Chayanov's " The Theory of Peasant Economy" and its critique
(Extracts from the book)
Introduction
For many decades now, peasant farming has been the subject of careful and detailed study. This study has more than once led to sharp arguments and divergent currents of economic thought. One might think it would be impossible to find any other theme in Russian economic literature to which has been devoted such an immeasurable quantity of books and pamphlets with varied approaches to the problem and very different trends of thought.
Therefore, in coming forward with a new work on the peasant farm it is absolutely essential to orient oneself with regard to all theories that formerly existed and problems that have been posed, and to determine as strictly as possible one's tasks and method of work. If this is not done, it will be difficult to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings and quite incorrect interpretations of the results obtained.
These precautions were ignored by those who carried out research on the school of thought to which the author belongs. As a result, before beginning an exposition of the results of his work, which has extended over many years, he must expend no small effort to prove the mere right of the school to exist, and must spend no little time on exactly formulating the methodological bases of his work, a common understanding of which is the only thing that will give the author, his critics, and the reader the opportunity of speaking the same language.
The current of Russian economic thought, which has, not entirely happily, been called the Organization and Production School and to which belong A. N. Chelintsev, N. P. Makarov, A. A. Rybnikov, A. N. Minin, G. A. Studenskii, the author, and others, was formed not long before the war and was brought forth by those deep social and economic changes observed in the life of our countryside after the 1905 revolution.
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It is quite true that peasant farming is not homogeneous; apart from peasant labor farms it includes numerous semiproletarian and semicapitalist farms to which Professor L. N. Litoshenko's desciption would fully apply. We do not propose, however, to consider our organization theory a universal one embracing all forms of undertakings labeled peasant. We are investigating only the organizational forms of the family farm in agriculture, and will extend our results only to this still quite considerable sector of the national economy.
It is true that L. N. Litoshenko doubts that the psychology of the labor-consumer balance is characteristic of those in this sector and insistently suggests avarice as the basic feature of peasant psychology. In this instance, however, we must agree on precisely what is the psychology of avarice and what is the labor-consumer balance. Of course, our critics are free to understand the labor-consumer balance theory as a sweet little picture of the Russian peasantry in the likeness of the moral French peasants, satisfied with everything and living like the birds of the air. We ourselves do not have such a conception and are inclined to believe that no peasant would refuse either good roast beef, or a gramophone, or even a block of Shell Oil Company shares, if the chance occurred. Unfortunately, such chances do not present themselves in large numbers, and the peasant family wins every kopek by hard, intensive toil. And in these circumstances, they are obliged not only to do without shares and a gramophone, but sometimes without the beef as well. It seems to us that if Rothschild were to flee to some agrarian country, given a social revolution in Europe, and be obliged to engage in peasant labor, he would obey the rules of conduct established by the Organization and Production School, for all his bourgeois acquisitive psychology.
But, apart from this, we have to remember that, as has already been noted, the labor-consumer balance theory was created not out of the head of some theoretician but as a result of observing features in the economic conduct of the masses of peasants, which were successfully explained only with the help of this hypothesis.
Nevertheless, we must, of course, recognize that our constructs reduce life to a scheme and, like any abstract theory, have as their subject an imaginary farm much purer in type than those we must encounter in reality. Incidentally, we have included in the present work an extensive new chapter dealing with the organizational plan of the peasant farm in all its concrete detail, and it will not be difficult for the reader to see to what extent the organizational features we have noted appear in reality.
The accusation that we consider peasant farming apart from any connection with world capitalist circulation, apart from the class struggle, and, as it were, apart from all social and economic features which are the essence of the economy's development in the present period is also based on a misunderstanding and disappears for the same reasons as the accusation of static analysis.
Although we do not deny their importance and we support the necessity for a careful study of them, all the problems listed are outside our consideration, since our subject is the internal organizational foundation of the individual family farm, working in its given conditions. We consider this point, misunderstood by our critics, one of the most important in explaining the problem, and thus allow ourselves to deal with it in greater detail.
