Friday, May 30, 2014

4 ALEXANDER CHAYANOV The Theory of Peasant Economy

the volume of activity proceeds almost in proportion to family growth and lags far behind the rapidity of the development of capital in­tensification, which we have already seen in analyzing the previous combination.
In concluding our analysis, we will look at the influence of number of family workers and capital intensity in providing the consumer with sown area (Table 3-14). It is clearly seen from the table that a
TABLE 3-14 Sown Area per Consumer
 
Number of Workers per Family Fixed Capital per Worker (Rubles)   

0-100 100-200 200-300      300-00   
0-2 ........ . 0.43 0.64 0.72          0.99   
2-4 ........ . 0.53 0.65 0.70          1.23   
4—00  ....... . 0.47 0.67 0.65          1.10  
simple increase in the family, not affecting the conditions of economic equilibrium, has no specific influence in the provision of sown area for the consumer, while increase in capital intensity raises his annual earnings and, moreover, in accordance with the theory, at a rate less than the rate of increment of the factor. Thus, for example, for family size of 2-4 workers see Table 3-15.
TABLE 3-15
Capital available
per worker (rubles) .. 0-100         100-200        200-300        300-oo Increase of capital
available per worker .. 100             200              325             525 Increase of sown area
per consumer ........ 100             122              132             232
Such are the results of our empirical analysis. We will try to sum it up theoretically.
The empirical dependent relationships we have established show us that when, in a particular year, the farm does not have the land or capital needed to develop an agricultural undertaking optimal as to relationship between farm and family size it is obliged to make its volume of agricultural activity conform with these means of produc­tion in minimum supply. This volume is not established automati­cally by being arithmetically derived from the minimum element, but is set by a complex process of the influence of deteriorating conditions for agricultural production on the basic equilibrium of the economic
The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization      101
TABLE 3-16
Percentage Working Time Spent in Agriculture, Crafts, and Trades
 
Sown Area in Each Field per Farm (Desyatinas) Percentage of Working Year Spent on:   

Agriculture Crafts and Trades   
0.0-0.0 ...... 10.3 41.9   
0.1-1.0 ...... 21.7 22.8   
1.1-2.0 ...... 23.0 21.9   
2.1-3.0 ...... 26.9 19.8   
3.1-6.0 ...... 28.1 13.7   
6.1-10.0 ..... 41.6 11.1  
For a whole series of other investigations we unfortunately do not have a record of labor and can judge the relationship of crafts and trades and agricultural income by the results, i.e., by the production it brings to the farm. The result of this analysis, as has been established by Shcherbina for Voronezh guberniya, for example, is just the same.
Thus, the peasant family hastens to meet a shortfall in agriculture incomes by income from crafts and trades. However, in the majority of areas where budget inquiries have been made it does not fully suc­ceed in doing this. This is particularly characteristic in Vologda uezd where, given the same labor expenditure, those engaging in crafts and trades are compelled to acquiesce in a lower standard of well-being, as can be seen from Table 3-17.
The cause of this is that incomes from crafts and trade in Vologda and, evidently, other uezds, too, result in a very low payment for la­bor. Consequently, earnings are won with great drudgery, and this in-
factors. Moreover, the family throws its unutilized labor into crafts, trades, and other extra-agricultural livelihoods. The whole of its summed agricultural, crafts, and trades income is counterposed to its demands, and the drudgery of acquiring it leads to an equilibrium with the degree of satisfaction of these personal demands.
Therefore, all forms of the influence of family composition and size on the family worker's output, which we studied in Chapter 2, and the other consequences following from the on-farm equilibrium of production factors are naturally related to the summed family in­come and not to that part which its agricultural incomes constitute.
Our budget materials give us quite clear examples of how labor, lacking the necessary means of production for its full disposition in agriculture, pours into crafts and trades. Thus, for example, see Table 3-16 for Vologda uezd, where a detailed record of labor was made.
102      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
TABLE 3-17
Annual Personal Budget per Consumer, Money and in Kind Vologda Uezd (Rubles)
1. Purely agricultural labor families ................   78.3
2. Families with members hiring themselves
out as workpeople or going into service...........   56.6
3. Families with members independently
engaging in crafts or trades ......................   66.3
4. Families with members engaging in crafts and
trades as entrepreneurs and using hired labor..... 148.9
evitably leads to the attainment of the basic economic equilibrium at a low level of well-being.3
All that has been said adequately shows us the complex processes of determining both the general and the particular agricultural vol­ume of peasant family economic activity. Because the family's agricul­tural undertaking and crafts and trades activity are connected by a single system of the basic equilibrium of economic factors, they can­not be reviewed independently of one another. This compels us to change somewhat the morphological scheme of the peasant farm, which we gave at the start of this chapter, by including the process of work in crafts and trades.
By detailing the separate links, we obtain the scheme shown in Figure 3-3. We see that as a result of the mutual relationships of the factors we have studied the volume of agricultural, crafts, and trades
FIGURE 3-3
FAMILY
SIZE OF OTHER CRAFTS AND TRADES
GROSS
INCOME FROM OTHER CRAFTS AND TRADES
LABOR lANDtal
AMOUNT OF ACTIVITY CAPITAL RENEWAL
^ROSS INCOME OF THE AGRICULTURAL UNDERTAKING 'ANNUAL INCOME FROM AGRICULTURAL WORK
INCOME FROM FAMILY'S WORK
, , v j PERSONAL BUDGET
a —: useful area
b = livestock c = equipment
[Editors' note.—d = not specified; probably buildings.]
3 For Vologda uezd, earnings from crafts and trades, excluding income from com­mercial industrial undertakings, were 48.9 kopeks per working day, while from agri­culture they were 59.4 kopeks, and even if all taxes and payments are excluded, 52.4 kopeks.
The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization      103
TABLE 3-18
 
