ENTRY
[ESC]DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT
Marx and the Death of the Author XII: Workers of the world includes farm labour too
Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery, not too far from where I sit writing this, in the greater scheme of things at least. Those familiar with the biographical details of Marx's life know that he spent the bulk of his life in exile here in London, after the failed 1848 revolutions across the German states. In Marx's time, London was the largest city in the world. Even today, it is one of the few officially designated 'mega cities' of Western Europe. London is very much a city centre, and was the archetype of the modern urban centre, the one upon which other up-and-coming urban centres of the 19th century looked to for inspiration. The Paris Metro, for example, is so named in imitation of the London & Metropolitan Line, the underground train that was the forerunner to much of today's Metropolitan and Northern Lines on the modern London Underground. New York City's boroughs are so called after the metropolitan boroughs of London, which themselves were based on ancient church parishes, and of course Harry Beck's world famous map of the London Underground became the model for countless similar maps the world over. Contrary to the popular belief of many Londoners, London is also not the only city in Britain. Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield, and even little Hull all became centres of considerable industry and shipping during the industrial revolution. York, which had spent centuries as the largest and most important city in its eponymous county of Yorkshire had, by the end of the industrial revolution, fallen to being the fifth largest city in Yorkshire. By 1900, just over three quarters of the British population lived in the various cities of Britain, and quaint countryside villages became even... quainter.
Britain was not alone in this urbanisation, as France, Germany, Belgium, and the United States went through similar industrialisation, urban centres began to swell. The combination of Jethro Tull's farm automation designs and the rise of factories as the primary source of economic production saw a dramatic shift in employment patterns away from agriculture/primary sector mass employment and towards manufacturing/secondary sector employment instead.
If you haven't already guessed, I've decided to turn last week's post into the first part of a four part series examining each of the sectors, this week's entry is agriculture/primary.
The 19th century was the first time that the concept of the 'modern' as something distinct from 'the past' became as widespread as it did, and because of the large scale reorganisation of labour away from agriculture and into manufacturing, the dominant narrative began to view cities as symbols of progress, civilisation, and the future, with rural territories and farming becoming equally demonised and romanticised figures of the past.
Of course, this is an over simplified view. Factories still cannot, despite repeated attempts, produce the food we consume out of nought. Statistically, historically, people who do not eat tend to die, at a near 100 per cent rate. Most people would describe this outcome as undesirable, and so eat. Nonetheless, despite this irritating fact of life, economists of the 19th and much of the 20th century tended to focus on the hot new commodity of the era, which was the mechanised labour of the factory, and away from the uncool, old fashioned, 'high labour/low productivity' nature of agriculture. So prone towards this were we that little critique on this front was given to Lewis' emphasis on driving the economy to manufacturing labour in his Nobel prize winning work. Most of the post-war, post-independence economic plans of Europe, Asia, and Africa focused on pushing their economies to manufacturing where and when able. As much as I'd love to throw neo-liberals under the bus, and I still will, don't you worry, agriculture was a (in)famously something of a blind spot for Marxist and Keynesian economists too. Agriculture might not be as sexy as factories, at least to many economists, but let's not forget the inciting incident of Les Mis was the theft of a loaf of bread.
Lenin is most famous today for the bizarre on going preservation of his body, which was not something he had intended to happen. (Unlike founder of the University of London, Jeremy Bentham, whose body is still on display not too far from my office, per his wishes in his will). Before his turn as revolutionary, controversial Soviet leader, and famous dead body, he had been an economist. Prior to Lenin's prominence, there had been debate and discussion between Marx, Engels, and early Russian Marxists about whether or not Russia could Communist. A concern amongst socialists of the era was that Russia could not Communist because it had never gone through the primitive accumulation phase of capitalism. You cannot redistribute wealth, it was argued, if there was no wealth to be redistributed. Engels had a different view, perhaps Russia had a golden opportunity to organise around traditional villages and generate wealth without the necessity of a bourgeois revolution, skipping the embedding of a bourgeois class that would ultimately work to suppress socialist advances. Perhaps, Engels thought, the lack of bourgeois power and capitalism in Tsarist Russia meant the Russians could by-pass the capitalist stage altogether.