As we have already noted in passing, the peasant farm as an organizational type of producing machine has existed historically and has been theoretically considered as entering into various economic systems. With certain changes in its internal structure, it may be the basis of a natural economy system, be an item in a national economy system consisting of peasant farms and family units of urban artisans, or become the basis for a feudal economy. In each of these economic regimes, the peasant farm occupies a specific place, different in each particular instance, is bound in different ways with other social classes, and conducts itself in different ways in the ups and downs of class struggle characteristic of each regime.
At the present time, the peasant farm almost everywhere has been drawn into the system of the capitalist commodity market; in many countries it is influenced by finance capital, which has made loans to it, and it coexists with capitalistically organized industry and, in some places, agriculture also. Peasant undertakings have exceedingly complex social interrelations with all these elements of the present-day economy. After Professor Lyashchenko's works on the evolution of Russian farming and Lenin's on the American farm, we can see with great clarity that we should not necessarily expect the development of capitalist influence and concentration in agriculture to take the form of the creation and development of latifundia. More probably, we should expect trading and finance capitalism to establish an economic dictatorship over considerable sectors of agriculture, which as regards production will remain as before, composed of small-scale family labor peasant undertakings subject in their internal organization to the laws of the labor-consumer balance.
We distinctly recognize the need for the Organization and Production School to indicate in individual investigations the place occupied by the peasant farm in the total system of the present-day national economy, and to give the theoretical tie-up of our organizational concept with the principle views on the national economy and its development.
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By carefully studying present-day peasant farming as it is, we have primarily studied the initial material from which the new countryside, in our opinion, should historically evolve in the next decade, having converted, by means of cooperatives, a considerable part of its economy into socially organized forms of production. It should be a countryside industrialized in all spheres of technical processing, mechanized, and electrified-a countryside that has made use of all the achievements of agricultural science and technology.
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An organizational analysis of peasant family economic activity is our task-a family that does not hire outside labor, has a certain area of land available to it, has its own means of production, and is sometimes obliged to expend some of its labor force on nonagricultural crafts and trades.
The Peasant Family and the Influence of Its Development on Economic Activity
On turning to a study of the labor farm's organization, we ought inevitably to begin our investigation with an all-around analysis of the constitution and laws governing the composition of the subject of this farm-the family that runs it.
Whichever factor determining peasant farm organization we were to consider dominant, however much significance we were to attach to the influence of the market, amount of land for use, or availability of means of production and natural fertility, we ought to acknowledge that work hands are the technically organizing element of any production process. And since, on the family farm which has no recourse to hired labor, the labor force pool, its composition, and degree of labor activity are entirely determined by family composition and size, we must accept family makeup as one of the chief factors in peasant farm organization.
In fact, family composition primarily defines the upper and lower limits of the volume of its economic activity. The labor force of the labor farm is entirely determined by the availability of able-bodied family members. That is why the highest possible limit for volume of activity depends on the amount of work this labor force can give with maximum utilization and intensity. In the same way the lowest volume is determined by the sum of material benefits absolutely essential for the family's mere existence.
As we shall see, these limits are far from being this broad, and, as will be shown below, within these limits family size and composition will further influence farm organization, not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively. It is absolutely essential, therefore, to study the labor family as fully as possible, and to establish the elements in its composition, on which basis it develops its economic activity, before we touch any question about the labor farm.
Leaving aside the semiclan, semifamily formations we have outlived and limiting ourselves merely to present-day forms of everyday life in civilized countries, we shall, nevertheless, find very great variety in the basic family structure of different peoples and of social strata.
First of all, there is no doubt that the concept of the family, particularly in peasant life, is far from always equated with the biological concept underlying it and is supplemented in content by a series of economic and household complications. In attempting to apportion the contents of this concept in the peasant's mind, Russian zemstvo statisticians, for example, when carrying out household censuses established that to the peasant the concept of the family includes a number of people constantly eating at one table or having eaten from one pot. According to the late S. Bleklov, peasants in France included in the concept of the family the group of persons locked up for the night behind one lock.
To a still greater extent, we will find variations in family size. In many agricultural districts of Slavonic countries, you may frequently encounter living together several married couples of two or even three generations, united in a single complex patriarchal family. On the other hand, in many industrialized districts we see every young member of the family striving before manhood to branch off from the paternal home and win economic independence and a life for himself.