Starobel'sk Uezd Vologda Guberniya   
Land use  ..................... .....   0.98 0.72   
Sown area  .................... .....   0.93 0.77   
Mowing ....................... .....   0.47 0.62   
Value of means of production .. .....   0.82 0.68   
Value of buildings ............ .....   0.64 0.53   
Value of equipment ........... .....   0.84 0.66   
Number of head of livestock ... .....   0.83 0.75   
Number of cows ............... .....   0.59 0.77   
Number of workstock .......... .....   0.76 0.46  
As is seen from a comparison of the correlation coefficients, such elements as livestock, sown area, income from farming, and the value of means of production are most closely interconnected. That is, the elements of agricultural production depend on one another tech­nically in the closest manner, and each is a gauge of that which is common to them all and which we call volume of economic activity. This connection between the elements of one and the same organiza­tional plan—essentially a technical and not an economic connection —is so close that, as we pointed out at the start of the chapter, the agricultural officer Arnol'd, by processing a considerable mass of material, succeeded in even establishing functional formulas to con­nect their magnitudes in grouped averages.
Thus, for example, in his Kherson study4 on the connection be-
4 Osnovnye cherty agronomicheskoi tekhniki i seVskokhozyaistvennoi ekonomii krest'yanskikh khozyaistv Khersonskogo uezda [Basic features of agricultural tech­nique and economy in Kherson uezd peasant farms], Kherson, 1902 g. Apart from the Kherson materials, Arnol'd subjected to mathematical processing a number of other
activity is established, the income from each of them is gathered in, and, combined, they give that synthetic single family labor income which, by comparison with its demands, also gives the basic economic equilibrium. For an exhaustive knowledge of the peasant farm's mechanism, it is of the greatest interest to quantitatively establish the force binding together all the elements of this system.
Thanks to the works of Professor S. N. Prokopovich, as well as of Kotov, Studenskii, Dzerzhanovska, Oparin, associates of the Post­graduate Seminar in Agricultural Economy and Policy, and others, we have some materials to judge the correlations between peasant farm elements. Thus, for example, the coefficients of correlation be­tween incomes from farming and other elements of the economy, shown in Table 3-18, are known from S. N. Prokopovich's works.
104      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
Myshkino uezd, ) y = 0.30+ 0.42*
Yaroslavl' guberniya] in reality......
Kozel'sk uezd, | y = 0.60 + 0.15x
Kaluga guberniya j in reality......
Peremyshl' uezd, \ y = 0.63 + 0.12*
Kaluga guberniya J in reality......
Kuznetsk uezd, | y = 0.60 + 0.56x
Saratov guberniya j in reality......
Groups by Size of Land for Use
 
