Chapter 32 Part Two Results Chapter Eight Land 1

I am your lord, and my lord is the Tsar.The Czar has the right to give orders to me, which I must obey, but he cannot give orders to you.In my domain I am the Tsar, I am your god on earth, therefore I must be responsible to you... You must first comb the horses 10 times with an iron comb, and then brush the hair with a soft brush.And I'll just give you a rough brush, and who knows if I'm serious about using the brush.God purifies the air with thunder and electricity, and on my farm I shall purify it with thunder and fire when I think it necessary. —A Russian lord's speech to his serfs

Owning a cow or two, a pig, and a few geese naturally makes the farmer happy.In his conception, he was above his brethren in the same class... In loafing after the herds he developed a habit of laziness... Daily work became a nuisance, indulgences His aversion to his surroundings increased day by day, and finally he had to sell a half-fed calf or piglet to support his lazy and intemperate life.So the cattle are sold frequently, and the poor and disappointing owner no longer wants to take up the regular job and get what he used to live by it...he just wants to get his money from the poor tax. Relief that is simply not deserved.

—Report of the Somerset Agricultural Council, England, 1782 1 Land change determined the life and death of most people between 1789 and 1848.The impact of the dual revolution on land ownership, land tenure, and agriculture was thus the most disastrous phenomenon of the period covered in this book.Because neither political revolution nor economic revolution can ignore the land.The first school of economists, the Physiocrats, held that the land was the only source of wealth.It was agreed that revolutionary changes in the land were a necessary prerequisite and consequence of capitalist society, if not all rapid economic development.The traditional land system and rural social relations around the world are like a huge ice cap covering the fertile soil of economic growth, so this ice cap must be melted at all costs and the land should be handed over to profit-seeking private enterprises farming.This means three changes.First, land must be transformed into a commodity, privately owned and freely retailable by it.Second, the land must be transferred to a class willing to exploit its productive resources for the market and driven by rational self-interested profit.Third, large numbers of rural people had to be transferred somehow, at least in part, to the growing non-agricultural sector of the economy to serve as freely mobile wage laborers.Some of the more thoughtful or radical economists also recognize a fourth desirable, albeit difficult, change.For "natural monopoly" does not quite fit in an economy that assumes optimal mobility of all land factors of production.As the area of ​​land is finite, and the different parts of it differ in fertility and arableness, those who own the more fertile parts must inevitably enjoy special advantages, and can levy rent from others.How to eliminate or alleviate the distress caused by this difference—for example, through appropriate taxation, through anti-agrarian concentration legislation, or even through nationalization—is a hotly debated issue, especially in industrialized Britain. (Such arguments also affected other "natural monopolies," such as the railways. Nationalization of the railways was never considered incompatible with the private enterprise economy, and was thus widely practiced [in England, serious in the 1840s raised the question of the nationalization of the railways].) In any case, these are agrarian questions in capitalist society.And its most urgent task is how to dispose of the land.

