he can await favourable opportunities, he can buy all he needs more cheaply, can sell at a better price. Only one thing remains for the small competitor; he struggles with all his might. Small-scale agriculture is able to continue in existence only through strenuous labour, in conjunction with the restriction of needs, with semi-starvation. Thus alone can it maintain itself under the capitalist regime. It suffers still more severely owing to heavy taxation. The capitalist State lays crushing burdens upon the smallholder. It suffices to remember what tsarist taxation signified to the peasant — “Sell all you have, so long as you pay your taxes.”
In general it may be said that small-scale production is far more tenacious of life in agriculture than in manufacturing industry. In the towns, the independent artisans and other small-scale producers are for the most part rapidly undergoing ruin, but in the rural districts of all countries peasant farming still leads a tolerably sturdy existence. Nevertheless, in the country, too, the impoverishment of the majority proceeds apace, only here the results are less obvious than in the towns. Sometimes it seems, as far as the amount of land is concerned, that an agricultural enterprise