Alexander Chayanov, Peasant Utopia, And the Natural Family Economy

One of the great human tragedies of the disaster-ridden 20th Century was destruction of the Russian and Ukrainian peasantries.  In the whole Russian Empire of 1910, there were 135 million peasants (out of 158 million total).  In European Russia alone, 93 million peasants formed 84 percent of the population.  For decades, moreover, this great mass of family farmers had grown more self-aware.  Romantic Slavophilism of the 1840’s stressed the peasant virtues of the countryside.  Emancipation of the serfs in 1861 led to creation of zemstvo, local peasant councils involving a form of rural democracy.  The Populist Movement launched in the 1880’s brought Russian intellectuals into the countryside, eager “to go to the people” and reconnect with nature.  Peasant unrest in 1905 helped shepherd in a quasi-democratic national parliament.  Then came the slaughter and privations of the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the violence surrounding “War Communism,” frequent purges, “de-Kulakization,” forced collectivization, and the vast disruptions of the Second World War.  By 1945, as many as 40 million of the peasants were dead; the remainder forced off their land, many into the gulags, their way of life pulverized.

This brief history poses intriguing questions.  In the absence of this cycle of violence, if there had been relative peace, how would the Russian peasantry have evolved?  What would this vast peasant majority have made out of a Russia experimenting with democracy and rapidly entering the industrial age? 

One answer comes from the pen of the Russian economist Alexander V. Chayanov, writing under the pseudonym Ivan Kremnev.  Published in 1920 and entitled The Journal of my Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia, his book looks to a decentralized, oddly progressive, democratic Russian peasant state set in 1984!*  The novella has a wonderful light side to it.  For example, its protagonist Alexei Kremnev wakes up after travelling through time and asks: “Have I really become the hero of a Utopian novel?... A pretty stupid situation.”  It turns out that the great national sport of Peasant Utopia in 1984 is “Knucklebones,” an ancient form of jacks followed with all the intensity of the real future’s World Cup soccer.  And on meeting his hostess in the future, Alexei grows enchanted with “this Utopian woman,...her almost classical head, perfectly set on a strong neck, her broad shoulders and full breasts, which raised her shirt collar with every breath.”  When her sister proves even more alluring, the novelist writes: “Alexei was positively crazy about Utopian women.”[1]

The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia opens with a curious “Forward” by P. Orlovskii, the pseudonym of V.V. Vorovskii, a publicist and professional diplomat.  Perhaps because the novella is “a scarcely veiled criticism of the narrow, somewhat joyless Bolshevik reality of 1920,”[3] Vorovskii goes out of his way to stress the unreality of Chayanov’s utopia; even trying to turn it into a negative dystopia.[4]

This negative spin, however, fails to harm Chayanov’s essentially positive portrait of The Land of Peasant Utopia.  The story opens in Autumn 1921 as Kremnev, a Bolshevik operative charged with eliminating the peasantry, leaves a meeting held in Moscow.  He has just voted on a decree to destroy the family hearth.  Phrases from the debate flash through his mind:

“By destroying the family hearth we are dealing the final blow to the bourgeois system!”

“Our decree forbidding taking meals at home eliminates from our lives the joyful poison of the bourgeois family and firmly establishes the socialist principle forever.”

“The cosiness of family life leads to possessiveness, the petty proprietor’s joys conceal the seeds of capitalism.”

Returning to his “half-destroyed family hearth fated in a week’s time to be destroyed completely,” he examines his shelf of Utopian novels—including tomes by William Morris, Sir Thomas More, and Edward Bellamy—and mutters to them that “[y]our solitary dreams are now common beliefs, your greatest audacities have become an official programme...!”  However, he pulls down a volume by the Russian populist Alexander Herzen.  Freeing his mind from “the hypnosis of Soviet daily life, new, unhackneyed, thoughts” stir within him.  He reads that weak, puny, and stupid generations will soon be smothered by an eruption:  “Then spring will come; young life will burgeon on their gravestones,... a wild, new power will burst forth in the youthful breast of the young nations.”  Alexei understands this to mean that socialism will grow to its “utmost limits, to absurdity,” that “a cry of refusal” will then break out among the people, “and there will be once more a mortal struggle in which socialism, in the position of today’s conservatism, will be defeated by another, unknown revolution still to come.” 

As he ponders what this “new rising” will be, an odor of sulphur fills the room; the hands of the clock disappear in a whirl; the walls grow distorted and tremble.  He falls on a sofa and loses consciousness.

