Peasant Economy

Reflections on the Notion of "Peasant Economy"*

Pierre Vilar

full awareness of the difficulties of the subject, I would like to share with you some of the doubts, concerns, and even irritations

evoked by the abundance of literature which has appeared over the past few years dealing with the "agrarian problem," "peasant economy," "agrarian reform," "historical role of the peasantry," etc. Col- laboration between economists, sociologists, politicians, and historians is desirable, even necessary. But there are two risks involved: confusion of ideas and simplification. I should say immediately and unreservedly that the meeting we just held here was in no way guilty of either of these faults. Quite to the contrary, I was delighted with the seriousness, rigor, and readiness to analyze in depth and to appreciate the complexities of the subject that was shown in the various discussions by my Spanish friends, geographers, and historians, most particularly the younger ones.

I do not ignore the fact that some masterpieces have been writ- ten about peasants, nor that the peasantry, the "peasant movement," has achieved social transformations as fundamental as those in China or Cuba. What does bother me is the use of the word peasant without any qualifiers, as if the concept of peasant, a peasantry in itself, existed. For, as soon as an urban civilization exists, the figure, the image of the peasant becomes the object of a double myth: con- tempt for anything rustic and the cult of the farmer {labrador) (or even the shepherd!), and the "glorification of the village." We have

Translated by Carol Dean Nassau from Economia Agraria en la Historia de Espana (1978) with the permission of the author and the publisher, Fundaciônjuan March. The paper was originally offered in the Seminario de Historia Agraria held on March 9-11, 1977, under the direction of Prof. Don Miguel Artola, catedrâtico of Contemporary Spanish History at the Universidad Autônoma de Madrid.

review, xxi, 2, 1998, 151-89 151

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also been confronted with two visions- and, undoubtedly, two truths- of the political role of the peasantry in direct conflict with each other. One sees the peasantry as a locus of all the conserva- tisms, of all the reactions, and the other (Che Guevara or Frantz Fanon) sees it as the locus of all revolutionary aspirations. Such contradictions should be enough to make us cautious about using the word peasant without further specifications or analysis.

For several years now, in the vocabulary of sociologists and historians, there has been a tendency to use the notion of a peasant economy to characterize certain widespread types of societies, whether ancient or contemporary. My former colleague and friend, the late Daniel Thorner, eminent specialist in contemporary India, explicitly inspired by the vocabulary of A.V. Chayanov, Russian agronomist and economist writing between 1910-30, proposed the concept of peasant economy in 1962 at the International Conference of Economic Historians in Aix-en-Provence, and later in an article in Annales in 1964 (Thorner, 1964). In 1973, at an internal meeting of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, shortly before his death, Thorner presented a paper, as yet unpublished, in which, with reference to Chayanov and the concept of peasant economy, he denounced the Marxist concept of mode of production as not useful and outdated. According to Thorner, it was incapable of clarifying the fundamental characteristics of countries like Tsarist Russia, India, Indonesia, China, pre-1914 Japan, or pre-1930 Mexico.

I confess that I reacted with a certain vivacity. Unfortunately, fate had it that Thorner's paper was never published. What I argued in our brief discussions was basically the following: it is possible that very large societies, as those he mentioned, are dominated over- whelmingly by a peasant economy no longer strictly belonging to the feudal mode of production and not fully belonging to the capitalist mode of production. But, what makes us think that we clarify their specific characteristics just by calling them "peasant?"

The instrumental concept of mode of production has its faults if understood only superficially. It is possible that, on different occasions, it has led to schematism. But it is not schematic by nature, but rather a global concept, one that makes of the internal contradictions of all systems the very principle of their dynamic and the origin of their transformations. Therefore, it must (and can) transmit those same qualities to the models which derive from it, just as the oppos- ing models derived from the concept of a pure economy- the mar-

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ket, perfect competition, theories of equilibrium-separate what is economic from what is social and hide the founding contradictions. The concept of peasant economy, as seen in its very name, discovers what it was looking to find, an economic model, an exclusively economic model. Such a model may aid the description or perhaps the explanation of partial mechanisms, but it is very doubtful that it can clarify the origins, the crises and the destiny of a society. In short, it does not seem to be an adequate instrument for global historical analysis. We will return to this consideration in the conclusion.

It is understandable that observers of India and China, which have such an enormous peasantry and so many centuries of appar- ent immobility, have tried to theorize their seeming originality. My own ignorance of Asian problems leads me to be cautious. But for regions closer to us and of relatively recent development, the peasant problem, or the agrarian problem, has inspired tendencies similar to those I have just cited. The intent is to isolate the problems of the countryside. How many books, both about the past and the present, have titles adorned with the words "rural," "agricultural," "countryside," "peasant," "peasantry"! Let us recognize that this is quite natural. We need go back only two hundred years to find a world where the peasantry represented 60, 70, 80 % of society. But, would that lead us to conclude that peasantry equals society? Is the concept of peasantry coherent?

Then came the time when the peasantry no longer occupied numerically the privileged place that it had held in societies that were less developed. There were then two temptations for observers of society. One was to devalue the persisting importance of the peasant masses in those groups that are developing rapidly, and to become preoccupied then with large-scale commerce, the birth of industrialization, the emergence of capitalism. I refer to those studies that consider modern times as beginning with mercantile capitalism, for- getting that, before 1760-80, in no country had the fundamental social structures ceased to be those of the countryside, one whose permeability to the penetration of the monetary economy was very unequal.

But there exists an opposite tendency, one which, in periods of transition, emphasizes the particularity if not the extensiveness of the peasant world. Here, some Marxists have suggested (erroneously in my view) in their vocabularies an isolation, a specificity of the countryside in the global society, by speaking of a smallholding

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mode of production, and simple commodity mode of production. Such expressions, taken from isolated phrases used by Marx, seem to be more related to the concepts of Chayanov or Thorner than to Marx's global thinking.

Finally, if we place ourselves in recent times and in nearby countries-Spain and France, for example- we find a surprisingly rapid development, one that in just a few years has changed the proportion of the active peasant population to the overall active population from 50 to 60% down to 20, 15, and as low as 10 percent. And the reactions, again, are multiple and various. Some economists applaud such a change as rational and propose that it be accelerated. Many sociologists and politicians, at quite varying levels of sincerity and analysis, defend family ownership and the small peasantry. Others, due to sentimental nostalgia or intellectual curiosity, become anthro- pologists or ethnologists, and study our last villages in the manner of Frobenius or Lévi-Strauss.

Faced with so many different positions (and all, to a certain degree, justified), how can we select our scientific instruments? Will one of them be the notion of peasant economy? That is the question I would like to address. Discovering Chayanov is becoming a more and more fashionable attitude in the West. But, will it be a scientific attitude or an ideological illusion, an instinctive, existential, classist reaction?

One quite appreciates the intoxication one experiences when rediscovering the wealth of thoughts, studies, and hopes manifested by the Russian intelligentsia found before and immediately following 1917. The subsequent closing of the curtain on this wealth explains today's admiration perfectly. But it is important to guard against the illusions and mirages that ideological prejudices can incite concern- ing the real values revealed by pluralism and freedom at the dawn of the Great Revolution.

Agronomy and the rural economy are particularly rich subjects in Russian reflection of 1880-1913 and 1917-30. Between the time of the emancipation of the slaves and the laws of Stolypin, the Rus- sian peasantry was in rapid change, even though it retained its basic characteristics, both its values and its sufferings. Already at that time, the three problems which Thorner defines with respect to the Third World (in his preface to Chayanov's English edition [Thorner, 1966: xi]) were being posed: 1) How can traditional society emerge from misery, filth, and illiteracy? 2) How can it modernize its tech-


niques? 3) How can such a society be integrated into the harmony of a global economy, national but more advanced?

Though faced with such problems, Russia, compared to Germany (at that time at the pinnacle of the scientific transformation of agriculture), or compared with the much more similar case of Spain (the Spain of the Institute for Agrarian Reform and of Joaquin Costa), appears to be, through its publications and activities, enjoying a surprising fecundity. The agrarian surveys and statistics from the zemtsvas fill 70 volumes. The number of agronomists working for those institutions increased from 124 in 1895 to 2,701 in 1912. Stu- dent enrollment in agronomy schools increased from 75 to 3,922. There should be no illusions: Chayanov, whose youth coincided with that period, criticized the usefulness of such surveys that have 677 questions! But, when his simplified version of such a survey was distributed, only 300 of the 7,000 people questioned replied and of these, only 164 answered in an acceptable manner. This gap between desired knowledge and possible knowledge measures the distance between practice and theory. The idea that one cannot initiate reforms without basic knowledge has jeopardized more than one agrarian reform. Spanish anarchists in 1932 called the debates on agrarian reform "masterpieces of pedantry." The criticism was ill- tempered, but not completely unjustified. Lenin had thought a great deal about agrarian problems. When he came to power, he did not call for a further stage of gathering information. His famous decree on the land came out one month after the political revolution. He did not have the illusion that it could resolve everything. But it decisively tied the fate of the poor peasant to that of the Revolution. Might not the return to Chayanov more or less signify a nostalgia for the old pedantries?