There are two major obstacles to such expropriation, and both require a combination of political and economic action to resolve.The two big obstacles are former capitalist landowners and traditional farmers.On the other hand, compulsory expropriation can be accomplished in various ways.The most radical was the British and American approach, since both eliminated the peasantry, and one of them eliminated the landowners as well.The typical English settlement resulted in a country of about 4,000 landowners who owned about four-sevenths of the land (three-quarters of which were farms of 50-500 hectares) cultivated by 250,000 farmers (I Using figures for 1851), employing about 1.25 million hired hands and servants.The small landholders' pocket fields continued, but apart from the Scottish Highlands and parts of Wales, it would be foolish to say that England has a small peasant class in the Continental sense.The typical American solution is that commercial homesteaders use a high degree of mechanization to make up for the shortage of hired labor.The mechanical harvester of Obed Hussey (1833) and McCormick (1834) made up for the purely business-minded farmer or land speculator entrepreneur.These ranchers pushed the American way of life westward from the New England states, grabbing land or buying it from the government at the lowest possible price.Typical Prussian solutions, generally the least revolutionary.It transformed feudal landlords into capitalist farm owners and serfs into wage laborers.Landlords still retained control of the territories on which they depended for their livelihood, having long been farmed for export markets by the labor of serfs; Smallholder cooperatives.In Pomerania at the end of the 19th century, about 2,000 large landowners owned 61% of the land, the remaining land was owned by 60,000 small and medium landowners, and the rest were landless peasants.This is undoubtedly an extreme example, but in fact, at the time of Kruniz's Encyclopedia of Domestic and Agricultural Economics in 1733, the working class in the countryside was apparently so completely unimportant to the term "labourer" that It is not mentioned at all in the book, yet by 1849 the number of rural hired laborers in Prussia who were landless or mainly employed in wage labour, was estimated to be around 20 million.The only alternative solution to the land problem in the capitalist sense was the Danish model, which created large numbers of small and medium commercial farmers.However, this was largely due to the reforms of the enlightened despotism of the 1780s and is therefore beyond the scope of this book.

The North American solution relied on the unique fact that the free land supply was virtually unlimited, and lacked any remnants of feudal relations or traditional peasant collectivism.In fact, the only obstacle to the expansion of purely individualistic farming was the slight problem of the red Indian tribes.Indian lands, ostensibly protected by treaties with the British, French, and American governments, were often collectively owned and often used as hunting grounds.The general conflict between the views of a society that fully alienable property is not only the only reasonable but the only natural arrangement, and the opposite view, is perhaps most evident in the antagonism between the Yankee and the Indian.The Commissioner of Indian Affairs argued: "What is most injurious and deadly [in preventing the Indians from learning the benefits of civilization] is their appropriation of too much land in the commons, and their entitlement to large annuities. Thus, one On the one hand, it will give them sufficient range of motion to indulge in the habits of migration and wandering, and prevent them from learning that property is personal, and the advantages of sedentary homes; habits, and gratify their decadent taste." It was therefore morally right to dispossess the Indians of their land by fraud, robbery, and any other suitable pressure, so long as it was profitable.

The nomadic, primitive Indians were not the only people who neither understood nor wished to understand bourgeois agrarian rationalism.In fact, apart from a few enlightened people, the "tough and rational" active small farmers, as well as the vast rural population from feudal lords down to poor herdsmen, all loathe this.Only a political and legislative revolution aimed at landlords and traditional peasants can create the conditions for a rational minority to become a rational majority.The history of agrarian relations in much of Western Europe and its colonies in the period in question is the history of this revolution, although its full consequences did not appear until the second half of the nineteenth century.

As we have seen, the first aim of the revolution was to convert land into a commodity.This must break the limited succession rights and other prohibitions on selling or disposing of land reserved on noble lands, which would allow landowners to suffer strong penalties of bankruptcy for being economically uncompetitive, thereby allowing more economically competitive buyers to operate.Especially in non-bishopric and Islamic countries (which Protestant countries have already done), large tracts of ecclesiastical land must be freed from the non-economic superstitious practices of the Middle Ages and opened up to the market and rational development.Masses of collectively owned (and thus poorly used) land, rural and urban community land, commons, communal pastures, woodland, etc. must also be accessible to individual enterprises.They must be divided into personal land and "enclosed land", waiting for them to use.It is certain that the new land buyers will be ambitious and serious enough that the second objective of the agrarian revolution will be achieved.