Alexi awakens to a new, radically different Moscow.  Through a window he sees that the Kremlin is still there, but everything else is unfamiliar.  Vast blocks of buildings are gone, replaced by “gardens everywhere” and “sprawling clumps of trees” woven together by boulevards with “streams of pedestrians, motor cars, and carriages” pouring through them “in a living river.”  Alexei examines the room.  He spots a newspaper, bearing the date “[5] September 1984.”  He has jumped forward over sixty years!  Phrases leap from the page—”peasantry”; “the past era of urban culture”; “state collectivism of sad memory”—also suggesting a very different world.

Alexei soon discovers that he has been mistaken for Charlie Mann, a visitor to Russia from America.  He is in the care of the Minin family, a vast clan living next to each other on their family farms, in houses “built in the simple style of the sixteenth century.”  A grey-haired patriarch, Alexei Alexandrovich Minin, is there to arrange for his tour and to answer his questions.  The author concludes that “the family is the family, and ever shall be.”5

Alexei also learns that during the 1920’s, “the peasantry...proved hard to communize.”  The peasants steadily increased their representation in The Congress of Soviets, and by 1934 power was firmly in their hands.  Having learned from the 1917 revolution of “the danger” to a democratic regime from “huge conglomerations of urban population,” the peasants pushed through a decree abolishing towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants.  An urban revolt occurred in 1937, but it was put down and the Moscow streets emptied while “the city’s skyscrapers were destroyed by the hundreds.”  Alexei’s host continues:  “Now the whole area for hundreds of miles around Moscow is a continuous agricultural settlement, intersected by rectangles of common forest, strips of co-operative pastures and huge climatic parks.”  Married couples and their children hold allotments of 8 to 10 acres, with their houses set side-by-side along roads for dozens of miles.  Township centers feature local schools, libraries, entertainment halls, and other community facilities.

The failure of socialism, one of the Minins explains, lay in its origin “in the dungeons of the German capitalist factories, nurtured in the minds of an urban proletariat haunted by forced labour.”  Wage-slaves themselves, the workers in constructing their own ideology made “servitude an article of faith of the future system; and created an economy in which all were performers and only a few individuals possessed the right to creative activity.”[6]  This had been Russian communism.

The Patriarch Minin reports that the social principles of the modern peasant order were not new:  “our task was to consolidate the old, centuries-old, principles on which from time immemorial the peasant economy had been based.”  He continues:

Our economic system, like that of ancient Rus’, is founded on the individual peasant farm.  We considered it, and still do so, the ideal model of economic activity.  In it, man confronts nature; in it, labour comes into creative contact with all the forces of the cosmos....Every workman is a creator, each manifestation of his individuality represents the art of work.

Each family raises its own food supply on its acreage, using only simple tools.  As a Minin brother tells Alexei:  “Our harvests of more than three tons an acre are achieved by practically looking after each ear of grain individually.  Agriculture has never been as manual as now.”[7]  The old man notes that living and working in the countryside is the healthiest way to live, with the most variety, adding “This is man’s natural condition.”[8] 

All the same, the Peasant Utopia retained—of necessity—some elements of the capitalist regime.  Where “the pre-socialist world...was driven by the power of human greed, by hunger,” the Communists put every worker on a state wage “and so removed all incentive from the work.”  After winning control, the Peasants restored “all the mechanisms which stimulate private economic activity” such as piece rates, bonuses for managers, and premium prices for desired farm products.  To spur on capital formation, they encouraged co-operatives to form “social capital funds,” or credit unions. 

Under pure capitalism, the family patriarch says, industry had assumed “a pathological, monstrous condition.”  All the same, in most branches of production, a return to artisan activity or cottage industry was also deemed impractical.  Instead, Peasant Utopia turned to cooperative enterprises with guaranteed large markets, which “nipped in the bud any chance of competition for most products.”  Heavy taxes on capitalist factories aided the process:

However, we still have private initiative of [the] capitalist type; in those areas where collectively managed enterprises are ineffective, and in those cases where an organizing genius can overcome, thanks to advanced technology, the effects of our Draconian taxation.

