An important final phase in the campaign against natural economy is to
separate industry from agriculture, to eradicate rural industries
altogether from peasant economy. Handicraft in its historical beginnings
was a subsidiary occupation, a mere appendage to agriculture in
civilised and settled societies. In medieval Europe it became gradually
independent of the _corvée_ farm and agriculture, it developed into
specialised occupations, i.e. production of commodities by urban guilds.
In industrial districts, production had progressed from home craft by
way of primitive manufacture to the capitalist factory of the staple
industries, but in the rural areas, under peasant economy, home crafts
persisted as an intrinsic part of agriculture. Every hour that could be
spared from cultivating the soil was devoted to handicrafts which, as an
auxiliary domestic industry, played an important part in providing for
personal needs.[376]
It is a recurrent phenomenon in the development of capitalist production
that one branch of industry after the other is singled out, isolated
from agriculture and concentrated in factories for mass production. The
textile industry provides the textbook example, but the same thing has
happened, though less obviously, in the case of other rural industries.
Capital must get the peasants to buy its commodities and will therefore
begin by restricting peasant economy to a single sphere--that of
agriculture--which will not immediately and, under European conditions
of ownership, only with great difficulty submit to capitalist
domination.[377] To all outward appearance, this process is quite
peaceful. It is scarcely noticeable and seemingly caused by purely
economic factors. There can be no doubt that mass production in the
factories is technically superior to primitive peasant industry, owing
to a higher degree of specialisation, scientific analysis and management
of the productive process, improved machinery and access to
international resources of raw materials. In reality, however, the
process of separating agriculture and industry is determined by factors
such as oppressive taxation, war, or squandering and monopolisation of
the nation's land, and thus belongs to the spheres of political power
and criminal law no less than with economics.
Nowhere has this process been brought to such perfection as in the
United States. In the wake of the railways, financed by European and in
particular British capital, the American farmer crossed the Union from
East to West and in his progress over vast areas killed off the Red
Indians with fire-arms and blood-hounds, liquor and venereal disease,
pushing the survivors to the West, in order to appropriate the land they
had 'vacated', to clear it and bring it under the plough. The American
farmer, the 'backwoodsman' of the good old times before the War of
Secession, was very different indeed from his modern counterpart. There
was hardly anything he could not do, and he led a practically
self-sufficient life on his isolated farm.
In the beginning of the nineties, one of the leaders of the Farmers'
Alliance, Senator Peffer, wrote as follows: 'The American farmer of
to-day is altogether a different sort of man from his ancestor of fifty
or a hundred years ago. A great many men and women now living remember
when farmers were largely manufacturers; that is to say, they made a
great many implements for their own use. Every farmer had an assortment
of tools with which he made wooden implements, as forks and rakes,
handles for his hoes and ploughs, spokes for his wagon, and various
other implements made wholly out of wood. Then the farmer produced flax
and hemp and wool and cotton. These fibres were prepared upon the farm;
they were spun into yarn, woven into cloth, made into garments, and worn
at home. Every farm had upon it a little shop for wood and iron work,
and in the dwelling were cards and looms; carpets were woven,
bed-clothing of different sorts was prepared; upon every farm geese were
kept, their feathers used for supplying the home demand with beds and
pillows, the surplus being disposed of at the nearest market town.
During the winter season wheat and flour and corn meal were carried in
large wagons drawn by teams of six to eight horses a hundred or two
hundred miles to market, and traded for farm supplies for the next
year--groceries and dry goods. Besides this, mechanics were scattered
among the farmers. The farm wagon was in process of building a year or
two; the material was found near the shop; the character of the timber
to be used was stated in the contract; it had to be procured in a
certain season and kept in the drying process a length of time
specified, so that when the material was brought together in proper form
and the wagon made, both parties to the contract knew where every stick
of it came from, and how long it had been in seasoning. During winter
time the neighbourhood carpenter prepared sashes and blinds and doors
and moulding and cornices for the next season's building. When the
frosts of autumn came the shoemaker repaired to the dwellings of the
farmers and there, in a corner set apart to him, he made up shoes for
the family during the winter. All these things were done among the
farmers, and a large part of the expense was paid with products of the
farm. When winter approached, the butchering season was at hand; meat
for family use during the next year was prepared and preserved in the
smoke house. The orchards supplied fruit for cider, for apple butter,
and for preserves of different kinds, amply sufficient to supply the
wants of the family during the year, with some to spare. Wheat was
threshed, a little at a time, just enough to supply the needs of the
family for ready money, and not enough to make it necessary to waste one
stalk of straw. Everything was saved and put to use. One of the results
of that sort of economy was that comparatively a very small amount of
money was required to conduct the business of farming. A hundred
dollars average probably was as much as the largest farmers of that day
needed in the way of cash to meet the demands of their farm work, paying
for hired help, repairs of tools, and all other incidental
expenses.'[378]
This Arcadian life was to come to a sudden end after the War of
Secession. The war had burdened the Union with an enormous National
Debt, amounting to £1,200,000, and in consequence the taxes were
considerably increased. On the other hand, a feverish development of
modern traffic and industry, machine-building in particular, was
encouraged by the imposition of higher protective tariffs. The railway
companies were endowed with public lands on an imposing scale, in order
to promote railroad construction and farm-settlements: in 1867 alone,
they were given more than 192,500,000 acres, and so the permanent way
grew at an unprecedented rate. In 1860 it amounted to less than 31,000
miles, in 1870 it had grown to more than 53,000 miles and in 1880 to
more than 93,000 miles. (During the same period--1870-1880--the
permanent way in Europe had grown from 80,000 miles to 100,000 miles.)
