Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel , 1885.
XII The Agrarian Question
1. Avast question presents itself at this moment to the European continent. It is the agrarian question, the question of knowing what new form of possession and cultivation of the soil the near future reserves for us. To whom will the land belong? Who will cultivate it and how will it be cultivated? Nobody fails to understand the gravity of the problem. Even less does he fail to understand, if he has been follow- ing attentively what has been going on in Ireland, in England, in Spain, in Italy, in some parts of Germany and in Russia, and this question indeed stands forward at this moment in all its magnitude. In the wretched villages, in the midst of that class of landworkers so despised up to the present, an immense revolution is under way.
The strongest objection that up to now has been made to socialism consists of the argument that if the social question interests the city workers, it does not have the same attraction for country dwellers; that if the town workers willingly accept the ideas of the abolition of individual property and become stirred up about the expropriation of the manufac- turers and factory owners, it is not the same with the peasants; the latter, we are told, distrust the socialists and if -- one day -- the city workers try to realize their plans, the peasants will soon make them see reason.
We must grant that, thirty or forty years ago, this objection had at least an appearance of validity in certain countries. A degree of well- being in some regions, and a good deal of resigned apathy in others, resulted in the peasants making little or no manifestation of discontent. But today this is no longer the case. The concentration of property in the hands of the wealthiest individuals, and the steady growth of a proletariat of the fields, the heavy taxation with which the States bear down on agriculture; the introduction into farming of widescale machine production on an industrial scale; the competition from America and Australia; and finally the rapid exchange of ideas that today penetrate even the most isolated hamlets; all these circumstances have meant that the conditions of farming have changed for all to see over the past thirty years. At this moment Europe finds itself in the presence of a vast agrarian movement that will soon embrace it entirely and give the grow- ing revolution a greater and quite different significance than if it had been limited solely to the towns.
Who does not read the news from Ireland, always the same? Half the country is in revolt against the landlords. The peasants no longer pay their rents to the owners of the land; even those who wish to do so dare not, for fear of being targeted by the Land League, a powerful secret or- ganization that extends its ramifications through the villages and punishes those who fail to obey its dictate: "Refusal of Rents." The land- owners are powerless to continue demanding rent. If they wanted to recover the rents owed to them at this moment, they would have to mobi- lize a hundred thousand policemen, and this would provoke a revolt. If some landowner decides to evict a non-paying tenant, he has to hurl into the fray at least a hundred policemen, for it will become a matter or resis- tance, sometimes passive and sometimes armed, by several thousand neighbouring peasants. And if he succeeds, he will not find a farmer will- ing to take the risk of occupying the property. Even if he should find one, the latter will soon be forced to decamp, for his cattle will have been ex- terminated, his crops burnt, and he himself condemned to death by the League37 or some other secret society. The situation becomes untenable for the landowners themselves; in certain districts the value of land has fallen by two-thirds; in others the landowners are proprietors only in name; they can only live on their own land under the protection of a squad of police camped at their doors in iron pillboxes. The soil lies fal- low; during 1879 alone the area of cultivated lands diminished by 33,000 hectares; the reduction in income for the proprietors, according to the Financial Reformer, was not less than 250 million francs.
The situation is so grave that Mr. Gladstone, after coming to power, made a formal agreement with the Irish M.R's to present a bill, according to which the great landowners would be expropriated in the public inter- est, and the land, after being declared national property, would be sold to the people in parcels that might be paid for in twenty-five years in annual instalments. But it is evident that such a bill will never be voted by the British Parliament, since it would at the same time deal a mortal blow to landed property in England itself. Thus there is no reason for us to as- sume that the conflict can peacefully be brought to an end. It is certainly possible that a general uprising of the peasants might be launched once again as in 1846; even if the situation merely remains the same, or, rather, steadily grows worse, we can foresee that the day is not far distant when the people of Ireland will finally reach the end of their patience after so many sufferings and so many broken promises. Let a propitious occasion appear, such as a momentary disorganization of power in England, and the Irish peasant, invited by the secret societies, upheld by the village merchants who would very much like to create for their profit a new 1793, will at last emerge from his hovel to do what so many agitators advise him to do today; he will take his torch to the mansions, gather for himself the lords' wheat, and, expelling their agents and demolishing their boun- daries, seize on the lands he has coveted so many years.