Indeed, this retention of a sphere for entrepreneurship had another motive: “to preserve for our comrade co-operators a degree of threat from...competition, and thus save them from technical stagnation.”  For even though “our present-day capitalists, too, have shark-like propensities,...we all know that there are sharks in the sea so that the other fish should not doze.”[9]

Society and the state are no idols in the land of Peasant Utopia: “We are particularly cautious about the state, which we use only when necessity dictates.”  As a faux editorial in the 1984 paper The Sign of the Zodiac explains: “The great decree...on the citizen’s inalienable rights made the state into an obedient instrument of human individuality and destroyed the fetish of its sovereign rights.”  As patriarch Minin adds: “we have stripped the state of virtually all social and economic functions, and the ordinary man has hardly any contact with it.”  Government, such as it was, came through a system of local peasant councils.  Peasant Utopia made every effort to push responsibilities and tasks ever closer to these councils.  Moreover, nine-tenths of the needed work was done outside government: “various societies, co-operatives, congresses, leagues, newspapers, other organs of public opinion, academies and, finally, clubs—that is the social fabric which constitutes the life of the nation.”[10]

The Minin family also explains to Alexei how the founders of Peasant Utopia were troubled by one thought: “are the higher forms of culture possible with a population scattered in the countryside?”  To shape a positive answer, they moved the theatres, the museums, the people’s universities, the choral societies, and the sporting activities into the country.  A law of obligatory travel, borrowed from the medieval guilds, allowed young men and women to see the world and expand their horizons.  A two-year conscription for military and labour service brought moral discipline: “[s]ports, rhythmic gymnastics, eurythmics, factory work, marches, manoevres, navvying—all this helps to mould our citizens.”  As a result, the number of those who drink “at the fountain-head of culture and life” steadily grows: “Nector and ambrosia have ceased to be the food of the Olympians alone, they now enrich the homes of humble villagers.”[11]  Peasant realism in art also now rules, with Pieter Brueghel as the acknowledged master. The Sign of the Zodiac reports that The Union of Peasant Choral Societies, with 40,000 singers from all 32 Great Russian provinces, will perform “Mazharov’s” new composition, “The Land Brings Forth Live Shoots,” on May Day 1984.[12]

In the end, though, Alexei’s real identity is exposed.  He spends a few days in a comfortable prison mostly holding “anthroposophists”:  that is, secular humanists “who had succumbed” to “the great German idea.”  Released from jail, he walks away alone, “friendless and penniless, to face life in a Utopian country he hardly knew.”

Animating this fanciful story was a provocative and dynamic microeconomics of the peasant or family farm.  Rejecting both the neo-classical economics of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and the socialism of Karl Marx, Chayanov posited a scientifically grounded “moral economy”[13] which threatened the very existence of the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union and drew the particular ire of Joseph Stalin.

Who was Alexander Vasilevich Chayanov?  Born in 1888, little else is known about his early life.  In 1909, at age 21, he published his first essays on agricultural economics.  A year later he received his Ph.D. from the Moscow Agrarian Institute, with his dissertation on The Southern Limit of the Three-Course System of Peasant Fields at the Start of the Twentieth Century.  Other early publications focused on the role of “Agronomists Advising the Public” (1911) and “The Problem of Training Agricultural Officers” (1914).  Although no Bolshevik, he was an active participant in the Russian Revolutions of 1917.  Two years later, Chayanov became Director of The Institute of Agricultural Economy, a think tank at Moscow’s Timiryazov Agricultural College.  From 1919 to 1930, he was the Soviet Union’s leading authority on agricultural economics.  During the early 1920’s, he also served the central government as Deputy Minister of Agriculture.[14]

It was in these years that Chayanov inspired the “School for Analysis of Peasant Production and Organization,” a neo-Populist intellectual movement better known by the shorthand “Organization and Production School.”  His colleagues included A.N. Chelintsev, N.P. Makarov, A.A. Rybinkov, G.A. Stundenski, and A.N. Minin, some of whose surnames he borrowed for Peasant Utopia.  Chayanov also worked with the great Russian macro-economist N.D. Kondratiev, the theorist behind the Long Wave.  Projects of the Organization and Production School included development of a unique bookkeeping system for peasant farms and a detailed study of specialty crops and cottage crafts found in the countryside.  The more this group studied the peasant economy, though, the more they believed that existing economic theories did not apply in this sphere.  In Chayanov’s words, they needed “to construct a separate theory of the family undertaking working for itself.”[15]  The early 1920’s also offered them a political opportunity.  After the disasters of “War Communism,” the Bosheviks retreated on the economic front.  Under the “New Economic Policy,” they shelved schemes to collectivize peasant land holdings and allowed “capitalists” to operate in industry on a modest scale: the very order outlined in Peasant Utopia.  Russia’s future economic life appeared to lie along the lines laid out by Chayanov and his team.[16]

