Robert G. Wallace

ABSTRACT

A busy year for Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1917 also marked the publication of his study of American agriculture. The report reads as more than a historical curiosity, offering insights, however era-bounded, on a variety of topics of substantive and epistemological interest today. Lenin writes of the history of American agriculture, its dynamic regionalism, and its sector-specific class conflicts. Along the way, despite his obvious structural tendencies, we meet an anti-foundational author who, while upbraiding bourgeois economists for their expedient technicism, often in scathing terms, also warns that sweeping conclusions about the sizes of farm and capitalization are problematic in the face of historically dependent and contradictory trends. Here, in the first of the paper’s two parts, we begin to place Lenin’s project in the broader stream of critical agrarian studies, including the classic contrast with agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov, but also the diseconomies of modern agriculture, the biological limits on industrializing food production, and Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign. Our aims here are more than academic. The exploration is framed by the roles the structure of agriculture and its impacts on its participants play in political change, from elections to revolution.

KEYWORDS

Lenin, peasant studies, U.S. regionalism, diseconomies of scale, dekulakization

From: Capitalism Nature Socialism 2018 29 (2)

Editor: Wang Yi