If we transport ourselves to the other extremity of the continent, to Spain, we find an analogous situation. In some areas, like Andalusia and the province of Valencia, where landed property is concentrated in a few hands, legions of hungry peasants have formed leagues and carry on an unceasing guerilla war against the owners. At night the mansions of the landlords are destroyed, the plantations are incinerated over hundreds of acres at a time, the crops burn, and whoever denounces the perpetrators of such acts to the authorities, as well as the alcalde who dares to pursue them, falls under the knives of the League.38
In the province of Andalusia there is a permanent strike among small farmers who refuse to pay their rents; let anyone look out who dares break this mutual agreement! A strong secret organization whose proclamations are fixed at night to the trees, constantly reminds those who have taken their oaths that if they betray the general cause they will be heavily punished by the destruction of their crops and herds and often also by death.
In regions where property is more broken up, it is the Spanish State itself that sets about provoking discontent. It crushes the small proprietor with taxes -- national, provincial, municipal, ordinary and extraordinary -- to such an extent that one can count in tens of thousands the small farms confiscated by the State and put up for sale without finding buyers. The population of the countryside is completely ruined in more than one province, and under the pressure of famine bands of peasants assemble and rebel against the taxes.
The situation is the same in Italy. In many provinces the farmers are completely ruined. Reduced to poverty by the State, the small peasant proprietor no longer pays his taxes and the State pitilessly seizes his plot of land. During a single year, some 6,644 small properties, with an average value of 99 francs, have been seized. Is it astonishing that in these provinces rebellion has become a permanent condition? Some- times it is a fanatic preaching religious communism who is followed by thousands of peasants, and these sectarians only disperse under the soldier's bullets; sometimes it is a village that goes en masse to seize the uncultivated lands of some proprietor and cultivate them on its own ac- count; sometimes it is the bands of hungry villagers who present them- selves before the town halls and demand bread and work under the threat of revolt.
Let nobody make much of the fact that these incidents are isolated! Were the revolts of the French peasants up to May 1789 any more numerous? Few in the beginning, and hardly conscious of their own na- ture, they sketched out the basis of the later revolution in the great cities.
Finally, at the eastern extremity of Europe, in Russia, the agrarian question appears under an aspect that in many ways reminds us of the situation in France before 1789. Personal serfdom is abolished there, and each agrarian commune now possesses some lands; but for the most part they are so poor or so scanty in area, the rates the commune pays the landlord in redemption or rent are so disproportionate to the value of the land, and the taxes which the State imposes are so heavy that now three- quarters at least of the peasants are reduced to the most frightful poverty. There is not enough bread to go round, and a single bad crop is enough for famine to rage over vast regions and to decimate their populations.
But the peasant does not suffer this situation without a murmur. New ideas and aspirations for a better future are germinating in the rural areas that have been brought into contact with the great centres by the net- work of railways. From one day to another the peasant waits for the day when some event will abolish both rent and redemption, and leave him in possession of all the lands that he considers his by right. If an Arthur Young were to travel today in Russia, as he travelled in France on the eve of 1789, he would hear the same vows and the same words of hope he noted in his Travels.39 In certain provinces an underground agitation has developed into a kind of guerilla warfare against the landlords. If political events were to expose the disorganization of the State and to excite popular passions, the starving villagers -- helped and perhaps provoked by the rural middle class which is rapidly emerging -- would embark on a whole series of agrarian revolts. Such revolts, breaking out without plan or organization over a large territory, but emerging and interconnecting on all sides, harassing armies and the government, and carrying on for years, might inaugurate and give strength to an immense revolution, with all its consequences for Europe as a whole.
But if the agrarian question is posed on such a grandiose scale in the countries we have just considered, if one day old Europe finds itself sur- rounded, as if in a circle of fire, by these peasant revolts, and the ex- propriation of the owners goes on widely in such countries, will not the centre of the continent and the so-called civilized countries feel the ef- fect? The answer cannot be in doubt. And when we have analyzed later on the agrarian situation in England, France, Germany, and Switzerland, when we have studied the powerful influence of a new element which is already provoking cries of alarm in England, the production of wheat on a large industrial scale in America and Australia; when finally we glance over the new ideas invading the minds of peasants in the countries which consider themselves the strongholds of civilization, we shall see that the agrarian question emerges in various forms before the whole of Europe, in England as much as in Russia and in France as much as in Italy. We shall see that the present situation is becoming untenable and cannot last for long; that the day is not far off when society will be changed down to its very foundations and give place to a new order of things: an order in which the systems of property and culture will undergo deep modifica- tions and the cultivator of the soil will no longer be, as he is today, the pariah of society; when he will come to his place at the banquet of life and intellectual development beside the rest of us, when the village will cease to be a den of ignorance and will become a centre from which life and well-being will radiate over the land.
