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

Only when the day finally comes when Socialism begins to exert a
pressure on the government adversely to the interest of the capitalist
class will higher wages and new governmental expenditures on wage
earners begin to reverse conditions automatically, making labor dearer,
small farms which employ labor less profitable, and a lease of
government land less desirable, for example, than the position of a
skilled employee on a model government farm. All governments will then
be forced by the farming population itself to lend more and more support
to the Socialist policy of great national municipal or county farms,
rather than to the artificial promotion or small-scale agriculture.

For the present and the near future the only lasting support Socialists
can find in the country is from _the surplus_ of agricultural laborers
and perhaps _a certain part_ of the tenants, _i.e._ those who cannot be
provided for even if all large estates are everywhere divided into small
farms, all practicable works of reclamation and irrigation completed,
and scientific methods introduced--and who will find no satisfactory
opportunity in neighboring countries. It must be acknowledged that such
tenants at present form no very large part of the agricultural
population in the United States. On the other hand, agriculturists are
even less backward here than in Europe, and there is less opposition
between town and country, and both these facts favor rural Socialism.

If, however, the majority of farmers must remain inaccessible to
Socialism until the great change is at hand, this is not because they
are getting an undue share of the national wealth or because they are
private property fanatics, or because agriculturists are economically
and politically backward, or because they are hostile to labor, though
all this is true of many, but because of all classes, they are the most
easily capable of being converted into (or perpetuated as) small
capitalists by the reforms of the capitalist statesman in search of
reliable and numerically important political support.

I have shown the attitude of the Socialists towards each of the
agricultural classes--their belief that they will be able to attach to
themselves the agricultural laborers and those tenants and independent
farmers who are neither landlords nor steady employers, nor expect to
become such. But what now is the attitude of laborers, tenants, etc.,
towards Socialism, and what program do the Socialists offer to attract
them? Let us first consider a few general reforms on which all
Socialists would agree and which would be acceptable to all classes of
agriculturists. Socialists differ upon certain _fundamental_ alterations
in their program which have been proposed in order to adapt it to
agriculture. Aside from these, all Socialist parties wish to do
everything that is possible to attract agriculturists. They favor such
measures as the nationalization of forests, irrigation, state fire
insurance, the nationalization of transportation, the extension of free
education and especially of free agricultural education, the
organization of free medical assistance, graduated income and
inheritance taxes, and the decrease of military expenditures, etc. It
will be seen that all these reforms are such as might be, and often are,
adopted by parties which have nothing to do with Socialism. Community
ownership of forests and national subsidies for roads are urged by so
conservative a body as Mr. Roosevelt's Commission on Country Life. They
are all typical "State Socialist" (_i.e._ State capitalist) measures,
justifiable and indispensable, but not intimately related with the
program of _Socialism_. The indorsement of such measures might indeed
assure the Socialists the friendly cooeperation of political factions
representing the agriculturists, but it could scarcely secure for them
the same partisan support in the country as they have obtained from the
workingmen of the towns.

Besides such legislative reforms as the above, the Socialists generally
favor legislative encouragement for every form of agricultural
cooeperation. Kautsky says that cooeperative associations limited to
purchase or sale, or for financing purposes, have no special connection
with Socialism, but favors _productive_ cooeperation, and in France this
is one of the chief measures advocated by the most ardent of the
Socialist agriculturist agitators, Compere-Morel, who was elected to the
Chamber of Deputies from an agricultural district. Compere-Morel notes
that the above-mentioned governmental measures of the State Socialistic
variety are likely to be introduced by reformers who have no sympathy
either with Socialism or with labor unions, and _as a counterweight_ he
lays a great emphasis on cooeperative organizations for production, which
could work with the labor unions and their cooeperative stores and also
with Socialist municipalities. In France and elsewhere there is already
a strong movement to municipalize the milk supply, the municipalization
of slaughterhouses is far advanced, and municipal bakeries are a
probability of the near future. Such cooeperative organizations, however,
like the legislative proposals above mentioned, are already so widely in
actual operation and are so generally supported by powerful
non-Socialist organizations that Socialist support can be of
comparatively little value.

There is no reason why a collectivist but capitalist democracy should
not favor both associations for productive cooeperation and friendly
relations between these and collectivist municipalities; nor why they
should fail to favor an enlightened labor policy in such cases, at least
as far as the resulting increase of efficiency in the laborer justified
it, _i.e._ as long as his product rises, as a result of such reforms,
faster than what it costs to introduce them.

