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From New International, Vol. VIII No. 10, November 1942, pp. 298–302.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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Feb. 16, 1881 |
Geneva |
Honored Citizen!
You must be aware that your Capital enjoys a great popularity in Russia. In spite of the confiscation of the edition, the few copies that remained are read and re-read by most fairly educated people of our country; there are serious people who study it. But what you are probably unaware of is the rôle that your Capital plays in our discussions on the agrarian question in Russia and on our rural commune. You know better than anyone else how urgent this question is in Russia. You know what Chernichevsky thought of it. Our advanced literature, like the Otechestvenniye Zapiski, for example, continues to develop his ideas. But this question is a question of life or death, in my opinion, above all for our Socialist Party. In one way or another, the personal destiny of our revolutionary socialists depends on what you have to say on this question. One of two things: either this rural commune, freed from the inordinate demands of the public treasury, from payments to the lords of the manor and from despotic administration, is capable of developing along the socialist path, that is, of gradually organizing its production and its distribution of the products on collectivist bases. In this case the revolutionary socialist must sacrifice all his strength to the liberation of the commune and to its development.
If, on the contrary, the commune is doomed to perish, there remains nothing for the socialist, as such, to do but devote himself to more or less arbitrary calculations in order to learn in how many decades the land of the Russian peasant will pass out of his hands and into those of the bourgeoisie, in how many centuries, perhaps, capitalism will reach in Russia the development it has attained in Western Europe. They will then have to conduct propaganda only among the workers of the towns who will be continually swamped in the mass o£ peasants who, as a result o£ the dissolution of the commune, will be thrown on the streets of the big cities in the search of hire.
In recent times we often hear it said that the rural commune is an archaic form which history, scientific socialism, in a word, everything that is beyond dispute, has condemned to doom. The people who preach this call themselves your preeminent disciples: “Marxists.” Their strongest argument is often: “Marx says so.”
“But how do you deduce that from his Capital? He does not deal in it with the agrarian question and does not speak of Russia,” it is objected.
“He would have said so had he spoken of our country,” reply your somewhat over-rash disciples. You will therefore understand, Citizen, the extent to which your opinion on this question interests us and what a great service you would be doing us by expounding your ideas on the possible fate of our rural commune and on the theory of the historical necessity of every country of the world passing through all the phases of capitalist production.
I take the liberty of begging you, Citizen, in the name of my friends, to be kind enough to do us this service.
If time does not permit you to expound your ideas on these questions in a fairly detailed manner, then oblige us at least by doing it in the form of a letter which you would allow me to translate and to publish in Russia.
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Accept, Citizen, my respectful greetings. |
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1. In dealing with the genesis of capitalist production, I have said that at its foundation lies “the radical separation of the producer from the means of production” (Capital, page 315, col. I, French edition) and that “the basis of this whole evolution is the expropriation of the agriculturists. It has as yet been radically accomplished only in England ... But all the other countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement.” (L.c., col. II.)
I have thus expressly restricted the “historical fatality” of this movement to the countries of Western Europe. And why? Compare, if you please, chapter XXXII, where it says:
The “movement of elimination transforming the individual and scattered means of production into socially-concentrated means of production, changing the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, this dolorful and appalling expropriation of the working people, there are the origins, there is the genesis of capital ... Private property, based upon personal labor ... is supplanted by capitalist private property, based upon the exploitation of the labor of others, upon wage labor” (page 340, col. II.)
Thus, in the last analysis, there is the transformation of one form of private property into another form of private property: (the western movement). The land in the hands of the Russian peasants, never having been their private property, how could this development apply?
2. From the historical point of view the only serious argument pleaded in favor of the fatal dissolution of the commune of the Russian peasants, is as follows:
By going far back, we find everywhere in Western Europe common property of a fairly archaic type; it disappeared everywhere with social progress. Why should it succeed in escaping the same fate only in Russia?
I reply: Because in Russia, thanks to a singular combination of circumstances, the rural commune, still established on a national scale, can gradually extricate itself from its primitive characteristics and develop directly as an element of collective production on a national scale. It is only thanks to the contemporaneity of capitalist production that it can appropriate from it all its positive acquisitions without passing through its hideous vicissitudes. Russia does not live isolated from the modern world; neither is it the prey of a foreign conqueror, like the East Indies.