In the preceding pages we saw the deplorable and indeed horrifying situation to which the cultivators of the soil, the peasants, have been con- demned in Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Russia. There can no longer be any doubt on this question; agrarian revolt is on the order of the day in such countries. But in the nations that flatter themselves in their civilization, like England, Germany, France, or even Switzerland, the situation of the farmers also becomes more and more untenable.
Take England as an example. Two centuries ago it was still a country where the farmer, working on land that belonged to him, enjoyed a cer- tain well-being. Today it is a land of great, fabulously rich proprietors, and a rural proletariat reduced to destitution. Four-fifths of all the arable land, some 23,976,000 hectares, are the property of 2,340 great land- owners; 710 lords own the third of England; one marquess makes jour- neys of thirty leagues without quitting his lands, and one earl owns a whole county. The rest of the landowners, a half-million families, must be content with less than a third of a hectare each, enough for a house and a smalljjarden.
2,340 families receive fabulous revenues, from 100,000 to 10,000,000 francs per annum; the Marquess of Westminster and the Duke of Bedford get 15,000 francs a day -- more than 1,000 francs an hour! -- more than a worker in a whole year, while hundreds of thousands of farm labouring families earn from their hard labours only between 300 and 1,000 francs a year. The labourer who makes the land produce, thinks himself lucky if, after 14 and 15 hour working days, he manages to earn 12 to 15 francs a week -- just enough not to die of hunger.
Writers of books indeed tell us that thanks to this concentration of property in a few hands, England has become the land of the most inten- sive and productive agriculture. The great lords, not wishing to cultivate the land themselves, lease it in large lots to tenant farmers, and these tenants, we are told, have made their farms into models of rational agriculture.
Once this was true. It is no longer true today.
First of all, immense areas of land remain absolutely uncultivated or are transformed into parks, so that, when autumn comes, the lord can stage monstrous hunts with his guests. Thousands of people could gain their nourishment from such lands! The landlord pays no heed to that fact; he does not know how to spend his fortune, so he gives himself the pleasure of having a park of several square leagues and he takes that area out of cultivation.
Thousands and thousands of farmers have been evicted, chased away by the landlords, and their fields, which nourish the people, have been transformed into pastures which nowadays serve to raise beef cattle -- in other words, meat, the food of the rich. The area of land devoted to crops is constantly diminishing. In 1869, England sowed 1,600,000 hec- tares with wheat; no more than 1,200,000 hectares are sown today.40 Fif- teen years ago it produced 26 hectolitres per hectare, but today it produces only 22 hectolitres per hectare.41
Even those farmers who cultivate areas of 50 or 100 hectares or more, middle class men seeking to become gentlemen in their turn and enjoy the good life through the toil of others, are now being ruined. Crushed with rents by the landlords' greed, they can no longer improve their farming and hold their heads up against American and Australian competition; the newspapers in fact are loaded with notices of farm auctions.
Thus the agrarian situation presents itself. The great mass of the people are driven from the land and into the large cities and the manufac- turing centres, where these starving folk compete frantically with each other. The land is held by a handful of noblemen who enjoy fabulous revenues and spend them at will on lives of extravagant and unproduc- tive luxury. The people in between, the farmers who have been hoping to transform themselves into lesser gentlemen, are ruined by the excessive rents, are ready to make common cause with the people so as to take the land out of the hands of the great proprietors. The whole country feels the effects of this abnormal situation regarding landed property.
Is it surprising that "nationalization of the land" should have be- come today the rallying cry of all the malcontents? Already in 1869 the great Land and Work League demanded that all the estates of the great nobles should be confiscated by the whole nation, and each day that idea gains more support. The League of Landworkers, with its 150,000 members, had but a single aim twenty years ago, which was to raise wages by means of strikes, but now it also is demanding the disposses- sion of the landlords.