With some justice, Chayanov insisted that he was no ideologue; rather, he was a scientist whose analysis rested on observation.  Starting in the 1870’s, the Tsarist government had collected a vast array of statistics on peasant social and economic life.  Already by 1910, agro-economists had found “that peasant economic behavior in the Russian countryside was not consistent with the simple allocation models of classical political economy.”  Notably, the peasants did not appear to maximize profits or recognize “marginal utility.”[17]  Chayanov based his alternate approach on a remarkably detailed 1910 investigation of 101 peasant households in Starobel’sk, with the results published in 1915.  According to economic historian Teodor Shanin, these findings “empirically validated—or at least illustrated” Chayanov’s general theory of peasant economy.[18]

The Austrian school of neo-classical liberal economics actually had a decided influence on Chayanov.  He noted himself that he and his colleagues faced communist critics who argued that “the Organization and Production School does not use [the] Marxist method and is, in essence, an offspring of the Austrian marginal utility school.”[19]  Austrian concepts, language, and logic do fill Chayanov’s analysis; and he admits that terms “such as ‘subjective evaluation,’ ‘marginal labor expenditure,’ and even ‘the utility of the worker’s marginal ruble of earnings’ are to be found in the works of the present author.”[20]  However, Chayanov did distance himself from the Austrians on a key point.  He refused to extend a micro-economic “subjective evaluation of the utility of objects” to “an entire system of ... national economy.”[21]

Chayanov’s theory of peasant economy must also be seen as part of a broader search for a “Theory of Family Economy,” a phrase used in the title of the 1923 German edition of his Peasant Farm Organization.[22]  Chayanov proposes the concept of “the natural economy,” where the unit of production is also the unit of consumption and where profits and wages play no role.  Such a system prevails on what he calls “the fully natural family farm.”  Indeed, he sees this “natural family economy” as one of four distinct economic types, the other three being capitalist, communist, and slave.[23]

Notably, Chayanov stresses that the family economy found on peasant farms is “coincident” with other economic systems; that is, it can co-exist with capitalism, slavery, or communism.  These distinct, “closed” systems then “communicate with the others only by those objective economic elements they [have] had in common,” conversations he outlines in a fascinating chart of Economic Systems.  For example, capitalism and the “natural family economy” can share in “reproduction of the means of production” but have nothing to say to each other about interest, wages, or land rent.[24]  Individuals placed in any of these systems find themselves adjusting to distinctive rules and incentives.  As Chayanov comments regarding a well-known finance capitalist:

It seems to us that if Rothschild were to flee to some agrarian country ... 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.[25]

From these assumptions, Chayanov argues that neither the neo-classical economics of Smith and Ricardo nor Marxism apply to the great mass of Russians living on “natural family farms,” circa 1920.  As land-use economists R. Roberts and T. Mutersbaugh ably summarize, Chayanov’s “basic claim was that family production precluded analysis according to either neoclassical or Marxist canons because both assume a fundamental distinction between capital and labor and between production and reproduction that do not exist within family farms.”[26]

Relative to Ricardo, Chayanov notes that the standard economic calculation for any capitalist economic unit would be:

GI (Gross Income) - OM (Outlays on Materials) - W (Wages) = NP (Net Profit)

On the peasant “family labour farm,” however, there are no “wages,” only hours of labor expended.[27]  The family uses its labor power “to cultivate the soil and receives as the result of a year’s work a certain amount of goods,” something very different from a wage.  In response, the neo-classical economists argued that the family farmer should be seen as both employer and worker.  Chayanov replies that this schizophrenic theory is a “fiction.”[28]  He adds:

A single glance at the inner structure of the family labor unit is enough to realize that it is impossible without the category of wages to impose on this structure net profit, rent, and interest on capital as real economic categories in the capitalist meaning of the word.[29]

In short, given the absence of wages, the entire neo-classical analytical scheme crumbles.  The peasant mode of production also proves to be insensitive to prices and scarcities arising from the interaction of farms and between them and the outside world.[30]  In addition, neo-classical economics fails to account for what Chayanov calls “differential optimums,” where the optimal size of enterprises differs in various agrarian regions and sub-branches of farming, and at given stages of technology.[31]

Relative to Marx, Chayanov challenges virtually everything the old communist had to say about peasants.  Marx called them “the class that represents barbarism within civilization.”  He saw peasant society as unstable.  As in all other forms of economic activity under his scheme, peasants exploited each other.  Some moved toward the capitalist accumulation of land and related means of production.  Others lost their property, falling into the rural proletariat.  Since the end of feudalism, Marx said, surviving peasantries merely marked capitalist underdevelopment.  As a class, family farmers were doomed.  The future choice lay either with large-scale agri-business or large-scale socialist agriculture.[32]