The railways and speculations in land made for mass emigration from
Europe to the United States, and more than 4 1/2 million people
immigrated in the twenty-three years from 1869 to 1892. In this way, the
Union gradually became emancipated from European, and in particular from
British, industry; factories were set up in the States and home
industries developed for the production of textiles, iron, steel and
machinery. The process of revolutionary transformation was most rapid in
agriculture. The emancipation of the slaves had compelled the Southern
planters to introduce the steam plough shortly after the Civil War, and
new farms had sprung up in the West in the wake of the railways, which
from the very beginning employed the most modern machinery and
technique.
'The improvements are rapidly revolutionising the agriculture of the
West, and reducing to the lowest minimum ever attained, the proportion
of manual labour employed in its operations.... Coincident with this
application of mechanics to agriculture, systematic and enlarged
business aptitudes have also sought alliance with this noble art. Farms
of thousands of acres have been managed with greater skill, a more
economical adaptation of means to ends, and with a larger margin of real
profit than many others of 80 acres.'[379]
During this time, direct and indirect taxation had increased enormously.
On June 30, 1864, during the Civil War, a new finance bill was passed
which is the basis of the present system of taxation, and which raised
taxes on consumption and income to a staggering degree. This heavy war
levy served as a pretext for a real orgy of protective tariffs in order
to offset the tax on home production by customs duties.[380] Messrs.
Morrill, Stevens and the other gentlemen who advanced the war as a lever
for enforcing their protectionist programme, initiated the practice of
wielding the implement of a customs policy quite openly and cynically to
further private profiteering interests of all descriptions. Any home
producer who appeared before the legislative assembly with a request for
any kind of special tariff to fill his own pocket saw his demands
readily granted, and the tariff rates were made as high as any
interested party might wish.
'The war', writes the American Taussig, 'had in many ways a bracing and
ennobling influence on our national life; but its immediate effect on
business affairs, and on all legislation affecting moneyed interests,
was demoralising. The line between public duty and private interests was
often lost sight of by legislators. Great fortunes were made by changes
in legislation urged and brought about by those who were benefited by
them, and the country has seen with sorrow that the honour and honesty
of public men did not remain undefiled.'[381]
This customs bill which completely revolutionised the country's economic
life, and remained in force unchanged for twenty years, was literally
pushed through Congress in three days, and through the Senate in two,
without criticism, without debate, without any opposition whatever.[382]
Down to the present day it forms the basis of U.S. customs legislation.
This shift in U.S. fiscal policy ushered in an era of the most brazen
parliamentary log-rolling and of undisguised and unrestrained corruption
of elections, of the legislature and the press to satisfy the greed of
Big Business. '_Enrichissez-vous_' became the catchword of public life
after the 'noble war' to liberate mankind from the 'blot of slavery'. On
the stock exchange, the Yankee negro-liberator sought his fortunes in
orgies of speculation; in Congress, he endowed himself with public
lands, enriched himself by customs and taxes, by monopolies, fraudulent
shares and theft of public funds. Industry prospered. Gone were the
times when the small or medium farmer required hardly any money, when he
could thresh and turn into cash his wheat reserves as the need arose.
