Social statistics in general and economic statistics in particular have made tremendous advances during the last two or three decades. A series of problems, moreover those most fundamental concerning the economic system of modern states and its development, which were previously decided on the basis of general considerations and approximate data, cannot nowadays be analysed at all seriously without taking into account the mass of data about the whole territory of a given country collected according to a single definite programme and summed up by expert statisticians. In particular, the problems of the economics of agriculture, which arouse particularly many disputes, require answering on the basis of exact, mass data, the more so since in the European states and in America it is a growing practice to make periodic censuses covering all the agricultural enterprises of the country.

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is less detailed on some questions than the earlier censuses of 1882 and 1895 but, on the other hand, it gives for the first time an unprecedented wealth of data on wage-labour in agriculture. And the use of wage-labour is the chief distinguishing mark of every kind of capitalist agriculture.

    We shall therefore endeavour first of all to give a general picture of the capitalist system of modern agriculture, relying chiefly on the data of the 1907 German census and supplementing them with the data of the best agricultural censuses of other countries, namely: the Danish, Swiss, American and the last Hungarian censuses. As regards the fact which most of all strikes the eye on a first acquaintance with the results of the census and which is being most talked about, namely, the reduction in Germany of the number of large farms (large in agricultural area) and the amount of land they possess, we shall turn to an examination of this only at the end of our work. For this is one of the complicated facts which are a function of a series of others, and it is impossible to understand its significance without first elucidating several much more important and basic questions.

    The German agricultural censuses, like all the European (as distinct from the Russian) censuses of the kind, are based on information collected separately about each agricultural enterprise. At the same time the amount of information collected usually increases with each census. For instance, in Germany in 1907, although very important information on the number of cattle used in field work was omitted (this information was collected in 1882 and 1895), for the first time information was collected on the amount of arable land under various cereals and on the number of family workers and wage-workers. The information about each farm obtained in this way is quite sufficient for a politico-economic characterisation of the farm. The whole question, the whole difficulty of the task, is how to sum up these data in such a way as to obtain an accurate politico-economic characteri-

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sation of the different groups or types of farms as a whole. When the summing up is unsatisfactory, when the-grouping is incorrect or inadequate, the result can be -- and this continually happens in the treatment of modern census data -- that unusually detailed, excellent data on each separate enterprise disappear, become lost or are wholly missing when dealing with the millions of farms of the entire country. The capitalist system of agriculture is characterised by the relations which exist between employers and workers, between farms of various types, and if the distinguishing features of these types are taken incorrectly or selected incompletely, then even the best census cannot give a politico-economic picture of the actual situation.

    It is clear, therefore, that the methods of summarising or grouping the data of modern censuses are of extreme importance. Later on we shall examine an exposition of all the rather diverse methods used in the best censuses enumerated above. For the present let us note that the German census, like the vast majority of the others, gives a full summary, grouping the farms exclusively according to a single feature, namely, the size of the agricultural area of each farm. On this basis the census divides all the farms into 18 groups, beginning with farms of less than one-tenth of a hectare and ending with those over 1,000 hectares of agricultural area. That such detailed subdivision is a statistical luxury unjustified by politico-economic considerations is felt by the authors of the German statistics themselves, who provide a summary of all the data in six -- or, by separating a subgroup -- seven large groups according to the size of the agricultural area. These groups are as follows: farms having less than half a hectare, one-half to 2, 2 to 5, 5 to 20, 20 to 100, and over 100, the last including a subgroup of farms with over 200 hectares of agricultural area.

    The question arises: what is the politico-economic significance of this grouping? Undoubtedly the land is the chief means of production in agriculture; the amount of land is the most accurate criterion of the dimensions of a farm and, consequently, of its type, i.e., for example, whether it is a small, medium or large farm, a capitalist farm or one not using wage-labour. A farm of less than two hectares is usually accounted a small (sometimes called a parcellised or

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dwarf) farm; from two to 20 hectares (sometimes from two to 100) -- a peasant farm, over 100 hectares a large -- that is to say, a capitalist farm.

    And so, the information on wage-labour collected for the first time by the 1907 census gives us above all a first opportunity of verifying from mass data this "usual" supposition. For the first time we see the introduction in statistical procedure of at least a certain -- although far from adequate, as we shall see later -- element of rationality, i.e., an element taking into account data of the most direct, immediate politico-economic significance.

    In point of fact, much is said about small production But what is small production? The most usual answer is that small production is one that does not use wage-labour. It is not only Marxists who look at it in this way. Ed. David, for example, whose book, Socialism and Agriculture may be called one of the latest summaries of bourgeois theories on the agrarian question, writes on page 29 of the Russian translation: "In all those cases where we speak of small production, we have in mind the economic category which functions without permanent outside assistance and without an auxiliary occupation."

