The Transition to Capitalism

At this meeting, the presentation of the chapter Capitalism and Agriculture continued. We examined an important aspect of the transition from the domestic economy of the feudal mode of production and primitive communism to the capitalist form. Kautsky, in The Agrarian Question, emphasizes how quickly this transition takes place: “Capitalist industry has such superiority that it quickly eliminates domestic peasant industry intended for personal consumption, and only the capitalist system of communications, with its railways, post office, and newspapers, brings the ideas and products of the city to the remotest corners of the countryside and subjects the entire rural population, not just those living near the cities, to this process”.

With the inexorable advance of the capitalist mode of production, the peasant sees the old mode of production rapidly and violently dissolving: the need for money, which he previously needed for “superfluous” items, now becomes vitally important. He cannot run his farm, he can no longer live without money.

The feudal lords, princes, and state power also have an increasing need for money. This leads to the transformation of the farmer’s payments in kind into payments in cash. As a result, the products of the land are transformed into commodities to be brought to market. These are no longer the products of his backward industry, for which he could easily find a buyer, but of urban industry. The farmer became a mere cultivator. The independence, security, and comfort of the peasant’s existence as it had been known until then disappeared.

Kautsky: "The farmer now depends on the market, which he found even more capricious and uncertain than the weather. He could defend himself to a certain extent against the vagaries of the weather (...) But he has no means of preventing prices from falling and selling unsold grain. What had previously been a blessing for him, namely a good harvest, now became a calamity! (...) The further away the markets for which the farmer produces become, the more impossible it is for him to sell directly to the consumer, the more he needs an intermediary. Between the consumer and the producer stands the merchant, who knows the market... dominates it... and uses it to exploit the farmer.

"The grain and livestock merchant is soon joined by the usurer, when he is not identified with him. In bad years, the farmer’s income is not sufficient; he has no choice but to resort to credit, to mortgage his land (...) What bad harvests, iron and fire could not do before, crises in the grain and livestock markets can now do. These crises not only cause temporary hardship for the farmer, but also alienate him from his sources of life—the land—separating him from them forever and turning him into a proletarian".

The more the farmer becomes dependent on the market, the greater the surplus of means of subsistence he must produce and sell, and the greater the amount of land he needs in proportion to the size of his family. But since he cannot extend his cultivated land at will, he is forced to reduce his overly large family, as he cannot feed it; he therefore sends the surplus labor away from the family home, sending them to work for others as laborers, soldiers, or urban proletarians, or to create a new home. The peasant family is thus reduced as much as possible.

As agriculture requires more labor at certain times of the year, two or three times more than in winter, where previously the members of the family compensated for this by working at home during the crop rest periods, they are now insufficient and external wage laborers are hired for certain periods. They cost less than a family member for the whole year. Over time, even the members of the family unit become wage earners for the head of the family, and the farm property, the family inheritance, becomes the property of the head of the family.

The ancient peasant family community is thus replaced by large farms with their army of wage-earning workers who, under the orders of the owner, work the fields, tend the livestock, and put his harvest in the barns.

The class antagonism between the exploited and the exploiters quickly penetrated the countryside and the peasant family itself, destroying the ancient harmony and commonality of interests.

This whole process had been developing since the Middle Ages, but it was only with the capitalist mode of production that it underwent an extraordinary acceleration to the point of regulating the conditions of the rural population.

The capitalist economy draws small peasant farms into the commercial vortex, and “the more agriculture becomes capitalist, the more it develops the qualitative difference between the techniques of small-scale and large-scale production”.

“This qualitative difference”, Lenin reiterates, “did not exist in pre-capitalist agriculture”.

Continuing, we have outlined the part concerning the capitalist mode of production in agriculture. We have read passages from The Condition of the Working Class in England by the young Engels, which outlines the emergence of the capitalist mode of production in agriculture and the imposition of its inexorable law of the exploitation of man by man and of the land on the altar of profit.

Federico thus introduces the chapter “The Agricultural Proletariat”: "The abandoned fields were aggregated into large leases, with small farmers overwhelmed by the overwhelming competition of large farms. Instead of remaining landowners or tenants, they were forced to give up their farms and enter the service of large landowners as farm workers. For a time, this situation, although it marked a deterioration in their conditions, was bearable. The spread of industry counterbalanced the increase in population. But when industrial progress began to slow down, and continuous improvements in machinery made it impossible for industry to absorb all the surplus working population from the agricultural districts, from that moment on, the misery that had hitherto been confined to the industrial districts, and even there only from time to time, appeared in the rural districts as well".

Engels continues this important chapter: "The workers are almost all day laborers and are employed by the landlords when they need them, and therefore often have no work for weeks, especially in winter. In the patriarchal state, where the peasants and their families lived on the farm and their children grew up there, where day laborers were the exception rather than the rule, there were more workers on each property than were strictly necessary. It was therefore in the tenant farmer’s interest to dissolve this state of affairs, to drive the farmer off the farm and turn him into a day laborer. This happened more or less generally at the end of the twentieth year of this century [the nineteenth century], and as a result, the latent surplus population was dissolved and wages fell. From that moment on, agricultural districts became the main seat of permanent pauperism, as factory districts were of the other kind, and poor laws were the first measure that public authorities could conceive of against the growing impoverishment of agricultural communities.

"The continuous expansion of large-scale farming, the introduction of threshing machines and other machinery in agriculture, and the widespread employment of women and children in the fields, which is so common that its consequences were recently examined by a special official commission, left a large number of workers unemployed. The industrial system was created by large-scale economics, with the dissolution of the patriarchal state and the introduction of machines, steam power, and the labor of women and children, and it pushed the most extreme and stable part of the working class into the revolutionary movement. The longer agriculture had proved its stability, the heavier the burden fell on the worker, and the more violent the disorganization of the old social bond became.

The report went on to explain how, with the inexorable advance of the capitalist mode of production, agricultural proletarians in England, and even more so in Ireland, became miserable, hungry, and destitute, and how the peasants’ struggles against the landowners developed, often involving arson and murder.