The truth is that Chayanov is an exceptional personality. He is not the only one; he is merely the most brilliant spirit of a school. But he did have everything it would take to earn our admiration today. With a literary temperament, he invented political fiction and was active in theater. A mathematician and a formalist, he proposed a paleontology of economic knowledge and a planning that would become more an art of animating thought than science. His vocabulary was 50 years ahead of ours (and I do not imply that ours is 50 years behind).

Chayanov was born in 1888 and by 1913 had already published thirteen original studies. In 1919, after the Revolution, and until

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1930, he headed up the well-known college of agronomic studies in Moscow which had 18 instructors, 30 researchers, a 140,000 volume library, and an Institute of Conjunctural Analysis jointly directed with Kondratieff. Therefore, until the decisive phase of collectivization, Chayanov was not a dissident, but rather an official. He was an innovator who promoted change eagerly. True to his first "organizational" ideas, he believed in the specificity of the Russian situation, but he had his eyes open to what was happening elsewhere. His ideas were contested strongly outside Russia as well as within, at his own Institute. But, until the about-face of collectivization which brought on his downfall, he was respected. He was exiled to Alma Ata in 1932. After that, nothing is known of him.

With only the works published in English, German, or Spanish as a basis, you will appreciate that it is impossible to evaluate and criticize Chayanov's work, and this is not at all my intention. What I would like to characterize is the spirit of a school, a tendency, a heritage, for what we now discuss of him today is essentially that.

When Chayanov began writing and publishing between 1908 and 1913, the two crises that had inspired Russian agrarian literature up to 1900- the worldwide and longlasting crisis of overproduction of the 1880's and the terrible famine of 1891 which took millions of lives- were, for the most part, already forgotten. Young Russian agronomists no longer worked in the employ of the great landowners as they had before. They made surveys for the zemstvas, were active in agricultural societies, and considered themselves to be working on behalf of the people, through their technical and economic expertise. They called themselves "organizational with the slogan "Organization and Production." Today, we would say technocracy and productivism. The old controversies between populism and Marxism on the "road to socialism" seemed to them to have been resolved. And they planned to show it theoretically, by concen- trating only on their domain of the "peasant economy"- without using the categories that they believed were common to classical/ marginalist and Marxist economics (and without dealing with the differences among these two)- and thereby arriving at its fundamental concepts.

A typical expression of this vision is found in Kosinski's Agrarian Questions, published in Odessa in 1906. He addresses there what Chayanov will merely generalize and treat in greater depth:

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We cannot properly speak of rent or profit in the peasant economy because the peasant who incarnates simultaneously land, capital, and labor does not divide the value created by the production process between necessary costs and surplus-value. The entire value that is created is used indivisibly and is equal to the sum of capitalist surplus-value and wages. Therefore, the idea of surplus-value, as well as the idea of capital, is foreign to him. The peasant considers the net income that he earns thanks to his natural resources, which he owns himself, to be the product of his work.

These statements that critics generally consider typical, together with the "essential notions" are, in reality, a rather puerile discovery. Kablukov, Chelinchev, Bruckus, Makarov, and Chayanov would later reiterate these views with a few nuances. They stem from the idea- implicit, certainly, in many first year political economy classes- that all economic agents make their decisions in terms of cost and utility, and that no one buys a loaf of bread without first calculating its marginal utility. In reality, everything stated as an economic law ought to be prefaced by: "everything happens as if ..." rather than suggesting the absurd image of a conscious calculation at every level. One only needs to study a small amount of business history to know that management, profitability, marginal efficiency of capital, redun- dancy of the work force, etc. have not been operational realities in daily practice (except in quite recent times and in very restricted zones). A great number of capitalist entrepreneurs believed (many still do), just as Kosinski's peasant, that the net income which is generated from their own resources, calculated grosso modo at the end of the fiscal year, is the product of their "labor." It took the genius of Quesnay to discover "net product" and the genius of Marx to discover "surplus-value." And, around 1900, they were discovering that such notions did not occupy the minds of the average mujik. What infantilism!

But by no means were these observations devoid of significance. They merely emphasized facts about which our modern statisticians are frequently confused. How, for example, can labor provided by a traditional peasant family be compared with the time-clocked labor of a factory worker? When the French decided (in 1956, if I remember correctly) to consider full-time work done by a farmer's wife to be only half-time (another approximation!), the active peasant work

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force (in work equivalence) went down by one million. It is clear that productivity declined accordingly. This gives us great confidence in the validity of statistical series!

It is true that the peasant proprietor-or the one in charge of a unit of production- organizes his labor freely, without calculations, varying it from zero to sixteen or eighteen hours a day depending on the season. It is also true that what we call in France aides familiaux (family helpers)- women, children, sons-in-law, the young and the old, domestic workers and alimentados alike- are less free than the father of the family. They obey him. There are then nuances in what Chayanov calls "self-exploitation." It is in many cases a fairly harsh exploitation by the nuclear family.

If we now shift from looking at the moment that the labor force was being used to the moment that it was being remunerated, we know very well that the latter corresponded, essentially, with family self-consumption of the farm product. But how are we going to show by statistical comparisons the subsistence-equivalent offered to each unit of labor that was incorporated? Chayanov, at this point, did not use figures on the average monetary salary paid in the observed region to the salaried worker, since he argued that the level of domestic consumption in the peasant family varied considerably depending on space and time. A debatable statement. In eighteenth- century France and Spain, serious research informs us that the habits of family consumption were very stable in a given region and, if there were differences, they were between rich and poor, between owners and tenants. Therefore, in the Spain of 1750, those who conducted the Catastro ofEnsenada did not hesitate to assess each head of a peasant unit of production and each of his helpers a basic tax proportionate to the prevailing agricultural wage in the region (with its internal hierarchy). Then, the owner-operator was taxed another time on the cumulative income of the unit less the sum of the wages already taken into account. Chayanov might argue perhaps that Ensenada's advisors were wrong. But what is certain is that they were not under the influence of the concept of marginal value nor of the Marxist concept of surplus-value. It thus seems quite clear that the peasant proprietor, insofar as he made no distinction between his labor input and his ownership of the means of production, does not fit the capitalist model.

But it is clear that it is equally difficult to imagine an economy entirely comprised of a collection of family units that would be


content to reduce or increase their consumption according to the vagaries of the harvests. The "natural economy" of the early German historical schools never existed; this is completely demonstrated today. I remember a time in my childhood (which corresponded, more or less, to Chayanov's most active years) when I met a friendly Utopian socialist who described the ideal society to me as an ensem- ble of autonomous farms (granjas autonomas) existing side by side in nature. I also had, a bit later, a excellent Latin teacher who dreamed of cultivating the land as he read Virgil. We will see that Chayanov, in those same years, also nourished similar Utopias. One may wonder if they did not reflect his theoretical schémas. Frequently, his experiences as an observer, a technician, and a man of action contra- dicted both his theoretical affirmations and his Utopian dreams.

An "autonomous farm," if we accept the hypotheses for a moment, would have to engage in three fundamental economic operations: 1) guarantee the existence and the reproduction of the labor force; 2) amortize capital, repairing equipment {cheptel mort, or dead cattle, in French), and feeding the livestock (cheptel vif, or live cattle, in French); 3) invest, since sowing, planting trees, and raising livestock are productive investments (and who does not do it?).

The problem lies in knowing if these three operations- over a given period, if not every year- would be covered by the output of the unit. We can imagine a succession of deficits and surpluses that would balance out in the middle run. This seems to be Chayanov's hypothesis. But, all continuous deficits or any momentary deficit that is too great (a frequent occurrence in the old agricultural economies) run the risk of eliminating the unit of production and labor. On the other hand, any considerable or continuous profit would lead the farm to grow at the expense of neighboring farms, or to commercialize the product outside the "peasant economy." An autonomous farm, in order to maintain itself as such, would require a constant equilibrium or, at least, a fairly regular one.

Ever since there has been a tax on land-income in France, the peasant, to a certain degree, has accepted the balancing game imagined by Chayanov. He has called "land-income" (renta in Spanish, revenu in French) not, as in the case of other social categories, that which is needed to live on, but rather that which is left in the hands of the head of the unit of production at the end of the year after living and investment expenses are deducted. Therefore, every year, the French peasant declaring himself to be either in deficit, or in a

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precarious equilibrium, or with a very small profit and thus, until quite recently, has been "dead fiscally." This characteristic is part of the condition of those who have combated the spontaneous tendency to eliminate the average peasant through competition and concentration. In spite of this, competition, elimination, and concentration are triumphing today. Marginal units have been defended for electoral, political, and social reasons. But, when the process of capitalistic development intensified, the peasant economy died. It will be argued that this is not the situation in present-day India nor was it the case in Russia at the beginning of this century. But, with regard to Russia, we can cite Chayanov against Chayanov, that is, Chayanov, the observer and technician, versus Chayanov, the "organizational" theorist of a purely "peasant" economy.