Socialists also favor the nationalization of the land, but without the
expropriation of self-employing farmers, as these are felt to be more
sinned against than sinning. "With the present conservative nature of
our farmers, it is highly probable that a number of them would [under
Socialism] continue to work in the present manner," Kautsky says. "The
proletarian governmental power would have absolutely no inclination to
take over such little businesses. As yet no Socialist who is to be taken
seriously has ever demanded that the farmers should be expropriated, or
that their goods should be confiscated. It is much more probable that
each little farmer would be permitted to work on as he has previously
done. The farmer has nothing to fear from a Socialist regime. Indeed, it
is highly probable," he adds, "that these agricultural industries would
receive considerable strengthening through the new regime."

Socialists generally agree with Mr. A. M. Simons's resolution at the
last American Socialist Convention (1910): "So long as tools are used
merely by individual handicraftsmen, they present no problem of
ownership which the Socialist is compelled to solve. The same is true of
land. Collective ownership is urged by the Socialist, not as an end in
itself, not as a part of a Utopian scheme, but as the means of
preventing exploitation, and wherever individual ownership is an agency
of exploitation, then such ownership is opposed by Socialism."[228]

Exploitation here refers to the employment of laborers, and this is the
central point of the Socialist policy. To the Socialists the land
question and the labor question are one. Every agricultural policy must
deal with both. If we were confronted to-day exclusively by large
agricultural estates, the Socialist policy would be the same as in other
industries. All agricultural capital would be nationalized or
municipalized as fast as it became sufficiently highly organized to make
this practicable. And as the ground rent can be taken separately, and
with the least difficulty, this would be the first to go. Agricultural
labor, in the meanwhile, would be organized and as the day approached
when the Socialists were about to gain control of the government, and
the wages of government employees began rapidly to rise, those of
agricultural and all other privately employed labor would rise also,
until private profits were destroyed and the process of socialization
brought rapidly to completion.

But where the scale of production is so small that the farmer and his
family do the work and do not habitually hire outside labor, the whole
case is different. The chief exploitation here is self-exploitation. The
capital owned is so small that it may be compared in value with the
skilled worker's trade education, especially when we consider the small
return it brings in, allowing for wages for the farmer and his family.
Even though, as owner, he receives that part of the rise in the value of
his land due to the general increase of population and wealth and not to
his own labor (the unearned increment), his income is less than that of
many skilled laborers.

Two widely different policies are for these reasons adopted by all
reformers when dealing with large agricultural estates and small
self-employing farmers. On this point there is little room for
difference of opinion. But small farmers are not a sharply defined
class. They are constantly recruited from agricultural laborers and
tenants on the one hand, and are constantly becoming employing farmers
on the other--or the process may take the opposite course, large farms
may break up and small farmers may become laborers--for all or a part of
their time. All agricultural reforms may be viewed not only in their
relation to existing small farmers, but as to their effect on the
increase or decrease of the relative proportions of small self-employing
farmers, of employing farmers, and of agricultural laborers.

And here appears the fundamental distinction between the Socialist
program and that of collectivist capitalism as far as the small farmers
are concerned. Socialists agree in wanting to aid those small farmers
who are neither capitalists nor employers on a sufficient scale to
classify them with those elements, but they neither wish to perpetuate
the system of small farms nor to obstruct the development of the more
productive large-scale farming and the normal increase of an
agricultural working class ready for cooeperative or governmental
employment. They point to the universal law that large-scale production
is more economical, and show that this applies to agriculture. Small
farming strictly limits the point to which the income of the
agricultural population can rise, prevents the cheapening of the
production of food, and furnishes a constant stream of cheap labor
composed of discontented agricultural laborers who prefer the more
steady income, limited hours, and better conditions of wage earners.

"Even the most energetic champions of small farming," says Kautsky,
"do not make the least attempt to show its superiority, as this
would be a hopeless task. What they maintain is only the
superiority of labor on one's own property to wage labor for a
strange exploiter.... But if the large farm offers the greater
possibility of lessening the work of the agricultural laborers,
then it would be a betrayal of the latter to set before them as a
goal, not the capture and technical development of large forms, but
their break up into numerous small farms. That would mean nothing
less than a willingness to perpetuate the drudgery under which the
agricultural laborers and small farmers now suffer."[229]

But how shall Socialists aid small farmers without increasing the number
of small farms? It might be thought that the nationalization of the land
would solve the problem. The government, once become the general
landlord, could use the rent fund to improve the condition of all
classes of agriculturists, without unduly favoring any, agricultural
evolution could take its natural course, and the most economical method
of production, _i.e._ large farms or large cooeperative associations,
would gradually come to predominate. But the capitalist collectivists
who now control or will soon control governments, far from feeling any
anxiety about the persistence of small-scale farming, believe that the
small farmers can be made into the most reliable props of capitalism.
Accordingly collectivist reformers either promote schemes of division of
large estates and favor the creation of large masses of small owners by
this and every other available means, such as irrigation or reclamation
projects, or if they indorse nationalization of the land in order to get
the unearned increment for their governments, they still make the leases
on as small a scale and revaluations at as long intervals as possible,
and so do almost as much artificially to perpetuate the small farm under
this system as they could by furthering private ownership.

