system, as a regulating law of social production, and under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organization of labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of the rural labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction.[1]
- ↑ See Liebig: “Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung anf Agricultur und Physiologie, 7. Auflage, 1862,” and especially the “Einleitung in die Naturgesetze des Feldbaus,” in the 1st Volume. To have developed from the point of view of natural science, the negative, i.e., destructive side of modern agriculture, is one of Liebig’s immortal merits. His summary, too, of the history of agriculture, although not free from gross errors, contains flashes of light. It is, however, to he regretted that he ventures on such hap-hazard assertions as the following: “By greater pulverising and more frequent ploughing, the circulation of air in the interior of porous soil is aided, and the surface exposed to the action of the atmosphere is increased and renewed; but it is easily seen that the increased yield of the land cannot be proportional to the labour spent on that land, but increases in a much smaller proportion. This law,” adds Liebig, “was first enunciated by John Stuart Mill in his ‘Principles of Pol. Econ.’, Vol I., p. 17, as follows: ‘That the produce of land increases, ceteris poribus, in a diminishing ratio to the increase of the labonrers employed” (Mill here introduces in an erroneous form the law enunciated by Ricardo’s school, for since the ‘decrease of the labourera employed,’ kept even pace in England with the advance of agriculture, the law discovered in, and applied to, England, could have no application to that country, at all events), “is the universal law of agricultural industry.’ This is very remarkable, since Mill was ignorant of the reason for this law.” (Liebig, l. c., Bd. I, p. 143 and Note.) Apart from Liebig’s wrong interpretation of the word “labour,” by which word he understands something quite different from what political economy does, it is, in any case, “very remarkable” that he should