ON "PROPERTY," "UNIT OF PRODUCTION," "LAND-RENT"

The concept of "peasant economy" assumes a confusion between property, unit of production, and labor. It is obvious that the peasant is not going to calculate year by year what part of his product is attributable (as the economists say) to labor, land, and capital. But, if some day he decides, out of convenience or necessity, to rent or sell his land, the notion of a price of rent will necessarily arise. Chayanov does not deny the concept of "renting the land." He frequently takes that into account. First, then, we need to know what was the proportion of rented land in Russia around 1900. Property- unit of production-division into small plots: our discussions at the meeting have shown how crucial it is not to confuse these concepts. If there is renting, then there is rental-income from the land. And, regarding such rental-income from the land, Chayanov, as we will see, is not very clear. He says:

Rent as an objective economic income category obtained after deducting material costs of production, wages, and the usual interest on capital from gross income cannot exist in the family economic unit because the other factors are absent. Nevertheless, the usual rent-forming factors like better soil and better location in relation to the market do surely exist for commodity-producing family labor economic units, too. They


must have the effect of increasing output and the amount of payment per labor unit (Chayanov, 1966: 8).

In this text, the "objective categories" of capitalist production are again introduced, at least for units that work "for the market." But, how many units work for the market and how many are truly autonomous farms (assuming that such can exist)? It seems obvious that if the family unit is outside the market, there cannot be rental income of any kind. If the unit is within the circuit of the market, the laws of "imputing" value should be applied and then there is nothing spe- cial. In any case, if rental-income is generated, what permits us to assume that it will affect only the consumption of the worker? If the rent is paid to someone outside ("land-rent"), how would the worker consume it? If it is an integral part of the gross revenue of the unit, who keeps the head of the unit of production from saving and investing it?

We will also see in Chayanov's text how the possible "profits from the enterprise" can get confused with "normal interest on capital," a position typical of a time when the category of profits disap- pears from the horizon of capitalist theory. And finally, regarding rental-income from the land, this income can only be differential, purely Ricardian.

On this last point, we should recall the recent lessons that the younger commentators on Marxist thought- Le Floch, Gilles Postel- Vinay, Pierre-Phillipe Rey- have drawn from the notion of "articulation of modes of production," particularly of the articulation of feudal categories with capitalist categories. Feudal proprietorship accorded rights- limited rights, to be sure- over the land and over the person of the peasant, and also over his product. When, in the transition towards capitalism, dominion over the person and customary levying on the product disappeared, what replaced it was absolute ownership of the land, that is, a monopoly of its use. In such a case, a person who does not own land and needs to cultivate a field, has to pay a rent to the owner, which will be calculated on the product, just as in the feudal system. If he is poor and it is a bad year, he will be subject to debts and legal persecutions that might be eased depending on whether some traditional paternalism remains. That is the feudal heritage. Land-rent, in this case, expresses a "relation of production." Conversely, if, between the landowner and the product itself, an entrepreneur with great means of production is inserted,

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the rent that this entrepreneur pays to the owner, just like the interest that he might pay to a capitalist for money or goods provided, would represent a relation of distribution (distribution of the surplus-value between capital and the entrepreneur). The notion of "differential rent" might be involved in this distribution. But it suffices that there be absolute ownership of land to create the possibility of "absolute rent."

These instruments of analysis have been sufficient for Gilles Postel-Vinay to clarify many of the phenomena surrounding "rental- income from the land" which have been present in France since the seventeenth century. On the other hand, Gabriel Desert and Mau- rice Lévy-Leboyer, despite their deep knowledge about the problems of Normandy, because they lacked an adequate theory, have drawn contradictory conclusions and engaged in sterile controversies. The notion of peasant economy nowhere suffices to characterize the social relations involved with the land. It is incapable of creating a clear definition of the various types of rental-income from the land.

ON THE FAMILY AS A UNIT OF MANPOWER

I have previously emphasized, with regard to the Catastro of Ensenada, that the Spaniards of the eighteenth century underlined particularly the difference between the condition of the day laborer, migrating and subject to seasonal layoffs, and that of the young domestic worker raised and fed on the same rural unit. The day laborer was considered a permanent social danger. His future role as an industrial proletarian could not be foreseen. Domestic workers, by contrast, seemed to be a guarantee of social stability. Classical, traditional problems: Marx based his chapter about the primitive accumulation of capital on the proletarianization, expulsion, and expropriation of the English yeomanry. Lenin made the same process the major theme of his Development of Capitalism in Russia. Chaya- nov's school, insisting upon the equilibrium of the peasant cell, seems to be returning to the hopes and fears of the eighteenth century.

Clearly, Chayanov could not ignore the fact that the presumed "equilibrium" of peasant society was being threatened right in front of his eyes by marked demographic growth. He then tried to per- suade himself that a law of equilibrium could adapt the dimensions


of the peasant unit to the number of workers it has available. He expressed the hope that a progressive increase in the standard of living, as that which occurred in France, would lead spontaneously to a voluntary limit on the size of the peasant family. It is obvious then what model is preferred by Chayanov: a peasant revolution in the French style, Malthusianism in both senses of the word, social con- servatism. But, would the French model be valid on the scale of the Russian or Asian peasantry? Chayanov would ask the same question that René Dumont (when he limited himself to being a good observer) applied to the large Asian populations and, around 1950, to the cultivated lands of Murcia: if the rural family grows without leaving the unit of production, everything will lead toward an inevita- ble hidden slowdown, to de facto underemployment. There would no longer be "self-exploitation" of the family group, but rather just the opposite, a cost of collective consumption that would be excessive in proportion to the work contributed. Would such a situation be viable on a long-term basis?

Chayanov proposes the following formula: Decreasing yields in the peasant economy do not per se cause work to stop as long as the equilibrium between necessities and drudgery has not been attained (1966: 6). It is the recognition of a limit imposed by the "disutility of labor." Alfred Sauvy has shown that below a certain level of remu- neration of full-time work, people prefer to consume less and have more nonwork time. Underconsumption and underemployment, do they not constitute the very definition of "underdevelopment"? The consequence is: 1) migration to foreign lands which is helpful for a time but, on a long-term basis, supposes a loss of sustenance for the national economy; 2) migration to urban, industrial underemployment in the overpopulated suburbs (bidonvilles, favelas, barriadas, etc.) and, finally 3), an aspect extensively covered by Chayanov, the acceptance of outside, wage work by some members of the peasant family. This last point demonstrates the inadequacy of the revenue within the autonomous family group; it signifies, in reality, the end of the autonomy of the group. At the same time, it assumes the existence of a wage sector (whether agricultural or industrial) around the peasant economy, constituting a threat to its very existence.

All these aspects of the transition from feudalism to capitalism have been extensively studied in western Europe by our best historians and economists, although they may not have arrived at any conclusions. (I am thinking, for example, of Jean Meuvret.) The

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same issues have also been debated about the "underdeveloped" nations of the twentieth century (rarely with any results, unfortunately). In Russia, they served as the focus of discussions and, later, the basis of the revolutionary decisions. Chayanov and his friends, who were intimately involved in the controversies and action, were witnesses to this. May we suggest that the cases we have just presented test the utility of the concept of "peasant economy"?

ON THE "PEASANT ECONOMY" IN RELATION TO FOREIGN TRADE

We have expressed our doubts about the possibility of a "natural economy" or a true autonomy of the peasant reality at either the macro- or microlevel. Chayanov's practical handling shows we are right: before 1917, he was particularly concerned with the linen economy, a very important sector of Russian agriculture. But, linen cannot be eaten, so it had to be sold, and even exported. In 1916, Chayanov was given the responsibility of assuring the continuity, despite the war, of the exportation to the North of Russian linen. He was faced with the difficulties of transport, the nightmare of Russian foreign trade. Three-quarters of the linen to be exported arrived in an unusable form. Chayanov then created a large cooperative for collection and sale of the product, supported by another very large cooperative (Siberian butter) and, finally, by a large international commercial firm. We are far from the "noncommodity" economy and even from "simple commodity production."

It is true that Chayanov attributed the capacity of resistance of Russian exports of linen to the world crisis of overproduction in 1880-95 to the great elasticity of production costs within the family economy. But, we know that Brazil and Japan also handled various commercial crises, to a greater degree than other countries, by sell- ing their products for less than their value, that is, without taking into account the amount of labor supplied by an overexploited work force. This is another characteristic of underdevelopment. How can we believe that such operations may be understood exclusively in terms of a greater or lesser degree of restriction of family self-consumption? To whose benefit will the profits generated from the operation go? No one tells us.

NOTION OF "PEASANT ECONOMY" 1 65

Let us consider a valid international comparison for the same years prior to 1914. In 1907- when Chayanov began writing and Kosinski formulated the particularities of the peasant economy- viti- culture in my native region, Languedoc, went through a terrible crisis of mévente (lowering of wine prices in the market far below the production cost, leaving less than the amount needed for the family of a small viticulturist to live on). It was a typically capitalist crisis. And nonetheless, the large majority of viticultural farm units that this affected (their statistical mode) were made up of family production units. Thus we see a case completely different from that in Rus- sia, for there was no self-consumption within the unit; the peasant sold his wine and bought everything else. But that in itself seems to signify as well that the existence of a familial cell of manpower does not imply the theoretical necessity described by the Russian agronomists at the turn of the century. What they observed was the modal form of agricultural organization in their country (just as is small- scale viticulture in mine). This does not mean that such an organization is valid as a model (and even less as a mode of production).