    The 1907 census fully establishes first of all that the number of these farms is very small, that in modern agriculture farmers who do not hire workers, and who do not hire themselves out to work for others, are an insignificant minority. Out of the total of 5,736,082 agricultural enterprises in Germany registered by the 1907 census, only 1,872,616, i.e., less than one-third, belong to farmers whose chief occupation is the independent conduct of agriculture and who have no auxiliary occupations. How many of them hire workers? On this there is no information; that is to say, it existed in the most detailed form on the original cards and was lost during the summarising! The compilers did not wish to calculate (after performing a mass of most detailed and futile calculations) how many farms in each group hire permanent or temporary wage-workers.

    In order to determine approximately the number of farms that do without wage-labour, we shall single out those groups in which the number of farms is less than the number of wage-workes. These will be groups with less than ten hec-

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tares of land per farm. These groups include 1,283,631 farmers who regard agriculture as their chief concern and have no auxiliary occupation. These farmers have a total of 1,400,162 wage-workers (if it is assumed that only those farmers who regard agriculture as their chief concern and have no auxiliary occupations maintain wage-workers). Only in the groups of farms with two to five hectares is the number of independent farmers without an auxiliary occupation greater than the number of wage-workers, namely: 495,439 farms and 411,311 wage-workers.

    Of course, cultivators who have auxiliary occupations sometimes have wage-workers and, of course, there are some "small" farmers who hire not one but several wage-workers. But nevertheless there can be no doubt that farmers who do not hire workers and who do not hire themselves out to work are an insignificant minority.

    From the data on the number of wage-workers three basic groups of farms in German agriculture are immediately distinguishable.

    I. Proletarian farms. These include groups in which the minority of farmers regard the conduct of independent agriculture as their chief occupation, groups in which the majority are wage-workes, and so on. For example, there are 2,084,060 farms of less than half a hectare. Of these only 97,153 are independent cultivators, and 1,287,312 are wage workers (in all branches of the national economy) by their chief occupation. The farms with one-half to two hectares of land numbered 1,294,449. Of these only 377,762 are independent cultivators, 535,480 are wage-workers, 277, 735 carry on small-scale industry, handicrafts or trade, 103,472 are employees or represent "various and unspecified" occupations. Clearly, both these groups of farms are in the main proletarian.

    II. Peasant farms. The bulk of the farms included here are those of independent cultivators; moreover, the number of family workers in them is greater than that of wage-workers. These will be groups with two to 20 hectares of land.

    III. Capitalist farms. Here we include farms with more wage-workers than family workers.

    The following are the total figures for these groups:

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    This table gives a picture of the economic system of modern German agriculture. At the bottom of the pyramid is a vast mass of proletarian "farms", almost three-fifths of the total number; at the top is an insignificant minority (one-twentieth) of capitalist farms. Let us point out, anticipating a little, that this insignificant minority has more than half of all the land and arable area. They have one-fifth of the total number of workers engaged in agriculture and over half the total number of wage-workers.

    Of the "farmers" with less than two hectares of land, the majority are wage-workers by their chief occupation. For them agriculture is an auxiliary occupation. Of the 3,378,509 enterprises in this group, 2,920,119 are auxiliary concerns (Nebenbetriebe ). A quite small minority, 14 per cent in al], 475,000 out of 3,4 million, are independent cultivators, and this includes those who have in addition an auxiliary, non-agricultural occupation.

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wages, is this not a direct survival of serfdom? The difference between serfdom, as an economic system, and capitalism lies in the fact that the former allots land to the worker, whereas the latter separates the worker from the land; the former gives the worker the means of subsistence in kind (or forces him to produce them himself on his "allotment"), the latter gives the worker payment in money, with which he buys the means of subsistence. Of course, in Germany this survival of serfdom is quite insignificant compared with what we see in Russia with her notorious "labour-rent" system of landlord farming, nevertheless it is a survival of serfdom. The 1907 census in Germany counted 579,500 "agricultural enterprises" belonging to agricultural workers and day-labourers, and of these 540,751 belong to the group of "farmers" with less than two hectares of land.

    We have put under the heading peasant farms those groups in which, on the one hand, the majority of cultivators are independent farmers and, on the other hand, the number of family workers is greater than the number of wage-workers.

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It was found that the absolute number of wage-workers in such farms is very great -- 1.6 million, more than a third of the total number of wage-workers. Obviously there are not a few capitalist enterprises among the general mass (2.1 million) of "peasant" farms. We shall see below the approximate number and significance of these enterprises, for the present we shall deal in more detail with the relationship between family and wage-labour. Let us see how big the average number of workers per farm is:

    We see from this table that, compared with industry, agricultural enterprises are generally of a small size as regards the number of workers. Only owners possessing more than 100 hectares have over 50 wage-workers: the number of such owners is 23,566, i.e., less than one-half per cent of the total number of farms. The total number of wage-workers on these farms is 1,463,974, i.e., a little less than the total number on the two million peasant farms.