Now he was chronically in need of money, a lot of money, to pay his
taxes. Soon he was forced to sell all his produce and to buy his
requirements from the manufacturers in the form of ready-made goods. As
Peffer puts it:
'Coming from that time to the present, we find that everything nearly
has been changed. All over the West particularly the farmer threshes his
wheat all at one time, he disposes of it all at one time, and in a great
many instances the straw is wasted. He sells his hogs, and buys bacon
and pork; he sells his cattle, and buys fresh beef and canned beef or
corned beef, as the case may be; he sells his fruit, and buys it back in
cans. If he raises flax at all, instead of putting it into yarn and
making gowns for his children, as he did fifty years or more ago, he
threshes his flax, sells the seed, and burns the straw. Not more than
one farmer in fifty now keeps sheep at all; he relies upon the large
sheep farmer for the wool, which is put into cloth or clothing ready for
his use. Instead of having clothing made up on the farm in his own house
or by a neighbour woman or country tailor a mile away, he either
purchases his clothing ready made at the nearest town, or he buys the
cloth and has a city tailor make it up for him. Instead of making
implements which he uses about the farm--forks, rakes, etc.--he goes to
town to purchase even a handle for his axe or his mallet; he purchases
twine and rope and all sorts of needed material made of fibres; he buys
his cloth and his clothing; he buys his canned fruit and preserved
fruit; he buys hams and shoulders and mess pork and mess beef; indeed,
he buys nearly everything now that he produced at one time himself, and
these things all cost money. Besides all this, and what seems stranger
than anything else, whereas in the earlier time the American home was a
free home, unencumbered, not one case in a thousand where a home was
mortgaged to secure the payment of borrowed money, and whereas but a
small amount of money was then needed for actual use in conducting the
business of farming, there was always enough of it among the farmers to
supply the demand. Now, when at least ten times as much is needed, there
is little or none to be obtained, nearly half the farms are mortgaged
for as much as they are worth, and interest rates are exorbitant. As to
the cause of such wonderful changes ... the manufacturer came with his
woollen mill, his carding mill, his broom factory, his rope factory, his
wooden-ware factory, his cotton factory, his pork-packing establishment,
his canning factory and fruit preserving houses; the little shop on the
farm has given place to the large shop in town; the wagon-maker's shop
in the neighbourhood has given way to the large establishment in the
city where ... a hundred or two hundred wagons are made in a week; the
shoemaker's shop has given way to large establishments in the cities
where most of the work is done by machines.'[383]
Finally, the agricultural labour of the farmer himself has become
machine work: 'He ploughs and sows and reaps with machines. A machine
cuts his wheat and puts it in a sheaf, and steam drives his threshers.
He may read the morning paper while he ploughs and sit under an awning
while he reaps.'[384]
Sering estimated in the middle eighties that the necessary cash 'for a
very modest beginning' of the smallest farm in the North West is £240 to
£280.[385]
This revolution of American agriculture after the 'Great War' was not
the end. It was only the beginning of the whirlpool in which the farmer
was caught. His history brings us automatically to the second phase of
the development of capitalist accumulation of which it is an excellent
illustration.--Natural economy, the production for personal needs and
the close connection between industry and agriculture must be ousted and
a simple commodity economy substituted for them. Capitalism needs the
medium of commodity production for its development, as a market for its
surplus value. But as soon as simple commodity production has superseded
natural economy, capital must turn against it. No sooner has capital
called it to life, than the two must compete for means of production,
labour power, and markets. The first aim of capitalism is to isolate the
producer, to sever the community ties which protect him, and the next
task is to take the means of production away from the small
manufacturer.
In the American Union, as we have seen, the 'Great War' inaugurated an
era of large-scale seizure of public lands by monopolist capitalist
companies and individual speculators. Feverish railroad building and
ever more speculation in railway shares led to a mad gamble in land,
where individual soldiers of fortune and companies netted immense
fortunes and even entire counties. In addition a veritable swarm of
agents lured the vast flow of emigrants from Europe to the U.S.A. by
blatant and unscrupulous advertising, deceptions and pretences of every
description. These immigrants first settled in the Eastern States along
the Atlantic seaboard, and, with the growth of industry in these states,
agriculture was driven westward. The 'wheat centre' which had been near
Columbus, Ohio, in 1850, in the course of the subsequent fifty years
shifted to a position 99 miles further North and 680 miles further West.
Whereas in 1850 51·4 per cent of the total wheat crop had been supplied
by the Eastern States, in 1880 they produced only 13·6 per cent, 71·7
per cent being supplied by the Northern Central and 9 per cent by the
Western States.
In 1825, the Congress of the Union under Monroe had decided to
transplant the Red Indians from the East to the West of the Mississippi.
The redskins put up a desperate resistance; but all who survived the
slaughter of forty Red Indian campaigns were swept away like so much
rubbish and driven like cattle to the West to be folded in reservations
like so many sheep. The Red Indian had been forced to make room for the
farmer--and now the farmer in his turn was driven beyond the Mississippi
to make way for capital.
Following the railway tracks, the American farmer moved West and
North-West into the land of promise which the great land speculators'
agents had painted for him in glowing colours. Yet the most fertile and
most favourably situated lands were retained by the companies who farmed
them extensively on completely capitalistic lines. All around the farmer
who had been exiled into the wilderness, a dangerous competitor and
deadly enemy sprang up--the 'bonanza farms', the great capitalist
agricultural concerns which neither the Old World nor the New had known
before. Here surplus value was produced with the application of all the
resources known to modern science and technology.