Nevertheless, however varied the everyday features of the family, its basis remains the purely biological concept of the married couple,1 living together with their descendants and the aged representatives of the older generation. This biological nature of the family determines to a great extent the limits of its size and, chiefly, the laws of its composition; although, of course, daily circumstances may introduce numerous complications.
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Thus, every family, depending on its age, is in its different phases of development a completely distinct labor machine as regards labor force, intensity of demand, consumer-worker ratio, and the possibility of applying the principles of complex cooperation.
In accordance with this, we can pose the first problem of our inquiry: Does the state of this continually changing machine affect the economic activity of a family running its labor farm, and if it does, how and to what extent?
Since the labor family's basic stimulus to economic activity is the necessity to satisfy the demands of its consumers, and its work hands are the chief means for this, we ought first of all to expect the family's volume of economic activity to quantitatively correspond more or less to these basic elements in family composition.
By the volume of economic activity here and throughout this book we understand all forms of family economic activity, both in agriculture and in the total group of crafts and trades. Any other approach to family economic activity will be mistaken, since the basic economic problem of the labor farm is a correct and joint organization of the year's work, stimulated by a single family demand to meet its annual budget and a single wish to save or invest capital if economic work conditions allow. Therefore, any sector analysis of economic workanalysis of peasant family farming by itself, for example-will be production, but by no means economic analysis. It will become economic only when problems of agricultural organization are analyzed in connection with the problem of the total economic activity of the family as a whole.
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Measure of Self-Exploitation of the Peasant Family Labor Force.
The Concept of Advantage in the Labor Farm
In studying the annual productivity of peasant labor from various sources, we ought, in the first place, to distinguish between the concept of gross product of labor and its net product. By gross product, we understand all income the family receives in the course of a year, both from agriculture and from other applications of its labor in farming and in crafts and trades. By net product, we understand that part of gross product left after covering all annual overheads connected with capital renewal and annual expenditures on the farm. Thus, the net labor product is determined by the annual increment of material values becoming available to the farm and obtained as a result of its annual labor-in other words, the annual payment to the farm family for labor expended on it and in crafts and trades.
At the moment, we are not going into the national economic nature of this income and will not elucidate the elements of unearned income included in it. We limit ourselves to a private economic definition of this single peasant family income which becomes available in the course of the year.
In view of the numerous misunderstandings that largely obscure the essence of the matter, we ought to stress with particular insistence that by the product of peasant labor, peasant farm income, and so on we always understand the joint income of the peasant family both from agriculture and from crafts and trades, except, of course, in all those cases where a special note is made. This circumstance is exceedingly important for us, since our theory of the labor farm and of the labor-consumer balance is a theory of an economic unit or, what is the same thing, the economic activity of family labor and not one of peasant agricultural production.
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Russian peasant families gross incomes-in terms of gold currency and prices of the year of the inquiry, including income in money ad kind-fluctuate for individual farms from 123.5 to 3393.0 rubles, and on average from 402.8 to 1070.0 rubles. This is the basic figure for the national economy on which the economic system of the U.S.S.R. is being built. It is clear that the difference noted depends to a great extent on variations in family size.
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In the present work, investigating the internal organization of the peasant farm, we cannot deal with the conditions that determine the level of labor productivity, since they depend not so much on on-farm factors as on general economic factors affecting the farm's existence. Soil fertility, advantageous location of farm in relation to market, current market situation, local land relations, organizational forms of the local market, and the character of trading and finance capitalism's penetration into the depths of the peasantry-these are the chief factors determining peasant labor productivity and pay. By their very nature, all these factors lie outside the field of our present investigation.
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The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization
The basic principles of the family farm which we have stated do not belong merely to the peasant farm. They are present in any family labor economic unit in which work is connected with expenditure of physical effort, and earnings are proportional to this expenditure, whether the economic unit be artisan, cottage industry, or simply any economic activity of family labor. The peasant farm as such is a much narrower concept and includes, as a family economic unit in agriculture, a number of complications which follow from the nature of agricultural activity. They add to the appearance of its essentially family nature a series of peculiar features in the structure of crop and livestock farming.
In its organization, any agricultural undertaking is described by its system, by which, according to Lyudogovskii's classical definition, should be understood "the kind and manner of combining quantitatively and qualitatively land, labor and capital."
