Zhu Xiang, Wei Hongxia

School of Marxism, Anhui University of Finance and Economics

Abstract：

The "agrarian question" constitutes the central theme of Marxist political economy, fundamentally addressing whether and how capital controls agriculture, transforms it, and ultimately integrates it into the overarching logic of capital accumulation. Through an in-depth analysis of Kautsky's Land Question, this paper reveals a neglected core proposition in his analytical framework: capital's penetration into agriculture is not linear but manifests as a rupture between "formal absorption" and "substantive absorption." This rupture originates from the natural boundary established by the non-identity between labor time and production time in agricultural production, which is transformed into structural boundaries of capital in agriculture through the "profit rate averaging" mechanism. Building on this foundation, the paper constructs a three-tiered analytical framework: The first tier reveals how the natural basis of agricultural production forms the intrinsic boundaries of capital logic; the second tier analyzes how capital attempts to breach these boundaries through three mechanisms—technological monopoly, circulation deprivation, and property alienation—yet consistently fails to achieve "substantive absorption"; the third tier elucidates that the "resilience" of smallholder economies is not rooted in their vitality but rather in the structural product of capital logic's "incomplete penetration" in agricultural domains. Furthermore, by applying this framework to examine contemporary China's "capital flowing into rural areas," the following propositions are argued: On the production side, capital flows into rural areas manifest as the construction of dependent relationships under the monopoly of "technology-data"; on the circulation side, it represents the systematic extraction of surplus value by platform capital; on the land property rights side, it reflects the capitalization of management rights and the tendency toward "deproduction"; and on the subject relations side, it shows the integration of household operations into the chain of capital accumulation as a "hidden employment" relationship—none of which are exceptions to the contemporary form of the "formal absorption" mechanism revealed by Kautsky.

Key Words：

agricultural policy; Kautsky; capital to the countryside; formal absorption; substantive absorption; institutional space