Table Of ContentKARL KAUTSKY
The Agrarian Question
IN TWO VOLUMES
Translated by Pete Burgess
Introduction by Harnza Alavi and Teodor Shanin
VOLUME 1
LONOON WINCHESTER MASS
First published 1899 in German by Verlag. ].H.W. Dietz Nachf., Stuttgart
This edition published 1988 by Zwan Publications
11-21 Northdown Street, London Nt 9BN, and
8 Winchester Place, Winchester
MA 01890, USA
Copyright © Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachf. GmbH
Godesberger Allee 143, D-5300 Bonn 2
Translation Copyright © Zwan Publications 1988
Introduction Copyright © Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin 1988
Typesetting: Ransom Typesetting Services, Woburn Sands, Bucks
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by
Billing & Sons Ltd, Worcester
No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted without written permission from the publisher
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Kautsky, Karl
The agrarian question.
1. Agriculture-Economic aspects
I. Title II. Die Agrarfrage. English
338.1 HD1411
ISBN 1 -85305 -&23 -7 v.l
ISBN 1 -85305 -024 -5 v.2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
(revised for vol. 1)
Kautsky, Karl, 1854-1938
The agrarian question.
Translation of: Agrarfrage.
1. Agriculture-Economic aspec~ermany.
2. Socialism-Germany.3. Communism and
agricu1ture--Germany. I. Title.
HDI306.G3K315 1988 338.1 87-20593
ISBN 1 -85305 -023 -7 (v. 1)
ISBN 1 -85305 -024 -5 (v. 2)
Contents
VOLUME 1
Glossary viii
Translator's Note ix
Introduction to the English Edition: Peasantry and
Capitalism by Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin xi
Foreword by Karl Kautsky 1
Part I: The Development of Agriculture in Capitalist Society
1. Introduction 9
2. The Peasant and Industry 13
3. The Agriculture of the Feudal Period 20
The Three-field System 20
The Restriction of the Three-field System through
Large-scale Farming by Feudal Lords 22
The Peasant Becomes a Starveling 27
The Three-field System Becomes an Unbearable
Burden on Agriculture 31
4. Modern Agriculture 35
Meat Consumption and Meat Production 35
Crop Rotation, Division of Labour 38
The Machine in Agriculture 43
Fertilisers and Bacteria 52
Agriculture - a Science 56
5. The Capitalist Character of Modern Agriculture 59
Value 59
Surplus-value and Profit 63
Differential Rent 71
Absolute Ground-rent 77
The Price of Land 83
6. Large and Small Farms 95
The Technical Superiority of the Large Farm 95
Overwork and Underconsumption on the Small Farm 110
The Cooperative System 120
7. The Limits of Capitalist Agriculture 133
Statistical Data 133
The Demise of the Small Enterprise in Industry 141
The Limited Nature of the Soil 145
The Larger Farm is not Necessarily the Better 147
The Latifundium 153
The Shortage of Labour-power 159
8. The Proletarianisation of the Peasantry 168
The Tendency Towards the Dismemberment
of the Land 168
The Forms of Peasant Supplementary Employment 179
VOLUME 2
9. The Growing Difficulties of Commodity';Producing
Agriculture 199
Ground-rent 199
The Law of Inheritance 202
Entailment 204
The Exploitation of the Country by the Town 212
The Depopulation of the Countryside 217
10. Overseas Food Competition and the Industrialisation
of Agriculture 236
The Export Industry 236
The Railway System 239
The Regions of Food Competition 244
Th~ Decline in Grain Production 253
The Unification of Industry and Agriculture 263
The Displacement of Agriculture by Industry 284
11. Prospects for the Future 298
The Mainsprings of Development 298
The Elements of Socialist Agriculture 303
Part ll: Social Democratic Agrarian Policy
12. Does Social Democracy Need an Agrarian Programme? 311
Off to the Land! 311
Peasant and Proletarian 313
Class Struggle and Social Development 325
Nationalisation of the Land 329
The Nationalisation of Forests and Water 335
Village Communism 339
13. The Protection of the Rural Proletariat 345
Industrial and Agricultural Social Policy 345
Freedom of Combination, the Servants Ordinance 346
Protection of Children 349
The School 361
Women's Labour 370
Migrant Labour 372
The Normal Working Day - Sunday Rest 377
The Housing Question 383
Rent on Land 388
14. The Protection of Agriculture 390
Social Democracy - Not the Representative of the
Employers' Interests 390
Feudal Privileges - the Hunt 391
Mixed Land Holdings - the Gemenglage 395
The Improvement of the Land 398
Control of Epidemics 401
State Insurance 403
The Cooperatives - the Agricultural Training System 407
15. The Protection of the Rural Population 410
