Alexander Chayanov
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Alexander Vasilievich Chayanov
(1888 - 1937), pseudonym Ivan Kremnev, theoretician of the peasant family farm, leading chair of agricultural economics in Soviet Russia in the 1920s.
Born in Moscow, Alexander Chayanov entered the famous Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1906 (known as the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy from 1917 to 1923 and as the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy since 1923) and graduated with a diploma in agricultural economics in 1911. Appointed associate professor in 1913, he became full professor and chair of the agricultural organization in 1918, and worked at the academy until his arrest in 1930. In 1919 he was appointed director of the Seminar of Agricultural Economy. In 1922 this institution became the Research Institute for Agricultural Economics and Politics. As director, Chayanov gathered an illustrious body of researchers. Often traveling abroad from 1911 onward, he became an internationally recognized specialist in his field, forming a network of correspondence in more than sixty countries. Chayanov actively participated in the Russian cooperative movement, filling leading positions during World War I and after the Revolution. From 1917 onward, he also took part in shaping agricultural policy, drafting plans for agricultural development at the Peoples Commissariat for Agriculture and the State Planning Commission.
Accused of being the head of the "Toiling Peasant Party," Chayanov was arrested in 1930. Only in 1987 did details of his further fate become known. Although the planned show trial never took place, he was sentenced to five years in prison in 1931 and exiled to Kazakhstan. Released due to his poor state of health, Chayanov worked from 1933 to 1935 in the Kazakh Agricultural Institute in Alma-Ata, teaching statistics. In connection with the show trial against Bukharin, he was newly arrested in March 1937, sentenced to death October 3, 1937, and shot the same day in Alma-Ata.
Belonging to the "neopopulist tradition," in the 1920s Chayanov became the most eminent theoretician of its Organization and Production School of Agricultural Doctrine. His fundamental work, Peasant Farm Organization (1925), was published in an earlier form in 1923 in Berlin. Emphasizing the viability of peasant agriculture and its ability to survive, he posited a special economic behavior of peasant households that relied almost exclusively on the labor of family members. Unlike the capitalist enterprise, the peasant family worked for a living, not for a profit, thus the degree of "self-exploitation" was determined not by capitalist criteria but by a hedonic calculus. He envisioned the modernization of traditional small farming not as part of capitalist or socialist development, but as part of a peasant process of raising the technical level of agricultural production through agricultural extension work and cooperative organization. His vision of a future peasant Russia is described in his utopian novel Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia (1920). This work later became instrumental in his downfall. His studies on the optimal size of agricultural enterprises are of interest even today. Chayanov's theory of the peasant mode of production challenged the Marxist interpretation of differentiation of the peasantry into classes by positing the idea of a cyclical mobility based on the peasant family life cycle.
Chayanov's ideas have survived him. His work after his arrest was rediscovered in the West in the mid-1960s. His pioneering study of the family labor farm now claimed the attention of agricultural sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists working on developing countries where the peasant economy remains a predominant factor. In spite of the problematic nature of part of his work, it is generally seen as an important contribution to the development of the theory of peasant economy.
Bibliography
Bourgholtzer, Frank, ed. (1999). "Aleksandr Chayanov and Russian Berlin." Journal of Peasant Studies 26 (Special Issue).
Harrison, Mark. (1975). "Chayanov and the Economics of the Russian Peasantry." Journal of Peasant Studies 2(4):389 - 417.
Kerblay, Basile. (1966). "A. V. Chayanov: Life, Career, Works." In Chayanov, Aleksandr V., The Theory of Peasant Economy, eds. Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerblay, R. E. F. Smith. Homewood, IL: Richard Irwin (American Economic Association).
Millar, James R. (1970). "A Reformulation of A. V. Chayanov's Theory of the Peasant Economy." Economic Development and Cultural Change 18:219 - 229.
—STEPHAN MERL
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Alexander Chayanov
Alexander V. Chayanov (Russian: Александр Васильевич Чаянов) (1888 – October 3, 1937) was a Soviet agrarian economist, and scholar of rural sociology and advocate of agrarianism and cooperatives.