I II III IV V VI   
0.90 1.00 1.41 1.57 1.98 2.49   
0.93 1.01 1.40 1.56 1.96 2.52   
0.89 1.21 1.60 2.01 2.74   
0.87 1.19 1.58 2.00 2.71 -   
0.81 1.10 1.43 1.79 2.46   
0.81 1.17 1.48 1.77 2.49 -   
0.72 0.79 0.90 1.14 1.50   
0.76 0.76 0.93 1.22 1.50  
Source: A. Amol'd, "Opyt primeneniya elementarnykh osnov analiticheskoi geometrii k issledovaniyu statisticheskikh zavisimostei" ["An attempt to apply elementary analytic geometry to research on statistical dependent variables"], Trudy podsektsii statistiki XI s"ezda estestvoispytatelei i vrachei 1901 g.
tween the quantity of usable land (x) and quantity of workstock (y) he found the formula y=1.65 + x/9. The correspondence between the formula and reality is seen in Table 3-20. For the connection of the value of useful livestock and quantity of useful land we have the formula y = (32 + 4.17x) (Table 3-21). The cost of large items of equipment is connected with the quantity of useful land per person by the formula y = 100 4- 68.2x (Table 3-22).
TABLE 3-20
Groups By Formula In Reality
1..... 6.64 rubles 7.00 rubles
II..... 4.34 4.29
III..... 3.33 3.27
IV..... 2.79 2.68
V..... 2.57 2.62
VI..... 2.07 2.15
TABLE 3-21
 
Groups By Formula In Reality   
I..... 219.36 rubles 219.22 rubles   
II..... 132.91 132.31   
Ill..... 95.13 102.00   
IV..... 74.83 92.80   
V..... 66.36 63.09   
VI..... 47.98 46.54  
investigations and obtained a series of formulas, similar in general type, but differing sharply in their coefficients, depending on their area. Thus, for example, he established the formulas in Table 3-19 for the relationship of number of cows to sown area.
TABLE 3-19
The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization      105 TABLE 3-22
 
Groups By Formula In Reality   
I.... 593.81 rubles 593.84 rubles   
II.... 349.64 359.69   
III.... .    273.23 266.18   
IV.... 221.40 230.22   
v.. . . 185.93 185.83   
VI. . . . 147.74 154.33  
As one should expect, all other connections, thanks to the multi­plicity of factors influencing the farm's income, stand lower than the technical links noted for each of these factors. Thus, for example, from S. N. Prokopovich's same work were found correlation coeffi­cients for farming income with the basic factors of the peasant under­taking's organization (Table 3-23).
 
