income."[227] Surely there is little ground to lay special stress
on the "barbarism" of small farms, if such a large proportion of farmers
and agricultural laborers prefer it on good grounds to "the serfdom and
insecurity" of labor on large farms or in manufacturing establishments.

It is doubtless chiefly because European conditions are such as to make
the conversion of the majority of agriculturists difficult, that so many
European Socialists claim that an existing or prospective preponderance
of manufacturers makes it unnecessary. But, while in many countries of
Europe the remnants of feudalism, or rather of eighteenth-century
absolutism and landlord rule, to which this backward political condition
is largely due, have not only survived, but have been modernized,
through the protection extended to large estates, so as to become a part
and parcel of modern capitalism, this condition does not promise to be
at all lasting. There are already signs of change in the agricultural
sections of Bohemia, Hungary, and Italy, while in France, where the
political influence of the large landlord class is rapidly on the
decline, the Socialists have appealed successfully, under certain
conditions, not only to agricultural laborers, but also to small
independent farmers.

As Socialists come to take a world view, giving due prominence to
countries like France and the United States, where agriculture has had
its freest development, they grow away from the older standpoint and
give more attention to the rural population. The rapid technical
evolution of agriculture and the equally rapid changes in the ownership
of land in a country like the United States have encouraged our
Socialists to reexamine the whole question. I cannot enter into a
discussion, even the most cursory, of agricultural evolution in this
country, but a few indications from the census of 1910 will show the
general tendencies.

Farm owners and tenants probably now have $45,000,000,000 in property
(1910), fully a third of the national wealth, and with 6,340,000 farms
they are just about a third of our population. This calculation does not
allow for interest (where farmers have borrowed) or rent (where they are
tenants); on the other hand, it does not allow for the fact that many
farmers have bank accounts and outside investments. But it indicates the
prosperity of a large part of the farming class.

The value of the land of the average farm has doubled since 1900 ($2271
in 1900--$4477 in 1910) in spite of a decrease in the size of farms,
while the amount spent for labor increased 80 per cent, which the
statistics show was due in part to higher wages, but in larger part _to
the greater amount of labor and the greater number of laborers used_.
Other expenditures increased almost proportionately, and the capital
employed in land, buildings, machinery, fertilizers, and labor has
almost doubled in this short period. As prices advanced less than 25 per
cent during the decade, all these increases were largely _real_. The
gross income of the average farm owner, measured in what it could buy,
evidently rose by more than 50 per cent, and his _real_ net income
nearly as fast. The average farm owner then was receiving a fair share
of the increase of the national wealth.

But farmers cannot profitably be considered as a single class. Tenants
are rarely at the same time landlords. Farmers paying interest are
usually not the same as those holding mortgages. A few of the debtors
may be very successful men who borrow only to buy more land and hire
more labor. But very few tenants are in this class. We may safely assume
that those who own without a mortgage or employ labor steadily with one
are getting _more_ than an average share of the national wealth, while
tenants or those who have mortgaged their land heavily and do not
regularly hire labor (except at harvest) are, in the average case,
getting less. Investments of borrowed money in the best machinery or
farm animals by a single family working alone and on a very small scale,
may give a good return above interest, but this return is strictly
limited unless with most exceptional or most fortunate persons.

Now the statistics of the increase of agricultural _wages_ show that
they rose in no such proportion as the increase of agricultural
capital--and the possibility of a farm hand saving his wages and
becoming the owner of one of these more and more costly farms is more
remote than ever. But there is a third solution--the agricultural
laborer may neither remain a laborer nor become an owner. If he can
accumulate enough capital for machinery, horses, farm animals, and seed,
he can pay for the use of the land from his annual product, he can
become a tenant. On the other side, if the value of the usual 160-acre
homestead rises to $20,000 or $30,000, the owner is easily able to make
a few thousand dollars in addition by selling his farm animals and
machinery and to retire to the country town and live on his rent.

It is evident that the position of most of these farm tenants is very
close to that of laborers. Though working on their own account, it is so
difficult for them to make a living that they are forced to the longest
hours and to the exploitation of their wives and children under all
possible and impossible circumstances. Already farm tenants are almost
as numerous in this country as farm owners. The census figures indicated
that the proportion of tenants had risen from 23 per cent in 1880 to 37
per cent in 1910. Not only this, but a closer inspection of the figures
by States will show that, whereas in new States like Minnesota, where
tenancy has not had time to develop, it embraced in 1900 less than 20
per cent of the total number of farms, in many older States the
percentage had already risen high above 40. This increase of tenants
proves an approach of the United States to the fundamental economic
condition of older countries--the divorce of land cultivation from land
ownership, and the census of 1910 shows that three eighths of the farms
of the United States are already in that condition.

Land and hired labor are the chief sources of agricultural wealth, and
capital is most productive only when it is invested in these as well as
other means of production. That is, if the small farmer is really a
small capitalist, if he is to receive a return from his capital as well
as his own individual and that of his family labor, he must, as a rule,
either have enough capital to provide work for others and his family, or
he must get a share of the unearned increment through the ownership of
his farm, or long leases without revaluation. Farm tenants who do not
habitually employ labor, or those whose mortgages are so heavy as
practically to place them in the position of such tenants, are, for
these reasons, undoubtedly accessible to Socialist ideas--_as long as
they remain farm tenants_.

But now after discarding all the European prejudices above referred to,
let us look at the other side. Tenants everywhere belong to those
classes which, as Kautsky truly says, in the passage quoted in a
previous chapter, are also a recruiting ground for the capitalists. They
are more likely to be the owners of the capital, now a considerable sum,
needed to _operate_ a small farm (cattle, machinery, etc.) than are farm
laborers, and it is for their benefit chiefly that the various
governmental plans for creating new small farms through irrigation,
reclamation, and the division of large estates are contrived. And it is
even possible that practically all the present tenants may some day be
provided for.

By maintaining or creating small farms then, or providing for a system
of long leases and small-sized allotments of governmentally owned land,
guaranteed against any raise in rents during the term of the lease,
capitalist governments may gradually succeed in firmly attaching the
larger part of the struggling small farmers and farm tenants to
capitalism. While still in the individualistic form capitalism will
establish, wherever it can, privately owned small farms; when it will
have adopted the collectivist policy, it will inaugurate a system of
national ownership and long leases.

Even the small farmer who hires no labor, and does not even own his
farm, will probably be held, as a class, by capitalism, but only by the
collectivist capitalism of the future, which will probably protect him
from landlordism by keeping the title to the land, but dividing the
unearned increment with him by a system of long leases, and using its
share of this increment for the promotion of agriculture and for other
purposes he approves.

Socialists, then, do not expect to include in their ranks in
considerable numbers, either agricultural employers or such tenants,
laborers, or farm owners as are becoming, or believe they will become,
employers (either under present governments or under collectivist
capitalism).