For any farming system, taking account of local conditions, we may, by a series of organizational calculations, determine both the technically most expedient relationship of its production factors and the absolute size of the farm itself to give the lowest cost for produce and, consequently, the highest income.
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It is self-evident that both size of farm area and proportions of production factors deployed on it are not limited to one optimal size and relationship. One can conceive of and observe in reality numerous farms where considerable deviation from these optimal norms sometimes takes place. However, the optimal combination gives the highest income, and any deviation from it gives the proprietor a reduced profit rate. Yet, it is also essential to note that this reduction of profit takes place most gradually, and it is this which explains the economic possibility for the existence of farms that greatly deviate from the optimal size and factor proportions.
If an organizer lacks sufficient land, capital, or work hands to develop his farm on the optimal scale, the undertaking will be built on a smaller scale in accordance with the minimum available factor. However, whatever the scale on which the farm is developed, there is always a proportion between its parts and a certain conformity in their relationships peculiar to each farming system. This is determined by technical expediency and necessity. Any violation of this harmony leads to an inevitable and perceptible reduction in the productivity of labor and capital expenditure, since it takes the farm away from the optimal combination of production factors. Thus, while preserving the proportionality of its parts and always striving for optimal size the farm can, in fact, be organized in the most varied sizes. This statement remains fully valid when dealing with the organization of an agricultural undertaking based on hired labor.
When approaching the organization of an undertaking based on the principles of the family labor farm, we first of all find that one of its elements-the labor force-is fixed by being present in the composition of the family. It cannot be increased or decreased at will, and since it is subject to the necessity of combining the factors expediently we naturally ought to put other factors of production in an optimal relationship to this fixed element. This puts the total volume of our activity within quite narrow limits.
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family size also arithmetically determines farm size and the composition of all its elements.
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1. We have pointed out that family labor, not finding occupation in its agricultural undertaking, turns to crafts and trades. It is exceedingly important to establish whether land hunger and shortage of capital are the sole factors which turn peasant labor to crafts and trades. In other words, we must explain: What quantitatively determines the division of peasant labor between earnings from crafts and trades and from agricultural work?
2. We have established that the effective size of peasant family landholding and capital, if they are at the minimum, are in many ways the determining factor in establishing the volume of the agricultural undertaking. It is essential to establish: What determines the availability of land and capital itself in the peasant family, and does the family not try to develop it from the minimum to the optimum?
3. We have noted that the agricultural ratio requires that any size of agricultural undertaking be organized in the most expedient relationship of its technical factors. It is essential to clarify the situation in which land and capital are at a minimum and the peasant family's agricultural undertaking is organized in accord with them. Does not the mass of family labor remaining outside this undertaking and the mass of demands it has not satisfied have any infiuence on the economic and technical organization of the agricultural undertaking itself?
We will try to answer each of these questions separately.
1. Our supposition that want of capital and, mainly, of land sometimes makes the peasant family throw a considerable part of its labor into crafts, trades, and other nonagricultural livelihoods is, in the majority of cases, perfectly correct. In accordance with it, departures for crafts and trades are particularly developed where there is considerable population density. However, we ought to make two provisos to this statement, and the second of these will be very significant for understanding the whole nature of the peasant farm.
First, very many crafts and trades depend in their development on the fact that the distribution of agricultural labor over time is very uneven, and whole seasons-for example, winter-are completely dead. At this time, peasant labor is free, and with very little intensity and, consequently, little drudgery, it is advantageous to use it in establishing the economic equilibrium by means of work in crafts and trades, thus easing the load of summer agricultural work.
Second, and this is the main thing, in numerous situations it is not at all a lack of means of production which calls forth earnings from crafts and trades, but a more favorable market situation for such work in the sense of its payment for peasant labor compared with that in agriculture. Zemstvo statistics for Vladimir, Moscow, and other guberniyas give us much data to show that peasant farms of an area of seasonal distant work and of certain local crafts and trades make very little use of their effective agricultural means of production.