TABLE 3-23   
Starobel'sk Uezd Vologda Guberniya   
Landholding  ........... 0.78 0.71   
Number of workers ____ 0.64 0.24   
Number of consumers .. 0.61 0.41  
The investigation of the peasant farm by correlation analysis of its elements is, unfortunately, in an embryonic state, despite a number of works already carried out. But, theoretically, we may foresee that we will have the following successive series of economic elements, the correlation coefficients of which will diminish as they become more distant from one another: the family (workers and consumers); per­sonal consumption; total family output in farming, crafts, and trades; annual income from farming; harvest, sown area, and other technical elements of the farm (livestock, equipment, and so on).
The family, measured by number of consumers, and the size of the personal budget are so strongly correlated that first acquaintance with budget statistics consumption materials led investigators to the idea that the consumption standard was fixed. Only in subsequent work did they succeed in establishing that a certain similarity to an im­mobile consumption standard occurs only in those areas and periods when, because of the low productivity of peasant labor, incomes ob­tained barely meet the physiological minimum for existence (Vo­ronezh and other budgets of the end of the nineteenth century).
Given a development of peasant labor productivity and an im­provement in the market situation, the satisfaction of demands moves away from the physiological minimum. Under the influence of var­
106      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
ious factors, predominantly those present in the conditions of pro­duction, some considerable variation appears, but, all the same, the annual personal budget continues to be strongly correlated with fam­ily size. Passing from the personal budget to the size of the family's annual output from agriculture and from crafts and trades, we natu­rally get a weakening of the correlation with the family, since the sum of total output, apart from the personal consumption fund, in­cludes income from which the family effects capital renewal and ac­cumulation, i.e., processes not connected with family size to such a great extent.
The connection with family size of agricultural incomes taken separately is naturally still weaker, since the process of family divi­sion of labor between agriculture and crafts and trades depends not on absolute family size but on local general economic conditions. The technical items of production—sown area, (work) force, and equip­ment—ought to have a still lower correlation with the family, since, with the same volume of family economic activity determined by the basic on-farm equilibrium, according to differences in the production system they can combine in the most varied ways. At the same time, of course, given a uniform production system, the correlation of its separate technical elements ought to be close to 1.00.
Such is the basic mechanics by which the effective family work force establishes the volume of its agricultural undertaking, as well as the general level of its work intensity and the degree of its demand satisfaction in a particular market situation and taking account of the effective quantity of family consumers, land, and capital.
For a final clarification of this process, it is essential for us to answer the following three questions, which have not been sufficiently illumi­nated by earlier analysis.
1. We have pointed out that family labor, not finding occupation in its agricultural undertaking, turns to crafts and trades. It is exceedingly important to establish whether land hunger and shortage of capital are the sole factors which turn peasant labor to crafts and trades. In other words, we must explain: What quantitatively determines the division of peasant labor between earnings from crafts and trades and from agri­cultural work?
2. We have established that the effective size of peasant family land-holding and capital, if they are at the minimum, are in many ways the determining factor in establishing the volume of the agricultural under­taking. It is essential to establish: What determines the availability of land and capital itself in the peasant family, and does the family not try to develop it from the minimum to the optimum?
The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization      107
3. We have noted that the agricultural ratio requires that any size of agricultural undertaking be organized in the most expedient rela­tionship of its technical factors. It is essential to clarify the situation in which land and capital are at a minimum and the peasant family's agricultural undertaking is organized in accord with them. Does not the mass of family labor remaining outside this undertaking and the mass of demands it has not satisfied have any influence on the economic and technical organization of the agricultural undertaking itself?
We will try to answer each of these questions separately.
1. Our supposition that want of capital and, mainly, of land some­times makes the peasant family throw a considerable part of its labor into crafts, trades, and other nonagricultural livelihoods is, in the majority of cases, perfectly correct. In accordance with it, departures for crafts and trades are particularly developed where there is con­siderable population density. However, we ought to make two pro­visos to this statement, and the second of these will be very significant for understanding the whole nature of the peasant farm.
First, very many crafts and trades depend in their development on the fact that the distribution of agricultural labor over time is very uneven, and whole seasons—for example, winter—are completely dead. At this time, peasant labor is free, and with very little intensity and, consequently, little drudgery, it is advantageous to use it in establishing the economic equilibrium by means of work in crafts and trades, thus easing the load of summer agricultural work. The figure of labor distribution over time for one of the Volokolamsk uezd peasant farms illustrates this idea quite clearly (Figure 3-4).
Second, and this is the main thing, in numerous situations it is not at all a lack of means of production which calls forth earnings from crafts and trades, but a more favorable market situation for such work in the sense of its payment for peasant labor compared with that in agriculture. Zemstvo statistics for Vladimir, Moscow, and other guber-niyas give us much data to show that peasant farms of an area of seasonal distant work and of certain local crafts and trades make very little use of their effective agricultural means of production.
Thus, for example, in 1804, according to survey data for Shuya uezd, Vladimir guberniya, 44.8 percent of total area was arable, and according to the zemstvo registration of 1899, only 27.8 percent. (Materialy dlya otsenki zemlei Vladimirskoi gubernii) [Materials for evaluating the lands of Vladimir guberniya], I, X). Moreover, according to the investigator, this process has continued into our day. "The supplanting of agriculture by industry leads to a reduction
108      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
121212121212121212121212 I       I       HI     12      Y      VT    VTT     \7TTT      JY      Y       XT      TTT
FLAX GROWING |M EARNINGS OFF FARM
I      I OTHER FIELD WORK B| HOUSEHOLD WORK
I      I MOWING
of arable and to its complete abandonment," the compiler of the collection writes, and he gives figures for the abandoned strips of the winter-sown area of from 3.7 percent (Shuya) to 7.1 percent (Vyaz-niki). This same picture has been noted in our period in Moscow guberniya, too.
In this case, evidently, the presence of crafts and trades is not ex­plained by the absence of land, and you do not need second sight to understand the reason. It is entirely because here crafts and trades give a considerably higher payment per labor unit. With their help, one may obtain earnings with less drudgery, and the family prefers to square the basic economic equilibrium of consumption and labor expenditure predominantly by means of occupation in crafts and trades. In this case, the peasant family behaves with its labor just like a capitalist distributing his capital, so that it gives him the highest net income.
In meeting its demands, the peasant farm strives to do this most easily and, therefore, weighing up the effective means of production
FIGURE 3-4 Distribution of Work by Half-Monthly Periods
The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization      109
5 The sole feature in this case distinguishing the peasant family from the entre­preneur consists in the fact that the capitalist somehow or other always distributes all his capital entirely; but the peasant family never uses the whole of its labor com­pletely and ceases to expend labor as it satisfies its demands and attains its economic equilibrium.
and all other objects to which its labor could be applied, distributes it in such a way that all opportunities that give a high payment may be used. Thanks to this, the peasant family, seeking the highest pay­ment per labor unit, frequently leaves unused the land and means of production at its disposal, once other forms of labor provide it with more advantageous conditions.5
Below, we will see that the peasant family, given a lack of means of production, can, at the cost of reducing its labor payment, always expand the volume of its economic activity even within agricultural production. This forced agricultural work with its gradually declin­ing rate of labor productivity is compared, in the peasant farm's esti­mation, with possible earnings from crafts and trades. These are also, of course, ranked in declining order of their labor payment. By com­paring these two series, the peasant farm takes for the realization of its labor from both agriculture and crafts and trades those oppor­tunities which guarantee it in total the highest payment per mar­ginal labor unit.
