Social Differentiation in Agriculture and the Ideology of Neopopulism

While the social and economic structure of societies transforms rapidly by evolutionary or revolutionary bounds, old controversies have a strong resilience and tend to reappear in their same content even if under new forms. This is the case for the debate on the nature and future of peasants and the family farm. In the late 1800s, the Russian populists argued that capitalism could not develop in their country for lack of an internal market and the impossibility of breaking into the international market against the competition of advanced capitalist economies. They defended, instead, the viability of a noncapitalist organization of agricultural production based on the economic viability of the old patriarchal peasantry and its organization in the communal mir 1 . Lenin and the Bolsheviks opposed this vision by arguing that (1) capitalism had already deeply penetrated into the countryside since the formal abolution of serfdom in 1861; (2) the majority of peasants were, in fact, on their way to proletarianization while an economically powerful kulak class was emerging; and (3) both proletarianization and a growing demand for manufactured inputs in agriculture were creating a rapidly expanding domestic market for Russian industry. It is this process of differentiation of the peasantry into social classes and elimination of the family farm that Lenin called “depeasantization.” 2