Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/93

Rh will nevertheless remain, who, with the help of their own family or at most of a lad or a girl (one may regard them as part of the family), will continue to work their little farms. With the present conservative nature of our peasants it is highly probable that a number of them will continue to work in the same way as heretofore. And a proletarian régime will have little inclination to take over that sort of petty business. No Socialist of any weight and standing has ever as yet demanded that the peasants should be expropriated or their lands confiscated. Every, small peasant will far more likely be allowed to remain and work. his farm as he has been doing it in the past. The peasant has nothing to fear from a Socialist régime.

It is even quite probable that peasant farming will receive a new strength from the new régime. The latter will bring the peasants abolition of militarism, reduction of taxation, self-government, nationalisation of the schools and highway rates, abolition of the poor rates, nationalisation and perhaps decrease of the mortgage burdens and many other advantages. We have, however, seen also that the victorious proletariat will have every reason to increase the mass of products, and among, the products for which demand will grow, first and foremost will be agricultural produce. In spite of all the refutations of the theory of the increasing misery of the proletariat under capitalism, there is still a vast amount of hunger to be satisfied to-day, and this fact alone justifies us in the supposition that a rise of wages will, in the first place, show itself in an increased demand for agricultural produce. The proletarian régime will, therefore, have the greatest interest in the increase of the production of the peasants, and with a view to this will lend them all the assistance it can. Its own vital interest will demand that the backward peasant farming should be brought up to date by grants of cattle, machines, manures, improvements in the soil, &c. In this fashion it will help to increase the amount of agricultural produce even on those farms which have not yet become socialised.

But here, too, as in other fields, the circumstances will make it necessary to simplify the process of circulation by substituting, in the place of a large number of private persons exchanging their products with one another, a few organisations which could enter into business relations with each other. The State will much rather supply breeding animals, machines, manures, &c., to peasant communities and co-operative societies than to individual peasants. The same communities and co-operative societies will,i in their turn, have as purchasers of their produce no longer private middlemen, but again co-operative stores, communal and national establishments (flour mills, sugar refineries, breweries, &c.). Thus private enterprise will here, too, gradually retire before social, and the latter will finally revolutionise the peasant way of farming itself, and develop out of the co-operative or communal organisation of a number of such concerns a social agricultural industry on a large scale. The peasants will amalgamate their