If the Russian admirers of the capitalist system deny the theoretical possibility of such an evolution, I would put to them the question: In order to exploit machinery, steamships, railroads, etc., was Russia forced, like the West, to pass through a long period of incubation of machine industry? Let them further explain to me how they managed to introduce in their midst, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole mechanism of exchange (banks, credit societies, etc.), whose elaboration cost the West centuries?
If, at the time of the emancipation, the rural communes had promptly been placed in conditions of normal prosperity; if thereupon the immense public debt, paid for the most part at the cost and expense of the peasants, with the other enormous sums furnished through the medium of the state (and always at the cost and expense of the peasants) to the “new pillars of society” now turned into capitalists – if all these expenditures had served the further development of the rural commune, then nobody would dream today of “the historical fatality” of the annihilation of the commune: everybody would recognize in it the element of the regeneration of Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries still enthralled by the capitalist regime.
Another circumstance favorable to the preservation of the Russian commune (in the course of development), is that it is not only the contemporary of capitalist production, but it has outlived the epoch when the social system appeared still intact, that it finds it, on the contrary, in Western Europe as well as in the United States, in combat with science, with the massses of the people, with the very productive forces which it generates. In a word, it finds it in a crisis which will end only by its elimination, by a return o£ modern societies to the “archaic” type of common property, a form in which – as is said by an American author [1] in no way suspect of revolutionary tendencies, supported in his labors by the Washington government – ”the new system” toward which modern society tends “will be a revival in a superior form of an archaic social type.” Hence we must not let ourselves be frightened too much by the word “archaic.”
But in that case it would at least be necessary to know its vicissitudes. We know nothing about them. In one way or another, this commune perished in the midst of incessant foreign and internal wars. It probably died a violent death when the Germanic tribes came to conquer Italy, Spain, Gaul, etc. The commune of the archaic type was already no longer in existence. Nevertheless, its natural vitality is proved by two facts. There are scattered exemplifications of it which have survived all the vicissitudes of the Middle Ages and have been preserved to this day, for example, in my birthplace, the district of Trier. But what is most important, it has so well imprinted its own characteristics upon the commune that supplanted it – the commune where the tillable land has become private property, while the forests, pastures, wastelands, etc., still remain communal property – that Maurer, in deciphering this commune of secondary formation, was able to reconstruct the archaic prototype. Thanks to characteristic traits borrowed from the latter, the new commune, introduced by the Germans in all the conquered countries, became the only hearth of freedom and of popular life throughout the Middle Ages. If, after the epoch of Tacitus, we know nothing of the life of the commune, nor of the manner or the time of its disappearance, we know at least the point of departure, thanks to the account of Julius Caesar. In his time the land was already being redistributed annually, but among the gens and tribes of the Germanic confederations and not yet among the individual members of a commune. The rural commune is therefore the product in Germania of a more archaic type, it was the product there of a spontaneous development instead of being imported ready-made from Asia. There – in the East Indies – we encounter it also and always as the last stage or the last period of the archaic formation.
In order to judge the possible destinies from a purely theoretical point of view, that is, always supposing normal conditions of life, I must now designate certain characteristic traits that distinguish the ”agriculture commune” from the more archaic types.
In the first place, all the previous primitive communities rest upon the natural kinship of their members; by breaking this strong but narrow bond, the agricultural commune is more capable of adapting itself, of extending itself and of sustaining contact with foreigners.
Then, in it, the house and its complement, the court, are already the private property of the agriculturist, whereas long before agriculture was even introduced the common house was one of the material bases of the preceding communities. Finally, while the tillable land remains communal property, it is periodically divided among the members of the agricultural commune, so that each agriculturist exploits on his own count the fields assigned to him and appropriates their fruits individually, whereas in the more archaic communities production took place in common and only its product was distributed. This primitive type of collective or cooperative production was, of course, the result of the weakness of the isolated individual and not of the socialization of the means of production.