Of course, one must never underestimate the sheer and utter incompetence of Tsar Nicholas II, whose cousin, the equally incompetent Kaiser Wilhelm II had a dream. A dream of a German-Russian alliance that would undermine British naval superiority. To do this, Russia or Germany had to have Pacific Ports, and Russia was a hell of a lot closer to that reality than Germany was, and so Willy goaded Nicky into taking Port Arthur from the Koreans, which the Japanese had already fancied, and so before we knew it, the 1905 Russo-Japanese War was going on. As mentioned prior, Nicky was pretty stupid and hadn't comprehended that Japan had a Pacific fleet at the ready, what with Japan being situated in the Pacific and all, and thought that the Trans-Siberian railway was done, despite that being mostly a lie by his corrupt and incompetent relatives and friends. The result was the Russian Army couldn't get to Korea in an orderly fashion, and started losing the war pretty quick like, and the Japanese Navy destroyed what little Pacific fleet the Russians did have, the Russians sent their Baltic fleet to even the score, but they had a hilariously disastrous trip around the southern tip of Africa to make to get to the Pacific, a trip that was so poorly done that it nearly triggered a war with, amongst other nations, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, and France. The 'dogger bank incident' off the coast of Britain causing Britain to revoke Russian access to the Suez Canal, necessitating the circumnavigation of Africa in the first place.
Anyway the Japanese destroyed what was left of Russia's already pitiful navy, and the good people of Russia freaked out that not only did their incompetent and out of touch leader lose a war, but he was the first 20th century European power to lose a war to a non-European power, a big deal in the highly racist world view of the early 20th century. Japanese nationalistic pride surges (causes mass death later, as nationalistic pride is wont to do) and Russian nationalistic pride is humiliated (causing much more immediate mass death). The 1905 revolution is here! A problem that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and countless other leftists throughout history have noted surfaces pretty quickly. Here's a decisive moment in Russian history, and the proletariat has no class consciousness, and therefore leftists have no centralised organisation. The bourgeois have astute class consciousness, and have already organised around the Russian flag, and sweep into relative victory, negotiating with the Tsarist factions and securing power in the Duma. Russia is going to copy Britain!
It didn't really copy Britain all that well, and that's part of why 1905 wouldn't end up being the most famous Russian revolution of the 20th century. Of course, a big part of this is the looming spectre of Nicky 2's immense incompetence. I know anti-Soviet propaganda likes to romanticise him, but honestly he might've been the dumbest cousin in a trifecta that included Kaiser 'Let's do war with everyone' Wilhelm II, which is saying something, since these two bumblefucks did more to end monarchism in Europe than generations of republicans before them.
The important thing for now, in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, Nicholas had to acknowledge the burgeoning power of the bourgeois, giving them a good decade to establish themselves, and ending some of Engel's dream of a Russia that could skip a bourgeois revolution. A fact he admitted long before 1905, as factories began to gain prominence in Russia. (As well as oil corporations, as noted by Adam Hanieh in Crude Capitalism). Compared to Britain and Germany, however, Russia's industrial capacity in 1914 was still considerably lax, and part of that Tsarist incompetence I hinted at earlier showed again after Archduke Franz Ferdinand's career met a fairly abrupt end. You see, the competent leaders of the First World War, especially in Britain, Germany, and the US realised that war was an industrial affair now, the smart play was to quasi-nationalise production and expand your industrial capacity. Build so many ships, for example, that instead of giving them elegant names like HMS Ark Royal you call them HMS M31. Sure it'll hurt morale a little as the sailors onboard those numbered ships realise the lack of name probably means they're fairly expendable, but that's still a set of floating guns! And even sad sailors can fire those floating guns!
In the unlikely event you've never heard of the First World War, it had a reputation for being a meat grinder, especially on the two European fronts, where the European armies had the easiest time massing. The trope of the Russian soldier waiting for a comrade to die so they could finally get a rifle? That was far more true in the Tsarist army than in the Soviet one, and a big part of that was because Nicholas hadn't put enough resources towards improving Russian manufacturing and military logistics to properly arm and equip his forces to adequately engage the thoroughly modernised German forces. Russia's only saving grace was the Austro-Hungarian military was similarly poorly managed. Tsarist Russia's laughable lack of logistics and industrial capacity meant the German army quickly began to dominate the Eastern Front.