'As the foremost representative of financial agriculture we may consider
Oliver Dalrymple, whose name is to-day known on both sides of the
Atlantic. Since 1874 he has simultaneously managed a line of steamers on
the Red River and six farms owned by a company of financiers and
comprising some 75,000 acres. Each one is divided into departments of
2,000 acres, and every department is again subdivided into three
sections of 667 acres which are run by foremen and gangleaders. Barracks
to shelter 50 men and stable as many horses and mules, are built on each
section, and similarly kitchens, machine sheds and workshops for
blacksmiths and locksmiths. Each section is completely equipped with 20
pairs of horses, 8 double ploughs, 12 horse-drawn drill-ploughs, 12
steel-toothed harrows, 12 cutters and binders, 2 threshers and 16
wagons. Everything is done to ensure that the machines and the living
labour (men, horses and mules) are in good condition and able to do the
greatest possible amount of work. There is a telephone line connecting
all sections and the central management.
'The six farms of 75,000 acres are cultivated by an army of 600 workers,
organised on military lines. During the harvest, the management hires
another 500 to 600 auxiliary workers, assigning them to the various
sections. After the work is completed in the fall, the workers are
dismissed with the exception of the foreman and 10 men per section. In
some farms in Dakota and Minnesota, horses and mules do not spend the
winter at the place of work. As soon as the stubble has been ploughed
in, they are driven in teams of a hundred or two hundred pairs 900 miles
to the South, to return only the following spring.
'Mechanics on horseback follow the ploughing, sowing and harvesting
machines when they are at work. If anything goes wrong, they gallop to
the machine in question, repair it and get it moving again without
delay. The harvested corn is carried to the threshing machines which
work day and night without interruption. They are stoked with bundles of
straw fed into the stokehold through pipes of sheet-iron. The corn is
threshed, winnowed, weighed and filled into sacks by machinery, then it
is put into railway trucks which run alongside the farm, and goes to
Duluth or Buffalo. Every year, Dalrymple increases his land under seed
by 5,800 acres. In 1880 it amounted to 25,000 acres.[386]
In the late seventies, there were already individual capitalists and
companies who owned 35,000-45,000 acres of wheat land. Since the time of
Lafargue's writing, extensive capitalist agriculture in America has made
great strides in technique and the employment of machinery.[387]
The American farmer could not successfully compete with such capitalist
enterprises. At a time when the general revolution in the conditions of
finance, production and transport compelled him to give up production
for personal needs and to produce exclusively for the market, the great
spreading of agriculture caused a heavy fall in the prices of
agricultural products. And at the precise moment when farming became
dependent on the market, the agricultural market of the Union was
suddenly turned from a local one into a world market, and became a prey
to the wild speculations of a few capitalist mammoth concerns.
In 1879, a notable year for the history of agricultural conditions in
Europe as well as in America, there began the mass export of wheat from
the U.S.A. to Europe.[388]
Big Business was of course the only one to profit from this expanding
market. The small farmer was crushed by the competition of an increasing
number of extensive farms and became the prey of speculators who bought
up his corn to exert pressure on the world market. Helpless in the face
of the immense capitalist powers, the farmer got into debt--a phenomenon
typical for a declining peasant economy. In 1890, Secretary Rusk of the
U.S. Department of Agriculture sent out a circular letter with reference
to the desperate position of the farmers, saying:
'The burden of mortgages upon farms, homes, and land, is unquestionably
discouraging in the extreme, and while in some cases no doubt this load
may have been too readily assumed, still in the majority of cases the
mortgage has been the result of necessity.... These mortgages ...
drawing high rates of interest ... have to-day, in the face of continued
depression of the prices of staple products, become very irksome, and in
many cases threaten the farmer with loss of home and land. It is a
question of grave difficulty to all those who seek to remedy the ills
from which our farmers are suffering. At present prices the farmer finds
that it takes more of his products to get a dollar wherewith to buy back
the dollar which he borrowed than it did when he borrowed it. The
interest accumulates, while the payment of the principal seems utterly
hopeless, and the very depression which we are discussing makes the
renewal of the mortgage most difficult.'[389]
According to the census of May 29, 1891, 2·5 million farms were deep in
debt; two-thirds of them were managed by the owners whose obligations
amounted to nearly £440,000.