In other words, we may theoretically assert that peasant family division of labor between earnings from agriculture and from crafts and trades is achieved by a comparison of the market situation in these two branches of the national economy. And since the relation­ship between these two market situations is inconstant, the relation­ship between labor expenditure on crafts and trades and on agricul­ture is also inconstant. In years of an unfavorable agricultural market situation—for example, given a harvest failure—the impossibility of attaining the economic equilibrium with the help of general agricul­tural occupations obliges the peasants to cast onto the labor market a huge quantity of peasant working hands who look for a livelihood from crafts and trades. As a result, we have the situation—normal for Russia, but paradoxical from a Western viewpoint—in which periods of high grain prices are, at the same time, periods of low wages.
In this respect, the work of N. P. Nikitin on Ryazan' guberniya is of very great interest. Its results, reported at Professor A. F. Fortuna-tov's seminar in Moscow, demonstrated with great clarity from the material of four decades the inverse proportion of the price of rye and the wages of agricultural workers. A curious comparison, made
110      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
by K. K. Paas in his work on the fur trade, of the export of grain and furs from Siberia has the same significance6 (Figure 3-5). This de-
FIGURE 3-5
1868     '70
1884
'75 '80
pendent relationship shows us that a deterioration in the market sit­uation for agriculture pushes peasant labor out into hunting, which thus creates an increased supply and, hence, a fall in squirrel prices. Thus, here, too, the process is not a simple one but goes through an evaluation of two market situations7 in the mechanism of the basic economic equilibrium.
2. The second of our questions, about the factors determining the availability of land and capital at the disposal of the family, is so significant in itself that it essentially requires an independent review. Below, we devote all of Chapter 5 to a review of the problem of capi­tal. However, it is absolutely essential for us to pose this problem now in order that the reader should not think that size of land for use and of capital is a sort of deus ex machina in the form of a priori prerequisites of the peasant farm.
We know from Chapter 1 of our investigation that the size of the main factor for the construction of the labor farm—the family run­ning the farm—depends chiefly on its age, and that its growth, being
6 K. Paas, Kratkii obzor pushnogo dela v Rossii [A brief survey of the fur trade in Russia], M., 1915 g., s.26. The diagram was drawn up by N. Türkin.
7 In essence, we may speak terminologically only of one single market situation of the entire national economy. If we conventionally talk of two market situations, we would need to speak more precisely of two portions of one system.
The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization      111
subject to biological laws, depends to a small extent on the family's economic state.
The size of area to be used is not so freely chosen and, as we see in Chapter 1 and the table of correlation coefficients, depends greatly on family size and general economic potential of the farm. In the case of communal land use, this correspondence is reached by means of general and particular repartition and, if this is insufficient, by rent­ing land. We see from Table 3-24 how far the peasant farm tends,
TABLE 3-24
Land Rented (Desyatinas) and Consumer-Worker Ratio
Own Arable Consumer per Worker
per Worker
(Desyatinas)                             1'°°-130        131~1'60 1-61~Q0
0.1-2.0 ................ 0^50 Ö73 1.19
2.1-3.0 ................ 0.08 0.56 0.50
3.1-oc   ................ 0.10 0.41 0.65
Average ......... 0.23 0.57 0.79
Average Con­sumer-Worker
Ratio ......... 1.15 1.45 1.75
by means of renting land, to bring the area it is exploiting agricul­turally into optimal relationship with family size. This table is based on materials of the Starobel'sk budget inquiry, which notes the influ­ence of family composition on size of rented area, given its own con­stant amount of land available.
However, the best proof of the constant tendency to bring size of agricultural area into an optimal relationship with family size are the dynamic investigations of Chernenkov, Kushchenko, Vikhlyaev, and Khryashcheva, which we quoted in Chapter 1. They show that as the family develops it moves over the years from one sown area category to another; although, of course, the general population density in a particular area, the conditions of the primary land allot­ment, and so on often provide insurmountable difficulties to the tendency to develop its land area to the optimum.
The expansion of land area encounters still greater difficulties in countries with a land regime of nonpartible inheritance, as well as in countries with an intensive capitalist farmer system of agriculture where each agricultural undertaking is firmly jointed together in all its parts by a production machine little subject to expansion and con­traction. European critics of the present book—namely, Professor A. Skalweit, Professor M. Sering, and others—have noted this distinction
112      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
of the European farm from that which I have described with partic­ular insistence. With this, I cannot but agree, and ought to acknowl­edge that in cases where the land regime is not very flexible the rela­tionship between land and family is regulated by a change in the amount of labor hired or hired out.
In particular, the peasant farm of Germany makes considerable use of hired labor for its work, and apart from that, thanks to a land regime of nonpartible inheritance, it is fixed as regards the land area given it and the firm economic organization constructed on it. Only in certain areas of southern Germany does Professor Skalweit note in peasant farms the same phenomena as those I have noted in the Russian materials (mobility of land for use under the influence of family growth, raising of land prices and rents above land rent in the economic sense, and so on).
This observation is completely justified and was made to me in private letters from Professors M. Sering, E. Laur, and others who have taken notice of my book. I was conscious of this circumstance even when I was working on this investigation. It was clear to me that in different countries economic organizations widely differing in nature are understood under the one term, the peasant farm. While with us in Russia 90 percent of the total mass of peasant farms are pure family farms, in Western Europe and America this group is in­significant socially, and the term peasant farm is applied to semi-capitalist farms. It was also clear to me that the land regime of non-partible inheritance widespread in the West does not give even purely family farms a chance to disclose their characteristic features clearly enough.
However, I think that all this does not diminish my conclusions or make my book a narrowly Russian one. While in Western Europe the group of private family farms that work in a land regime where their characteristics may be particularly clearly expressed are a com­paratively small part of the total mass of peasant farms, I have every reason to suppose that in a number of countries of Eastern Europe, and especially in non-European countries like India, China, and Japan, this group of farms forms a very considerable social sector. Its total proportion in the world economy is such that it fully deserves special attention and study.
Apart from that, as we will see in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, i.e., in Western Europe itself, you may observe even in peasant farms squeezed by a regime of nonpartible inheritance some elements of
The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization      113
the economic conduct we have established in the mode of determin­ing the necessary degree of intensity.
Processes of capital accumulation are in this respect easier, but, as we will see in Chapter 5, they, too, demand some effort from the farm.
However, by taking in advance some of the conclusions of Chapter 5, we can still accept that the peasant farm with minimum land area and means of production has a real stimulus to develop them to the optimum, and in accord with its capability carries out this expansion if, of course, the agricultural market situation is not lower than the market situation for earnings from crafts and trades. Therefore, if in each particular year the volume of activity is determined by the means of production available in that year, the availability of means of production of itself, taken over long periods, is adjusted by the family or, more accurately, tends to be adjusted to the objective optimal volume of activity.
3. We have established that the peasant family without enough land and means of production at its disposal for the complete use of all its labor in the agricultural undertaking puts its surplus in an­other form of economic activity (crafts and trades). It frequently oc­curs, however, that the possibility of earnings from crafts and trades is also extremely limited or that payment for labor is very low.
In this case, it is sometimes advantageous for the peasant farm to violate the optimal combination of production elements for its activ­ity and to force its labor intensity far beyond the optimal limits. In­evitably losing on unit labor payment, it nevertheless considerably expands the gross income of its agricultural undertaking and reaches a basic equilibrium between the drudgery of labor and consumption —within the limits of agricultural activity, of course—at a level of well-being lower than would occur given a farm optimal in size and proportions.
This forcing up of labor intensity, buying increased annual agricul­tural income at the price of reducing labor unit payment, is achieved either by an intensification of work methods or by using more labor-intensive crops and jobs. If we compare different crops from the view­point of labor quantity and gross income which each desyatina de­mands and gives, we will see a great difference between them. Note, for example, Table 3-25. We see that the replacement of oats by flax, for example, as it were increases four times the area of the spring-sown field, making it possible to dispose of four times the quantity of labor on the same area. In exactly the same way, we can increase the labor
114
THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
TABLE 3-25
Labor Expenditure per Desyatina of Oats, Potatoes, and Flax
 