ON "ADEQUACY" AND "INADEQUACY" AS NOTIONS- THE KEY TO "PEASANT ECONOMY"

In the Chayanovian analyses we regularly find the idea that an economy can be judged from beginning to end by the notions of adequacy and inadequacy, as experienced and understood by the economic subjects themselves. I find the concept very interesting and necessary to understand what French historians have become accustomed to calling "economies of the Ancien Régime" or "of the old style" (that is, before the technosocial revolutions of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries in western Europe). But we have to be very precise about when the notions of adequacy and inadequacy can be applied. They are somewhat in contradiction to another notion: that of the elasticity of peasant family consumption through the ups and downs of the economy. Where does elasticity end and inadequacy begin? If it is a question of absolute inadequacy, below the physiological minimum, we know that it cannot be either global or continuous. People would die off. What is interesting is that adequacy and inadequacy are manifested: 1) over time by the dif-

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ferentials in harvests, which is the problem of periodic famine; 2) in social space, by the inequality of conditions among the peasantry.

Differentials in Harvests

I do not want to spend much time on this point. I have covered it sufficiently in an article which I dedicated to my teacher Ernest Labrousse, inventor of the fundamental notion of old-style crisis, that is, the historical analysis of the social (and not the purely economic) consequences of the periodic falls in food production in the predominantly agricultural economies of olden times.

In that article I argued that the most characteristic thing about the Russian agricultural decline between 1900 and 1913 was not, as it seemed, the difference between the average Russian and European yields (for wheat, 6.5 quintals per hectare in Russia, 13.5 in France, 20 in Germany) but rather in fact the severity of the declines re- corded from one year to the next in the Russian yields. Whereas, after 1902, no annual wheat yields in Germany fell more than 4% from the previous year's harvest, the Russian wheat yield suffered declines of 8% from 1909 to 1910 and 34.8% from 1910 to 1911. Chayanov argued that the Russian peasant did not know the concept of productivity (since each year he supplied more or less the same amount of work), but that he was greatly concerned with the yield, what he got from the land compared to what he gave to it. It seems to me that the reason for such attention on the part of the Russian peasant lay precisely in the threat he faced because of the annual differential in harvests. And we know that the phenomenon has been persistent. The famine of 1891, in particular, caught the attention of the agronomists. The famine of 1921 led Chetverikoff to begin his investigations of cyclical phenomena.

But Chayanov and his school were less interested in short-term cyclical dynamics than in statistical structural models- which may be one of the reasons for his recent success in some intellectual circles. However, if his peasant economy was reacting fundamentally (as they claimed) to the contrast between adequacy and inadequacy, it could only be due more than anything else to the periodic experi- ence of bad years following good years.

If we think about the consequences (in the history of the Russian revolution) of the food crises of 1921 and 1932, we may wonder if the instruments of analysis forged by the Labrousse school about the


old-style crisis were not more useful for the study of this revolution than an extension of the concept of peasant economy would be for the study of problems of the Third World.

The Differential Social Analysis of the Peasantry

I continue to be struck, when discussing the problems of the peasantry, by the similarity between the historical analyses such as those Labrousse taught us to practice and the notes of Lenin in 1893 or his chapters on the evolution of the rural world in The Develop- ment of Capitalism in Russia. There isn't just one peasantry or one peasant problem. There are within rural society socially differentiated peasants who, in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, have lost the original unity of their class- which comes from subordina- tion and the obligations that every peasant owed to the lord. The mercantile economy, when it penetrates into the peasant economy at its various levels, creates a significant hierarchy among the peasantry which is periodically strengthened by the famines. Let us not forget how, in Spain, such a hierarchy had been clearly delineated by Zâbala in 1732 and Craywinckel in 1764. The lines of division were located between the relatively rich peasant, always the seller of some part of his product, the poor peasant who is not self-sufficient and is always the buyer of some part of his subsistence and, finally, the peasant intermediate between the two groups who has something to sell in good years (but at considerably lower prices) and much to buy in the bad years (at very high prices due to the scarcity of grains). Another characteristic, noted by Meuvret in seventeenth-century France and by Lenin in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century was that cash needs do not affect the highest strata of the peasantry as much as the lowest level which is regularly finding itself short of cash as the result of usury, taxes, and the need to purchase seed.

At the level of the poor peasantry, the peasant cell is disrupted in the microeconomy by any single incident (illness, death of the head of the family, etc.). The collective accident- the bad harvest that is translated into hunger for every poor person who is a buyer of grain- destroys the stability not of the entire peasant society but rather of a large part of its lower strata. The transition from feudalism to capitalism, even though it does not automatically reproduce the English scheme delineated by Marx, does establish everywhere a differentiation between the rich peasant, whether proprietor or

168 Pierre Vilar

capitalist leaseholder (in Russia, the kulak), and the migrant peasant (depointé in the old French texts), the Russian mujik destined, in the best of cases, to become a proletarian worker and, in the worst, one of the idle unemployed in the suburbs. Where, then, would one find the unity of the peasant or familial society? Such words have a positive ring to them that are more or less consciously motivated by ideological preferences.

It is because of this that we can perfectly understand how Stalin, basing himself firmly on Lenin's texts, could have assimilated Chaya- nov's school to right deviationism. It is obvious that the phrase directed against Bukharin in 1929 applies equally to them:

Bukharin's mistake is that he does not understand and does not accept this simple thing, he forgets about the social groups in the countryside, he loses sight of the kulaks and the poor peasants, and all that remains is one uniform mass of middle peasants (1955: 48).

Certainly the spirit and the writings of Chayanov are too complex to keep such a simplified accusation from being profoundly unjust. Much of it- its flexibility, its adaptability to differing circumstances, its discoveries both in practice and in theory, seems brilliant. The fact remains that, to the degree that his practical results were very scattered and his theories always formal, Chayanov fell into many contradictions:

1) When he insisted, as he often did, on the considerable diversity of the soil, climate, and social conditions throughout the immense Russian empire, he actually destroyed the beautiful, unified concept of a peasant economy capable of offering a model, for either conservation or construction.

2) When he proclaimed that capitalist economic theory "cannot and should not be extended to other organizational forms of economic life" (1966: 24), he stated a truth that I, as a Marxist and an historian, would personally like to see systematically accepted. But, despite this, Chayanov never ceased to reason, as a marginalist formalist, in terms of an individualist and subjective economics. It is because of this that certain critics have pointed to him as the forerun- ner of generalized economics, valid for all sociohistorical systems.

3) When war communism incited Chayanov to invent nonmone- tary economic calculus- which he did with reference to the isolated state of Von Thûnen- he fell into another formalist and structuralist


temptation which, although anticipating certain recent concepts of geography, turned its back once again on the historical vision of the economy and the world.

4) Thus, Chayanov came to present the problem of the optimal dimensions of the large agricultural units and of the future giant sovkhoz in purely spatial terms. The example of the American farms lead him to abandon, around 1928, many of his early statements about the logic of the peasant economy. As René Dumont does today, Chayanov ended by oscillating between the hopes of capitalist productivism and sentimental nostalgia about "this world that we have lost," in Laslett's language.

This doubt became more explicit when, in 1920, Chayanov, undoubtedly upset by the brutality of the tax collections of war communism, wrote a political fiction novel that the Soviet authorities agreed to publish (with a cautious preface) but which would constitute later, in all probability, the major case against him at his trial. Published under the pseudonym of Ivan Kremnev, the Journey of My Brother Alexis to the Land of Peasant Utopia is set in Moscow in 1984. The Bolshevik power had been overthrown in 1934 by a peasant revolution. Moscow has no more than 100,000 inhabitants and no town in the agricultural areas has more than 10,000. The arable land is structured like a checkerboard of fields cultivated by peasant fami- lies, grouped into cooperatives, but retaining individual incentives, prices, and wages. There are no longer bread factories (nor meat factories), but rather traditional villages with their own songs, dances, crafts, fairs, and folk costume. A short distance away, in Arkhangelskoe, which Kremnev visited, there is an ideal community of the type imagined by Kropotkin. In other countries, international communism has exploded as a result of centrifugal forces. The Ger- many of 1984 is the only state that continues the communism of the factories of the 1920's, the normal heritage of the great capitalist enterprise. But the same system has failed in Russia because it was imposed upon a peasant nation. Thus the themes of revisionism, populism, anarchistic communitarianism, even theosophy are all joined together in Chayanov's fiction. It proves how the agronomist of good will, having been enclosed in a peasant world, oscillates between two contradictory poles as unrealistic as they are unrevolu- tionary. On one side, pure theory, and on the other, Utopia.