Finally, the Irish Land League42 is beginning to extend its ramifica- tions into Scotland and England, and everywhere it is arousing sym- pathy. But we know how the League operates. It will begin by declaring that the rents to be paid to the great landlords are henceforward reduced by a quarter, according to the League's decree. By all kinds of petty means and in the last resort by force it will prevent the eviction of those who pay only three quarters of their rent. Later, when its forces are organized, it will declare that nothing at all must be paid to the landlord, and it will arm the farm population to put its will into operation. When the right moment comes it will do as the French peasants did between 1789 and 1793; it will force the landlords, by iron and fire, to abdicate their rights to the land.
What will be the new kind of property arrangement as a result of the revolution in England? It would be difficult to foretell that at the present moment, for the outcome of the revolution will depend on the length of the revolutionary period, and especially on the strength of the opposition which revolutionary ideas will encounter on the part of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. One thing is certain, that England is proceeding in the direction of the abolition of individual property in land, and that the opposition encountered by that idea on the part of the landowners will prevent the transformation from taking place in a peaceful manner; to make its wishes prevail, the people of England will have to resort to force.
3.
My readers in the French countryside may well laugh when they hear what is said of them in those fine books that the politicians and the economists are publishing in the big cities. It is said in these books that al- most all the French peasants were well-off and contented with their lot; that they have enough land, enough cattle, and that the land brings them plenty of money so that they have no difficulty in paying their taxes which in any case are light, while the cost of cultivating the land has not gone up; that each year they are making new economies and continuing to grow rich.
The peasants will answer, I suspect, that these commentators are idiots, and they will be right to do so.
Let us examine the elements of which the twenty-three or twenty- four million people who live in the French countryside are composed, and see how many among them are content with their lots and have no desire to change them.
First, we have the eight thousand great landowners (round about 40,000 persons if one counts their families) who possess, particularly in Picardy, Normandy and Anjou, properties that bring them from ten thousand to two hundred thousand francs a year, and sometimes even more than that.
These certainly have no reason to complain. After spending the sum- mer months in their domains and turning into cash the value of whatever is produced by the hard work of wage-earners, small tenant farmers and share-croppers, they depart to spend their money in the cities. There they drink champagne by the glassful with women on whom they lavish their money freely, and in their palaces they spend as much in a day as would feed a family for half a year. Those fellows indeed have no reason to la- ment; if they complain it is because the peasant becomes each day less tractable and nowadays refuses to work for nothing.
Of such people, let us speak no more. We shall have a word to say to them on the day of the revolution.
The moneylenders, the cattle merchants, the higglers, those vultures who nowadays batten on the villages, and, coming from the towns with a small purseful as their entire fortune, turn themselves into landowners and bankers; the notaries and lawyers who foment the process; the en- gineers and the gangs of functionaries of all kinds who dip deeply into the funds of the State and the communes, especially when the latter, egged on by interested parties, run into debt to embellish the village around the mayor's house: this kind of gentry, the vermin that considers the countryside a rich land of savages ready for exploitation, have also no reason to complain. Try and move their hearts about anything, and they will resist your appeals with all their strength. Peasants ruining themsel- ves by signing promissory notes, farmers impoverishing themselves with litigation, illiterate countrymen letting themselves be sucked dry by the spiders who surround them, all this is the order of the day for the usurers. And communes that let themselves be bullied by the mayor, plus a State that squanders public funds, are equally on the order of the day for the functionaries. When they have ruined the peasants in France, they will go on to do the same thing in Hungary, in Turkey if they must, in China if they need. Usury has no fatherland.
Obviously this group will not complain of their lot. But how many of them are there? Five hundred thousand? Perhaps a million, including their families? More than enough to ruin our villages in a few years, but hardly enough to resist when the peasants turn against them with all their force.
Next we come to the small landowners who possess between 50 and 100 hectares. Most of them in fact do not know where the shoe pinches and when one talks to them of changing something, their first thought will be to ask if they will not lose what they actually possess. Some of them, who may be temporarily unlucky, will hope to "succeed" one day: a lucky speculation, a lucrative job in addition to their calling as farmer, a rich relative who commits suicide one fine morning, and good fortune will return. Generally speaking, real need is unknown to them, and work also. It is not they who till their lands; for that they have farm labourers whom they pay 250 to 300 francs a year, and from whom they gain work that is worth a thousand.