'The situation is this: farmers are passing through the "valley and
shadow of death"; farming as a business is profitless; values of farm
products have fallen 50 per cent since the great war, and farm values
have depreciated 25 to 50 per cent during the last ten years; farmers
are overwhelmed with debts secured by mortgages on their homes, unable
in many instances to pay even the interest as it falls due, and unable
to renew the loans because securities are weakening by reason of the
general depression; many farmers are losing their homes under this
dreadful blight, and the mortgage mill still grinds. We are in the hands
of a merciless power; the people's homes are at stake.'[390]
Encumbered with debts and close to ruin, the farmer had no option but to
supplement his earnings by working for a wage, or else to abandon his
farm altogether. Provided it had not yet fallen into the clutches of
his creditors like so many thousands of farms, he could shake from off
his feet the dust of the 'land of promise' that had become an inferno
for him. In the middle eighties, abandoned and decaying farms could be
seen everywhere. In 1887, Sering wrote:
'If the farmer cannot pay his debts to date, the interest he has to pay
is increased to 12, 15 or even 20 per cent. He is pressed by the banker,
the machine salesman and the grocer who rob him of the fruits of his
hard work.... He can either remain on the farm as a tenant or move
further West, to try his fortunes elsewhere. Nowhere in North America
have I found so many indebted, disappointed and depressed farmers as in
the wheat regions of the North Western prairies. I have not spoken to a
single farmer in Dakota who would not have been prepared to sell his
farm.[391]
'The Commissioner of Agriculture of Vermont in 1889 reported a
wide-spread desertion of farm-lands of that state. He wrote: "... there
appears to be no doubt about there being in this state large tracts of
tillable unoccupied lands, which can be bought at a price approximating
the price of Western lands, situated near school and church, and not far
from railroad facilities. The Commissioner has not visited all of the
counties in the State where these lands are reported, but he has visited
enough to satisfy him that, while much of the unoccupied and formerly
cultivated land is now practically worthless for cultivation, yet very
much of it can be made to yield a liberal reward to intelligent
labour."'[392]
The Commissioner of the State of New Hampshire issued a pamphlet in
1890, devoting 67 pages to the description of farms for sale at the
lowest figures. He describes 1442 farms with tenantable buildings,
abandoned only recently. The same has happened in other districts.
Thousands of acres once raising corn and wheat are left untilled and run
to brush and wood.
In order to resettle the deserted land, speculators engaged in
advertising campaigns and attracted crowds of new immigrants--new
victims who were to suffer their predecessors' fate even more speedily.
A private letter says: 'In the neighbourhood of railroads and markets,
there remains no common land. It is all in the hands of the
speculators. A settler takes over vacant land and counts for a farmer;
but the management of his farm hardly assures his livelihood, and he
cannot possibly compete with the big farmer. He tills as much of his
land as the law compels him to do, but to make a comfortable living, he
must look for additional sources of income outside agriculture. In
Oregon, for instance, I have met a settler who owned 160 acres for five
years, but every summer, until the end of July, he worked twelve hours a
day for a dollar a day at road-making. This man, of course, also counts
as one of the five million farmers in the 1890 census. Again, in the
County of Eldorado, I saw many farmers who cultivated their land only to
feed their cattle and themselves. There would have been no profit in
producing for the market, and their chief income derives from
gold-digging, the felling and selling of timber, etc. These people are
prosperous, but it is not agriculture which makes them so. Two years
ago, we worked in Long Cañon, Eldorado County, living in a cabin on an
allotment. The owner of this allotment came home only once a year for a
couple of days, and worked the rest of the time on the railway in
Sacramento. Some years ago, a small part of the allotment was
cultivated, to comply with the law, but now it is left completely
untilled. A few acres are fenced off with wire, and there is a log cabin
and a shed. But during the last years all this stands empty; a neighbour
has the key and he made us free of the hut. In the course of our
journey, we saw many deserted allotments, where attempts at farming had
been made. Three years ago I was offered a farm with dwelling house for
a hundred dollars, but in a short time the unoccupied house collapsed
under the snow. In Oregon, we saw many derelict farms with small
dwelling houses and vegetable gardens. One we visited was beautifully
made: a sturdy block house, fashioned by a master-builder, and some
equipment; but the farmer had abandoned it all. You were welcome to take
it all without charge.'[393]
Where could the ruined American farmer turn? He set out on a pilgrimage
to follow the wheat centre and the railways. The former had shifted in
the main to Canada, the Saskatchewan and the Mackenzie River where wheat
can still thrive on the 62nd parallel. A number of American farmers
followed--and after some time in Canada, they suffered the old
fate.[394] During recent years, Canada has entered the world market as a
wheat-exporting country, but her agriculture is dominated to an even
greater extent by big capital than elsewhere.[395]
In Canada, public lands were lavished upon private capitalist companies
on an even more monstrous scale than in the United States. Under the
Charter of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company with its grant of land,
private capital perpetrated an unprecedented act of robbing the public.
Not only that the company was guaranteed a twenty years' monopoly of
railway-building, not only that it got a building site of about 713
miles free of charge, not only that it got a 100 years' state guarantee
of the 3 per cent interest on the share capital of £m. 20--to crown it
all, the company was given the choice of 25 million acres out of the
most fertile and favourably situated lands, not necessarily in the
immediate vicinity of the permanent way, as a free gift. All future
settlers on this vast area were thus at the mercy of railway capital
from the very outset. The railway company, in its turn, immediately
proceeded to sell off 5 million acres for ready cash to the North-West
Land Company, an association of British capitalists under the
chairmanship of the Duke of Manchester. The second group of capitalists
which was liberally endowed with public lands was the Hudson Bay
Company, which was given a title to no less than one-twentieth of all
the lands between Lake Winnipeg, the U.S. border, the Rocky Mountains,
and Northern Saskatchewan, for renouncing their privileges in the
North-West. Between them, these two capitalist groups had gained
possession of five-ninths of all the land that could be settled. A
considerable part of the other lands was assigned by the State to 26
capitalist 'colonising companies'.[396] Thus the Canadian farmer was
practically everywhere ensnared by capital and capitalist speculation.
