The Question of the Competitive Capacity of the Small-scale Agricultural Enterprise

Abstract

Comrade Kautsky followed my remarks on ‘Economic Differences between Agriculture and Industry’ with an article entitled ‘The Competitive Capacity of the Small-scale Enterprise in Agriculture’, in which, while expressing his far-reaching agreement with me on some matters, he presented a series of significant contradictory opinions on others. The points of agreement would have been more far-reaching, and the points of disagreement less significant, if Comrade Kautsky had only stuck precisely to the area of investigation I intended my remarks to cover. In the interest of the greatest possible clarification of the problem at present under discussion I must emphatically oppose the ‘incorrect extension’ of the basic idea of my remarks made by Comrade Kautsky at the opening of his article. He writes there: ‘Comrade David asserts on the contrary that this’ (namely the sentence in the programme according to which economic development leads with natural necessity to the ruin of the small-scale enterprise) ‘is only valid for industry; in agriculture the small-scale enterprise is well able to compete with the large-scale one.’ I did not compose this sentence with the intention of giving it such a universal validity and extension for all time to come, and I do not now have such an intention.