Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

"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 rôle 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]