Chayanov responds that the peasant mode of production successfully reproduces itself; that history is not necessarily moving toward capitalism or communism; that the peasantry is not disappearing: “the organizational shape of the basic cell, the peasant family labor farm, will remain the same, always changing in particular features and adapting to the circumstances surrounding the national economy.”[33]  On a related point, Chayanov denies that peasants exploit each other.  Inequalities in the countryside have another, more natural explanation.[34]  Chayanov also blasts the socialist command economy in action.  “By what means is the individual worker to be driven to labor so that he does not consider as drudgery the input expected of him under the production plan,” he asks?  In addition, he sees the state-run economy generating “a new class stratification,” a fresh kleptocracy of rulers who would “deprive the whole regime of its original high ideals.”[35]  More broadly, Chayanov shows that collective farms would not be more efficient than peasant farms and that the “horizontal cooperation” of collectivization would destroy local rural leadership and lead to bureaucratic inertia.[36] As historian Daniel Thorner concludes:  “Chayanov’s whole approach—his selection of the pure family farm as the typical Russian unit [and] his insistence on the survival power of such family farms....—was diametrically opposed to Lenin.”[37]

On this basis, Chayanov further insists that it is a profound error to impose either neo-classical or Marxist analysis onto peasant farms.  While “Manchester liberalism” was based on—and so appropriate to—the scientific investigation of capitalism, it “cannot and should not be extended to other organizational forms of economic life.”[38]  He points to the one-sided, neo-classical understanding of homo economicus.  As an equivalent error on the peasant side, “we would assume that every homo economicus without exception is an organizer of a family economic unit, that hired labor and employers do not naturally exist, and that the national economy is formed from the interrelations of these family units.”  Chayanov offers multiple examples of rational peasant behavior inexplicable by conventional economic theory.[39]  Even bookkeeping premised on neo-classical concepts could do damage to non-capitalist entities.  Chayanov would no doubt have agreed with the American Southern Agrarian Andrew Lytle, who quipped:  “as soon as a farmer begins to keep books, he’ll go broke shore as hell.”[40]

Instead, Chayanov offers what Teodor Shanin calls a “conceptual rearmament” of the micro-economy of the peasant farm.[41]  Chayanov’s work includes all the paraphernalia associated with modern economics:  complex formulae; elaborate graphs with curving, intersecting lines; and the like.  However, it can be fairly summarized through four propositions:

(A) Biology, not class conflict or marginal utility, drives the peasant economy.  Chayanov was a biological materialist, a monist in stressing that economic development rests on “demographic differentiation which depends [in turn] on biological family growth.”[42]  By family, he does not mean some older (or newer?) conception of a group of people eating from one pot.  Rather, he means “the purely biological concept of the married couple, living together with their [children] and aged representations of the older generations.”[43]  Shanin underscores the importance given by Chayanov to a farm’s sexual division of labor, which “turns marriage into a necessary condition of fully-fledged peasantship.”[44]

Equally critical to the “natural family economy” is the presence of children, and Chayanov assumes a robust peasant fertility.  Indeed, his whole theory rests on what Daniel Thorner calls “the natural history” of a family, as rural couples marry, bear an average of nine children, settle those children on the land, and then retire.[45]  Economic historian Mark Harrison summarizes: 

Peasant economy reproduces itself through the family.  The family is the progenitor of the family life-cycle and of population growth.  It is the owner of property.  As such, it expresses the fact that the aim of production is household consumption, not feudal rent or bourgeois profit.[46]

(B) Peasants seek subsistence, rather than accumulation.  Chayanov builds his model “on the concept of the peasant farm as a family labor farm in which the family as a result of its year’s labor receives a single labor income and weighs its efforts against the material results obtained.”[47]  This means that the use-value of a product, or family consumption needs, takes precedence over market value.  This also means that the peasantry itself determines price and “factor substitution,” again underscoring a lack of interest in profit and accumulation.  When subsistence needs run beyond a family’s farm product, peasants turn “to craft, trades, and other non-agricultural earnings to attain the economic equilibrium not fully met by farm income.”  Chayanov concludes that this balance between agricultural and craft work forms “a single equilibrium.”[48]