For Russian civilians, supplies also dried up, and any feelings of humiliation still lingering from the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War were now being compounded by the fact that the Ottomans were claiming more victories than the Russians. Push came to shove, we got a battleship Potemkin, and bish-bash-bosh it's 1917, time for another revolution, and this time the military has provided, inadvertently, a kind of class consciousness for the proletariat that had been lacking in 1905, and so boom! Socialist Russia!
What kind of socialism is still up for debate and of course a bloody civil war follows, as well as an invasion by British-American force, who quickly withdraw because, well, that whole First World War thing really reduced the appetite for further full-out war. Anyway, Lenin wins, and quickly realises the same problem that had vexed Marx and Engels a generation earlier, and the same problem that had finally led to the Romanovs collapsing. Outside of the resources of the Russian aristocracy, Russia didn't have a whole lot, Russian aristocrats had already sold a lot of it to foreign bourgeois in a desperate attempt to cultivate the capital necessary to imitate the rich lives of their British, European, and American counterparts. What did remain in Russia was land. A fuck tonne of land. This wasn't unique to Russia, this was also what awaited Mao at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Nehru at the dawn of Indian independence, and countless African leaders now with their hard-won independence. Like it or not, they had agricultural economies, and a library full of literature telling them they needed manufacturing ones to pull off this socialism thing. This is why Germany and Britain had spent the latter half of the 19th century being predicted to become the global vanguards of socialism, not Russia and China.
Of course, we could argue that is because at this point a great deal of the literature around both Marxism and wider economics was centred on Europe. (For all intents and purposes today Europe includes Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, no fussing over this label please). In the slight defence of all involved, this is largely because that's where readily recorded data was readily available, especially in a pre-internet era where transmission of data still largely consisted of physically shipping books/folders/packets of papers across vast areas, up to and including the massive oceans of the world. Of course, even this should be taken with a certain grain of salt as highly racialised notions of what cultures/civilisations were deemed worthy of meticulous record keeping. Further, with any dataset you have to ask who is recording the data, and if the imperial centres were the ones recording the data, the data was of course going to be skewed in their favour. (See also one of the many problems with GDP statistics). As such, data around Russia and China was already fairly light compared to data around Britain and Germany.
But it was Lenin, in wearing his 'economist hat' (I picture it looking like a bowler hat) who finally put pen to paper to go through the difficulties of adjusting an agrarian economy to a manufacturing one. In the context of Russia, the problem was fairly obvious, it had only been in the mid-19th century that Russia had finally began putting an end to the feudal system, with the attempted end to the serf system. I say attempted because the Tsarist regime gave an even worse go at this than the British bourgeois did ending slavery. The British bourgeois did end slavery, but moved the formerly enslaved into considerably low waged precarious employment. To add insult to injury, as I've mentioned before, the British government did move to pay reparations, but to the former slavers. (This is yet another reason Jamaica couldn't just industrialise like Lewis had hoped). The Tsarists were quick to show why Marx viewed the bourgeois as an improvement over the aristocracy, in that when abolishing the serf system, the move was to force the serfs directly into employment with their former aristocratic overlords, passing the 'debt' of reparations to the former 'owners' of the serfs onto the former serfs themselves. Again, making the early 19th century British bourgeois look quite woke in comparison. Something both the British bourgeois and the Russian aristocrats failed to do was address land ownership. Jamaican plantations might lack free labour, but they were still largely owned by the same British businesses that had owned them during the slave era. Even if the serfs had gotten out of debt, there was no land left in Russia for them to buy to become farmers in their own right, the landlord class of rural Tsarist Russia had remained entirely unchanged, and thus the exploitation of the labour of the former serfs would continue as if nothing changed, and the economic patterns that already had Russian agriculture falling behind the rest of Europe economically continued.