There is no doubt that these people will be the enemies of the revolu- tion; they are already enemies of liberty, upholders of inequality, pillars of exploitation. They form, indeed, a considerable force -- round about 200,000 owners, which means 800,000 individuals including families, and today they are a real power in the villages. The State confers on them a great deal of importance, and their means assure them an influence within the commune from which they do not fail to profit. But what will they become when confronted with the surge of a popular uprising? It will certainly not be they who will go forward to resist it: they will stay permanently in their homes and await the outcome of the turmoil.
Those who own between ten and fifty hectares are more numerous than the preceding class. They alone are more than 250,000 landowners, almost 1,200,000 people, if one includes families. They own nearly a quarter of the arable surface of France.
This group represents a considerable force through its influence and activity in the countryside. While the preceding group often live in the towns, these work in their own fields; they have not broken with the village, and up to the present they have remained peasants. It is on their conservative attitudes that the reactionaries count most of all.
It is true that at one time, in the first half of this century, this class of cultivators enjoyed a certain prosperity, and it was natural that, emerging from the Great Revolution and anxious above all to retain what they had won in the Revolution, they should obstinately oppose any changes, fear- ing to lose what they had gained. But in recent years things have changed a great deal. While, in some areas of France, such as the South- west, the farmers in this category still enjoy a certain well-being, in the rest of the country they complain already of need. They are no longer able to save, and it becomes harder for them to increase their properties, which are constantly being broken up by the division of heritages. At the same time they are no longer finding land to rent on conditions as favourable as in the past; today they are being asked crazy prices for patches they want to lease.
Often owning tiny lots scattered in the four corners of the commune, they cannot make farming profitable enough to sustain the costs that bur- den the cultivator. Wheat brings in very little, and cattle raising offers only a scanty profit.
The State crushes them down with taxes, and the Commune does not spare them: cart, horse, threshing-machine, even manure are taxed. Addi- tional centimes add up to francs, and the list ofduties becomes as high as it was under the defunct kingdom. The peasant has become once again the State's beast of burden.
Moneylenders ruin him, and promissory notes ravage him; mortgages grind him down, the city manufacturer exploits him by making him pay two or three times cost for the smallest tool. He im- agines himself still the owner of his fields, when he is no more than their caretaker; the work he does goes to fatten the moneylender, to nourish the bureaucrat, to buy silk dresses and fine carriages for the industrialist's wife, and to make life agreeable for all the idlers in the city.
Do you believe that the peasant does not understand all this? Come on! He understands it perfectly, and as soon as he feels strong enough he will not miss the chance to shake up these gentry who live at his expense.
With all that, we have still only a tenth of the inhabitants of the countryside. What about the rest?
These are the nearly four million heads of families (meaning roughly 18,000,000 persons) who own properties of five or three hectares per fami- ly, often one hectare, or even a tenth of a hectare, and often nothing. Out of this number eight million persons have all the trouble in the world making ends meet by farming two or three hectares, so that each year they have to send tens of thousands of their boys and girls to make a hard living in the city; 7 million of them have for their whole property a miserable plot of land, a house, and a small garden, or even possess noth- ing and make a hard living from day to day, feeding themselves on crusts of bread and potatoes, when they can get them. These are the great bat- talions of the French countryside!
This vast mass counts for nothing in the calculations of the economists. But for us, it is everything. It constitutes the village; the rest are just incidental -- parasitical fungi growing on the trunk of a great oak tree.
These are the peasants we are told are rich, absolutely content with their lot, anxious to change nothing, and certain to turn their backs on the socialists!
Let us remark first of all that each time we have spoken to such peasants, telling them what we think in comprehensible language, they have not turned their backs on us. It is true that we have not talked to them of electing us in place of the member of parliament or even of the rural constable; we have not embarked on long pseudo-scientific ha- rangues about socialism; we have not preached to them of putting their bits of land into the hands of a State that would distribute the soil as seemed good to it, according to the whims of an army of bureaucrats. If we had uttered such stupidities, they would in fact have turned their backs on us, and they would have been right.