(C)  Peasant “Self Exploitation” is the key labor variable.  Peasants operate in a non-wage environment.  The family’s labor product, Chayanov says, is a function of the family’s size and composition, its productivity, “and—this is especially important—the degree of self-exploitation through which the working members effect a certain quantity of labor units in the course of the year.”  Crafting another key theorem, Chayanov adds that “the degree of self-exploitation is determined by a peculiar equilibrium between family demand satisfaction and the drudgery of labor itself.”  Put another way, as more mouths need to be fed, as the number of children and non-working elderly grows, the labor of family workers expands toward limits fixed by the drudge factor.  Chayanov concludes that “peasant farms are structured to conform to the optimal degree of self-exploitation of the family labor force.”[49]  In this environment, the work motivation of the peasant is not entrepreneurial.  Rather, it operates the same as under a “piece rate system,” where the artisan would be paid for each unit produced, not by the hour.  This allows the peasant “alone to determine the time and intensity of his work.”  Chayanov adds:  “all other conclusions and constructions follow in strict logic from this premise.”[50]

(D)  The Consumer/Worker Ratio drives economic decision making within the family.  In direct opposition to the theories of Marx and Lenin, Chayanov empirically shows that inequality in the Russian countryside was primarily due to the life cycle of families.  A newly married couple without children has a ratio of Consumers (mouths to feed) ÷ Workers near 1.0.  They aim at accumulating land.  As children arrive, this ratio climbs toward 2.0, reaching a maximum level of stress with 4 to 6 children.  The family in this circumstance engages in more “self-exploitation” and finds ways (in fluid land systems) to acquire more land, or to expand work in crafts.  As the children grow older, they become workers as well.  The ratio then falls and these middle-aged families acquire still more land, since they now have the labor to work it.  As the ninth baby comes, the early children are ready to marry and found a farm of their own.  Now “wealthy” parents launch them off with gifts of land; and so begin deconstructing their property.  As the last grown child leaves, they “retire” to live as dependents on their offspring.  Chayanov stresses here how family size is directly related to land use and how “the peasant provides himself with a family in accordance with his material security.”  Confirming this thesis, Chayanov’s intensive research into Starobel’sk peasant households found a strong correlation between farm size and family size.  A related “correlation coefficient” between agricultural income and family size was a robust 0.64.[51] 

Beyond these propositions, Chayanov also points to certain intrinsic advantages of the peasant economy.  First, peasants enjoy the satisfactions of liberty and responsibility.  As the economist summarizes:

The peasant and the artisan manage independently; they control their production and other economic activities on their own responsibility.  They have at their disposal the full product of their labor output and they are driven to achieve this labor output by family demands.[52]

Second, “the very nature of an agricultural enterprise imposes limits on its enlargement,” making it easier for the peasant to survive capitalist pressure than it was for the artisan facing the new factories.[53]  Third, the peasant enjoys advantages in the deployment, surveillance, and monitoring of labor; put another way, it is easier to keep track of family members than hired hands.  Fourth, the peasant family can cover its lack of capital by enhanced labor intensity, allowing peasants to out-compete the well-capitalized farm enterprise resting on wage labor.  This surplus of labor also enables peasants under certain conditions to buy out their heavily capitalized neighbor.[54]  Fifth, the peasant farmer enjoys an advantage in ecological sustainability.  Micro-management—”a union of local farmer knowledge and land-productive capability”—can give family farmers an edge over agribusiness.[55]  Finally, the family labor unit is better equipped to survive economic crisis.  Following Chayanov, Thorner explains: “In conditions where capitalist farms would go bankrupt, peasant farms could work longer hours, sell at lower prices, obtain no net surplus, and yet manage to carry on with their farming, year after year.”[56]

All the same, Chayanov is acutely aware that future economic development required change in the countryside.  To begin with, he is an ardent champion of the “extension” concept, where agronomists and horticulturalists bring new agricultural techniques to the peasantry and teach and assess farmers in management matters.  The “District Social Agronomist” would be the catalyst for improved farming practice.[57]

More critically, Chayanov holds that the peasant economic system could survive in the new century only by building up cooperatives: another tacit admission of capitalism’s special energy.  Through “vertical cooperation” offering product processing, exchange, tools, storage, and credit, the peasant could enjoy the benefits of large scale organisation without sacrificing family-scale production.  As Chayanov puts it: “We must hope that the [family] labor farm, strengthened by cooperative bodies, will be able to defend its position against large-scale, capitalist type farms as it did in former times.”[58]  And while “small is beautiful” is a theme of Peasant Utopia, Chayanov actually looks toward the formation of powerful combines.  While co-ops would commonly begin around the procurement of tools, “cooperatives very soon turn to the organization of the co-operative marketing of agricultural products which they develop in the form of gigantic alliances combining hundreds of thousands of small-scale producers.”[59]  He foresaw here entities such as the massive Land O’Lakes cooperative in Minnesota or the Mondragon combine in Spain, multi-billion-dollar enterprises controlled by the producers themselves.

