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 reëxamine 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.