How the labour movement can change agriculture

This article was approved at the Workers’ Liberty conference this year after some months of discussions.

It does not try to give comprehensive surveys of world agriculture, or of agricultural policies which a world workers’ government could carry through to combat the two plagues of eco-degradation and of much of the world’s rural population being still trapped in impoverished low-productivity farming. Those surveys required expertise which we do not have, but a workers’ government will be able to command and develop.

Essentially, the article surveys the ideas for workers’-movement policy on agriculture of the Marxists of the era of Marx, Trotsky, and others; discusses how agriculture has developed differently from what they expected; and suggests some ideas on how we can take that different development into account politically.

Inadequate

Two issues, in particular, were mentioned in the conference discussion as inadequately covered in the article.

One is no-till agriculture. The article talks of a drive to “swivel farm work... towards better rotations, no-till methods...”, but deliberately attempts no more detail, for the reasons already mentioned.

No-till methods, i.e. farming without ploughing the land, break with the norms of thousands of years, but have been developed recently in some areas of advanced capitalist agriculture (US, South America, Australia...)

They can allow the soil to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere; limit or even reverse soil erosion; sustain the diversity of the soil biome; and, done right, reduce agri-chemical usage. They are not always easy, and require specialised equipment.

The second is landownership. There are certainly many large landowners in the world, and taking their land under public ownership can reduce rents for farmers or channel the rent money to social purposes. In many areas it is also important to enable social housing development.

Trend

However, the big trend of the last 200 years or more is of farmers owning more of the land they farm, having more security on it, and having relatively smaller burdens of rent, repayments for purchase, or feudal-type dues. David Cannadine described this process for Britain in his book The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.

Moreover, ownership of the land is a different matter from ownership of farms. Public ownership of the land on which a farm operates does not give public control of the farm’s production any more than public ownership of the land on which a factory stands gives public control of the factory’s production.

Very large farms (by area) are mostly livestock farms as against cropland, and may have fewer workers than small cropland farms.

On these and other questions, of course, Solidarity’s columns are always open to contributions challenging our ideas. 
 

World agriculture has become dominated, in many countries, by mega-capital from one angle, micro-capital from another. It is becoming more so. Later in this article I will review the “classic” Marxist discussions on the issue. But from the start we have to register that things have not turned out as Engels, Lenin, Kautsky, and others expected, i.e. tending towards the 19th century British model, of fully capitalist farmers hiring wage-labour, or, after socialist revolutions, towards agricultural cooperatives.

The industries surrounding agriculture are mega-capitalised. Four companies control 90% of the global grain trade. Another four control 66% of the agri-chemical trade, and an overlapping four 53% of global seed trade. Three sell almost half the farm machinery. Four run 75% of the world’s corporate abattoirs and packing plants for beef, four others 70% of ditto for pork. In Britain the large supermarket chains have 90-odd % of the grocery market.

The USA, the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay between them do 62% of the world’s agricultural exports, from 4% of the world’s agricultural workforce. In the USA, UK, and western Europe, only about 2% of the workforce is in agriculture.

Unlike in other economic sectors, labour productivity varies vastly from place to place. The figures are illustrative only (because of exchange-rate difficulties and more), but the USA is estimated to get $100,000 value-added per unit labour input in agriculture, the UK $55,000, China $5,600, Tanzania $870. The gap in yields per hectare is smaller, but France and the UK produce about six times as much wheat, maize, or potatoes per hectare as Tanzania.

Yields in some countries have since World War Two risen faster than in industry, thanks to machinery, agri-chemicals, irrigation, and improved techniques. Without that increased productivity the world would have had acute food shortages for decades, or many more ecosystems destroyed for expanded agricultural land, or both. We must criticise the way the productivity has been shaped, but to reverse out of it, back to more traditional food production or an idealised version of it, is hopeless. In other countries productivity has stagnated, food wastage on the way between farms and consumers is high (37% in sub-Saharan Africa, because of poor transport and lack of cold storage), and nutrition remains poor.

The countries most dependent on food imports are often the most “agricultural”. Most African countries depend heavily on food imports, though some 70% of their workforce is in agriculture. The UK now produces about 60% of the food it consumes, up from 30 to 40% in the 1930s, though the land area given to agriculture is a bit smaller now than then.