The Transformation of the Police State into a
Cultural State 410
Self-administration 412
Militarism 413
Nationalisation of Expenditures on Schools, Poor Relief
and Roads 417
Free Administration of Justice 420
The Costs of the Modern Cultural State 423
Bourgeois and Proletarian Taxation Policy 426
The Neutralisation of the Peasantry 438
16. The Social Revolution and the Expropriation of the
Landowners 442
Socialism and the Small Enterprise 442
The Future of the Independent Household 449
Bibliography 454
Index of Authors 458
Glossary
Anerbenrecht The peasant law of entailment
Fideikommiss Fideicommissum the aristocratic law of
entailment
Gesindeordnung Servants Ordinance, 1810, which regulated the
relationship between estate· owners and their
workers
Guts.bezirk Independent estate district: a unit of local
government in East Elbia based on an estate, on
which jurisdiction was exercised by the estate
owners (Junker)
Heuerling Cottagers or small peasants available for
agricultural work
Einlieger Agricultural workers lodging in a peasant
household
Instsmann A type of cotter: agricultural workers on East
(pI. Insleute) Elbian estates, living in their own households,
and occasionally housed in barracks. Paid in
money and fixed share of the harvest. Subject to
the Servants Ordinance (Gesindeordnung)
Mark The Mark community of peasants, centred on the
(genossenscha/t) common pasture (Allmend) waste and woodland
Sachsengiingerei Migration of workers to Saxony for the sugar
beet harvest
Translator's Note
This edition ~s the first English translation of the complete 1899 Dietz
Verlag edition of Die Agrarfrage, which was republished in 1966 with
an introduction by Ernst Schraepler. Kautsky did not provide a
bibliography of the works cited in the text: this has been remedied
here; in just a few cases it has not been possible to ascertain publication
dates.
A number of the tables in the German edition contained errors, some of
which were due to typographical errors and some to errors of
calculation. These have been amended where the original mistake could
be traced.
I would like to thank Ben Fowkes for his constructive and critical
observations on the draft translation.
Pete Burgess
London 1988
Introduction to the English
Edition: Peasantry and
Capitalism
HAMZA ALAVI and TEODOR SHANIN
'Kautsky's book is the most important event in present-day economic
literature since the third volume of Capital. Until now Marxism has
lacked a systematic study of capitalism and agriculture. Kautsky has
filled this gap.'l Lenin could not have praised Kautsky's The Agrarian
Question more highly, ranking it after the great work of the founder of
Marxism himself. Kautsky's study appeared in 1899. At the time Lenin
had himself just completed a study of the impact of capitalism on
Russian agriculture which formed the first part of his book on The
Development of Capitalism in Russia. In a postscript to it Lenin
expressed regrets that he got Kautsky's book too late to make use of it to
illuminate his own work. The dissimilarities as well as similarities of
context and argument between these two major contributors to Marxist
analyses of the impact of capital on agriculture and rural societies offer
valuable insights into their respective analytical and political
positions at the turn of the century. They also provide an important
point of entry into the issue of and their bearing on similar issues today,
notably in the 'developing' societies.
In view of the acclaim with which Kautsky's work on The Agrarian
Question was greeted by his contemporaries, as well as the vigorous
controversies that it sparked off, it is extraordinary to see how much the
work has been neglected by twentieth-century theorists not only in the
context of European rural history but also, and especially, in that of
changes in the contemporary peasant societies of the Third World. Part
of the reason for that neglect might lie simply in the fact that
knowledge of the German language, which for much of the nineteenth
century was an indispensable mark of scholarship in Europe, was soon
displaced by English; and it is only now, after a staggering delay of 90
years, that this first English translation is at last being offered. Nor
was The Agrarian Question available in other West European languages
until quite recently, for the first Italian translation appeared only in
1959, a Spanish one in 1970, while the French edition of 1900 was
quickly out of print, to be renewed only in 1970.