He was a proponent of agricultural cooperatives, but was skeptical about the inefficiency of large-scale farms. Chayanov's skepticism was rooted in the idea that households, especially peasant households which practice subsistence farming, will tend to produce only the amount of food that they need to survive. He believed that the Soviet government would find it difficult to force these households to cooperate and produce a surplus. These views were sharply criticized by Joseph Stalin as "defence of the kulaks". However, Chayanov was ultimately shown to be right about the problems with Soviet agricultural planning.
In 1930 Chayanov was arrested in the "Case of the Labour Peasant Party" (Трудовая крестьянская партия), fabricated by the NKVD. The name of the party was taken from a science fiction book written by Chayanov in the 1920s. The process was intended to be a show trial, but it fell apart, due to the strong will of the defendants. Nevertheless on a secret trial in 1932 Chayanov was sentenced to five years in Kazakhstan labour campss. On October 3, 1937 Chayanov was arrested again, tried and shot the same day.
His wife was repressed as well and spent 18 years in labour camps. Chayanov was rehabilitated in 1987.
Chayanov's major works, Peasant Farm Organisation (originally published in Russian in 1925) and On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems were first translated into English in 1966. Chayanov's theory of the peasant household influenced economic anthropology. The substantivist Marshall Sahlins drew on Chayanov in his theory of the domestic mode of production, but later authors have argued that Chayanov's use of neo-classical economics supports a formalist position.
His book Puteshestvie moego brata Alekseia v stranu krest’ianskoi utopii [My brother Alexei's journey into the land of peasant utopia] (Moskva: Gosizdat, 1920) predicted a rapid transfer of power into peasant hands; its hero wakes up in 1984, "in a country where the village has conquered the city, where handicraft cooperatives have replaced industry." Like Evgeny Zamyatin's We, it contains theosophical elements.[1]
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Consumption-labour-balance principle
The higher the ratio of dependents to workers in a household, the harder the workers have to work. Chayanov proposed that peasants would work as hard as they needed in order to meet their subsistence needs, but had no incentive beyond those needs and therefore would slow and stop working once they were met. The principle, which is called the consumption-labour-balance principle, is therefore that labour will increase until it meets (balances) the needs (consumption) of the household. This view of peasant farming implies that it will not develop into capitalism without some external, added factor. Furthermore, the peasant's way of life is seen as ideologically[citation needed] opposed to capitalism in that the family work for a living, not for a profit.
In practice
In practice, the consumption-labour-balance principle means that accounting is not as precise on a farm than in a regular financial capitalist company. This, as there is no separation between capital and labour. Accounting works with an artificial cost structure which charges all kinds of costs which in reality, a farm does not have. For example, wage and farm-grown animals as well as organic fertiliser and animal feed are charged against commercial (artificial) fertiliser and composed animal feeds. A bought tractor is written off in four years against the bought value while the farmer often buys a second secondhand tractor and carries along with it for another 15 years.[2]
Chayanov's influence
Chayanov's ideas have survived him. His work was rediscovered by Westerners in the mid-1960s. Agricultural sociologists, anthropologists and ethnologists working in developing countries, where the peasant economy remains a predominant factor, apply his theory to help understand the nature of the family labour farm. Halil Inalcik, the leading historian of the Ottoman Empire, applied his ideas to peasant land tenure in the Ottoman Empire.
Beginning in the mid 1990s, Vladimir Megre's Ringing Cedars series have many points in common with Chayanov.[3]
References
- ^ Thomas Lahusen in V. Y. Mudimbe, ed., Nations, Identities, Cultures (Duke University Press, 1997: ISBN 0-8223-2065-7), p. 128.
- ^ "Sterk Gemengd," EOS magazine March 2009.
- ^ Leonid Sharashkin, The socioeconomic and cultural significance of food gardening in the Vladimir region of Russia, Phd Dissertation, University of Missouri–Columbia May 2008 p.237
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