Although there is no necessary and immediate conflict of interest
between wage earners and small farmers, it is evident that it is
impossible for Socialists to offer the small farmers as much as the
capitalist collectivists do,--for the latter are willing in this
instance to promote, for political purposes, an uneconomic mode of
production which is a burden on all society.

Here, however, appears an economic tendency that relieves the situation
for the Socialist. Under private ownership or land nationalization with
long leases and small-scale farms, it is only once in a generation or
even less frequently that farms are subdivided. But the amount of
capital and labor that can be profitably applied to a given area of
land, the intensity of farming, increases very rapidly. The former
self-employing farmer, everywhere encouraged by governments, soon comes
to employ steadily one or more laborers. And it is notable that in every
country of the world these middle-sized or moderate-sized farms are
growing more rapidly than either the large-scale or the one-family
farms. This has an economic and a political explanation. Though large
farms have more economic advantages than small, the latter have nothing
to expend for superintendence and get much more work from each person
occupied. The middle-sized farms preserve these advantages and gradually
come also to employ much of the most profitable machinery, that is out
of reach of the small farmer. Politically their position is still
stronger. They are neither rich nor few like the large landholders.
Their employees are one, two, or three on each farm, and isolated.

Here, then, is the outcome of the agricultural situation that chiefly
concerns the Socialist. The middle-sized farmer is a small capitalist
and employer who, like the rest of his kind, will in every profound
labor crisis be found with the large capitalist. His employees will
outnumber him as voters and will have little hope that the government
will intervene some day to make them either proprietors or possessors
of long-term leases. The capital, moreover, to run this kind of farm or
to compete with it, will be greater and greater and more and more out of
their agricultural laborer's reach. These employees will be Socialists.

We are now in a position to understand the divisions among the
Socialists on the agricultural question. The Socialist policy as to
agriculture may be divided into three periods. During the ascendency of
capitalistic collectivism it will be powerless to do more than to
support the collectivist reforms, including partial nationalization of
the land, partial appropriation of unearned increment by national or
local governments, municipal and cooeperative production, and the
numerous reforms already mentioned. In the second period, the approach
of Socialism will hasten all these changes automatically through the
rapid rise in wages, and in the third period, when the Socialists are in
power, special measures will be taken still further to hasten the
process until all land is gradually nationalized and all agricultural
production carried on by governmental bodies or cooeperative societies of
actual workers.

If the Socialists gain control of any government, or if they come near
enough to doing this to be able to force concessions at the cost of
capital, a double effect will be produced on agriculture. The general
rise in wages will destroy the profits of many farmer employers, and it
will offer to the smallest self-employing farmers the possibility of an
income as wage earners so much larger, and conditions so much better,
than anything they can hope for as independent producers that they will
cease to prefer self-employment. The high cost of labor will favor both
large scale production, either capitalistic or cooeperative, and
national, state, county, and municipal farms. Without any but an
automatic economic pressure, small-scale and middle-scale farming would
tend rapidly to give place to these other higher forms, and these in
turn would tend to become more and more highly organized as other
industries have done, until social production became a possibility. Not
only would there be no need of coercive legislative measures, but the
automatic pressure would be, not that of misery or bankruptcy pressing
the self-employing farmer from behind, but of a larger income and better
conditions drawing the majority forward to more developed and social
forms of production.

In France a considerable and increasing number of the Socialist members
of Parliament are elected by the peasantry, and the same is true of
Italy. In Herve the French have developed a world-famed
ultra-revolutionary who always makes his appeal to peasants as well as
workers, and in Compere-Morel, one of the most able of those economists
and organizers of the international movement who give the agriculturists
their chief attention. The latter has recently summed up the position of
the French Party in a few incisive paragraphs--which show its similarity
to that of the Americans. His main idea is to let economic evolution
take its course, which, in proportion as labor is effectively organized,
will inevitably lead towards collective ownership and operation and so
pave the way for Socialism:--

"As to small property, it is not our mission either to hasten or to
precipitate its disappearance. A product of labor, quite often
being merely a tool of the one who is detaining it, not only do we
respect it, we do something more yet, we relieve it from taxes,
usury, scandalous charges on the part of the middlemen, whose
victim it is. And this will be done in order to make possible its
free evolution towards superior forms of exploitation and
ownership, which become more and more inevitable.

"This means that there is no necessity at all to appeal to
violence, to use constraint and power in order to inaugurate in the
domain of rural production, the only mode of ownership fit to
utilize the new technical agricultural tools: collective ownership.

"On the other hand, a new form of ownership cannot be imposed; it
is the new form of ownership which is imposing itself.