And still mass immigration continued--not only from Europe, but also
from the United States!
These are the characteristics of capitalist domination on an
international scale. Having evicted the peasant from his soil, it drives
him from England to the East of the United States, and from there to the
West, and on the ruins of the Red Indians' economy it transforms him
back into a small commodity producer. Then, when he is ruined once more,
he is driven from the West to the North. With the railways in the van,
and ruin in the rear--capital leads the way, its passage is marked with
universal destruction. The great fall of prices in the nineties is again
succeeded by higher prices for agricultural products, but this is of no
more avail to the small American farmer than to the European peasant.
Yet the numbers of farmers are constantly swelling. In the last decade
of the nineteenth century they had grown from 4,600,000 to 5,700,000,
and the following ten years still saw an absolute increase. The
aggregate value of farms had during the same period risen from
£150,240,000 to £330,360,000.[397] We might have expected the general
increase in the price of farm produce to have helped the farmer to come
into his own. But that is not so; we see that the growing numbers of
tenant farmers outstrip the increase in the farming population as a
whole. In 1880, the proportion of tenant farmers amounted to 25·5 per
cent of the total number of farmers in the Union, in 1890 it was 28·4
per cent, in 1900 35·3 per cent, and in 1910 37·2 per cent.
Though prices for farm produce were rising, the tenant farmer was more
and more rapidly stepping into the shoes of the independent farmer. And
although much more than one-third of all farmers in the Union are now
tenant farmers, their social status in the United States is that of the
agricultural labourer in Europe. Constantly fluctuating, they are indeed
wage-slaves of capital; they work very hard to create wealth for
capital, getting nothing in return but a miserable and precarious
existence.
In quite a different historical setting, in South Africa, the same
process shows up even more clearly the 'peaceful methods' by which
capital competes with the small commodity producer.
In the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics, pure peasant economy
prevailed until the sixties of the last century. For a long time the
Boers had led the life of animal-tending nomads; they had killed off or
driven out the Hottentots and Kaffirs with a will in order to deprive
them of their most valuable pastures. In the eighteenth century they
were given invaluable assistance by the plague, imported by ships of the
East India Company, which frequently did away with entire Hottentot
tribes whose lands then fell to the Dutch immigrants. When the Boers
spread further East, they came in conflict with the Bantu tribes and
initiated the long period of the terrible Kaffir wars. These god-fearing
Dutchmen regarded themselves as the Chosen People and took no small
pride in their old-fashioned Puritan morals and their intimate knowledge
of the Old Testament; yet, not content with robbing the natives of their
land, they built their peasant economy like parasites on the backs of
the Negroes, compelling them to do slave-labour for them and corrupting
and enervating them deliberately and systematically. Liquor played such
an important part in this process, that the prohibition of spirits in
the Cape Colony could not be carried through by the English government
because of Puritan opposition. There were no railways until 1859, and
Boer economy in general and on the whole remained patriarchal and based
on natural economy until the sixties. But their patriarchal attitude did
not deter the Boers from extreme brutality and harshness. It is well
known that Livingstone complained much more about the Boers than about
the Kaffirs. The Boers considered the Negroes an object, destined by
God and Nature to slave for them, and as such an indispensable
foundation of their peasant economy. So much so that their answer to the
abolition of slavery in the English colonies in 1836 was the 'Great
Trek', although there the owners had been compensated with £3,000,000.
By way of the Orange River and Vaal, the Boers emigrated from the Cape
Colony, and in the process they drove the Matabele to the North, across
the Limpopo, setting them against the Makalakas. Just as the American
farmer had driven the Red Indian West before him under the impact of
capitalist economy, so the Boer drove the Negro to the North. The 'Free
Republics' between the Orange River and the Limpopo thus were created as
a protest against the designs of the English bourgeoisie on the sacred
right of slavery. The tiny peasant republics were in constant guerilla
warfare against the Bantu Negroes. And it was on the backs of the
Negroes that the battle between the Boers and the English government,
which went on for decades, was fought. The Negro question, i.e. the
emancipation of the Negroes, ostensibly aimed at by the English
bourgeoisie, served as a pretext for the conflict between England and
the republics. In fact, peasant economy and great capitalist colonial
policy were here competing for the Hottentots and Kaffirs, that is to
say for their land and their labour power. Both competitors had
precisely the same aim: to subject, expel or destroy the coloured
peoples, to appropriate their land and press them into service by the
abolition of their social organisations. Only their methods of
exploitation were fundamentally different. While the Boers stood for
out-dated slavery on a petty scale, on which their patriarchal peasant
economy was founded, the British bourgeoisie represented modern
large-scale capitalist exploitation of the land and the natives. The
Constitution of the Transvaal (South African) Republic declared with
crude prejudice: 'The People shall not permit any equality of coloured
persons with white inhabitants, neither in the Church nor in the
State.'[398]
In the Orange Free State and in the Transvaal no Negro was allowed to
own land, to travel without papers or to walk abroad after sunset. Bryce
tells us of a case where a farmer, an Englishman as it happened, in the
Eastern Cape Colony had flogged his Kaffir slave to death. When he was
acquitted in open court, his neighbours escorted him home to the strains
of music. The white man frequently maltreated his free native labourers
after they had done their work--to such an extent that they would take
to flight, thus saving the master their wages.