However, our task is not to situate Chayanov within the history of the socialist revolution. It involves rather asking ourselves the

170 Pierre Vilar

question whether for the historical problems of the past and for the contemporary problems of the peasant masses undergoing transformation in the crucible of precapitalist remnants, imperialist capitalism, and socialist experiments, it is useful to adopt Chayanov's theoretical concepts as Thorner proposed to apply them, thinking that they would offer a better instrument of analysis than the Marxist concept of mode of production. (I would observe that if Thorner did not seem to condemn the instruments forged by cyclical history, then he at least forgot to include them in his study of the peasant economy.)

Let us examine the table offered by Chayanov to characterize everything that, when facing capitalism, does not obey its laws. The term mode of production does not figure in the table. But the economic systems include feudalism, slave economy and Commu- nism and in the categories presented as economic, there is a category for regulation by noneconomic force necessary for the maintenance of the system. There is no category of pure economy and it is possible that we are looking at models closer to the global concept of mode of production (an economic-legal-political-ideological whole) than Thorner seemed to think. Unfortunately, from this point of view, the table is not homogenous.

It is interesting to see Chayanov attempt an economic analysis of slavery. But, what type of slavery is he talking about? The slavery of Antiquity? Colonial slavery? American slavery before the Civil War? Probably the latter since nothing in the table, aside from the cost of slaves, seems to distinguish the slave economy from the capitalist economy. How could we not fail to think of the recent controversies between Fogel (1974) (and the "New Economic History") and Geno- vese (1974)? Such a comparison would, however, lead us very far away from our theme.

More important in pinpointing an ideology is the opposition between the two extremes on the table: capitalism and Communism as system. Capitalism is presented much the same as it was presented early in this century: all extraeconomic pressure has disappeared, surplus-value is reduced to the modest interest paid to the stockhold- ers and to the differential income which is a result of varying soil fertility. The profits of the enterprise do not appear in the table; production and reproduction of the means of production (that is, the accumulation of capital) is described as a technological process and neither the origin of capital nor who appropriates the capital


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172 Pierre Vilar

thus accumulated is specified: the guarantee given by the state system to private ownership at all levels is not defined as coercion. Con- versely, the Communism which is presented as devoid of any mercantile element can only be Communism as it is imagined in its last stage of its evolution. At that stage, only the production and reproduction of the means of production remains, and it is arranged according to the norms of the state plan. But, Communism defined in this way- Stalin insisted emphatically on this in his last pam- phlet-would assume the total elimination of mercantile processes both in agriculture and in industry and the total rationalization of economic calculation in a classless society where the administration of things will really have replaced the government of the people. In this case, extraeconomic coercion would cease to characterize it. By confusing socialism and Communism, the one a transitional phase and the other a model of the distant future, Chayanov only includes planning and coercion under the concept Communism. Presented in this manner, the capitalism-Communism contrast clearly indicates Chayanov's ideological tendency. It is the one we can find in every political speech of Western statesmen.

On the other hand, between capitalism and Communism and eliminating the currently unimportant problem of slavery, we do not find in Chayanov's table any indication that there existed (and still exists) primitive forms of society, tribal realities, hierarchical caste stagnation, and remnants of pastoral or peasant communities. No, it is all reduced to subtle distinctions between various forms of family economy and the feudal system. The term feudal system is subdi- vided into seigniorial economy and peasant economy as if the reality of the feudal system were not precisely the organic combination between land tenancy and eminent domain over the tenants. Besides the feudal economy, we find an economy based on exploiting serfs (economia de exacciones serviles). It is certain that a serfdom of this type (Chayanov was thinking of the Russian obrok) indicates the final stage of decline of the feudal system. The only difference between this system and family economy is the fact that the feudal rent appears to be imposed upon the individual and not upon the land. In reality, it represented the transition from feudal rent (which was imposed on both man and the land) to capitalist absolute rent, which comes from the fact that the proprietor has total disposition of the land (the seignior having had eminent domain, not total disposition). The table, categorizing only with yes and no (+ or -), structuralist and not


dialectical, is incapable of characterizing the nature of what is changing, what is evolving.

If we concern ourselves with concrete cases of transition, we always find that feudalism is being destroyed by capitalism, or that capitalism (even if it is fairly well developed) has not yet relinquished all traces of feudalism (or primitivisms or slavery). To give the name peasant economy to an intermediate autonomous and stable system does not seem to me to be useful but rather quite dangerous. What matters is the combination of relations between men and goods (absolute or limited ownership, whether the means of production are commercialized or not) with relations between men and men (owners and slaves, lords and serfs, employers and workers, etc.). The purpose of assuming that, between feudalism and capitalism, there is a peasantry capable of escaping feudal exactions as well as the law of the market (selection, concentration, expropriation of the weak)- when in reality the transition causes both threats to weigh heavily upon the poor peasantry- derives, in my opinion, from the clash in the mind of the agronomist between his organizational and technological desires on the one hand and his sympathy for the peasant way of life on the other. Feudalism has ended; capitalism has begun development, but very slowly and through some cruel selec- tions; the revolution is disappointing or frightening; the peasant Utopia (or the kindred ecological Utopia) is all that remains.

CHAYANOVIAN TEMPTATIONS IN HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, AND POLITICS

In the light of my rapid sketch, I shall call Chayanovian temptations the oscillations of many historians and sociologists between the preference granted to peasant reality in the description and explanation of past societies and the excessive reduction or the excessive isolation reserved for the same peasant reality in present day societies. Chayanov's account was, not so long ago, unusual. It is becoming increasingly frequent today. Its characteristic is the convergence of interpretations.

Daniel Thorner's Arguments

Only Daniel Thorner, editor and introducer of the selected works of Chayanov in English (1966), has consciously assumed the

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heritage of the Russian school. And he did so in the name of the historians and with them as his audience. His arguments of 1962-64 had a momentarily important echo (Fernand Braudel reproduced Thorner's "Peasant Economy, Concept for Economic History" in the Italian selection of articles of Annales). The author did not have time to pursue his offensive against the Marxist concept of the mode of production. I confess that, despite the respect I have for his memory, Thorner's arguments do not convince me.

1) His primary criterion for characterizing the peasant economy was the predominance of the rural population, of the active agricultural work force, and of agricultural production in the composition of the national product. But, for Thorner as in the case of elections or stockholding in a corporation, predominance means over 50 percent. This is a game rule, not a significant marker in socioeconomic analysis. It seems to me that modern societies are not transformed into the developed industrial model until the agricultural population has fallen to less than 20% of the total active population. Then yes the agricultural sector can be treated as any other economic sector. But before that (from 50% to 20%), French, Spanish, Russian, etc. societies had to continue to take into account the specificities of the agricultural sector without our being able to call them "peasant societies" because of that. The breakpoint of 50% (and rural population, active agricultural population, and agricultural product are three very distinct categories) is a mechanical criterion, obviously arrived at without much thought.

2) Thorner's second criterion is the existence of cities containing at least 5% of the total population. Another mechanical criterion. What is the significance of the city in a peasant economy? Is it the classic opposition between two types of people, between two types of life? The view proposed by Thorner probably refers more than anything to the admirable article by Julio Caro Baroja in Mediterra- nean Countrymen (1963). But this article is about the psychological and literary reflection born of the country-city antinomy, of the continuity of the clichés handed down (as in the case of the "national stereotypes" also studied by Caro Baroja). A theme of this kind seems to fit perfectly into the study of the superstructural level of distinct modes of production. But, for an economic history, the co- existence of the country and the city has a more concrete significance: the city cannot live without the country and molds it to its service in complex ways. Barcelona imports wheat from Sicily while


the countryside of Tarragona exports its wheat. We are all familiar enough with the history of modern times to discard a theorization that would replace the complexities of those facts with a simplified definition of the majority sector of societies in transition.

3) The criterion of the state. Thorner would like to eliminate primitive, segmentai, and tribal societies, even the early feudalism with parcellized political power, from the peasant society category. I wonder if peasant societies are not perhaps only those whose common denominator was that social classes and political power was located in rural surroundings. The most solid part of Chayanov's concepts, in any case, was the effort to discover an originality in the social reality between feudalism and capitalism: but I don't know if we could define in the same manner all the cases Thorner enumer- ated under the name of peasant economies: Japan (without taking into account the work of Takahashi), postcolonial Indonesia (what happened to specialized plantations?), pre- and postrevolutionary Mexico, and China where it is recognized that certain land rentals represent between 50 and 60% of the gross product (in this case, how could we speak of the autonomy of the unit of production?).

There is still India, which Thorner studied in particular. But, since the time of his studies, what has happened to India? Listen to the American, Clifton Wharton, in his article entitled "The Green Revolution, Cornucopia or Pandora's Box?"

As a result of different rates in the diffusion of the new technology, the richer farmers will become richer. In fact, it may be possible that the more progressive farmers will capture food markets previously served by the smaller semi-subsistence producer. In India, only 20 percent of the total area planted to wheat in 1967-68 consisted of the new dwarf wheats, but they contributed 34 percent of the total production. Such a development could well lead to a net reduction in the income of the smaller, poorer and less venturesome farmers. This raises massive problems of welfare and equity. If only a small frac- tion of the rural population moves into the modern century while the bulk remains behind, or perhaps even goes backward, the situation will be highly explosive (1969: 467-68).