Payment   
Working Outlays on Gross Income Gross Income per   
Days per Materials per (Rubles per less Outlays Working   
Desyatina Desyatina Desyatina) on Materials Day   
oats   
Moscow uezd ...... . .     24.7 14.90 66.35 51.41 2.08   
Volokolamsk uezd . ..     22.5 16.94^ 46.44 29.50 1.31   
Vologda uezd ..... ..     32.2 12.99 39.71 26.72 0.83   
Bronnitsy uezd ..     20.0 14.45 44.97 30.52 1.52   
potatoes   
Moscow uezd ...... ..     48.9 51.00 137.20 86.20 1.76   
Volokolamsk uezd . ..    47.2 21.37 63.75 42.38 0.90   
Vologda uezd...... ..     56.9 26.79 121.90 95.11 1.67   
Bronnitsy uezd ..     47.9 21.72 94.50 72.78 1.62   
flax   
Volokolamsk uezd . ..     83.0 15.95 90.66 74.71 0.90   
Vologda uezd...... . .     88.2 13.32 93.33 80.01 0.91  
intensity of our farms by introducing root crops and potatoes into their fields.
Taking one of the Volokolamsk farms we described in 1910 and making an extract for it from the 1898 census, we have the compari­son in Table 3-26. In the twelve years that separate the two periods
TABLE 3-26
Change of a Three-course Grain Farm to Clover- and Flax-Growing
Rye     Oats     Potatoes     Flax     Clover     Fallow
1898: 1.8 workers, 3.9 desyatinas of arable
Desyatinas of sown .....     1.33 1.00 0.20         0.17 0.00 1.20
Working days .......... 40.7 22.5 9.1 14.1 0.0         0.0
Labor payment ......... 26.80 29.50 8.11 12.10 0.00        0.00
1910: 2.4 workers, 3.9 desyatinas of arable
Desyatinas of sown .....     1.00 0.00 0.15         0.83 1.00 0.92
Working days .......... 30.6 0.0 7.1 68.3 20.0          0.0
Labor payment ......... 20.18 0.00 6.35 62.00 40.00        0.00
taken, the farm underwent a fundamental break: sowing of forage was introduced, and commercial flax-growing reduced the growing of oats. In total, the 1898 farm, with 86.6 working days, obtained 77 rubles, 47 kopeks, giving a payment per day of 89.5 kopeks; the 1910 farm, with 126.0 working days, obtained 128 rubles, 50 kopeks, or 102.0 kopeks per working day. But it is still more important that even
The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization      115
TABLE 3-27
 