It is easy to understand that the dualism inherent in the “agricultural commune” can endow it with a vigorous life, for on the one hand common property and all the social relations that flow from it make its situation solid, at the same time that the private house, the piecemeal cultivation of the tillable land and the private appropriation of the fruits admit a development of the personality, incompatible with the conditions of the more primitive communities. But it is no less evident that the same dualism can become in time a source of decomposition. Apart from all the influences of hostile surroundings, the mere gradual accumulation of personal [movable] wealth which begins with wealth in cattle (and admitting even wealth in serfs), the increasingly pronounced rôle that the movable element plays in agriculture itself and a mass of other circumstances, inseparable from this accumulation, but which it would lead me too far afield to expound, will act like a solvent of economic and social equality, and will create inside the commune itself a conflict of interests which entails in the first place the conversion of the tillable land into private property and which ends by the private appropriation of the forests, pastures, wastelands, etc., which have already become communal annexes of private property. It is by that token that the “agricultural commune” appears everywhere as the latest type of the archaic formation of society and that in the historical movement of Western Europe, ancient and modern, the period of the agricultural commune appeared as the transition period from the primary to the secondary formation. But does this mean that in all circumstances the development of the “agricultural commune” must follow this route? Not at all. Its constitutive form admits this alternative: either the element of private property which it implies will triumph over the collective element, or the latter will triumph over the former. Everything depends upon the historical milieu in which it finds itself situated ... These two solutions are a priori possible, but for each one entirely different historical milieux are obviously needed.
3. Russia is the only European country where the “agricultural commune” has maintained itself on a national scale down to the present day. It is not the prey of a foreign conqueror like the East Indies. Neither does it live isolated from the modern world. On the one hand, the common ownership of the land permits it to transform piecemeal and individualistic agriculture directly and gradually into collective agriculture, and the Russian peasants already practice it in the undivided grasslands; the physical configuration of its soil invites mechanized exploitation on a vast scale; the familiarity of the peasant with the artel contract facilitates for him the transition from piecemeal to cooperative work, and finally Russian society which has so long lived at his expense, owes him the advances necessary for such a transition. On the other hand, the contemporaneity of Western production, which dominates the world market, permits Russia to incorporate in the commune all the positive acquisitions elaborated by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine forks.
If the spokesmen of the “new pillars of society” deny the theoretical possibility of the indicated evolution of the modern rural commune, they should be asked if Russia was forced, like the West, to pass through a long period of incubation of machine industry in order to arrive at machines, steamships, railroads, etc.? They should be asked further how they managed to introduce in their midst, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole mechanism of exchange (banks, stock companies, etc.) whose elaboration cost the West centuries?
There is one characteristic of the “agricultural commune” in Russia which afflicts it with weakness, inimical in every sense. It is its isolation, the lack of contact between the life of one commune and that of the others, this localized microcosm, which is not encountered everywhere as an immanent characteristic of this type but which, where it does exist, has caused the rise over the communes of a more or less central despotism. The federation of the Russian republics of the North proves that this isolation, which seems to have been primitively imposed by the vast expanse of the territory, was in large part consolidated by the political destinies that Russia had to undergo since the Mongol invasion. Today it is one of the easiest obstacles to eliminate. It would be necessary simply to substitute for the volost, a governmental institution, an assembly of peasants chosen by the communes themselves and serving as the economic and administrative organ of their interests.
A very favorable circumstance, from the historical point of view, to the preservation of the “agricultural commune” in the course of its further development, is that it is not only the contemporary of Western capitalist production and can thus appropriate its fruits without subjugating itself to its modus operandi, but that it has outlived the epoch when the capitalist system appeared still intact, that it finds it, on the contrary, in Western Europe as well as in the United States, in the struggle with the working masses and with science and with the productive forces themselves which it generates – in a word, in a crisis which will end by its elimination, by a return of modern societies to a superior form of an “archaic” type of collective property and collective production.
It is understood that the evolution of the commune would take place gradually and that the first step would be to place it in normal conditions on its present basis.
But facing it stands landed property, holding in its hands almost half, and the best part, of the soil, not to mention the domains of the state. That is the side from which the preservation of the “rural commune,” in the course of its further evolution, is intermingled with the general movement of Russian society, whose regeneration may thus be purchased.
Even from the purely economic standpoint, Russia can emerge from its agricultural [...?...] [2] by the evolution of its rural commune; it would seek in vain to emerge from it by capitalized farming on the English model, which dashes with all the rural conditions of the country.