The British government employed precisely the opposite tactics. For a
long time it appeared as protector of the natives; flattering the
chieftains in particular, it supported their authority and tried to make
them claim a right of disposal over their land. Wherever it was
possible, it gave them ownership of tribal land, according to well-tried
methods, although this flew in the face of tradition and of the actual
social organisation of the Negroes. All tribes in fact held their land
communally, and even the most cruel and despotic rulers such as the
Matabele Chieftain Lobengula merely had the right as well as the duty to
allot every family a piece of land which they could only retain so long
as they cultivated it. The ultimate purpose of the British government
was clear: long in advance it was preparing for land robbery on a grand
scale, using the native chieftains themselves as tools. But in the
beginning it was content with the 'pacification' of the Negroes by
extensive military actions. Up to 1879 were fought 9 bloody Kaffir wars
to break the resistance of the Bantus.
British capital revealed its real intentions only after two important
events had taken place: the discovery of the Kimberley diamond fields in
1869-70, and the discovery of the gold mines in the Transvaal in 1882-5,
which initiated a new epoch in the history of South Africa. Then the
British South Africa Company, that is to say Cecil Rhodes, went into
action. Public opinion in England rapidly swung over, and the greed for
the treasures of South Africa urged the British government on to drastic
measures. South Africa was suddenly flooded with immigrants who had
hitherto only appeared in small numbers--immigration having been
deflected to the United States. But with the discovery of the diamond
and gold fields, the numbers of white people in the South African
colonies grew by leaps and bounds: between 1885 and 1895, 100,000
British had immigrated into Witwatersrand alone. The modest peasant
economy was forthwith pushed into the background--the mines, and thus
the mining capital, coming to the fore. The policy of the British
government veered round abruptly. Great Britain had recognised the Boer
Republics by the Sand River Agreement and the Treaty of Bloemfontein in
the fifties. Now her political might advanced upon the tiny republics
from every side, occupying all neighbouring districts and cutting off
all possibility of expansion. At the same time the Negroes, no longer
protected favourites, were sacrificed. British capital was steadily
forging ahead. In 1868, Britain took over the rule of Basutoland--only,
of course, because the natives had 'repeatedly implored' her to do
so.[399] In 1871, the Witwatersrand diamond fields, or West Griqualand,
were seized from the Orange Free State and turned into a Crown Colony.
In 1879, Zululand was subjected, later to become part of the Natal
Colony; in 1885 followed the subjection of Bechuanaland, to be joined to
the Cape Colony. In 1888 Britain took over Matabele and Mashonaland, and
in 1889 the British South Africa Company was given a Charter for both
these districts, again, of course, only to oblige the natives and at
their request.[400] Between 1884 and 1887, Britain annexed St. Lucia Bay
and the entire East Coast as far as the Portuguese possessions. In 1894,
she subjected Tongaland. With their last strength, the Matabele and
Mashona fought one more desperate battle, but the Company, with Rhodes
at the head, first liquidated the rising in blood and at once proceeded
to the well-tried measure for civilising and pacifying the natives: two
large railways were built in the rebellious district.
The Boer Republics were feeling increasingly uncomfortable in this
sudden stranglehold, and their internal affairs as well were becoming
completely disorganised. The overwhelming influx of immigrants and the
rising tides of the frenzied new capitalist economy now threatened to
burst the barriers of the small peasant states. There was indeed a
blatant conflict between agricultural and political peasant economy on
the one hand, and the demands and requirements of the accumulation of
capital on the other. In all respects, the republics were quite unable
to cope with these new problems. The constant danger from the Kaffirs,
no doubt regarded favourably by the British, the unwieldy, primitive
administration, the gradual corruption of the _volksraad_ in which the
great capitalists got their way by bribery, lack of a police force to
keep the undisciplined crowds of adventurers in some semblance of order,
the absence of labour legislation for regulating and securing the
exploitation of the Negroes in the mines, lack of water supplies and
transport to provide for the colony of 100,000 immigrants that had
suddenly sprung up, high protective tariffs which increased the cost of
labour for the capitalists, and high freights for coal--all these
factors combined towards the sudden and stunning bankruptcy of the
peasant republics.
