(e) Industry and Agriculture

The socialization of agriculture will not stop with the institutions that have been described. The final aim of this movement must be the union of industry and agriculture.

Formerly both were combined in the private peasant holding, when the peasant produced nearly all the industrial products which he used. The progressive division of labour has made one peasant industry after another independent and transferred it to the towns, setting up by their side numerous new industries which have become indispensable to the peasant, even in such a backward country as Russia. The ruin of Russian industry is not least due to the ruin of Russian agriculture.

The more the farmer’s work is restricted to agriculture proper, the more it becomes seasonal work, which at various times swells enormously, and then almost completely subsides. A man who carries on a seasonal trade in a town may discharge his workers in the slack season, and re-engage them when business revives. The discharged workers find various ways of helping themselves during the slack season, although they often suffer acute privations. On the other hand, most of the country workers follow only one occupation, and in the slack periods of agriculture the day-labourers can find scarcely any employment, whereas in the busiest times it is usually difficult to obtain a sufficient number of hands.

In addition to these disadvantages attaching to the migration of industry from the country to the town, population declines in the country and congests the towns. Moreover, the country population lacks the intellectual stimulations which are provided in ample measure by the towns, and a great spiritual gulf yawns between town and country, which contributes not a little to the enmity between the two.

But the towns are centres not only of a higher intelligence, but also of luxury, debauchery, and criminality. The urban worker loses his affinity with nature and runs the danger of physical deterioration. Moreover, the congestion of population in the large towns involves a growing cost of transport for its provision of food, water, and other vital necessaries, as well as the increasing expense of the removal of waste products, whose valuable manure properties are largely lost to agriculture.

This separation of industry and agriculture, of town and country, to the extent to which it has proceeded to-day, is one of the worst effects of industrial capitalism, and until the process has been reversed, the damage it has wrought will not have been entirely repaired.

Indications are already in existence which point to the transfer of certain industries to the countryside.

The first types of industries to be exploited by capitalism, both home industries and mines, originated outside the towns. When machinery was first utilized, its earliest driving power was water, whence a factory is still called in England a mill. Industry followed water-power to certain valleys. The steam machine and railways then concentrated the great majority of industries in certain towns.

Hitherto the opposing tendencies have not been strong enough to reverse the direction of this movement. It is true that a number of factories have been transported to the country, when cheap labour was to be found there. Other industries are obliged to be near their agricultural raw materials, which for technical or economic reasons will not bear the cost of transport, for instance, sugar factories, distilleries, preserved vegetable factories, etc.

Many manufacturers have acquired land in the vicinity of their factories, in order to supply their workers with cheap foodstuffs, milk, butter, eggs, and meat.

But all these undertakings have so far been of too isolated a character to influence perceptibly the social picture as a whole; they have been undertaken without any system, and none of them has touched the real problem: the organic connection of industrial and agricultural production.

In this respect capitalism has not performed the slightest work of preparation.

It will be the task of a socialist regime to discover by experiment the most appropriate ways for combining industry with agriculture, so that industry may not only find a location on the countryside and agricultural enterprise may not only be considered as a source of supply for industrial workers. In addition, labour-power must be so trained and organized that industrial workers will be able to assist in field labour during the busiest periods of agriculture, and the land-workers must be enabled to enter industry during the slack periods, especially in winter.

A still higher form of the union of industry with agriculture will be attained where it is found possible for every worker to be engaged regularly day in and day out for a few hours in the open air, in field labour, and a few hours in the factory, thus abolishing the soul and body-destroying monotony of one-sided labour.

The health and interest of the workers would surely gain enormously if each of them were engaged four hours in industry and four hours in agriculture, making an eight-hour day. By the employment of three shifts, the total working time expended in both cases would be twelve hours daily.

These periods could of course be adapted to the fluctuating labour requirements of agriculture.

As we have said, experience in this sphere has yet to be acquired. It goes without saying that attempts in this direction should not follow a rigid plan. The same organization will not suit every industry, and each industry has its special location where it best thrives.

On the other hand, the towns will continue to exist as centres of State administration and of higher education. But with the reduction of the State bureaucracy and the increase of local government, there will be a shrinkage in the army of officials in the capital. Moreover, it will be possible to achieve a higher degree of decentralization in industry, the more it is systematically organized and rendered independent of the market fluctuations, and the better the transport facilities become.

What central institutions remain in the towns will scarcely involve a larger population than about 100,000 inhabitants.

On the other hand, the transfer of industry to the countryside will cause the villages to grow into small towns, as is already the case in Italy, which will again facilitate the separation of the business from the household in agriculture and the expansion of the large-scale undertaking.

The solution of this problem would cause an immense number of new buildings to be constructed on the countryside; it would require careful work of preparation, and take a long time. It can only be undertaken by a very wealthy State where Socialism is firmly rooted. In the period of transition from Capitalism to Socialism, with which we are chiefly concerned, it is hardly a practical question.

Nevertheless it may not be superfluous to have referred to the problem here, so that practical men and theorists may begin to pay attention to it and to accumulate experience, just as the experiments with productive co-operation during the eighteen-forties, although very premature and impracticable, provided us with many valuable hints.

We cannot develop Socialism out of theories which are merely the results of speculation. These theories must be based on experience. The greater the sum of experience at our disposal, the more securely we shall be able to move into the future.

On the whole we have discovered that the socialization of agriculture presents greater difficulties and requires more preliminary work than in industry. Nevertheless, a socialist regime would not be able to defer the solution of this problem. The sooner and the more successfully Socialism is able to prove its power in agriculture, the more easily it will be able to disarm its most dangerous opponent, the peasantry.

As a physical force factor, the capitalists are no longer to be feared in an industrial and highly-developed democratic community. There the opposition between Capital and Labour is a matter of economics and intelligence, not of physical force.

The peasant, on the other hand, represents not only a powerful economic factor, but also a physical power, which, under certain circumstances, would be very obstructive and even dangerous to a Labour regime. His economic antagonism to the workers is, however, less deeply rooted than that of the workers to capital.

Even where a Labour regime would compensate capital for all the means of production which it has to cede to the State or the municipality, the capitalists are threatened with the loss of the power they have hitherto exercised. But the small peasant, who exploits no wage-earner, has no power to lose to Socialism, but rather leisure and prosperity to gain.

He does not, however, believe in theoretical assurances. He can only be won by practical object lessons. To provide him with these is of the greatest importance for us. But this must be of a different nature from the object lessons in Socialism which the Bolshevists in 1917 promised to give to the world. They must be less grandiose, less rapid, and more thoroughly prepared, so that they cannot fail to achieve the best results.