But only when the majority of the peasantry will undoubtedly emerge from their ranks will they be transformed into a class capable of free use of their resources, and will an automatic step be taken towards the third objective, namely, the creation of a The vast "free" labor force composed of workers.The emancipation of the peasantry from non-economic shackles and obligations (serfdom, slavery, exorbitant taxes paid to the lords, forced labor, etc.) was also an essential prerequisite.Such liberation has additional and decisive benefits.Once the door was opened for free laborers to be encouraged to pursue higher wages or to be employed on free farms, it was believed that they could be more productive than forced labor (whether serfs, slave labor or slaves).After that, there is only one further condition left that must be fulfilled.It is necessary to cut off the roots of those large populations who are now working the land, and have been bound to it for all previous human history, and who would be a surplus if the land were not effectively developed, and whose roots must be cut and allowed to grow. They flow freely.Only in this way can they flow into the towns and factories that need them more and more.In other words, when farmers lose other constraints, they must also lose their land. (It is estimated that the number of surplus laborers employable in the early 1830s was one-sixth of the total population in urban and industrial Britain, one-twentieth in France and Germany, one-twentieth in Austria and Italy, In Spain it is 1/30, in Russia it is 1%.)

In most of Europe this meant that the whole traditional legal and political structure generally known as "feudalism" had to be abolished where it had not disappeared.Generally speaking, during the period 1789-1848, the vast area from Gibraltar to East Prussia, from the Baltic Sea to Sicily, has achieved this goal largely due to the direct or indirect effects of the French Revolution.Similar changes did not occur in Central Europe until 1848, and in Russia and Romania in the 1860s.Outside Europe, similar results were apparently achieved in the Americas, with the major exceptions of Brazil, Cuba, and the American South, where slavery continued until 1862-1888.Several colonial areas directly administered by European countries, notably India and parts of Algeria, underwent similar legal revolutions.Turkey and Egypt did the same for a short time.

The actual methods of achieving the Agrarian Revolution were mostly quite similar, with the exception of Great Britain and a few other countries where feudalism in the above sense had either been abolished or never really existed (although traditional peasant communalism ).Legislation to dispossess large landed estates was neither practically necessary nor politically feasible in England, since the large landowners or farm owners were already assimilated into capitalist society.They fought hard (1795-1846) against the bourgeois model to achieve final victory in the countryside.Although their dissatisfaction was tinged with a traditional protest against the sweeping principle of purely individualistic profit, in fact the most obvious cause of their dissatisfaction was the sheer desire to preserve the French Revolution during the postwar depression. and high prices and high rents during the Napoleonic Wars.Their dissatisfaction was the pressure of agriculture rather than the reaction of feudalism.The main cutting edge of the law was thus turned against the remnants of farmers, tenant farmers, and hired labourers.According to private and general enclosure laws, from 1760 about 5,000 "enclosures" divided about 6 million hectares of communal arable and communal lands into private holdings, and many less Formal decrees supplemented these enclosure laws. The Poor Law of 1834 was designed to make life for the rural poor intolerable, thereby forcing them to leave the countryside and take whatever work was offered them.And they did so very quickly. In the 1840s several counties in England were on the verge of absolute population loss, and from 1850 onwards flight from the land became widespread.

The Danish reforms of the 1780s abolished feudalism, although the main beneficiaries were not landlords but tenant farmers, and those landowners who were encouraged to consolidate their strips into individual holdings after the abolition of vacant land, a sort of "circle The process of "earth" was roughly completed in 1800.Feudal estates were mostly sold in parcels to former tenant farmers, although the process was slowed down between 1816 and 1830 during the post-Napoleonic depression, when small landowners had a harder time surviving than tenant farmers.By 1865, Denmark had become a country mainly composed of independent farmers.Similar less drastic reforms in Sweden had similar effects, so that by the second half of the 19th century, traditional village farming and strip-field systems had practically disappeared.The former feudal areas of the country were assimilated into other areas where free peasantry had become dominant, just as in Norway (part of Sweden after 1815, and before that part of Denmark) free peasantry had been overwhelmingly dominant.The tendency to subdivide larger areas is offset in some areas by the tendency to consolidate holdings.The net result was that agriculture rapidly increased its productivity (Denmark doubled its cattle population in the last quarter of the 18th century), but with a rapidly growing population, a growing number of the rural poor could not find work. After the mid-nineteenth century, peasant poverty led to one of the largest immigration movements of the century.Farmers emigrated (mostly to the American Midwest) from arid Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.