There are some farms in the high-productivity areas which are large not only in land-area but in workforce. Some farms hire lots of workers for a short time for picking fruit and vegetables. Automated picking is in its infancy.

But mostly the farms run on family labour, and often even the main farmer has a substantial non-farm job or business on the side. The average depreciated value of the machinery and equipment in use on a US farm is not huge, at $164,000, and 72% of EU farmers have no formal training for their job. But US and EU farmers are able to produce high volumes with tiny workforces.

In the UK, there were 1.7 million hired farm workers in 1851, on maybe 300,000 farms. Now there are fewer than 200,000, on more than 200,000 farms. The average net worth of a farm is £2.2 million: £1.9 million land, £0.7 million structures and equipment, minus £0.3 million debt.

86% of the European Union’s 9.1 million farms have no regular workers other than family. In the USA, the 1.9 million farms have greater average land area, but only 3.5% spend more than $100,000 a year on hired labour, and only 1.3% have more than four people working on them.

In Ireland, all but 400 of 138,000 farms are “family farms”, and only 7% of the workforce is non-family.

Even farms with large land areas are usually small businesses as measured by labour, comparable to the smallest shops. In Brazil, which has many large holdings, 12.8 million of the 16.6 million people working on the five million farms are family.

Australia has huge farms (average 2,850 ha), but an average of only about two staff per farm, of whom 27% are part-time. The world’s biggest farm, Anna Creek cattle station in South Australia, with a land area bigger than the whole country of Israel, has just eleven workers including the manager and the cook, and most of those are jackaroos and jillaroos (apprentices who will later run their own farms).

China had its agriculture reorganised from 1958 into “communes”, each with thousands of people, in order to facilitate economic extraction by the state. Supplementary individual plots, as in the Stalinist USSR, were licensed in 1961, after a retreat from the “Great Leap Forward” in which maybe 30 million starved to death.

Since 1978 the land, still owned by the state, has been redivided into family-tilled plots. There are now about 150 million holdings. The number is 63 million down on 2012, but the average is still tiny (0.8 ha, about one football field), and hired labour is only about 4% of the agricultural workforce. All use chemical fertiliser, in fact over-use it, the smaller farmers more per hectare than larger-scale. Use of machinery quadrupled between the 1980s and 2007. Most small farms pay contractors to operate machinery onto their plots when they need it, rather than owning machines themselves. Unlike in the higher-productivity countries, seed and chemical supply, produce marketing, and machinery-contracting is dominated by smaller capitalist farms.

Productivity in China has risen sharply since 1978, but by a move mainly from larger units to smaller. The main other economic function of the small farms is looking after children whose parents have gone to the coastal cities for wage-labour: China has some 67 million such “left-behind” children, mostly on farms but some in small inland cities.

The world picture is complex. Some ex-Stalinist states still have sizeable parts of agriculture in multi-worker holdings, now capitalist: Ukraine, Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia. Agricultural cooperatives (ejidos) survive in Mexico, though in decline.

Broadly, though, farming on small plots mostly for the farm family’s subsistence remains widespread in large areas of the world, usually at a very low rate of labour productivity. Where farming has moved to higher productivity, it is mostly not to fully-capitalist farms with substantial hired labour, as in 19th century Britain, or to “plantations” with many workers, but to micro-capitalism: farms using more equipment and inputs, maybe of sizeable area, but with little non-family labour.

The productivity of that micro-capitalism has greatly increased, per worker and per hectare, especially since World War Two. The world is able to produce about 50% more food than it needs to feed the human population. With world population likely to peak in the 2080s around nine billion, on one level feeding the world is much less of a problem than previously in human history. The world land area used for agriculture rose gradually from 1400 CE to 1870, then faster from 1870 to the early 1960s (about 130% over a century), but has now levelled off and started to decrease slowly. If agricultural productivity increases across more of the world, less land will be needed.

The reliance of many poor countries on food imports is double-edged. There is no good reason for crops to be grown in so many areas unsuitable for them as well in a variety of suitable areas. Starvation due to local harvest failure has become less common. Malnutrition among children has declined, though now more and more slowly. But diets often remain poor. Egypt, now heavily dependent on food imports, has one of the world’s highest obesity rates, including among poor people. Competition from imports often impoverishes peasants in poorer countries, meaning they cannot sell whatever surplus they produce.

