Why is agricultural policy a political issue?

Recently I read Weber's essay from the late 19th century, "The Special Tendencies of Germany's Move Toward Capitalism," also known as “The Development of Rural Labor Conditions in the Eastern Elbe Region” and found it quite illuminating, because it ultimately touches on a question concerning the reform of the land system. Weber's policy proposals relate to the question of “what standpoint the design of the land system requires.”

Weber advocated state intervention in the large estates of the eastern region: by means of gradual purchase, land would be nationalized and then resold to wealthy farmers, thereby curbing the “cultural decline” caused by the large influx of Poles (Slavs) brought about by the capitalization of the large Junker estates in the east. When reading this, I felt a trace of bewilderment: the cause of state policy intervention against the Junker landlords was in fact the “ethnic conflict” in which Polish immigrants objectively squeezed out German agricultural workers, rather than an economic issue. According to the views of mainstream economists, the purpose of factor allocation is to achieve Pareto optimality, without needing to consider the origin of factors or other social values, such as justice or culture.

This raises an important question for me: is the issue of economic efficiency no longer a simple question, but a systemic one? It seems that this is precisely how Weber thought about it. “The question of economic policy is not merely an economic question, but also a political one”——one criterion of a political question is the question of the increase or decrease of national power relative to other nations. This national power involves not only the economy (aggregate output), but also cultural and political contest, and this is also Weber's advice to a rising Germany: reaching the highest level economically alone does not necessarily make one a great power. Weber believed that economic policy has its political consequences, and that its goal is not indisputably to expand production and develop the economy; it must be subordinate to the political and cultural values of the national interest.

⟦NL> Junker landlords had always existed in eastern Germany. In the process of competing with modern capitalism, they had to respond by transforming into bourgeois entrepreneurs, thereby rationally weighing various factor allocations. Social history records: eastern Germany lacked a tradition of independent peasant proprietors; peasants were generally dependent peasants, and peasants and the large estates (owners) practiced a sharecropping system, “the traditional forms of labor and social relations were bound by the rules governing estate workers and dependent peasants.” In addition, peasants also held small plots and rights to public land for grazing; through these rights peasant families could raise poultry and pigs, thereby attaining a relatively high standard of living. After capitalist agriculture entered the eastern estates, rising land prices led to the rapid abolition of these common land rights, and the traditional dependent peasants and transitional forms of in-kind allowance peasants were quickly replaced by a new type of fully proletarianized “agricultural worker” receiving monetary wages.

Generally speaking, for these former “dependent peasants,” an excessively low standard of living was unbearable, because “capitalism permits the cost of maintaining the reproduction of labor power to be reduced to a minimum”: when wages could not maintain the existing standard of living, they could only adopt other methods capable of raising total household income. Besides adopting “familial production” methods, such as housewives and children taking part in household textile work to increase income, even though marginal returns declined, there was another method: leaving the eastern countryside. This caused a labor shortage for the large estate enterprises and provided an opportunity for the large-scale influx of Polish immigrants. But “the Poles were materially and spiritually accustomed to enduring a low standard of life,” thereby allowing estate owners to obtain greater profits. The large estates obtained a large amount of cheap Polish labor and gained the advantage of profits, but based on cultural and ethnic considerations, Weber was deeply worried: the influx of large numbers of Polish peasants changed the problem of cultural decline in the east.

When Poles poured into eastern Germany, Weber worried that “the ‘higher’ culture of the Germanic people was being invaded by the ‘lower’ civilization of the Poles.” Economically speaking, in order to maintain competitiveness, it was beneficial and harmless for the Junker landlords to bring in low-priced Polish immigrants, but the resulting “Polonization” of the east violated the overall interest of the nation. Therefore, the Germans in the east should be protected. In terms of this standpoint, Weber was nationalist and placed national interest above all: at the beginning of this investigation he said, “How is the general development of the workers connected with the general development of the nation? What prospects do the workers have?” Weber was not, as Marx predicted, speaking merely from a “class standpoint.” Clearly Weber had already gone beyond the narrow standpoint of the interests of the large landowners and stood on the standpoint of the interests of the nation-state, although what it ultimately benefited was the German “bourgeoisie”——in this sense Weber was opposed to the large landowners, because of their politically backward and decadent character and their economically narrow interests.

Weber obviously cannot be considered as speaking from the standpoint of the working class either. Weber was not a “humanitarian” who sympathized with workers; the point on which his concern for the workers' prospects rested was the cultural superiority of the German nation. Although he also cared about the fate of laborers under different relations of production and made comparisons, improving laborers' treatment and requiring the working class to organize were never within Weber's consideration. In the value choices of his policy proposals, Weber did not endorse any class standpoint, but only, after the investigation, focused on formulating plans for the prospects of the German nation: for the growth of national power, or “reason of state,” the interests of the large landlord class could be adjusted. Weber said rather resolutely: one must abandon the notion that “the current distribution of land property in the east is an unshakable foundation of the political and social order,” and “in order to protect advanced German culture, changing the mode of land distribution in the east is appropriate.”

The policy inspiration Weber offered came from another region of Germany: Mecklenburg's implementation of an “internal colonization” policy. Here there was a strong stratum of independent peasant proprietors, few people complained of labor shortages, and there were also few migrant workers. But in those places (implying the eastern estates) where the peasant stratum had been destroyed, the historical retribution was a shortage of labor, thereby creating the evil consequence that large numbers of Polish workers had to be brought in. Consequently, policy had to design a denser population layout in order to block the influx of slave-like Polish laborers——a denser population layout, together with the superior culture of the German population, was conducive to the organization of labor, and this was conducive to raising the cultural level of labor, and even this right of association was something the Slavic Poles could not enjoy.

Weber's logic was: to stabilize German workers locally, they must be provided with a certain amount of land and form a stratum similar to “independent peasant proprietors” who could settle down. “The key to land distribution… lies in whether there are villages inhabited by peasants.” In contrast, another situation was freedom detached from dependence, where “freedom was equivalent to homelessness,” causing a large loss of labor.

But in order to prevent the institutional creation of large numbers of “small estates’ (smallholding peasants) who were merely “satisfied with the lowest cultural aspirations,” it had to be required that the “internal colonization” policy not go to another extreme. The prescription Weber offered was state purchase of large estates: replacing private landlord colonization with internal state colonization, whereby the state would possess the means to regulate interests. The state would lease land to “wealthy farmers” and provide loan support for land improvement and intensive cultivation. This is a land system similar to state ownership of land with tenant farmers operating it and paying rent and taxes. It differs from the system in which large estates are owned and tenant peasants pay rent to large landlords (the dependent peasant system), and also differs from the situation in which large estates naturally tend to hire low-priced laborers with cultural disadvantages to engage in extensive grain cultivation. The reason is that this labor structure benefits only the income of the estates and not the overall interest of the state, and this large estate system is also different from a thorough capitalist wage-labor agricultural production method

Although such a policy would temporarily require state investment for purchases, it would ultimately be beneficial to the long-term development of agriculture and fundamentally beneficial to rescuing the crisis of “cultural invasion.” In this regard, Weber believed that the state itself (the German state as the personal carrier of a national will) should restore the plan abandoned in 1870 for colonization on state-owned land, and make it a powerful (power) means of regulating interests (economic, cultural, political, and so on).