Percentage of Arable   
Desyatinas of Sown under:   
Areas per Worker Flax Potatoes   
Oats and flax ...... 2.6 14.0 3.9   
Potatoes and flax .., 2.2 16.6 27.4   
Potatoes .,........ 0.9 3.5 77.9  
of labor intensive crops of flax and the almost kitchen garden growing of potatoes (101 working days per desyatina) for three districts of Kostroma uezd.
However, the deepest and most interesting investigations in this respect are not Russian but western ones, carried out by E. Laur in Switzerland and K. Brdlik in Czechoslovakia. They disclosed the sharp deviation of small-scale farms from the optimum due to the impossibility of achieving the basic economic equilibrium at the optimum. The results of these investigations are summarized briefly in Table 3-28, for Switzerland, and in Table 3-29, in a different form, for the Czechoslovak farms.
In studying both these tables, we can come to a single conclusion which is most clearly expressed in the Swiss work. The peasant farm, restrained by its land area, forces up its labor intensity more than three times as against the optimal intensity for the capitalist farm. It also somewhat increases its capital intensity and thus almost doubles its gross income; however, this is achieved at the cost of reducing the payment per labor unit, which requires that the farm's equilibrium be established at a lower level of well-being. Similar forcing up of intensity is quite unacceptable to the capitalist farm, since in this event the land rent, in the economic sense, per hectare falls almost
though one worker in 1910 had a total of 1.63 desyatinas of sown in­stead of the 2.17 in 1898 he could dispose of 52.5 working days on the farm instead of the 48.2 in 1898; i.e., despite the pressure on land, he was able to increase the labor energy used.
Excluding years of favorable market situation, high labor intensive crops usually give a smaller labor payment than do more extensive crops. Therefore, peasant farms turn to intensive crops only when, due to land pressure, they cannot meet their demands to the necessary extent with an optimal labor payment and do not have advantageous crafts or trades. Thus, for example, N. P. Makarov observed the in­fluence of land pressure, shown in Table 3-27, on the development
116      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
TABLE 3-28 Switzerland, 1910
Per Hectare:
 