Diet is often poor in richer countries, too; particularly among people with lower incomes. A healthy diet is often considerably more expensive than unhealthy alternatives, and the most deprived areas often have more unhealthy and less healthy foods available.

We want to reorganise economic life to win comfort and dignity for all, social control, and sustainability (at least to a sufficient approximation that unsustainable trends can be detected and checked in good time). In that optic, agriculture poses many other issues.

Soil fertility is at risk in many areas. Soil erosion is running at unsustainable levels. According to the FAO, 41% of land in South Asia, 24% in south-east Asia, 20% in West Asia, 16% in South America, and 14% in sub-Saharan Africa, is degraded. Levels in high-input agricultural areas are somewhat lower (8% in North America), but still bad.

Agriculture as presently run is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and thus to global warming. Global warming in turn will damage agriculture in many areas, especially nearer the Equator. Agriculture is the major contributor to loss of biodiversity, with unpredictable consequences, and to deforestation. It is also the major contributor, via run-off of nutrients and waste, to pollution of oceans and water generally. Water supplies for agriculture are running short in many areas.

All these trends are worsened by a sharply rising trend of meat and dairy consumption. Meat production, especially beef, causes much more environmental damage than production of other foods, both directly and via the vast areas used for growing animal feed (soybeans and other), sometimes, as in Brazil, got by clearing forest valuable for the whole global environment.

The lever the working class has for change in this sphere is in the giant concentrations of wage-worked agriculture-linked industries: processing, distribution, seeds, agri-chemicals, machinery. Public ownership and democratic and workers’ control of those sectors can swivel farm work towards crops; towards restoration of biodiversity and reforestation (already the EU pays subsidies to farmers for land area, including that not used for agriculture); towards better rotations, no-till methods, and “precision agriculture” limiting agri-chemical use; towards better waste management. Both in the USA and in China, excess fertiliser use has been reduced a lot in recent years without harming productivity, though it remains very high in China and 40% higher in the USA than in France.

A workers’ government would have to use market mechanisms for a long time, as Trotsky explained in The Revolution Betrayed. Generally there is an advantage in the market prices being “real” prices which sway with supply and demand: otherwise the information which prices give to the economic planning procedure is garbled, and black markets and shortages emerge. A researcher into the Brezhnevite USSR, where official prices were administered though with a close eye to international markets, found five grades of unofficial markets there: pink, white, grey, brown, black.

However, some manipulation of prices is entirely workable. Taxes on tobacco have brought revenue and reduced consumption. VAT exemption on food works smoothly. Food is already subsidised in capitalist countries, for example by payments to farmers in the UK and the EU. It would be entirely workable for a publicly-owned, democratically controlled industry to redirect the subsidies to foods whose production and processing causes least environmental damage and provides best nutrition. And to additionally redirect subsidies and funding towards afforestation and "rewilding" to sequester carbon and improve biodiversity.

Livestock farming generally draws more state subsidies than food crops. In other words, states subsidise increased meat-eating.

The current UK row over inheritance tax confirms that. Agricultural property has been exempt from inheritance tax. The government wants to limit the exemption so that family-inherited farms are subject to 20% tax (2% per year over ten years) on value above £1.5 million (if owned by one person) or above £3 million (if owned by two). Agricultural property passed to non-family will be similarly taxed on value above £2.7 million or £1.3 million.

According to the government, the largest beneficiaries from the exemption have been people showing no income from agriculture, i.e. rich people transferring wealth into big landholdings to avoid tax. The tax change will reduce such transfers and so tend to reduce agricultural land prices.

The Labour Land Campaign, while not backing the farmers’ protests, has said that Land Value Tax would work better than the inheritance-tax change. We are not tax experts. Nevertheless, it is clear that the exemption has been a subsidy to larger agricultural properties, which are mostly livestock, more than to pulse, vegetable, and fruit farming.

Of UK agricultural land, 57% is used for livestock; 18% wheat, barley, and other cereals; 2% rapeseed and similar; 1.5% potatoes, other vegetables, and fruit; around the same for pulses; the rest fallow or used for non-agriculture. There is no good environmental or socialist reason to subsidise livestock farming above other modes.