"It is in vain that they use the most powerful, the most
artificial, means to develop, to multiply, and animate the private
ownership of the land; the social ownership of the land will impose
itself, through the force of events, on the most stubborn, on the
most obstinate, of the partisans of individual ownership of the
rural domain."

The French Socialists do not propose to interfere with titles of any but
very large properties, or even with inheritance. Whether they have to
meet government ownership and 33-year leases now being tried on a small
scale in New Zealand, or whether a capitalist collectivist government
allows agricultural evolution and land titles to take their natural
course, they expect to corner the labor supply, and in this way
ultimately to urge agriculture along in the Socialist direction. From
the moment they have done this, they expect a steady tendency on the
part of agriculturists to look forward, as the workingmen have done, to
the Socialist State:--

"The question arises, under a Socialist regime, will small
property, the property cultivated by the owner and his family, be
transmissible, allowed to be sold, or left as inheritance to the
children, to the nephews, and even to very remote cousins? From the
moment this property is not used as an instrument of
exploitation--and in a Socialist society, _labor not being sold_,
it could never become one--what do we care whether it changes hands
every morning, whether it travels around through a whole family or
country?"

For, since the Socialist State will furnish work for all that apply, at
the best remuneration, and under the best conditions, especially as it
will do this in its own agricultural enterprises, relatively few farmers
will be able to pay enough to secure other workers than those of their
own families.

In the United States the Party has definitely decided by a large
majority, in a referendum vote, that it does not intend to try to
disturb the self-employing farmer in any way in his occupation and use
of the land. In a declaration adopted in 1909, when, by a referendum
vote of nearly two to one, the demand for the immediate collective
ownership of the land was dropped from the platform, the following
paragraph was inserted:--

"There can be no absolute private title to land. All private titles,
whether called fee simple or otherwise, are and must be subordinate to
the public title. The Socialist Party strives to prevent land from being
used for the purpose of exploitation and speculation. It demands the
collective possession, control, or management of land to whatever extent
may be necessary to attain that end. It is not opposed to the occupation
and possession of land by those using it in a useful bona fide manner
_without exploitation_." (My italics.)

Those American Socialists who have given most attention to the subject,
like Mr. Simons, have long since made up their minds that there is no
hope whatever either for the victory or even for the rapid development
of Socialism in this country unless it takes some root among the
agriculturists. Mr. Simons insists that the Socialists should array
against the forces of conservatism, privilege, and exploitation, "all
those whose labor assists in the production of wealth, for all these
make up the army of exploited, and all are interested in the abolition
of exploitation."

"In this struggle," he continues, "farmers and factory wage workers
must make common cause. Any smaller combination, any division in the
ranks of the workers, must render success impossible. In a country where
fundamental changes of policy are secured at the ballot box, nothing can
be accomplished without united action by all classes of workers.... The
better organization of the factory workers of the cities, due to their
position in the midst of a higher developed capitalism and more
concentrated industry, makes them in no way independent of their rural
brothers. So long as they are not numerous enough to win, they are
helpless. 'A miss is as good as a mile,' and coming close to a majority
avails almost nothing."[230]

Looking at the question after this from the farmers' standpoint, Mr.
Simons argues that many of the latter are well aware that the ownership
of a farm is nothing more than the ownership of a job, and that the
capitalists who own the mortgages, railroads, elevators, meat-packing
establishments, and factories which produce agricultural machinery and
other needed supplies, control the lives and income of the
agriculturists almost as rigidly as they do those of their own
employees. Mr. Simons's views on this point also are probably those of a
majority of the party.

Mr. Victor Berger does not consider that farmers belong to that class by
whom and for whom Socialism has come into being. "The average farmer is
not a proletarian," he says, "yet he is a producer."[231] This would
seem to imply that the farmer should have Socialist consideration,
though perhaps not equal consideration with the workingman. Mr. Berger's
main argument apparently was that the farmers must be included in the
movement, not because this is demanded by principle but because "you
will never get control of the United States unless you have the farming
class with you," as he said at a Socialist convention.

Thus there are three possible attitudes of Socialists towards the
self-employing farmer, and all three are represented in the movement.
Kautsky, Vandervelde, and many others believe that after all he is not a
proletarian, and therefore should not or cannot be included in the
movement. The French Socialists and many Americans believe that he is
practically a proletarian and should and can be included. The
"reformists" in countries where he is very numerous believe he should be
included, even when (Berger) they do not consider him as a proletarian.
The Socialist movement, on the whole, now stands with Kautsky and
Vandervelde, and this is undoubtedly the correct position until the
Socialists are near to political supremacy. The French and American
view, that the self-employing farmer is practically a wage earner, is
spreading, and though this view is false and dangerous if prematurely
applied (_i.e._ to-day) it will become correct in the future when
collectivist capitalism has exhausted its reforms and the small farmer
is becoming an employee of the highly productive government farms or a
profit-sharer in cooeperative associations.