Some Aspects of German Agriculture

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is not so much to provide an even coverage of German agriculture as to focus on some of its particular aspects. The features which we have chosen to discuss in this chapter are either directly relevant to the issues, policies and discussion which together constitute the agrarian question, or those which occupy a central place in Marxist analyses of the development of capitalist agriculture. The discussion of the Prussian reforms of the beginning of the nineteenth century is an example of the latter. In our analyses we have not restricted ourselves to any particular category of literature; we have drawn freely on both Marxist and non-Marxist literature. However, wherever a particular feature has a special significance in Marxist analyses we summarise and assess the relevant Marxist arguments. The coverage of Marxist analyses in this chapter is patchy; we shall have more to say about them later in chapters 3 and 4, especially in the latter. The discussion of this chapter is kaleidoscopic in nature; in order to emphasise this what we have done is to divide the chapter into sub-sections, each dealing with a particular aspect.