    Among the peasant farms, the group that is seen at once to stand out from the rest is that with 10-20 hectares: this group has an average of 1.7 wage-workers per farm. If we single out only the permanent workers we shall find that they number 412,702 for the 412,741 farms of this group (411,940 of the farms distributed according to the number of workers). This means that not a single enterprise is able to do without permanent use of wage-labour. That is why we single out this group as that of "Grossbauer ", big peasant farmers or peasant bourgeoisie. Usually it is owners of 20 or more hectares that are reckoned to belong to this category, but the 1907 census has shown that the use of wage-labour in agriculture is more widely distributed than is usually thought,

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and that the boundary at which the constant use of wage-labour begins must be shifted considerably lower.

    Further, in examining the relationship between family and wage-labour, we find that in proletarian and peasant farming the average number of family workers shows a continual increase parallel to the increase in the number of wage-workers, whereas in capitalist farms the number of family workers begins to fall as the number of wage-workers grows larger. This phenomenon is quite natural and confirms our conclusion that farms of over 20 hectares are capitalist farms, in which not only is the number of wage-workers greater than that of family workers, but also the average number of family workers per farm is less than in the case of peasant farms.

    Long ago, even at the very beginning of the controversy between the Marxists and the Narodniks, it was established from Zemstvo statistical data that in peasant farming family co-operation is the basis for the creation of capitalist co-operation, i.e., substantial peasant farms notable for their particularly large number of family workers become converted into capitalist farms employing wage-labour to an ever-increasing extent. Now we see that the German statistics for the whole of German agriculture confirm this conclusion.

    Let us take the German peasant farms. As a whole they differ from the proletarian farms by being enterprises based on family co-operation (2.5-3.4 family workers per farm) and not enterprises of individuals. The proletarian farms have to be called the farms of individuals because they do not even average two workers per farm. Among the peasant farms, however, there is competition over the number of wage-workers taken on: the greater the size of the peasant farm, the higher is the number of its family workers and the more rapidly does the number of its wage-workers increase. The big peasant farms surpass the small peasant farms (of 2-5 hectares) by less than one-and-a-half times as regards the number of family workers but they exceed them by more than four times as regardg the number of wage-workers.

    We see here a precise statistical confirmation of the cardinal distinction between the class of small farmers in general, and of small peasants in particular, and the class of wage-workers, a distinction that is always being pointed

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out by Marxists and which the bourgeois economists and revisionists are quite unable to grasp. All the circumstances of commodity farming lead to the result that the small peasants are unable to exist without striving to consolidate and extend their enterprises, and this struggle implies a struggle to increase the use of outside labour-power and to make its use cheaper. That is why in every capitalist country the mass of small peasants as a whole, of whom only an insignificant minority "rise to prominence", i.e., become real capitalists, are permeated by capitalist psychology and follow the agrarians in politics. The bourgeois economists (and the revisionists, too, in their wake) support this psychology; the Marxists explain to the small peasants that their only salvation lies in joining hands with the wage-workers.

    The data of the 1907 census are also extremely instructive in regard to the proportion between the number of permanent and temporary workers. Altogether the latter are exactly one-third of the total number: 5,053,726 out of 15,169,549. Of the wage-workers 45 per cent are temporary, of the family workers 29 per cent are temporary. But these proportions undergo substantial change in the different types of farm. The following are the data for the groups we have distin guished.

    We see from this table that among the proletarian farms with less than half a hectare (there are altogether 2.1 million such farms!) temporary workers form more than half of both the family workers and wage-workers. These are chiefly auxiliary farms which occupy only part of the time of their owners. Among the proletarian farms of 0.5-2 hectares, too,

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the percentage of temporary workers is very high. As the size of the farm increases the percentage falls -- with only one exception. This exception is that among wage-workers of the biggest capitalist farms the percentage of temporary workers increases slightly, and since the number of family workers in this group is quite negligible, the percentage of temporary workers among the workers as a whole increases considerably, from 25 to 32 per cent.

    The difference between peasant and capitalist farms as regards the total number of temporary workers is not very great. The difference between the numbers of family and wage-workers is very considerable in all types of farm, and if we take into account that among temporary family workers there is, as we shall see, an especially high percentage of women and children this difference becomes still greater. Hence wage-workers are the most mobile element. . . .

    . . . they carry on agriculture. Generally speaking, women's labour predominates also in the peasant farm, and it is only in the big peasant and capitalist enterprises that men constitute the majority.

    There are in general fewer women among wage-workers than among family workers. Obviously, the capitalist cultivators in all the groups are among those farmers who obtain the best labour forces. If the predominance of women over men can be taken as a measure of the straitened circumstances of the farmer and of the unsatisfactory state of a farm that has no possibility of using the best labour forces (and this supposition inevitably follows from all the data on women. . . .

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    The significance of the data on the use of machinery in agriculture is usually underestimated in economic literature. Firstly, the capitalist character of the use of machinery is quite often ignored (always, in the case of bourgeois economists); the economists make no investigation of this problem, they do not know how to raise it or do not even want to do so. Secondly, the use of machinery is considered in isolation and not as a criterion of the different types of farm; different methods of cultivation and different economic conditions of farming.