HOME | DD

MyLittleTripod — Agrarian Socialism

Published: 2014-09-16 17:48:04 +0000 UTC; Views: 1873; Favourites: 17; Downloads: 14
Redirect to original
Description (From Wikipedia.com)

Agrarian socialism is a socioeconomic political system which combines an agrarian  way of life with socialist  economic policies.

When compared to standard socialist  systems which are generally urban /industrial (thus often focused on centralisation and a comprehensive state ), internationally oriented , and more progressive /liberal  in terms of social orientation, many agrarian socialist movements have tended to be rural  (with an emphasis on decentralization and smaller government ), locally focused, and traditional/conservative.

Agrarian socialism applies to predominantly pre-industrial, non-urbanized demographics. The emphasis of agrarian socialists is therefore on control, ownership and utilisation of land rather than the means of production .

The 17th Century movement called the Diggers  based their ideas on agrarian communism .

The Socialist Revolutionary Party  was a major political party in early 20th century Russia and a key player in the Russian Revolution . After the February Revolution  of 1917 it shared power with other liberal and democratic socialist forces within the Russian Provisional Government . In November 1917, it won a plurality of the national vote  in Russia's first-ever democratic elections (to theRussian Constituent Assembly ), but soon split and the remaining faction of this party who remained loyal to Alexander Kerensky  was defeated and destroyed by the Bolsheviks  in the course of the Russian Civil War  and subsequent persecution.

The party's ideology was built upon the philosophical foundation of Russia's narodnikPopulist  movement of the 1860s-70s and its worldview developed primarily by Alexander Herzen  and Pyotr Lavrov . After a period of decline and marginalization in the 1880s, the Populist/narodnik school of thought about social change in Russia was revived and substantially modified by a group of writers and activists known as "neonarodniki" (neo-Populists), particularly Viktor Chernov . Their main innovation was a renewed dialogue with Marxism and integration of some of the key Marxist concepts into their thinking and practice. In this way, with the economic spurt and industrialization in Russia in the 1890s, they attempted to broaden their appeal in order to attract the rapidly growing urban workforce to their traditionally peasant-oriented programme. The intention was to widen the concept of the 'people' so that it encompassed all elements in the society that were opposed to the Tsarist  regime.

The party's program was both democratic socialist  and agrarian socialist in nature; it garnered much support amongst Russia's ruralpeasantry , who in particular supported their program of land-socialization as opposed to the Bolshevik  programme of land-nationalisation—division of land to peasant tenants rather than collectivization in state management. Their policy platform differed from that of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Parties  — both Bolshevik  and Menshevik  — in that it was not officially Marxist (though some of its ideologues considered themselves such); the SRs believed that the 'labouring peasantry', as well as the industrial proletariat, would be the revolutionary class in Russia. Whereas Russian SDs defined class membership in terms of ownership of the means of production, Chernov and other SR theorists defined class membership in terms of extraction of surplus value from labour. On the first definition, small-holding subsistence farmers who do not employ wage labour are, as owners of their land, members of the petty bourgeoisie; on the second definition, they can be grouped with all who provide, rather than purchase, labour-power, and hence with the proletariat as part of the 'labouring class'. Chernov nevertheless considered the proletariat the 'vanguard', with the peasantry forming the 'main body' of the revolutionary army.

Related content
Comments: 0