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.. we may theoretically assert that peasant family division of labor between earnings from agriculture and from crafts and trades is achieved by a comparison of the market situation in these two branches of the national economy. And since the relationship between these two market situations is inconstant, the relationship between labor expenditure on crafts and trades and on agriculture is also inconstant. In years of an unfavorable agricultural market situation-for example, given a harvest failure-the impossibility of attaining the economic equilibrium with the help of general agricultural occupations obliges the peasants to cast onto the labor market a huge quantity of peasant working hands who look for a livelihood from crafts and trades. As a result, we have the situation-normal for Russia, but paradoxical from a Western viewpoint-in which periods of high grain prices are, at the same time, periods of low wages.
The second of our questions, about the factors determining the availability of land and capital at the disposal of the family, is so significant in itself that it essentially requires an independent review. Below, we devote all of Chapter 5 to a review of the problem of capital. However, it is absolutely essential for us to pose this problem now in order that the reader should not think that size of land for use and of capital is a sort of deus ex machina in the form of a priori prerequisites of the peasant farm.
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However, the best proof of the constant tendency to bring size of agricultural area into an optimal relationship with family size are the dynamic investigations of Chernenkov, Kushchenko, Vikhlyaev, and Khryashcheva, which we quoted in Chapter 1. They show that as the family develops it moves over the years from one sown area category to another; although, of course, the general population density in a particular area, the conditions of the primary land allotment, and so on often provide insurmountable difficulties to the tendency to develop its land area to the optimum.
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We have established that the peasant family without enough land and means of production at its disposal for the complete use of all its labor in the agricultural undertaking puts its surplus in another form of economic activity (crafts and trades). It frequently occurs, however, that the possibility of earnings from crafts and trades is also extremely limited or that payment for labor is very low.
In this case, it is sometimes advantageous for the peasant farm to violate the optimal combination of production elements for its activity and to force its labor intensity far beyond the optimal limits. Inevitably losing on unit labor payment, it nevertheless considerably expands the gross income of its agricultural undertaking and reaches a basic equilibrium between the drudgery of labor and consumption -within the limits of agricultural activity, of course-at a level of well-being lower than would occur given a farm optimal in size and proportions.
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Kurt Ritter,8 noting in his review of my book the same factors as does Professor Skalweit,9 points to the incorrect nature of my terminology and says that even purely family farms, insofar as they become commodity producers and dispose of their produce on the capitalist market and are subject to the influence of its prices, should be called capitalist farms, since they form part of the capitalist system of the national economy.
In some respects, this may be correct, since the term capitalism is exceedingly overloaded with meaning and may cover the most disparate phenomena. However, it is essential to remember that the main part of our analysis is not national economic but private economic in character, and we needed an organization to separate family undertakings from those constructed on the basis of hired labor. The hired we have called capitalist, since in their private economic organization they have elements of capitalist relations. If Dr. Kurt Ritter finds it possible within capitalism as a national economic system to give two different terminologies for hiring and nonhiring farms in the private economic sense, we will merely welcome it. We note only that the family farm is also conceivable outside the capitalist system of national economy.
The Organizational Plan of the Peasant Farm
Russian critics of our early works usually call our theory a consumer theory of the peasant farm and contrast it with the acquisitive concept of the farm. In this, there is either a great misunderstanding or a wish, for the sake of polemics, to give our views an obviously distorted image.
Any economic unit, including the peasant farm, is acquisitivean undertaking aiming at maximum income. In an economic unit based on hired labor, this tendency to boundless expansion is limited by capital availability and, if this increases, is practically boundless. But in the family farm, apart from capital available expressed in means of production, this tendency is limited by the family labor force and the increasing drudgery of work if its intensity is forced up. The labor-consumer balance we have analyzed is the expression of the mechanism for limiting the peasant family's consumer tendencies. Given high labor productivity, the peasant family will naturally tend not only to meet its personal demands but also to expand the farm's capital renewal and in general to accumulate capital.
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Any economic unit, including the peasant farm, is acquisitivean undertaking aiming at maximum income. In an economic unit based on hired labor, this tendency to boundless expansion is limited by capital availability and, if this increases, is practically boundless. But in the family farm, apart from capital available expressed in means of production, this tendency is limited by the family labor force and the increasing drudgery of work if its intensity is forced up. The labor-consumer balance we have analyzed is the expression of the mechanism for limiting the peasant family's consumer tendencies. Given high labor productivity, the peasant family will naturally tend not only to meet its personal demands but also to expand the farm's capital renewal and in general to accumulate capital.
