Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels didn’t have much to say about agriculture in The Communist Manifesto. And what little they did say has often led to confusion. Take one famous passage from the opening section:

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

That final biting phrase, drawn from Samuel Moore’s 1888 English translation, has long since taken on a life of its own. But as Hal Draper pointed out, it was based on a mistranslation of the German term idiotismus: “In the nineteenth century, German still retained the original Greek meaning of forms based on the word idiotes: a private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in the original sense of isolation from the larger community.”