Because it is this very thing that happened with the old style crisis (food shortage) in the cyclical downturn of the 1970's.

176 Pierre Vilar

I am in perfect agreement with Thorner that expressions such as economy of average subsistence or semifeudal society are bastard concepts. But, to observe the articulation of the two successive modes of production, especially in times of crisis, is undoubtedly more operational than the simple adoption of the term, peasant economy. The distinction between rich, poor and middle peasants was fundamental to Mao's tactics and strategy. For historical obser- vation, we will probably need slightly more complicated terms. At the crossroads of the two modes of production, when new techniques and social conditions are established at the same time, we have to ask ourselves: Who is in charge of these new techniques? Who will get richer? Who will get poorer? Capitalism then reveals its true nature: it will call the rich peasant, provided with means of production and prepared to take hold of the new ones, an enlightened man, an entrepreneur (even a manager). The result, however, will be the elimination, the pauperization, the proletarianization of the masses. In order to appropriate a technique, one needs already to have means at one's disposition. Chayanov had posed this problem with regard to the risks. I have not been able to agree with these particular studies and I regret it, because I have frequently dreamed of a great effort, individual and collective, regional, and worldwide, that would be called "Risks and Modes of Production" and would extend from the Asian and Incan economies, to the hydraulic community in Valencia, to the great capitalist and colonial public or private works, and to the socialist achievements. This fundamental theme would help in the study of peasant economies, without the notion of peasant economy in general being able to do much to clarify it.

On France: Historians and Sociologists Studying France, a "Peasant Nation"

The French case attracts and baffles the theorists of peasant economy. There is no more classic example of the peasant family that works the land and frequently owns it. But there is no country that has more clearly realized its bourgeois revolution, and has more quickly followed England on the capitalist road. However, officially, France did not cease, throughout the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth, to sing the praises of the peasant nation par excellence, and this in the writings of both conservative agrarians


and radical reformers. It is natural as well that the existence of such a large stratum of self-sufficient rural workers and proprietors that were "neither rich nor poor" should have incited the bad humor of the revolutionary proletariat and the sarcasm of Marx himself. He held the French peasantry responsible, as we know, for the successes of Louis Napoleon. Not only did he not consider the peasantry to be a true social class, but he called them "a sack of potatoes." Closer to us, the same irritation with the French peasant was manifested, logically, at the other extreme of the ideological gamut: the admirers of rapid capitalist growth, such as Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, accused the French Revolution of having created out of the peasantry a mass of modest, satisfied proprietors or entrepreneurs. The peasants were experts in the reality of the market, but incapable of large-scale sav- ings and investment, and were demographically Malthusian because of their strong wish to avoid the proletarianization of their children. It was because of this that the French capitalist economy of the second half of the nineteenth century remained backward. Located somewhere between the precocious English model and the late, but powerful, Prussian model, France constituted an economically defi- cient model but it was socially stable because of its slowness to effectuate the necessary liquidation of the peasantry so beneficial to the industrial revolution. More than one country dreams of the same stability (we have seen this in Chayanov's case).

All this is well-known and scarcely debatable. But because of its exceptional character, it has given rise to some theoretical and historical temptations that, if not exactly identical, are related to Chayanov's and Thorner's positions. Is it necessary to give a name to that sector of the French society- if not all of French society- which was legally liberated in 1789 from feudal bonds but only marginally involved in capitalist production and yet rarely resisted its spirit? It is curious to note that some Marxists (I do not say "Marxism"), unwisely based on fragments of Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, have used expressions such as the "smallholding mode of production" to describe nineteenth-century France. It seems to me that this use of mode of production is a dangerous departure from the fundamental idea as it was developed by Marx in his mature work. Mode of production is not merely a way of producing (and even less a way of exchanging). It comprises, at one and the same time, a technological complex of a certain level, a system of juridical and social relations, linked to the requirements of this technology,

178 Pierre Vilar

and a set of institutions and ideological convictions that ensure the general functioning of the system.

The massive presence of the peasant reality in the Revolution of 1789 must not lead us to ignore the basic fact about it, which was the legal and institutional liquidation of the feudal mode of production, that had already been quite transformed before 1789 as a result of the underlying economic evolution, and the legal and institutional construction necessary for the maturing of the bourgeois order. The prominent role of the peasantry- a rich peasantry wishing to obtain the freedom to sell (both produce and land), and the poor peasantry, rebellious because of the lack of daily sustenance- imposed upon the top-down bourgeois revolution a minimum of concessions for both groups of peasants, despite the fact that the first group was making demands in the same direction as the bourgeoisie and the second in the opposite direction. Therefore, it has been possible for interpretations to vary according to the individual preferences of historians.

Immersed in their own history, Soviet historians such as Porch- nev and Abo say that we have insufficiently emphasized the peasant character of the French Revolution, which they call the most important peasant revolution in history. But Ernest Labrousse (1944), studying the origins of the Revolution with a greater sense of history, distinguished three kinds of aspiration: the upper bourgeoisie wanted power; the middle classes (including the well-to-do peasants) wanted more freedom; and the poor wanted food, protection, and the maintenance of the old, customary guarantees. There were many contradictions within the very heart of the Revolution.

Georges Lefebvre (1979) likewise insisted upon the "quasiowner- ship" character of a good part of the tenancies before 1789, but also upon the miseries of the peasant masses. A scholar like Gustave Festy, a high official and agronomist landowner, made a study (an excellent one) of agriculture at the time of the Revolution and became angry when he saw poor peasants sending a marchioness who was a supporter of Enlightened agronomy to the guillotine. Again, the contradiction between interests in technological progress and the wish for social equality.

Antoine Pelletier, because he began studying Babeuf, is deepen- ing the historical analysis of the old notion of common good which was widespread among the poor peasants in the Ancien Régime. He would like to establish the peasant community that existed before the individualist society in another mode of production. Albert


Soboul (1976), in his recent collection of articles about the peasant aspects of the French Revolution, came out against this abuse of vocabulary. I believe he was right. The truth is that the notion of common good has to be systematically reintegrated into a coherent complex that makes up the feudal mode of production (and very probably that of other precapitalist modes of production). Cap- italism destroys, for the first time in history, the sense of community, abandoning the individual to his own resort, assuming responsibility amidst economic competition. We know that the Russian populists wanted to retain (or revive) the peasant communal realities. And it has frequently been emphasized, in the case of the Asian revolutions, how much the transition to socialism can be facilitated in the countryside if the peasant has not known the stage of individual ownership and monetary exchange.

After the French Revolution, and the success of the sale of biens nationaux [property seized from the church and émigrées and auc- tioned off to the highest bidder] (that is, of redemption), did a peasant France any longer exist? No, what existed were peasant Frances. From the Basque country to Brittany, with sharecropping as a social base and religious pressure at the summit, western France did not entirely stop being feudal in spirit. In northern France, or in the Parisian Basin, the capitalist tenant was a true entrepreneur, and in Normandy he specialized in cattle-raising for sale in market of the capital.

I have already said something about viticulture in Languedoc. It is a true agricultural industry, entirely commercialized and large- scale, and yet, despite everything, primarily in the hands of family units of production, using their own labor without outside help. Rémy Pech (1975) has concluded, in a recent study of this ambigu- ous case, that the small viticulturist, who owns and works his land, exploits himself (and his family) in the sense that, in most cases and for most years, his gross income is less than the average wages he would have paid had he employed a waged labor force, of course without taking into account the fact that he received no land rent or entrepreneurial profit. This leads us back to Chayanov. We have underlined the differences (there is no self-consumption on the unit of production). In addition, the situation described is not an un- changing one. Viticulture obeys the laws of the market. The sales price may momentarily be much less than the value produced. These are typically capitalist crises of overproduction. But the opposite

180 Pierre Vilar

situation has also existed. The viticulture of Languedoc has known years of superprofits (particularly during wars).

Smallholding France, France the country of petty producers- these are, to be sure, formulas that express what was the social mode of working the soil (that is, the method that was numerically in the majority), but not at all what was the economic mode, since large landowners, even giant landowners (particularly in the case of viticulture) produced the most important part of the harvests sold on the market. Consequently, there is also in France a proletariat (whose origin is in recurrent migration) in the service of agriculture and who constitute the lowest stratum, the worst paid, in terms of the range of income in France.

I have cited with pleasure, on various occasions, a naive speech delivered in 1903 in Béziers, at the founding meeting of a farm workers' syndicate, as testimony of the growth of consciousness (albeit belated) of this very articulation of two modes of production.

