Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

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).

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 coöperation 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.