Of course, in speaking of the peasant farm we still do not need to conceive of its organizational plan in nature as a conscious structure, written out with all its tables and maps into a large in-folio volume. It is equally undoubted, however, that like Moliere's Jourdain who had talked prose for 40 years without suspecting it, our peasant for hundreds of years has been carrying on his farm according to definite, objectively existing plans, without, perhaps, fully recognizing them subjectively.
The very advantage or disadvantage of any particular economic initiative on the peasant farm is decided, not by an arithmetic calculation of income and expenditure, but most frequently by intuitively perceiving whether this initiative is economically acceptable or not. In the same way, the peasant farm's organizational plan is constructed at the present time, not by a system of connected logical structures and reckonings, but by the force of succession and imitation of the experience and selection, over many years and often subconsciously, of successful methods of economic work. Therefore, we do not aim at issuing our further logical constructs as a priori deliberations of the peasant organizing his farm. Rather, we conceive them as a method for the a posteriori organized recognition of our subject, and merely hope that in time, given the development of our social agricultural science, some of our a posteriori considerations may also become practical methods which our peasants may use for the practical arrangement of their farms.
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Account of the Family Labor Force and Its Consumer Demands
For us, the farm family is the primary initial quantity in constructing the farm unit, the customer whose demands it must answer and the work machine by whose strength it is built. To avoid misunderstandings, we consider it essential to repeatedly state that the forms of farm and production created by the family are largely preordained by the objective general economic and natural conditions in which the peasant farm exists. But the volume of economic work itself and the mechanism for constituting the farm derive predominantly from the family, taking into account all other elements of the economic circumstances.
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we can establish that personal budget size per consumer fluctuates around 70-100 rubles, giving an average family an annual budget of 500-800 rubles. This is approximately the sum which the peasant family's economic activity should give to achieve the basic economic equilibrium, apart from income needed to renew capital circulating in the production process. Moreover, as we will see below, the family's level of well-being depends not so ivuch on development of demands as on tqe production conditions available to peasant family labor.
Account of Land Held and Possible Land for Use
The organizational plan of an agricultural unit based on hired labor takes the organization of its area as the initial determinant in constructing its economy; and although it finally completes this section of the organizational plan corresponding to the situation in other sections, it may freely take the plan as the starting point for its considerations. But in the family farm where it is not land but the family labor and consumer elements which are given, the problems of organizing the area naturally cannot be so significant.
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Communal repartitions, long-term and short-term rentings, and (for countries where private property in land still exists) pun:hases and sales permit adequate adjustment of size of land for use to the farm's requirements.
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The opposition of the party's Marxist theoreticians to Chayanov's thesis appeared very early-for example, in the preface to Ivan Kremnev's Peasant Utopia. In his introduction to Peasant Farm Organization, Chayanov himself cited the major arguments of the Marxist school against his theory of peasant economy.
I. The method used by Chayanov was not Marxist. He was considered a spokesman of the Austrian marginalist school, whose theory was based on current market prices and who considered value subjectively as a function of needs. BtJ.t for a Marxist, prices were merely variables determined by the level of production forces and modified in relation to labor productivity, * whereas value had for them an objective content. In the 1924 preface to Ocherki, Kritsman particularly attacked Chayanov for ignoring the role of the material productive forces as a factor in the development of the peasant economy. Meerson followed with this criticism: the importance of activity was measured by the labor and the means of production, not by labor alone; because the means of production were not divided equally, there was a redistribution of the labor force itself, as Marx had shown in his introduction to the Critique of Political Economy.**
* G. Gordeev, Na Agrarnom Fronte, No. 4 (1927), pp. 162-71.