... It would not be a bad idea, as I see it, to be somewhat concerned about the lot of this poor martyr we call the "culti- vator" or "worker of the land," since, comrades, you and I have been watering this land with our sweat, this land that feeds the capitalists who treat us like slaves, just as in the time of the feudal lords. Because today it is not only the nobles who want the poor to remain poor, but I dare say that we also see, to our great displeasure, republicans and even socialists, who are in power and who, when it suits them, shamelessly continue to be the enemy of the poor worker of the land. Yes, those who preach fraternity and equality to us give us the example of how in fact such words are practiced and offer an example to the enemies of the worker. For, it seems to me that when an owner who has radical-socialist opinions gives his workers two francs a day and denies them wine after the first of August, as the nobles and opportunists of the country did, then they deserve to be treated like capitalists and enemies of the fatherland of the "people of the land" (patrie "terrienne") This can be seen to be the case of all rich republicans without exception

Thus, in a country where the public schools of the Third Re- public were teaching as a self-evident truth that the French Revo- lution had extended ownership and installed equality, the agricul-


tural worker was analyzing in a naive language the replacement of feudal exploitation by capitalist exploitation. Seigniors still existed. The nobles continued to be nostalgic for the Ancien Régime. But, although they used a different political vocabulary, the nobles were hardly distinguishable from the rich, or the capitalists even if the latter were republicans, for they were no less harsh as owners facing the wage-workers. Let us observe that the word bourgeois does not appear and that the expression, patrie "terrienne" indicated that the speaker reflects the sentimentality of the peasant more than of the worker. There does exist in fact a peasant way of life which includes both the gentleman farmer and the agricultural worker. But, as an instrument of social analysis, there is no such thing as a peasant mode of production (nor is there a peasant economy) in which the distinctions and class struggles characteristic of capitalism, feudalism, or their combinations would disappear in the transition.

I will say nothing, not even for comparative purposes, about the case of Spain. It was already addressed in this colloquium and every- one here knows it better than I. I will limit myself to pointing out how useless it would be to speak of a single Spanish agrarian problem when there is an Andalusian latifundio and a Galician minifundio, 2l Valencian huerta and Catalonian viticulture, Castilian wheat production and Basque polycultural hamlets. I know we talk of a Span- ish peasantry, but it is a figure of speech. There is no Spanish peasant economy. The only point I have wanted to make clear in this conference is that we should keep ourselves from using concepts that simplify when history is complexity.

Latin American Peasants: A Look at Recent Mexican Studies

In the last few years, I have had many contacts with Latin Ameri- can researchers and Americanists from various countries. Colloquia and congresses on the topic of agrarian problems and peasants have increased and have produced much brilliant documentation. But it has proved difficult to use it for obvious reasons. Up to a certain point, there is unity around the theme: massive majorities of peasants, hardly a beginning of industrialization, consequences of pre- colonial and feudal structures, limitations of evolution by foreign imperialists, and the influx of overflowing peasant populations to the monstrous suburbs. But, the diversity of the Latin American scene is no less evident: the Andes are not the pampas, the Amazonian

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jungle has nothing in common with the Mexican high plateau; the hacienda is not the export-oriented colonial plantation, the Mexican ejido does not resemble the Andean pastoral community. Coloniza- tion, independence, immigration, agrarian reforms, and revolutions have not had the same results all over the continent.

How then can the Latin American peasant reality be discussed as a single whole? With monographs? That was the case in the Paris colloquium in 1965; the juxtaposition of details was overwhelming. By specializing in one theme, in one problem? That was what the Commission on Social Movements wanted to do at the Congress of Historical Sciences in Moscow in 1970 when studying peasant movements of the past two centuries around the world. But this meant studying the consequences of structures whose characteristics were not always well known. The conclusions could be nothing more than a disturbing vagueness. Hence the final statement by J. Droz:

Even when he is harshly exploited, the small peasant is capable of a prolonged effort which furnishes a solid foundation for the armed guerilla, an essential form of modern subversion.

Have the peasant frenzies of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries been so modernized? I have my doubts. Here is another diagnosis made about the Mexican peasantry by Jean Meyer, inspired by his lengthy residence with the cristeros (1977), a mystical deviation of the peasant movement. We find initially, as with Chaya- nov, an opposition between the peasant notion of adequacy and the capitalist notion of calculation.

For three centuries in Mexico, there have been two projects: that of the peasant which in the end is not economic, and that of the "agricultural developer" which is.

What the middle classes have condemned, as Meyer interprets it, when considering the economic project, is not the peasant as a type of person, but the peasant condition as a way of life.

Industrialization, urbanization . . . have to resolve the peasant problem just as the liberals understood they had to solve the Indian problem: kill the peasant in order to make the man live.

Between that and the peasant Utopia there are only a few steps:


In order that history not repeat itself in vain, peasants have to collaborate with people for whom development is not exclusively defined in the industrial, Western mould, with people who are capable of recognizing in the peasantry a personality and aspirations to which their bold and desperate resistance attests. The peasant movements would, then, be more of a defense of a

way of life than a protest against an inadequate standard of living. But why not both of them?

One last meeting that I would like to talk about is the Congress of Americanists in Mexico in 1974. There was a symposium on Modes of Production in Latin America over which I had the (unde- served) honor of presiding. The symposium was attended by all the young Marxists of the continent. The tension between that session and the other congress sessions revealed rather well the nature of the instinctive ideological prejudices against the use by sociologists and historians of the concept of mode of production.

I hasten to add that such use does not suffice to resolve the issues raised and that the symposium was not a model of problematic clarity. But it did allow me to become conscious of some dangers of confusion inherent in some vocabularies:

1) Yes the notion of mode of production has been extended and became widespread. However, the terms mode of colonial production and pre-Colombian mode of production, even when used by my best friends, are not the happiest of innovations.

2) If the dominant mode of production is considered (rightly) as determinant, it runs the risk of isolating excessively a single trait of a system in transition. We know that Andre Gunder Frank considers the Spanish colonial society since 1924 as capitalist because the colonies were exploited from the beginning in the interests of large international commerce. Such a declaration is absurd if the entire phenomenon of the Conquista is historically analyzed. A more recent essay by Marcello Carmagnani, on the other hand, tries to develop, along the lines of Witold Kula, an economic model of Latin Ameri- can feudalism with its internal social relations affected by the initial feudalism of the Spaniards, but whose surplus product was, in large part, destined for Europe where the necessary primitive accumulation of capitalism was taking place. The essay is quite interesting but I fear that he generalizes too much on the basis of some local or

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regional models that were limited in time (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).

3) I also don't like what I call "theoretical vertigo," many pages devoted solely to abstract or verbal considerations or to arguments based on citations and not on data. Despite this, however, I remain committed to what I already previously said about the empirical and positivist historians: excessive theoretical preoccupation is by far preferable to lack of interest.

The best balance between theoretical preoccupations and concrete applications is to be found, and admirably pursued, in the (published and unpublished) works of scholars like Enrique Semo and Roger Bartra about the Mexican economy and society, as well as in their journal, Historia y Sociedad.

I single out, for example, one of the latest studies by Semo on the Mexican hacienda in its stage of decline in the last century. Semo struggles, with good reason, against received ideas and constant prejudices and, in particular, against the image of the hacienda which has been drawn for so long by liberal capitalism on the one hand and by democratic propaganda on the other. They consider it an illogical, antieconomic enterprise. Semo demonstrates that a social disequilibrium, a ferocious exploitation of the labor force is not necessarily illogical or nonproductive for those who secure advantage from the system. The hacienda was a system in itself, main- tained by the social class that secured advantage in it, with coercions of every kind, both extraeconomic and economic. One does not have to speak of a "mode of production," for the hacienda is not isolated from the capitalist realities of the nineteenth century. Semo demonstrates at the same time Frank's error of making the hacienda into a pure type of capitalist enterprise and the error of Tannebaum, for whom the Mexican hacienda is a quasiautonomous unit of labor and consumption. Semo strives, on the contrary, to analyze the hacienda as a type of articulation, of organic combination. Not dualist, not semi-feudal, but a localized element, relatively stable for a moment of the evolution, combining feudal heritage with capitalist appeal. He justifies Carmagnani's model up to a certain point, but at the same time shows its limits in space and its extensions over time.

Roger Bartra's studies are equally helpful to appreciate the important notions of transition and articulation (and let us add mediation between economic realities and political systems). Bartra places himself at the crossroads of tendencies that I have criticized here


and in ways that seem quite new to me. He published and presented Chayanov in Spanish. He uses the concept of a simple commodity mode of production and he cites Kula to justify the place in the framework of general economics problems that are perhaps particular to one mode of production. I have discussed these points with him.

