Dogmatism

Dogmatism + Remnant Feudalism = Catastrophe: Thoughts on the Tragedy of Chayanov

Jianfu YAO

(Translated from Chinese by Hai WANG and Li-an ZHOU)

Mistrial of Chayanov in the 1930s

"Dogmatist Marxism plus the remnants of Feudalism is a big catastrophe." Wan Li, a prominent communist party official, summarized the sanguinary history of socialist countries over past seventy years (Wan, p. 547). The tragedy of Chayanov is an epitome of this catastrophe.

Chayanov was the director of the Institute of Agricultural Economic Research at the Soviet Academy of Lenin Agricultural Science in the 1920s. He argued that the trend of the agricultural management in the Soviet Union would be small and medium sized family farming plus vertically integrated cooperatives. Government should leave the freedom of land management to the farmers while enhancing its efficiency through technical and financial assistance. However, the dogmatic Marxists of the 30's in Soviet Union rebuked Chayanov's theory as anti-agriculture collectivization. In addition, these dogmatists manipulated the economic issue into a political issue and marked Chayanov as a "class enemy" and a "people's enemy." Chayanov was brutally killed in 1939. Almost half a century after his death, Chayanov's honor was eventually redeemed. Wan Li's conclusion is a summarization for the series of Chayanovist tragedies.

Revived Chayanov Theory

During the 1920s, Chayanov wrote a fiction, "The Trip of My Brother Alex to A Peasantry Utopian State." In this book, he depicted a utopian state in 1984. The primary features of this state include: 1) collectivization and the village-township enterprises; 2) the dominance of towns and small cities; 3) farmers who leave land but work in nearby cities and towns; 4) farmers' self-management; 5) a two-tier economy that integrates the autonomous peasant farming with the non-agricultural operation and vertically-organized cooperatives; and 6) the combination of traditional family and kinship-oriented values and modern rational decision making, and etc. This utopian state envisioned in the 20's is amazingly similar to China's situation in 1984 (Qin, 1996, p. 3).

Chayanov believed that family farming is the foundation of rural economy and the development of small and medium sized family farms should be encouraged. The natural advantage of agriculture is different from that of the manufacturing industry. It is impossible to concentrate the solar energy received in a one-hundred-acre land in a one-acre land. But on the other hand, a manufacturing factory can gather various kinds of machine and equipment in one location to efficiently use raw materials, reduce transportation costs and so on. The purpose of vertically integrated cooperatives is two folds. One is to provide comprehensive assistance to the family based farms. The other is to channel the farms into the mainstream of national planned economy. Chayanov's vision of family farmers plus vertical cooperatives is almost a duplicate of current China's two-tier economy in rural areas.

In addition, Chayanov also pointed out:

(1) The rural cooperative originated from the cooperation of small sized production entities in purchasing agricultural production means. This system will expeditiously develop into a larger cooperative organization that sells agricultural products. Eventually, a larger collective cooperative containing various smaller production entities will naturally take shape as time elapses.

(2) Under market influence, the evolving direction of the agricultural cooperatives will be the development towards processing agricultural raw materials based upon the integration with product sale and marketing. The agricultural cooperatives enable the agricultural product-processing activities to separate from the farms, thereby promoting the rural industrialization and gaining a dominant role in rural economy. This development process can be accelerated with the support and loan from the government.

(3) The centralized and coordinated agricultural production is made possible in a new and superior way by the development of agricultural cooperatives that take control over sales, marketing and processing technology. Small producers will be forced to make production plans, improve technology and adopt new methods in accordance with the sales, marketing and production policies enacted by the cooperatives, in order to fit into the competition of international market (Chayanov, 1996, p. 269).

Currently in China's rural areas, the integration of agriculture production, marketing and rural industry came after a half century of strenuous exploration. The result is strikingly similar to Chayanov's prediction. Unsurprisingly, Chayanov's theories were popular in Japan and Germany during the 20's and 30's and in Europe and America during the 60-70's. In 1967, France and Holland published Chayanov's works in eight volumes. Chayanov's theories have been considered as a golden key to the understanding of the peasantry society all over the world. Some even acclaim Chayanov as peasant's Marx and the hero of creating a new political economy. It is such an irony that Chayanov, executed as "people's enemy" in 1939, became the peasantry's new Marx half a century later.