Indeed, Chayanov even shows how extending the co-operative principle to marketing and technical reprocessing brings about:

...a concentration and organization of agricultural production in new and higher forms, obliging the small-scale producer to alter the organization plan of his household in conformity with the policy of cooperative marketing..., to improve his technology, and to adopt more perfect methods of land cultivation and cattle-rearing, which ensure uniform standards for the product.

This fundamental change within the household brings in turn “a quantitative transformation” of rural life, from “a system of peasant households” into “a system based on a public co-operative rural economy.”  This co-op driven “socialization of capital” does leave “the implementation of certain processes to the private households of its members.”  However, they perform their work “more or less as a technical assignment.”[60]

It was this vision of a peaceful economic revolution, guided by peasant-controlled cooperatives, that an increasingly desperate Chayanov put forward in the late 1920’s as the alternative to a mass collectivization of farms.  He even turned for support to the spirit of Lenin, who once remarked that “a system of civilized cooperators” could be part of socialism.[61]

However, by the late 1920’s Chayanov had made a powerful enemy of Joseph Stalin.  As the latter consolidated power as General Secretary of the Communist Party, he also launched his violent “horizontal” consolidation of the Russian peasantry.  In a speech delivered December 27, 1929, Stalin attacked Chayanov by name for refusing to accept the theory of ground rent devised by Marx and Lenin.[62]  A few months later, Chayanov, Kondratiev, and other colleagues were arrested.  Stalin’s prosecutors charged that they were “wreckers” and members of a secret, counter-revolutionary group, the Labour Peasant Party.  Condemned to the Gulag, Chayanov died near Alma Alta in 1939, martyr for a Third Way economics.

He left a significant intellectual legacy.  Translation of his basic work into English in 1966 was a major stimulus to the revival of academic interest in the peasantry during the late 1960’s and 1970’s, evidenced most notably in the launching of The Journal of Peasant Studies.  James Scott’s influential 1976 volume The Moral Economy of the Peasant drew heavily on Chayanov’s framework.[63]  Recent national and international activism to protect family farming, such as the protests of the controversial group Via Camesina, claims Chayanov as an inspiration.  Via Camesina seeks “just prices” for farm goods, declares “local food” to be a human right, and—in opposing the World Trade Organization—advances the idea of “food sovereignty.”  It is difficult to judge how Chayanov would react to this language.  However, he probably would agree with one sympathetic commentator that “[s]tate and market—the antagonists of old—still threaten peasant livelihood today, along with the new superstate forms of government.”[64]

All the same, the premature end of his theoretical work was a deep loss.  Chayanov was an innovator, moving not only toward a general theory of peasant economy, but also to a broader theory of the natural family economy.  He exposed how both neo-classical and Marxist theory largely ignored family relations and their powerful economic consequences.  He placed the natural family at the core of his analysis, and began to see the vast ramifications of so doing.  Chayanov’s arrest put an end to this quest. A half century would pass before economists such as Gary Becker returned to the question.  The gulag also denied Chayanov the grand opportunity to test his theory of future peasant economic development in his native land, where it would surely have enjoyed popular support. 

Another aspect of the tragedy of Chayanov is ably captured by economic historian Mark Harrison.  “Perhaps Chayanov was the Newton of agrarian societies,” he writes.  “The trouble is that today we believe in relativity.”[65]  Chayanov’s moral economy premised on the natural family finds too little resonance in a civilization largely given over to an amplified moral individualism and an unsettled post-family order.

Endnotes:

1 Ivan Kremnev (pseudonym of A.V. Chayanov), “The Journey of my Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 4 (Oct. 1976): 75, 77, 79, 83.

2 R.E.F. Smith, “Notes on the Sources of George Orwell’s 1984,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 4 (Oct. 1976): 9-10.

3 R.E.F. Smith, “Introduction,” Journal of Peasant Studies 4 (Oct. 1976): 5.

4 P. Orlovskii, “Forward,” The Journey of My Brother Alexei, pp. 65-70.

5 Kremnev, The Journey of My Brother Alexi, p. 83.

6 Ibid., pp. 89-90.

7 Ibid., pp. 84, 88.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., pp. 90-91.

10 Ibid., pp. 97-99, 112.

11 Ibid., pp. 97-99.

12 Ibid., pp. 114-15.

13 A phrase applied to Chayanov in:  Marc Edelman, “Bringing the Moral Economy Back In ... the Study of 21st Century Transnational Peasant Movements,” American Anthropologist 107 (No. 3, 2005): 331-33.