But Bartra bases all of his calculations on direct observations. He does so using Marxist theoretical concepts and does not reject the possibility of calculating himself what the peasant is naturally incapable of calculating: the distribution of his produce among valid categories of a socioeconomic whole, which is not however peasant but rather precisely capitalist. He so perfectly perceives the danger that an oscillation between technocracy and populism presents, in the manner of Chayanov, that he has proposed applying the term of technocratic populism to certain tendencies of recent Mexican reformism which is precisely what he intends to criticize. He knows how the defenders of Mexican agrarian reform have responded to the productivism that was advised by Dumont from afar not with economic arguments but with socio-political arguments:

Among the functions of landed property, we have to include functions of a political nature; we have to maintain faith and hope among the peasants in order to avoid outbursts of unrest

Bartra derives from this a historical theory (not a defense) of a Mexican road to capitalism, distinct from both the English and the Prussian roads. Begun under the regime of Porfirio Diaz- the evolution of the hacienda into an capitalist enterprise- it imposed so much violence on the peasants that they participated unexpectedly, desperately, in the Revolution of 1910, However, it was only in 1930 that the governments, under the guise of distribution of the ejidos (a limited form of smallholding property), tried to associate the peasant masses with the institutionalized revolution. Democratic Caesar- ism, some critics called it. Bartra compares (he does not assimilate) this case of the political utilization of the peasantry with the cases of European Caesarism analyzed by Marx and Gramsci. This mediation between the socioeconomic realities and the political realities will be the theme of the next great work of Bartra.

Meanwhile, in his small book Las Clases Sociales Mejicanas (studied from the point of view of agrarian structures), he creates a tho-

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roughly detailed classification of all the peasant strata. And, both with regard to their internal relations as well as their relations with the urban and industrial worlds, he proposes some clarifying formulas (or that can become so via the very discussions to which they will give rise): permanent primitive accumulation, non-proletarian pauperization, underemployment of peasants to a greater degree than can be explained by the need for an industrial reserve army. Thus, he proposes a theorization of underdevelopment which is but a particular form of the transition to capitalism, made difficult through the existence and pressure of outside capitalisms endowed with far superior technological and financial means. Such a definition of the role of the peasantry in transition poses some problems similar (but not identical) to those with which Chayanov was concerned- par- ticularly those of the agronomist as technocrat, economist, reformer, and revolutionary (if he is trying to be one).

I remember the difference I discovered between two trips to Peru (1968, 1974). I observed, not without a certain astonishment, in the interval an influx of millions of Andean Indians to Lima. There too, they had launched an agrarian reform as a way of calming the waters. Large haciendas were put at the disposal of peasant cooperatives. I remember how the head of one of them, when asked by a visitor, "What a magnificent business! How are you going to manage it?" answered: "And if you were put into Apollo VII, how would you manage it?" I do not believe this very peasantlike humor signifies the resignation of a class to the technological exigencies of the century, but it does signify an ironic objection before the open abyss faced by so many unemployed peasant masses as the result of the productivist ambitions of the leading agricultural enterprises. Agronomists of good will (I have known some truly admirable ones in Peru) believe they have been naturally designated to prepare the future. But, we have seen how, in the case of Chayanov and Dumont, their technological certitudes, the prejudices of their classical capitalist education in economics, and their sentiments about the peasant and his way of life soon intermingle. Who is going to reconcile the ecological or nostalgic dream with the model of the large American farm or the Sovkhoz?


For Our Countries in the Near Future: Problems of the Market and the End of the Peasantry?

I was reflecting on the theme of this conference when two recent news items came to my attention. One was about the demonstrations in the streets of Leon, denouncing the congestion in the potential markets for Spanish agricultural products. This type of unrest wasn't born yesterday. But it has been a long time since Spain feared every year the inadequacy of the harvests. Now, it seems that Spanish agriculture, in all sectors, has definitively passed from the old style unrest to the modern type unrest, a transition so magnificently expressed by the Spanish Marxist, Jaime Vera: from the absolute inadequacy of the product, to the relative ways of proceeding of merchandise. I do not know a more precise definition for the contrast between two modes of production. Each word is significant.

The other news item that interested me was a fairly new type of interview given by the President of France in the Elysée to 60 French persons from all walks of life. A peasant, with moving sincerity, said: "Mr. President, I farm a few hectares of land and my son would like to continue farming them. They are enough for our family. Why are we refused any aid?" The response was astonishing: "Today, it is impossible to expect aid for nonprofitable units of production." (And "what about rent?", one of Kosinski's or Chayanov's peasants might ask.) It is clear that from now on they will not go on aiding marginal units, those least endowed with means of production, whose survival depends upon a price level much greater than the mean value of his product and which is noncompetitive in international markets. For a long time, for social and electoral reasons, governments have ensured the survival of such marginal units by setting prices very high. But, for some years now, aid has gone solely and directly to peasants who want to leave the farm. Some critics have affirmed that this change has been accepted by the peasantry, and technological transformations seem to confirm it (Sergio Mallet, "Les Paysans contre le passé"). I have tried to verify, through concrete inquiries (unfortunately quite limited), the degree to which the individual peasant has become familiar with economic calculations, with accounting. It is difficult to generalize the results, but it seems that economic calculations, even for very large units, are in the hands of specialized organizations and financial experts. The poor or middle peasant does not participate in the advantages of such an

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organization if he is not guided and oriented by corporate, syndical, or cooperative associations. What is most clear is that he under- stands what has been strikingly ignored for half a century: the secret of productive indebtedness: France's Crédit Agricole is the most important credit organization in the country. The peasant economy is now a part of the total economy like any other, but a part that is now becoming ever smaller.

The peasant as such and the peasant condition of yore seem, in our developed societies, to be more or less rapidly doomed. But, agriculture and the farm? The land as a means of production? We are not at all certain of its future. The Mansholt Plan established for the European Community that four million hectares of cultivated land, within the Community, will be converted into woodlands and one million into recreational parks. The Vedel Report on French agriculture found this provision of the Mansholt Plan to be ridicu- lous. It studied various models of agricultural restriction for the future. The Bergman model would sacrifice, in France alone, 22 million hectares of useful agricultural land out of every 33 million and 7.5 million hectares of cultivated land out of every 18 million. The MODEF model (proposed by the Movement to Defend Family Agriculture) is called exaggeratedly conservative, backward, and anticompetitive but in agreement with the dreams of the specifically French egalitarian society (MODEF, with a vocabulary of Chayano- vian connotations, represents the peasant sector of Communist inspiration.) Between the two extremes, there is, naturally, an intermediate plan (Malassis). But, the Vedel Report does not disdain at all the ideal models:

The model of the rural collectivity of tomorrow could be that of a small city between 5,000 and 10,000 inhabitants, sur- rounded by villages and small farms essentially agricultural and also with a residential population scattered throughout the countryside. (Mendras)

Will Chayanov's Utopia be brought into being by capitalism? But how can we forget, in the face of this European Malthusian-

ism imposed by the concept of profitability, the (underlying and periodically acute) hunger of half the world? The annual reports by the FAO always pose myriad questions for me: In the bad years, they predict widespread food shortages; in the good years (when Canada and the United States have reserves of 50 or 60 million tons of


unsold wheat), the FAG wonders who is going to support the peso as it adapts from demand to supply. The bad years return and the international grain industry triples or quadruples the business arrangements (with corresponding profits). The old contradiction between production and consumption located unequally in different places, a gap that was regional at the dawn of capitalism (when Cam- pomanes and Turgot tried to struggle against it) is now global. The world of the peasant economy is a world that suffers from hunger. And the nonpeasant world does not know what to do with the products of its fields. Perhaps that is why I said, at the beginning of this paper, that the immense agrarian literature causes some irritation in its readers.

REFERENCES

Carmagnani, Marcello (1976). Formation y crisis de un sistema feudal: America Latino, del siglo XVI a neustros dias. Mexico: Siglo XXI.

Caro Baroja, Julio (1963). "The City and the Country: Reflexions on Some Ancient Common- places," in J. Pitt-Rivers, éd., Mediterranean Countrymen. The Hague: Mouton, 27-40.

Chayanov, A. V. (1966). The Theory of Peasant Economy. Homewood IL: The American Economic Association.

Fogel, Robert W. (1974). Time on the Cross. Boston: Little, Brown. Genovese, Eugene (1974). Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Pantheon. Labrousse, Ernest (1944). La Crise de l'économie française à la fin de l'Ancien Régime et au début de la

Révolution. Paris: PUF. Lefebvre, Georges (1979). The Coming of the French Revolution. New York: Vintage. Meyer, Jean (1977). La Cristiada, 3 vols. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Pech, Rémy (1975). Entreprise viticole et capitalisme en Languedoc-Rousillon: Du phylloxera aux crises de

mévente. Toulouse: Le Mirail. Soboul, Albert (1976). Problèmes paysans de la Révolution, 1789-1848: Etudes d'histoire révolutionnaire.

Paris: Maspéro. Stalin, Joseph V. (1955). "The Right Deviation in the C.P.S.U.(B.), April 1929," in Works, XII.

Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1-113. Thorner, Daniel (1964). "L'Economie paysanne, concept pour l'histoire économique?" Annales

E. S. C, XDC, 3, mai-juin, 417-32. Thorner, Daniel (1966). "Chayanov's Concept of Peasant Economy," in D. Thorner et al., eds.,

A. V. Chayanov on The Theory of Peasant Economy. Homewood IL: The American Economic Association, xi-xxiii.

Wharton, Clifton R. (1969). "The Green Revolution: Cornucopia or Pandora's Box?" Foreign Affairs, XLVII, 3, Apr, 464-76.

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Peasant Economy