Disregarding all the miseries that presently a'fflict the Russian “rural commune” and considering only its constitutive form and its historical milieu, it is evident in the first place that one of its fundamental characteristics, common ownership of the soil, forms the natural basis of collective production and collective appropriation. In addition, the familiarity of the Russian peasant with the artel contract would facilitate for him the transition from piecemeal to collective work, which he already practices to a certain degree in the undivided grasslands, in drainage work and in other undertakings of a general interest. But for collective work to supplant piecemeal work – a form of private appropriation – in agriculture properly so called, two things are needed: the economic need of such a transformation and the material conditions to accomplish it.
As to the economic need, it will make itself felt to the “rural commune” itself from the moment when it is placed in normal conditions, that is, as soon as the burdens that weigh upon it are removed and its cultivable land receives a normal expanse. The time has passed when Russian agriculture asked only for the land and its piecemeal tiller armed with more or less primitive tools ... The time has passed all the more rapidly because the oppression of the tiller infects and sterilizes his field. It now needs cooperative work, organized on a large scale. As the peasant's want of the things needed for the tilling of his three desyatins increases, will he be more advanced with ten times the number of desyatins?
But where are the tools, the manures, the agronomical methods, etc., all the means so indispensable to collective work, to be found? There is precisely the great superiority of the Russian “rural commune” over the archaic communes of the same type. It alone, in Europe, has maintained itself on a vast, national scale. It thus finds itself placed in a historical milieu where the contemporaneity of capitalist production imparts to it all the conditions of collective work. It is in a position to assimilate the positive acquisitions elaborated by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine forks. The physical configuration of the Russian land invites agricultural exploitation with the aid of machinery, organized on a vast scale, managed by cooperative labor. As to the
first setting-up costs – intellectual and material costs – Russian society owes them to the “rural commune” at whose expense it has lived so long and in which it must seek its ”regenerating element.”
The best proof that this development of the “rural commune” corresponds to the historical current of our epoch is the fatal crisis suffered by capitalist production in the European and American countries where it has had its greatest upswing, a crisis which will end by its elimination, by the return of modern society to a superior form of the most archaic type – collective production and appropriation.
4. In order to be able to develop, it is first of all necessary to live, and nobody can conceal from himself that at this moment the life of the “rural commune” is imperilled.
In order to expropriate the agriculturists it is not necessary to drive them from their land, as was done in England and elsewhere; neither is it necessary to abolish common property by a ukase. Try to seize from the peasants the product of their agricultural labor beyond a certain measure, and in spite of your gendarmerie and your army you will not succeed in chaining them to their fields. In the last stage of the Roman Empire, provincial decurions, not peasants but landed proprietors, fled from their homes, abandoned their lands, even sold themselves into slavery, all in order to be rid of a property which was no longer anything but an official pretext for squeezing them without mercy or quarter.
Since the so-called emancipation of the peasants, the Russian commune was placed by the state in abnormal economic conditions and since that time it has not ceased to bear down upon it with the social forces concentrated in its hands. Debilitated by its fiscal exactions, it becomes an inert object o£ easy exploitation by trade, landed property and usury. This oppression from without has unleashed within the commune itself the conflict of interests already present in it and has rapidly developed its germs of decomposition. But that is not all. At the cost and expense of the peasants, the state has given a hot-house impulsion to branches of the Western capitalist system which, without at all developing the productive preconditions of agriculture, are the most suitable for facilitating and precipitating the theft of its fruits through unproductive intermediaries. It has thus cooperated in the enriching of a new capitalist vermin, sucking the already impoverished blood of the “rural commune.”
... In a word, the state has lent its assistance to the precocious development of the technical and economic means most suited for facilitating and precipitating the exploitation of the agriculturist, that is, of the greatest productive force of Russia, and for enriching the “new pillars of society.”
5. Unless this concurrence of destructive influences is broken by a powerful reaction, it must naturally lead to the death of the rural commune.