Dogmatism + Remnant Feudalism = Catastrophe: A Reflection on Chayanov's Tragedy

The tragedy of Chayanov is only a small part of the whole disastrous history of the Soviet Union. I first heard of Chayanov's name in an international conference, "Soviet Agriculture Reform, Problems and Prospects," in Moscow in 1990. In that conference, British Scholar Sanin and many other Chayanov's followers claimed that Chayanov had influenced over a generation of scholars in peasantry research. "Not only did his theories enlighten the labyrinth of Russian history, but also help clarify the historical origins and the consequences of a variety of crucial events between the October Revolution and the sweeping collectivization in Russia's rural areas." Soviet scholars attending the conference also pointed out that the campaign of attacking Chayanov and his economic theory in the 20's and 30's was one of major disasters in Soviet history, which eventually led to the crisis in agriculture that spread over the entire Soviet economy. Chayanov was executed; Chayanov's theories were wrongly suppressed; and many professors and scholars who supported Chayanov's collectivization theories were also executed, exiled or otherwise persecuted. This suffocated the liberal and academic atmosphere in the Institute of Agricultural Economic Research. No different opinions could be heard, and no free and independent research was allowed. As a result, only one mode of thinking was permitted. Peasants were forced to join collective farms that eventually became nationalized farms with ever-growing scale. As Stalin asserted, collective farms were the new trend of rural development, and would evolve in a direction opposite to the capitalist agricultural economy. Any deviation from Stalin's policy would be marked as anti-agricultural collectivization. Unitary thinking inevitably led to unitary action. Wrongful and dogmatist policy-making, which was done in the name of Marxism and backed by proletariat dictatorship, suffocated independent scientific thinking and truth-seeking through brutal means such as killings and exiles. However, as biologist Pavlov put it, science and dogmatism are incompatible, while science and free critique are synonymous. The devastating combination of dogmatism and feudalism invited catastrophe. In the Soviet Union, the total meat output in 1951 was 4.7 million tons, which was lower than the 5 million tons in 1913. The corn output in 1953 was also lower than 1913's, and the Soviet Union degraded from a corn export country to a corn import country. In 1913, Russia's corn export was 8.7 million tons, while Soviet corn import was 19.0 millions tons in 1973 and 19 million tons in 1976. The deterioration of the economy, the resentment of the public, and the crises of food, agriculture and overall economy stimulated political crisis and eventually evolved into a national disaster. The historical tragedy of the Soviet Union is definitely not one single incident, but the result of thousands of Chayanovist tragedies spanning over seventy years of the Soviet history.

In the 1990 conference some Soviet scholars praised the success of China's agricultural reform and the courage to break away from the system of agricultural collectivization. The western scholars also advised the Soviet Union to follow China's path and to re-think Chayanov's collectivization theory. At that time, the Soviet government had already implemented a series of policy changes, including the leasing of land to the peasants and the enacting of land privatization law. However, when we visited the farms, we did not see much change in the state-owned farms. A professor at Soviet Philosophical Research Institute told me that, in contrast to China's reform, Soviet's seventy years of collectivization practice had trained the peasants to be manufacturing workers. Cow workers only knew how to extract milk, and reapers only knew how to operate reaping machines. They knew nothing outside their assigned tasks. If they rented land, they had no idea how to use it. Young people were good at dancing and singing but with little expertise in managing a farm. Almost all first generation peasants with wide knowledge of managing farms from the 1920s had deceased by 1990, which made a big difference compared to China's situation. The difficulties and complications that Soviet reform encountered, and is encountering, impose such a heavy burden on new generations that it can only be alleviated over the course of many years to come.

Seventy years after the October Revolution, Chayanov's works were made public again in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. In China, the translated version of Chayanov's "Peasantry Economic Organization" was published in 1995, while in 1990 I could only find one Chayanov book published in Russian at the Beijing Library, China's largest library. Chayanov's works as well as his thinking and life had received unfair treatment for a long time. Nevertheless, thinking cannot be killed, and truth will eventually be revealed.

(The author is a Senior Research Fellow at the Research Center for Rural Economy at China's Ministry of Agriculture.)

References:

1. Wan, Li. "How to Understand and Manage the Construction of Socialist Spiritual Civilization." In Wan Li Works.

2. Qin, Hui. "Chayanovism in Contemporary Peasantry Research." In Peasantry Economic Organization. 1996.

3. Chayanov. Peasantry Economic Organization. 1996.