But, whenever we talked to them of what we mean by the revolution, they always listened to us, and answered that our ideas corresponded with their own. This, in fact, is what we said to the peasants and what we shall keep on saying to them:
"In the past the land belonged to the Commune, composed of all those who cultivated it themselves, with their own hands. But, by all kinds of fraud, by violence, usury and sheer deception, the speculators have successfully appropriated it. All these lands that now belong to Sir So-and-so or Lady This-and-that were formerly communal lands. Today the peasant needs them to farm and feed himself and his family, whereas the rich do not cultivate them but exploit them to wallow in luxury. Or- ganized in their communes, the peasants must take back the land and put it at the disposal of those who are willing to farm it.
"Mortgages are an iniquity. Nobody has the right to appropriate your land because you have borrowed money, since its value depends on the work carried out by your forefathers when they cleared it, built the vil- lages, made the roads, drained the marshes; even now, it is productive only because of your toil. The peasanf s International will therefore make it a duty to break the bonds of mortgages and to abolish that odious jn- stitution for ever.
"The taxes that crush you are devoured by bands of bureaucrats who are not merely useless but positively harmful. Therefore we must sup- press them. Proclaim your absolute independence, and declare that you know better how to manage your affairs than these gentlemen in gloves from Paris.
"Do you need a road? Let the people of neighbouring communes dis- cuss it, and they will produce something better than the ministry of public works.
"A railway? The interested communes of a whole region can do it bet- ter than the speculators, who amass millions by laying down bad track. Do you need schools? You can do that also as well as -- and better than -- these gentlemen from Paris. The State has no place in all this: schools, roads and canals can all be better made by yourselves and at lower cost.
"Do you need defence against foreign invaders? Learn to do it your- selves, and above all do not ever confide that task to the generals, who will certainly betray you. Armies have never been able to halt an in- vader, but the people, the peasantry, when they have had an interest in preserving their independence, have got the better of the most for- midable armies.
"Do you need tools, or machines? You must come to arrangements with the workers in the cities who will send them to you in exchange for your products, at cost price, without passing through the hands of a mer- chant who gets wealthy at the expense of both the worker who makes the tool and the peasant who buys it.
"Do not be afraid of the power of government. These governments, which seem so formidable, crumble under the first attacks of the insurgent people: we have seen enough of them tumbling down in a matter of hours, and one can foresee that in a few years revolutions will spread out all over Europe and topple authority. Profit from that moment to over- throw the government, but above all to make a revolution, to chase away the great landowners and declare their wealth common property, to demolish the moneylenders, abolish mortgages and protect your absolute independence while the urban workers do the same thing in the cities. After that, organize yourselves by freely federating in communes and regions. But watch out, and do not let the revolution be plundered by all kinds of people who will come and pose as the benefactors of the peasants. Act on your own, without expecting anything from anyone but yourselves."
That is what we have said to the peasants. And the only objection they have offered did not reflect on the substance of our ideas, but con- cerned solely the possibility of putting them into operation.
"Very good," they answer us. "All that would be excellent, if only the peasants could come to an understanding with each other."
Let us work, then, towards the point when they will come together. Let us propagate our ideas, let us scatter freely the writings that expound them, let us work to establish the links that are still lacking between the villages, and, on the day of the revolution, let us be ready to fight beside them and for them!
That day is much nearer than is generally believed.
Notes
37. The Land League was founded by Michael Davitt in October 1879 with aims of fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale of the right to occupancy. When Charles Stewart Parnell was arrested for inflammatory nationalist speeches, the League called on tenants to refuse payment of rents. Thereupon the British government suppressed it as a legal organization in October 1881, but it continued as a powerful secret society. Trans.
38. Presumably Kropotkin is talking here of the terrorist group known as Los Desheredados (The Disinherited). The majority of the anarchists in Spain expressed disapproval of their methods. Trans.
39. Arthur Young (1741-1820) was an agricultural writer who travelled extensively in the rural areas of England, Wales, Ireland and France and described them in his published journals. His Travels during the Years 1787, 1788, 1789 is an extremely valuable document on peasant France immediately before the Revolution. Trans.
40. Written in 1880. Peter Kropotkin.
41. See the figures given by the Times of 13th October 1880. Peter Kropotkin.
42. Irish Land League. See note 37. Trans.