But the question arises: If all these interests (I include the large industries placed under government protection) have found the present state of the rural commune to be profitable, why should they conspire deliberately to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Precisely because they feel that “this present state” is no longer tenable, that consequently the present mode of exploiting it is no longer in vogue. Already the misery of the tiller has infected the land which grows sterile. Good harvests are balanced by famines. Instead of exporting, Russia must import grains. The average of the last ten years has revealed not only a stagnant but a retrograde agricultural production. Finally, for the first time Russia must import grains instead of exporting them. There is therefore no more time to lose. It is therefore necessary to come to a conclusion. It is necessary to constitute into an intermediate rural class the more or less well-off minority of the peasants and to convert the majority into proletarians and nothing more. Toward that end the spokesmen of the “new pillars of society” denounce the very evils inflicted upon the commune as so many natural symptoms of its decrepitude.
Since so many diverse interests, above all those of the “new pillars of society” erected under the benign empire of Alexander II, have found the present state of the “rural commune” so profitable to them, why should they come to conspire deliberately at its death? Why do their spokesmen denounce the evils inflicted upon it as so many irrefutable proofs of its natural decay? Why do they want to kill their goose with the golden eggs? Simply because the economic facts, whose analysis would lead me too far afield, have unveiled the mystery that the present state of the commune is no longer tenable, and that by the mere necessity of things the present mode of exploiting the masses of the people will no longer be in vogue. Hence a new one is needed, and the new one, insinuated under the most diverse forms, always comes down to this: to abolish common property, to let the more or less well-off minority of the peasants constitute themselves into an intermediary rural class, and to convert the great majority of the peasants into proletarians and nothing more.
On the one hand, the “rural commune” is almost reduced to the last extremity, and, on the other, a powerful conspiracy lies in waiting in order to give it the finishing stroke. To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is necessary. However, the holders of the political and social powers are doing their best to prepare the masses for such a catastrophe. At the same time that the commune is bled and tortured, its land sterilized and impoverished, the literary lackeys of the “new pillars of society” ironically designate the evils that have been inflicted upon it as so many symptoms of its spontaneous and incontestable decrepitude, that it is dying a natural death and that it would be a good job done to abridge its agony. Here it is no longer a question of a problem to resolve; it is quite simply a matter of an enemy to beat. It is therefore no longer a theoretical problem. To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is necessary. However, the Russian government and the “new pillars of society” are doing their best to prepare the masses for such a catastrophe. If the revolution takes place at an opportune time, if it concentrates all its forces to assure the free upswing of the rural commune, the latter will soon develop as a regenerating element of Russian society and as an element of superiority over the countries enthralled by the capitalist regime.
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March 8, 1881 |
41, Maitland Park Road, |
Dear Citizeness:
A nerve malady that has attacked me periodically for the past ten years prevented me from replying sooner to your letter of February 16. I regret not being able to give you a succinct exposition, intended for publication, of the question that you did me the honor of proposing. It is months ago that I promised a work on the same subject to the St. Petersburg Committee. However, I hope that a few lines will suffice to leave you in no doubt on the misunderstanding with regard to my so-called theory.
In analyzing the genesis of capitalist production, I say:
“At the foundation of the capitalist system there is therefore the radical separation of the producer from the means of production... the basis of this whole evolution is the expropriation of the agriculturists. It has as yet been radically accomplished only in England ... But all the other countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement.” (Capital, French ed., p. 315.)
The “historical fatality” of this movement is thus expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. The reason for this restriction is indicated in this passage from Chap. XXXII:
“Private property, based upon personal labor ... is to be supplanted by capitalist private property, based upon the exploitation of the labor of others, upon wage labor.” (L.c., p. 340)
In this Western movement it is therefore a question of the transformation of one form of private property into another form of private property. Among the Russian peasants it would be necessary, on the contrary, to transform their common property into private property.
The analysis given in Capital thus offers reasons neither for nor against the vitality of the rural commune, but the special study I have made of it, for which I sought the materials in the original sources, has convinced me that this commune is the point of support of the social regeneration in Russia, but for it to function as such it would first of all be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which assail it from all sides and then to assure it the normal conditions of a spontaneous development.
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I have the honor, dear citizeness, to be your devoted |
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1. The reference is to L. Morgan, Ancient Society, London 1877. – D.R.
2. Undecipherable word: probably cul-de-sac. In the third draft the word in the corresponding place is: impasse – D.R.
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