Public ownership and democratic control can shift the balance. It can push livestock farmers to shift to crops or to reforesting and restoring land. It can make beef scarcer and more expensive for consumers; pulses, fruit, and vegetables cheaper and more plentiful. It can reduce fertiliser and pesticide use in the richer countries and China, and prudently increase that (together with irrigation and “designer seeds” and cold-storage facilities to reduce wastage) in countries, for example in Africa, where agriculture still has low productivity and is already suffering a lot from climate change.

How fast a workers’ government can push, how fast it will need to push, and indeed exactly how and where it will push, are matters for experience and expert calculation for which that government will have wider resources than we can possibly have now. As socialists, our chief task is to win the public ownership and democratic control of the big industries which shape and structure agriculture, and thus open the way for informed democratic deliberation to decide, rather than profit-maximisation.

Socialists have debated how much continuing use of land for livestock and for animal feeds is compatible with environmental sustainability. The decision will have to be taken by a future workers’ government with much more expertise than we have, and with continuously-updated knowledge of the success or failure of previous policies, and how fast environmental emergencies will have developed in the meantime.

For sure, though, we must work to stop the current escalation of meat-production agriculture and disproportionate government subsidies for it.

Abattoir workers have sometimes been well-organised, for example in Australia. But there they then suffered an era-defining defeat in the 1983-5 Mudginberri dispute. Conditions in meat-processing are now usually bad for workers, let alone for the animals slaughtered, even in countries with better than average worker conditions. The Covid outbreaks in 2020 in meat factories in Germany showed that. Public ownership and democratic control will offer those workers paths to retraining for better jobs elsewhere in food industries, and better conditions for those who remain.

The public food industry will also launch new projects, including farm-free food (using solar energy to produce protein without photosynthesis), nutritious and ecologically sound free school meals, cheap and healthy workplace and public canteens which take over the assets of the giant capitalist fast-food chains, and socialised public supermarkets making healthy diets affordable and accessible.

It will bring electricity, water supplies, machinery, agri-chemicals, new seeds, and agricultural education to countries and areas where farm populations are stuck in low-productivity work.

All that can be achieved by turning big agri-industry to the goals of sustainability and nutrition, rather than to those of maximum profit for its corporations. Unlike in some other economic sectors, in agriculture socialists do not face the difficulty that winning the “generalised abundance” of the basics of life which is a precondition for socialism requires considerable growth. The world already produces enough food for the predicted peak human population of the globe. We can manage while using less land. The problem is distribution, composition, and processing - who gets what food?

In Britain landownership and ground rent are smaller issues in agriculture than for housing. The majority of farmers are owner-occupiers for all or most of their land, and the total rent paid in 2021 was £714 million, or an average of about £3,500 per farm. In other countries rent may still be a big issue; in some, advocacy of expropriation of the landlords and of moderate rents may be essential for workers to win the support or at least the cautious assent of large classes of peasants or small farmers.

To write a detailed agrarian programme today, with no large socialist implantation in agri-industry and agriculture, would be foolish. But we can see a road for working-class political and industrial action along some lines, and not along others. The “traditional” socialist recipe of public ownership and workers’ control can be applied in big agri-industry, but not in farming.

To attempt to take the world’s over 500 million small or tiny farms into public ownership would be foolish. “Workers’ control” is no answer, since on most farms the workers are the farm family who already control them.

Other common left-wing answers on agriculture also have problems. Their general tendency is to seek to boost small-scale, local, and traditional agriculture.

But that approach would leave low-input peasant agriculture mired in poverty.

Even in regions dominated by micro-capitalist agriculture, the larger farms (by area: their workforces are usually still small) are much more efficient. Romania and Greece between them have 40% of the EU’s farms (some peasant rather than micro-capitalist) but only 5% of the output. France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark have 9% of the farms and 40% of the output. To seek to approximate agriculture to Romania and Greece would starve Europe and help no-one.

Small micro-capitalist farmers often overuse agri-chemicals more than larger ones.

Some micro-capitalist farmers in richer countries seek to farm with very few agri-chemicals. They have lower yields (per land area and even more per labour input) but can get by economically, by charging higher prices, selling produce directly in nearby prosperous areas, running seminars and tourist visits, attracting volunteer labour, and so on. Some deserve to be cherished as experimenters. A socialised, worker-controlled para-agricultural industry would surely develop many experimental farms, of different sorts (including GM).