** D. Meerson, Na Agrarnom Fronte, No. 3 (1925).
2. Peasant economy was considered as a static entity, independent of the economic environment. Chayanov's school refused to see that the peasant economy was in conflict with capitalism and the prey to social differentiation. Lenin's work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, was the Soviet Marxists' reference book to illustrate this breakdown. According to his critics, Chayanov had mistakenly grouped together middle peasants and kulaks under the category of farmers with more than 15 hectares. A further breakdown by farm si1e would have shown that renting land and employing labor were very frequent in the group cultivating more than 25 hectares. Also, increase in family size was more rapid in the last categories than in those where it was necessary, because of lack of land, to look for outside wages. Finally, the drudgery of labor inside the peasant family varies not only in relation to the size of the family but also in relation to the social group to which the given family belongs.*
* L. Kritsman, Preface to the 1924 edition of Ocherki.
It was not correct to claim that the small farm could compete successfully with capitalist farms. This reasoning, based by Chayanov on an equality in technical levels of the two sectors, was refuted by the facts; capitalist enterprises used more perfected techniques and therefore obtained greater returns. The inability of the small farm to adopt technical progress or its underutilization of machinery because of its size proved the contradictions between this social form and the production forces. Continuing in this defense of technical progress, the theoreticians of the party attacked Chayanovs "optima" theory, accusing him of failing to see the evolution of the optima in relation to this progress and of confusing the optimal dimension of an enterprise with the optimal dimension of cultivated areas.*
* Sulkovskii, Na Agrarnom Fronte, No. 4 (1928).
3. Chayanov tended to idealize peasant economy by attributing to it well-intentioned motives. Facts prove that the mentality of a peasant is no different from that of a capitalist farmer. This idealization was a reflection of the petty bourgeois ideology which justifies the reactionary policy of support for the kulaks.*
*This reproach was aimed more at Kondrat'ev than at Chayanov. See Vermenichev
"Neopopulism" was a new version of the ideology of the Stolypin reform, an "American style" development without revolution. In other words, Chayanov's policy would stabilize the peasant economy by cooperation and encourage the efficient elements of the peasantry, considered as "progressive."*
* Sylkovskii, Na Agrarnom Fronte, No. 11-12 (1929), pp. 78-96.
The school had adopted in some measure the pre-Revolutionary thesis of the Social Democrats-a thesis that considered the evolution of capitalism in agriculture inevitable, and even desirable, as a step in the transition toward socialism. But (and in this the neopopulism conformed to the former populism) they continued to think that a peasant economy could attain socialism without going through forced collectivization, and that the creation of large production cooperatives had no future except in certain regions where an extensive mechanized agriculture was possible.
When the right opposition in the party was liquidated, the gulf between Chayanov and his opponents became unbridgeable.*
* Kulikov, Na Agrarnom Fronte, No. l (1931), p. 36, but Nicholas Bukharin disclaimed belonging to "these petty bourgeois princes who protect agriculture against all the changes envisaged in favor of industry. They are in essence supporting the conservation of the small enterprise with its family structure, its backward techniques ....These ideologists of petty bourgeois conservatism do not manage to understand that the development of agriculture depends on that of industry." "Notes of an Economist," Pravda, October 30, 1928.
The criticism, which initially had been relatively courteous, gained in intensity from 1929 on and became increasingly political. In 1930, Chayanov was accused of counterrevolutionary conspiracy. *
*I. Vermenichev, "Burzhuaznye ekonomisty kak oni est (Kondrat'evshchina)," Bol'shevik, No. 18 (1930), pp. 38-55.
"A group of bourgeois and petit bourgeois scholars: Kondrat'ev, Yurovskii, Doyarenko, Oganovskii, Makarov, Chayanov, Chelintsev and others to which are joined Groman, Sukhanov and Bazarov, representing the anti-marxist tendency in agrarian economics, these last Mohicans of the populist ideology, are now unmasked as beingJeaders of a counter-revolutionary 'Qrganization aimed at overthrowing the Soviet regime."*
*I. Vermenichev, "Burzhuaznye ekonomisty kak oni est (Kondrat'evshchina)," Bol'shevik, No. 18 (1930)
According to the same author, this organization was trying to slow down the growth of agricultural production and foster the development of capitalist elements in the countryside; the scholars belonging to it inspired right-wing deviationism (pravyi uklon), and were trying to deflect the party line toward a bourgeois ideology.
These accusations were based on the "confessions" of Professor Karatygin, who had admitted participating in an organization to sabotage the workers' food supply.* Thus, the difficulties of the procurement campaign were attributed to these scholars.
*Pravda, September 22, 1930
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