The main explanation for the neglect must lie, however, not in the
linguistic barriers but in the general disenchantment with Marxism of
xi
xii The Agrarian Question
the Second International, a positivistic, deterministic and evolutionist
Marxism which was epitomised in the work of Karl Kautsky. Much of
this was reincarnated in the ideological forms of Stalin's Marxism,
thereby surviving for much longer than might be inferred from the
infrequency of later references to Kautsky.2 It has survived also as a
stereotype of Marxism in the works of its opponents. But the actual
writings of those progenitors of 'orthodox Marxism' were mostly
relegated to oblivion by official spokesmen of the renewed Marxist
orthodoxy of the Third InternationaL As a US communist of long
standing said to one of the writers of this introduction: 'It took me 40
years to discover that Karl and not Renegade was Kautsky's given first
name.' In Germany, Kautsky's opposition to the Bolshevik revolution set
the seal on_his post-1914 status as an ideological pariah in the eyes of
revolutionary Marxists. He was equally unacceptable to the SPD majori
ty because of his refusal to go along with the policy of the leadership to
give total support to the war and to exchange Marxism as he understood
it for their own brand of postwar ·pragmatism'. His decision to leave
Germany in 1924 was an admission of his growing isolation.
With the upsurge of Marxist scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s and
the recent reconstruction of the history of German socialism, closer
attention is now being given to the work and the role of Karl Kautsky.
Much has been written about the Marxism of the Second International
and what Lichtheim has called the conceptual 'drift towards
positivism and scientism which accelerated after Marx's death and
[was] formalised by Kautsky [as] a cast-iron system of "laws" '3 We
would accept such a critique ~f Kautsky's Marxism, but we do not
therefore conclude that Kautsky's work is barren and should be
discarded. Nor do we accept the somewhat naive attempts to
re-Iegitimise the pre-1914 Kautsky by making a Leninist out of him.
Kautsky's work on The Agrarian Question in particular does not fit such
dismissive or subsuming categorisations. Much of Kautsky's analytical
achievement is particular to him. Much of it is also relevant to
contemporary analysis. Amongst the most interesting and theoretically
fruitful aspects of his work are those that have to do with the
transformation of peasant economies by capital. In order to see this work
in perspective it may be helpful if we begin by identifying five
principal points of analysis which characterise his study.
Peasants: Processes, Perspectives and Prescriptions
The first point concerns the impact of capital on the class differentiation
of rural society. Kautsky's arguments in this connection are often
Introduction to the English Edition xiii
misread. Moreover, having started with certain preconceptions,
Kautsky modifies his views quite radically in the course of the work, in
the light of his findings as the analysis progresses.
Kautsky's initial presumption was that just as the tendency towards
concentration and centralisation of production that is set in motion by
the dynamics of capital accumulation eliminated petty commodity
production in manufacturing, likewise, in the field of agriculture it
would result in the dissolution of the peasantry and a polarisation of
rural society into two classes: the rural proletariat and capitalist
farmers. In so far as the rural censuses of Germany did not show
progressive concentration of land in fewer hands, increasing levels of
intensification of capital investment and wage labour in some forms
could still lead to the emergence of capitalist enterprises in agriculture
culminating in the demise of the peasantry (potentially so, at least, as
Kautsky did not find sufficient evidence that this was happening
either). Theoretically, the existing peasantry is subsumed under the
residual category of petty commodity producers, destined to disappear
under capitalism. As Kautsky proceeds with his analysis, however, he
defines with increasing clarity the significant structural differences
between the conditions of peasant production and petty commodity
production in manufacturing, so that the assimilation of the peasantry
becomes problematic.
This becomes clear by Chapter 7, where Kautsky's analysis nearly
turns full circle. Having started with a presumption of a general
tendency on the part of capitalist development to dissolve and
eliminate the peasantry, he finds himself explaining the opposite,
namely why such a tendency does not prevail; why the peasantry may
even persist within the general framework of capitalism. At first he
merely qualifies the operation of the presumed law of evolution. Later
he points out (in the section of Chapter 7 entitled 'Statistical Data')
that in Europe 'the small farm has not lost ground to the large since the
1850s. In fact, in terms of overall acreage, small farms seem to be growing
in some areas.' He then considers, in the section entitled 'The Limited
Nature of the Soil', factors that retard centralisation and concerttration
in agriculture where, he argues, they operate more slowly than in
industry - the difference between the dissolution of petty commodity
production and of the peasantry by capitalism is merely a matter of
difference in the relative speed of the process. By the time Kautsky gets
to the section on 'The Shortage of Labour Power', however, we find him
pointing out the functional role of small farms as 'production sites' for
labour-power needed by the capitalist large farms and industry. The
growth in the number of large farms curtails the supply of rural