But, with its lower yields, in the foreseeable future on a wider scale “organic” farming would use much more land with concomitant ecosystem destruction, emit as much or more greenhouse gas through requiring more transport as some of the expanded farmland would be considerably further away, and may be no better or worse on nitrogen pollution. Widespread pesticide and fertiliser use in farming today cause significant ecological harm, damaging biodiversity and polluting water respectively. Many pesticides in use today are very harmful to human health, particularly to agricultural workers and to those exposed to high levels, with wider impacts insufficiently known. But these impacts are not the only ecological and human considerations; and (current) “organic” alternatives aren't always better. Enforcedly “organic” farming in poor countries where peasants can’t afford agri-chemicals should not be cherished.

Genetically-modified organisms in agriculture need to be vetted carefully, but to reject them would reduce production and reduce options for adaptation to changed climate conditions. Seeking to make food production more local would increase emissions and pollution via the consequent increased output of products in areas unsuited to them. The saving in emissions from less transport would be small in comparison. “Food sovereignty” is defined loosely enough to gain endorsement from the United Nations and the World Bank, but in some interpretations at least “prioritise local and national economies and markets… peasant and family farmer-driven agriculture, artisanal-fishing, pastoralist-led grazing…”

Historically, small-scale farmers, peasant or micro-capitalist, are not an ecological class. In 2024 we saw the European Union’s efforts to increase crop rotation and fallow land, and to reduce pesticide use, defeated by farmers’ mobilisations. Farmers have often defeated attempts to increase fuel taxes, too.

Peasants and small farmers have sometimes been a bourgeois-democratic revolutionary force, breaking up lords’ estates and ending tribute-exaction by lords and clerics. Never a socialist force. In UK and European politics, they have become a sizeable political force on the right since the 1930s and especially since the 1950s. They are a very small part of the working population, but have managed to win import curbs, price guarantees, and subsidies. They are characteristically very tied to (their own) private property and to maintaining old ways.

Since 1993 there has been an international left-wing peasant and small farmer movement, Via Campesina, of which the British wing is the Landworkers’ Alliance. It is however small compared to groups like the National Farmers’ Union, and still oriented to seeing the small farmer or even peasant as the source of virtue rather than large-scale industry and its working class.

The classical Marxist discussions of peasants and small farmers mostly concluded that the best the socialist working class could hope for was to persuade them to accept a socialist regime rather than get them to help introduce it. That aspect of the conclusions still seems sound today. It will be easier to carry through, because in advanced capitalist countries the small-farmer class is now only a small minority, and the working class can offer them economic security and alternative jobs as stewards of ecologically-restored land.

Marx and Engels (and socialists before them) looked to the urban working class. They saw socialist society as organised in middle-sized cooperative settlements combining agriculture and industry which would avoid both the squalor, pollution, human atomisation, and hived-off household drudgery of cities, and the poverty and isolation of rural life. That regime would be brought to the countryside by the workers who had won power in the cities, rather than sprouting first by rural initiative and then being joined by migrants from the cities.

The Communist Manifesto’s demands were more a summary of what Marx and Engels found best in previous socialist agitation than a theoretical prescription by them. They included: “abolition of property in land… abolition of all right to inheritance… improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan… industrial armies, especially for agriculture… gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country”.

In the March Address of 1850 Marx and Engels opposed division of the large feudal and landed estates among the peasants. “They must demand that the confiscated feudal property remain state property and be used for workers’ colonies, cultivated collectively by the rural proletariat”.

In The 18th Brumaire, Marx concluded that the peasantry was characteristically conservative and had provided Napoleon III with his social base. He looked forward to the time when “disappointed in the Napoleonic Restoration, the French peasant will part with his belief in his smallholding”.

British agriculture then had gone through a technical revolution starting before the Industrial Revolution. It was run by capitalist farmers with a fairly large number of wage-workers (1.7 million in 1851) and larger holdings than in France. For decades to come, and despite the number of wage-workers in British agriculture decreasing from that point, Marxists would see that model as destined to replace peasant agriculture everywhere.