What's that I hear? The pained screams of my Irish ancestors? Okay, let's do it, starting under Elizabeth I and accelerating under subsequent English, Scottish, and British monarchs as well as under genocidal proto-Christofascist Oliver Cromwell, the English/Scottish 'Plantation System' in Ireland had made it impossible for indigenous Irish-folk to own land in Ireland, creating a British landlord class that owned all the farms in Ireland, but sought the usage of cheap Irish labour to actually make the farms do stuff. (In)famously, the growing popularity of the new-world plant known as the potato had turned it into a 'cash crop', and so the entirety of Ireland became an over-glorified potato farm. Introduce one genetic disease into an ecosystem decimated by monoculture, add on the British Protestant belief in self-determination mixed with a slight racist view that the Irish are lazy drunkards in need of salvation, and bish-bash-bosh you got yourself a genocidal famine, that has left modern Ireland at a population loss compared to 1840. Even if local Irish farmers had wanted to grow additional non-potato crops to prevent the absolute collapse of Irish agriculture, British private property laws inhibited the practice. Laws that, as is frequently forgotten, were violently enforced by the British Army and the Royal Irish Constabulary.
As such, Lenin, and countless other economists of the 20th century realised that monopolistic landlords were inhibiting agricultural production, as such it became imperative to break up these landlords and create new patterns of agricultural ownership, so the farmers would benefit fully from the fruits of their labour (no pun intended). The bad news for Lenin is the Civil War was a bit much and he kind of stroked out. He tried his best not to get Stalin to replace him, since he had a feeling Stalin liked the aesthetic of Communism more than the substance, but died before he could prevent that. The elephant in the room for socialism will always be the Stalinist and Maoist land reforms, which famously did not go well. In the case of Stalin, some of this was Stalin's deeply held racial beliefs. In both cases, there was also a lot of belief in farming pseudo-science that was popular in the era, not unlike modern politicians extolling the virtues of drinking raw milk whilst a major world power has an entirely preventable diarrhoea outbreak. In the case of both Mao and Stalin, actual agriculture experts were ignored in favour of 'outside thinkers' who had deeply flawed understandings of agriculture.
Today, of course, agricultural science is more advanced than ever before. The problem is the ownership of that knowledge. Much like with IT and the rest of the global supply chain, there has been a monopolisation of intellectual property, here we can introduce many of our usual suspects with global agricultural monopoly, like Monsanto, Nestle, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, General Mills, Kelloggs, Mars, Unilever, Johnson and Johnson, and Proctor and Gamble who have monopolised control of everything you could possibly buy at your local grocers. Farmers might own their farms these days, but they are limited in who they can sell to, diminishing their wages. There's also monopolies on who farmers can buy from, with Bayer, BASF, KWS, DLF, Sakata, VVilmorin & Cie,ChemChina, and Corteva monopolising the global seed, fertiliser, and other agri-chemical production. Bayer by themselves knocks the others out of the park, and so can set extraordinary prices. All of these companies, in their cartel-like behaviour can engage in rent seeking behaviour rather than profit seeking. And that's without us talking about how the introduction of computers into tractors has removed the farmer's right-to-repeair their own equipment, with John Deere tractors self-terminating if they detect any repair work done by anyone other than a John Deere repairman.
This creates a situation where the food monopolies can charge us the consumers whatever they want, and pay the farmer producers whatever they want. These food monopolies, like much of capitalism, are driven largely by useless middle men who contribute nothing to the production of the food, whilst punishing the people who do the majority of the labour and the poorest of consumers. Contributing considerably to the cost-of-living crisis you hear so much about. Like most capitalists, they also actively frown on regulation, and desire to cut costs on quality control, leading to predictable outbreaks of preventable diseases. Each time pretending these outcomes could never have been foreseen despite over a century of data telling us this was going to happen. Killing unknown numbers of people through starvation, poverty, and in the case of Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Pepsico, outright water deprivation. (Remember that next time you see an advert talking about the tragedy of drinking water availability in Africa).
If there's a takeaway from this, economic development can't just be industrial policy. We need farmers, but we don't need agricultural monopolies. And next time we do land reform, we should likely do it based on actual science and not the weird beliefs of spiritualists, magic crystal types, 'race scientists', or those extolling the virtues of living like Neanderthals or other members of a mythical past.
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