They tried, obstinately and unimaginatively, to defend themselves
against the sudden eruption of capitalism which engulfed them, with an
incredibly crude measure, such as only a stubborn and hide-bound peasant
brain could have devised: they denied all civic rights to the
_uitlanders_ who outnumbered them by far and who stood for capital,
power, and the trend of the time. In those critical times it was an
ill-omened trick. The mismanagement of the peasant republics caused a
considerable reduction of dividends, on no account to be put up with.
Mining capital had come to the end of its tether. The British South
Africa Company built railroads, put down the Kaffirs, organised revolts
of the _uitlanders_ and finally provoked the Boer War. The bell had
tolled for peasant economy. In the United States, the economic
revolution had begun with a war, in South Africa war put the period to
this chapter. Yet in both instances, the outcome was the same: capital
triumphed over the small peasant economy which had in its turn come into
being on the ruins of natural economy, represented by the natives'
primitive organisations. The domination of capital was a foregone
conclusion, and it was just as hopeless for the Boer Republics to resist
as it had been for the American farmer. Capital officially took over the
reins in the new South African Union which replaced the small peasant
republics by a great modern state, as envisaged by Cecil Rhodes'
imperialist programme. The new conflict between capital and labour had
superseded the old one between British and Dutch. One million white
exploiters of both nations sealed their touching fraternal alliance
within the Union with the civil and political disfranchisement of five
million coloured workers. Not only the Negroes of the Boer Republics
came away empty-handed, but the natives of the Cape Colony, whom the
British government had at one time granted political equality, were also
deprived of some of their rights. And this noble work, culminating under
the imperialist policy of the Conservatives in open oppression, was
actually to be finished by the Liberal Party itself, amid frenzied
applause from the 'liberal cretins of Europe' who with sentimental pride
took as proof of the still continuing creative vigour and greatness of
English liberalism the fact that Britain had granted complete
self-government and freedom to a handful of whites in South Africa.
The ruin of independent craftsmanship by capitalist competition, no less
painful for being soft-pedalled, deserves by rights a chapter to itself.
The most sinister part of such a chapter would be out-work under
capitalism;--but we need not dwell on these phenomena here.
The general result of the struggle between capitalism and simple
commodity production is this: after substituting commodity economy for
natural economy, capital takes the place of simple commodity economy.
Non-capitalist organisations provide a fertile soil for capitalism; more
strictly: capital feeds on the ruins of such organisations, and although
this non-capitalist _milieu_ is indispensable for accumulation, the
latter proceeds at the cost of this medium nevertheless, by eating it
up. Historically, the accumulation of capital is a kind of metabolism
between capitalist economy and those pre-capitalist methods of
production without which it cannot go on and which, in this light, it
corrodes and assimilates. Thus capital cannot accumulate without the aid
of non-capitalist organisations, nor, on the other hand, can it tolerate
their continued existence side by side with itself. Only the continuous
and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organisations makes
accumulation of capital possible.
The premises which are postulated in Marx's diagram of accumulation
accordingly represent no more than the historical tendency of the
movement of accumulation and its logical conclusion. The accumulative
process endeavours everywhere to substitute simple commodity economy for
natural economy. Its ultimate aim, that is to say, is to establish the
exclusive and universal domination of capitalist production in all
countries and for all branches of industry.
Yet this argument does not lead anywhere. As soon as this final result
is achieved--in theory, of course, because it can never actually
happen--accumulation must come to a stop. The realisation and
capitalisation of surplus value become impossible to accomplish. Just as
soon as reality begins to correspond to Marx's diagram of enlarged
reproduction, the end of accumulation is in sight, it has reached its
limits, and capitalist production is _in extremis_. For capital, the
standstill of accumulation means that the development of the productive
forces is arrested, and the collapse of capitalism follows inevitably,
as an objective historical necessity. This is the reason for the
contradictory behaviour of capitalism in the final stage of its
historical career: imperialism.
Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction thus does not conform to the
conditions of an accumulation in actual progress. Progressive
accumulation cannot be reduced to static interrelations and
interdependence between the two great departments of social production
(the departments of producer and consumer goods), as the diagram would
have it. Accumulation is more than an internal relationship between the
branches of capitalist economy; it is primarily a relationship between
capital and a non-capitalist environment, where the two great
departments of production sometimes perform the accumulative process on
their own, independently of each other, but even then at every step the
movements overlap and intersect. From this we get most complicated
relations, divergencies in the speed and direction of accumulation for
the two departments, different relations with non-capitalist modes of
production as regards both material elements and elements of value,
which we cannot possibly lay down in rigid formulæ. Marx's diagram of
accumulation is only the theoretical reflection of the precise moment
when the domination of capital has reached its limits, and thus it is
no less a fiction than his diagram of simple reproduction, which gives
the theoretical formulation for the point of departure of capitalist
accumulation. The precise definition of capitalist accumulation and its
laws lies somewhere in between these two fictions.