“In the sphere of agriculture”, predicted Marx in Capital, “large-scale industry… annihilates the bulwark of the old society, the ‘peasant’, and substitutes for him the wage-labourer”.

He saw capitalist agriculture as unsound because of its concentration of the population in cities, and consequent removal of human wastes as fertiliser from the countryside, as disturbing the cyclical relations between humanity and the rest of nature. He took that from the best scientific advice of his time, but it was a misdiagnosis: human wastes have never been primary as fertiliser, and in any case are returned to the soil more efficiently (and after some, only inadequate, filtering for harmful matter) by modern sewage systems. Despite seeing soil fertility problems, he evidently thought that capitalist agriculture employing numerous workers would continue to outstrip tiny-scale, mostly-for-subsistence, tradition-bound peasant agriculture until both could be replaced by middle-sized cooperatives combining industry and agriculture, urban and rural.

In The Civil War in France, Marx argued that the Paris Commune could have got support from the peasants by offering them tax reductions from suppression of bureaucratic privilege; “enlightenment by the schoolmaster in place of stultification by the priest”; and relief from debt, as well as giving hope to the rural wage-workers.

He proposed no transformation of property relations in the countryside. Within the First International, Marx and Engels opposed the old demand for abolishing all inheritance, now pushed forward by Bakunin. That, they said, would only antagonise the French peasants intent on handing down plots from generation to generation. The 1880 programme of the French Workers’ Party, written by Jules Guesde but in discussion with Marx, proposed abolishing inheritance above 20,000 francs (about £100,000 today: French peasant plots then were considerably smaller than French family farms are now).

Both that 1880 programme and the German Marxists’ Erfurt Programme of 1891, largely endorsed by Engels, included no “peasant” or “rural” demands. Soon after, both French and German socialists started to discuss how they could reach the peasantry. In the late 19th century, the agricultural population was nearly 40% in Germany, nearly 50% in France, while only 10% in Britain.

Some socialists devised programmes to safeguard small farms. Engels said that was promising the impossible. In the short term peasants would gravitate to the right. In the longer term, socialists should support and organise the rural wage-workers, and offer the peasants friendly assistance to reorganise in cooperatives.

Following that discussion, Kautsky wrote a big book on The Agrarian Question (1899).

Agriculture is different from any other sector, he noted, in that the main means of production, the land, can be divided into small units and cannot be concentrated in one place. Tiny farmers stayed attached to their land and survived by providing a pool of wage-labour to nearby large farmers. They might survive for a long time yet. Socialists should not seek to make the survival longer. The tiny-farm households lived in worse misery than workers, and, argued Kautsky, were more apt to exhaust the soil than the more productive farmers.

He offered no great prospects for better than neutralising the rural population. The driving force for advance was industry. “Should industry turn towards socialism”, he wrote, “then agriculture must follow suit”. Socialist industry could offer agriculture better ways of organising, but he was not prescriptive about them. He was hesitant about wholesale nationalisation of land, but insisted on public ownership of forestry and water resources.

In the Russian empire, where peasants were the big majority, Marxists first organised themselves round the idea that the urban working class was the main force for change, but then discussed the “agrarian question” intensely.

There was much dispute about detail. They advocated nationalisation of all the land, while stressing that this was a bourgeois-democratic demand, not a socialist one. In 1913, half the land was still owned by big landlords, and only half by peasants. Peasants accepted that. The peasants who had come to own land suffered under “redemption payments” to the former landlords until 1907, and after that under debt.

Even the populist Socialist-Revolutionaries advocated “socialisation of all privately owned lands; that is, their transfer from private property of individual owners to public domain and administration by democratically organised communes and territorial associations of communes on the basis of equalised utilisation”.

The Marxists wanted big farms to remain intact and be farmed collectively. In 1917 and in 1918, the Bolsheviks strove to organise “poor peasants” separately, partly with that in mind. In the October Revolution, however, they concluded that they had to let the SR programme pass - by abstaining in the vote, Lenin wrote, though I’m not clear whether he meant that literally - because it had overwhelming support among the peasants.