14 See:  Mark Harrison, “Chayanov and the Economics of the Russian Peasantry,” Journal of Peasant Studies 2 (July 1975): 389; F. Sanchez de Puerta, “Chayanov and Social Agronomy in Russia (1918),” at http://library. wur.nl/ejae/vln 3-2.html (12/6/2006): 2; and Daniel Thorner, “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy,” in A.V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy (Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986): xii.

15  A.V. Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization (Moscow: The Cooperative Publishing House, 1925): 37-38.

16  Mark Harrison, “The Peasant Mode of Production in the Work of A.V. Chayanov.”

17  Harrison, “Chayanov and the Economics of the Russian Peasantry,” p. 393.

18  Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910-1925 (Oxford:  At the Clarendon Press, 1972): 105.

19  Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 43.

20  Ibid., p. 46.  Also:  Edelman, “Bringing the Moral Economy Back In,” p. 334.

21 Gary Littlejohn, “Peasant Economy and Society,” in Barry Hindess, ed., Sociological Theories of the Economy (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977): 121.

22  Noted in Thorner, “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy,” p. xv.

23 A.V. Chayanov, “On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems [1924],” in Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, p. 4, 11; also Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 42.  Early on, Chayanov posits two other economies as well - “serf” and “feudal” - yet decides in the end that these are merely variations of the “family economy.”  See:  Thorner, “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy,” p. xxii.

24 Chayanov, “On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems,” pp. 25, 27.

25 Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 48.

26 R. Roberts and T. Mutersbaugh, “Commentary,” Environment and Planning 28 (1996): 952.

27 Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 86.

28 Ibid., p. 4.

29 Chayanov, “On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems,” p. 5.

30 Harrison, “The Peasant Mode of Production in the Work of A.V. Chayanov,” p. 332.

31 Theodor Shanin, “Chayanov’s Message:  Illuminations, Miscomprehensions, and the Contemporary ‘Development Theory,’” in Chayanov, The Thoery of Peasant Economy, p. 6.

32 Harrison, “The Peasant Mode of Production in the Work of A.V. Chayanov,” p. 324; and Harrison, “Chayanov and the Economies of the Russian Peasantry,” p. 407.

33  Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 42.

34  Harrison, “Chayanov and the Economics of the Russian Peasantry,” p. 390.

35  Chayanov, “On a Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems,” p. 24.

36 See: Teodor Shanin, “The Nature and Logic of the Peasant Economy.  II:  Diversity and Change.  III: Policy and Intervention, “Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (Jan. 1974): 201.

37  Thorner, “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy,” p. xx.

38  Chayanov, “On a Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems,” p. 13.

39  Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 39-41, 225.

40  Andrew Lytle, “The Hind Tit,” in I’ll Take My Stand:  The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge and London:  Louisiana State University Press, 1977 [1930]):  241.

41  Shanin, The Awkward Class, p. 101.

42  Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 257.

43  Ibid., p. 54.  Emphasis added.

44  Teodor Shanin, “The Nature and Logic of the Peasant Economy 1: A Generalisation,” Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (Oct. 1973): 68.

45  Thorner, “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy,” p. xvii.

46  Harrison, “The Peasant Mode of Production in the Work of A.V. Chayanov,” p. 330.

47  Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 41.

48  Ibid., pp. 64, 94, 101.  Also:  Shanin, “The Nature and Logic of the Peasant Economy. 1:  A Generalization,” p. 70; and Harrison, “The Peasant Mode of Production in the Work of A.V. Chayanov,” p. 333.

49  Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, pp. 5-7, 92.

50  Ibid., p. 42.

51  Ibid., pp. 48, 57-63, 69.  Also: Shanin, The Awkward Class, p. 102; and Harrison, “Chayanov and the Economics of the Russian Peasantry,” p. 398.

52  Chayanov, “On a Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems,” p. 13.

53 Alexander Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Co-operatives, trans. by David Wedgwood Benn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991 [1927]: 5.

54  Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 96; and Roberts and Mutersbaugh, “Commentary,” pp. 953-54.

55  Roberts and Mutersbaugh, “Commentary,” p. 954.

56  Thorner, “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy,” p. xvii.

57  Puerta, “Chayanov and Social Agronomy in Russia,” p. 4.

58  Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, p. 256.

59  Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Cooperatives, p. 10.  Emphasis added.

60  Ibid., pp. 10-11.  Emphasis added.

61  Ibid., p. 22.

62  Littlejohn, “Peasant Economy and Society,” p. 118.

63  James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).

64  Edelman, “Bringing the Moral Economy Back In...,” p. 341.

65  Harrison, “The Peasant Mode of Production in the Work of A.V. Chayanov,” p. 331.