Despite the Bolsheviks’ reservations, in fact the revolution produced redistribution of the land, by the land committees set up by the Soviets and Provisional Government in June 1917. On that basis the Bolsheviks won the mass support which enabled them to win the civil war. The result, so Lenin would concede by 1921, was to make almost all “middle peasants”. “The land experienced the so-called Black Redistribution”, commented one Bolshevik at the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Comintern: the Marxists had perforce come back, full circle, to the programme which Plekhanov and his comrades first advocated on splitting from the main populist current and then rejected on becoming consistent Marxists.

The “middle peasants” were consolidated in their status by the New Economic Policy, introducing taxation and trade to feed the cities instead of requisitioning. Inevitably differentiation followed. Some peasants became richer, some poorer.

The Left Opposition advocated judicious taxation of the richer peasants to help industry revive sufficiently to offer equipment and goods to the peasants at affordable prices. Until 1928 Stalin dismissed that as fanciful. In 1928-9 he made a turn to forced collectivisation and forced-march industrialisation. That enabled the state to extract products from the countryside, but devastated rural productivity.

In the Spartacus Programme of December 1918, Rosa Luxemburg warned the new and impatient Communist Party: “If socialist reconstruction is to be undertaken in real earnest, we must direct attention just as much to the open country as to the industrial centres, and yet as regards the former we have not even taken the first steps… The peasants are still untouched by socialism, they constitute an additional reserve for the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie…” She was right about that.

The programme offered expropriation of large landholdings (not nationalisation of all land), encouragement to agricultural cooperatives, and a guarantee that “small peasant holdings remain in the possession of their occupants” until they voluntarily join the cooperatives.

The Communist International discussed the agrarian question at its Second (1920) and Fourth (1922) Congresses. The old idea of abolishing the distinction between town and country was fading. Rightly so: in the decades since the economic, and cultural advantages of large, dense cities and the possibility of making them safer and healthier than rural areas have become clearer. The disadvantages of low-density “suburban sprawl” (the capitalist approximation to merger of town and country) have become more evident. The environmental case for a sharper division between denser cities and rural areas with more ecological restoration and reforestation has become stronger.

The Communist International backed small peasants’ bourgeois-democratic fight for land against the big landlords. Smallholders could be promised relief from rent and mortgage payments, and improved access to machinery. Even “rich” peasants should not be expropriated. But with many peasants the best that could be hoped for was to “neutralise” them. It was desirable that socialist revolutions should keep the big estates intact as units to be cultivated collectively, but that had not been possible in Russia, and might not be possible elsewhere where there was acute land-hunger.

In the Transitional Programme of 1938 Trotsky largely limited himself to a call to work out a programme for peasants. The answer was difficult and would differ from country to country. In the meantime the programme advocated workers’ and small farmers’ committees to “open the books” and regulate transport costs, credit, and marketing, thus closing the gap between low prices for farmers and high prices for workers at the expense of the big capitalist concerns coming between them.

The small farmers, warned the programme, must remain the owner of their plots as long as they want, and Marxists would “expose mercilessly the Stalinist methods of collectivisation, which are dictated… by the interests of the bureaucracy”.

The agricultural cooperatives which Marxists proposed have developed in some places and sometimes, notably in Italy after World War One, but mostly in the form of consumer, supply, and marketing cooperatives. Generally the advances available from applying machinery, from more scientific crop and soil management, and especially after World War Two from agri-chemicals, have proved accessible even to small farmers in more capitalistically-developed countries. Without them, the world would already have huge food shortages. In richer countries farmers own farm machinery; in China, where most are too poor to do that, they deal individually with machinery-contracting firms.

If socialist revolution had spread more widely after 1917, the idea of pooling resources for production in larger units better able to use machinery and negotiate trade might have gained mass support. But there was always a powerful pull the other way. In agriculture, the small farmers’ means of production are divisible, i.e. capable of being worked in small units. And more: each small farmer shapes their own land. It is as it is because of the work they have done on it. It is their home as well as their workplace.

In Europe, bourgeois states intervened from the 1930s with policies of quasi-socialism for micro-capital: marketing boards, price guarantees, import controls, export subsidies, debt relief, income subsidies. That has been enough to manage the transition from peasants to micro-capitalists, and to secure their adherence to bourgeois politics, almost always to the right wing.

An environmentalist-socialist programme must reckon with those facts, but, doing so, we can propose policies which can win support from part of the farming population and gradual acceptance by most of the rest.