Outlays Eco-   
on Ma- Payment nomic   
Hectares Per- terials per Rent   
Farm per centage Outlays per Gross Labor per Con-   
Size Con- Hired Working on Ma- Working Income Day Hectare sumer's   
(Hectares) sumer Labor Days terials Day (Francs) (Francs) (Francs) Budget   
0-5    .. 1.2 7.4 147 304.9 2.07 902.0 2.90 68.0 609.9   
5-10   .. .     2.1 19.4 115 212.8 1.85 777.7 3.36 77.2 638.1   
10-15 ..      3.2 30.1 89 214.9 2.51 728.1 3.62 85.4 706.3   
15-30   .. ..     4.8 47.5 76 183.5 2.42 610.0 3.87 85.9 779.6   
30-oo   .. .     7.9 57.3 56 170.6 3.04 501.0 3.70 86.9 802.4  
TABLE 3-29 Czechoslovakia
 
Labor Net Gross Payment   
Fatm in Terms Cost of Gross Payment Profit on of Labor per   
Size of Annual Work Income of Labor Capital Annual Worker   
(Hectares) Workers (Crowns) (Crowns) (Crowns) (Crowns) (Crowns)   
2-5 0.57 329 532 420 12 737   
5-20   .., 0.27 221 451 333 59 1675   
20-100 ... 0.22 170 416 305 88 1890   
>100 .. 0.17 138 408 265 78 2401  
one and a half times. We consider it absolutely essential to stress that these conclusions have not been reached on the basis of Russian budgets but on European material.
Given the low degree of mobility of land areas we have already noted in Western Europe, the pressure of demographic elements leads, not to fluctuations in the area under agricultural exploitation, but to combinations with the degree of agricultural intensity. For our conception of the family farm, both methods are equivalent, and this we would particularly like to stress for our West European critics who are inclined to recognize our constructs as applicable only to the Rus­sian and, in general, to the Eastern peasant farm.
Apart from the described pressure of surplus labor on farm organi­zation, displacing intensity from its optimum, it is essential to note that the family character of the undertaking affects a whole series of other technical changes, as we will review in the following chapter.
Such are the particular features introduced into the family labor farm by the technical conditions of agricultural production. In their basic features, the mechanics of combining the economic factors pe­culiar to this form of economic activity may be considered to have been established.
The Basic Principles of Peasant Farm Organization      117
8 (Conrad's) Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, Vol. 122, Book 5, p. 680, Jena, 1924.
9 A. Skalweit, "Die Familienwirtschaft als Grundlage für ein System der Sozialöko­nomie," Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Vol. 20, Book 2 (1924), p. 232.
Kurt Ritter,8 noting in his review of my book the same factors as does Professor Skalweit,9 points to the incorrect nature of my termi­nology and says that even purely family farms, insofar as they become commodity producers and dispose of their produce on the capitalist market and are subject to the influence of its prices, should be called capitalist farms, since they form part of the capitalist system of the national economy.
In some respects, this may be correct, since the term capitalism is exceedingly overloaded with meaning and may cover the most dis­parate phenomena. However, it is essential to remember that the main part of our analysis is not national economic but private eco­nomic in character, and we needed an organization to separate family undertakings from those constructed on the basis of hired labor. The hired we have called capitalist, since in their private economic organ­ization they have elements of capitalist relations. If Dr. Kurt Ritter finds it possible within capitalism as a national economic system to give two different terminologies for hiring and nonhiring farms in the private economic sense, we will merely welcome it. We note only that the family farm is also conceivable outside the capitalist system of national economy.
For many of our readers, however, the concrete features of the living peasant farm are not yet depicted beyond our graphs, compari­son of figures, Arnol'd formulas, and correlation coefficients. For a whole series of our further theoretical constructs, too, it is absolutely essential to make our abstract schemes concrete and to descend from the study of the statistician and economist, working with his volumes of statistical tables, closer to the concrete life and work of the organiz­ing agricultural officer. In accordance with this, we devote our next chapter to a more or less detailed analysis of the concrete questions of individual peasant farm organization.
CHAPTER 4
The Organizational Plan of the Peasant Farm
One of the commonest and most unfortunate difficulties in under­standing the peasant farm is our characteristic statistical method of perceiving and thinking about it. Concepts of 1.78 horses compared with 8.34 persons of both sexes, 26.15 percent without horses, a de­cline in the average number of livestock held (in terms of large ones), depending on a rise in the percentage of literacy—these are the images and conceptions in which Russian economists are accustomed to think about the subject of our inquiry. Nevertheless, we can surely suppose that to think in this way about the peasant farm production machine is the same as to describe the structure of a modern steam engine as consisting of 39 percent Fe, 31 percent Cu, 16 percent H20 and 14 percent various organic substances.
To pass, even for a short time, from figures of the "Collection of statistical and economic information on agriculture in-guber­niya" to concrete, practical work among living peasant farms is enough to doubtlessly convince oneself that one must master more than the totals of classifications by sown area and the correlation co­efficients of its elements to understand the peasant farm; such data mainly describe, not the structure of the peasant undertaking as such, but a broad collection of peasant farms. One must seize hold of its living organizational ideas, the machinery of its individual economic organism which is "the subjective teleological unity of rational eco­nomic activity, i.e., running the farm." In brief, we will fully under­stand the basis and nature of the peasant farm only when in our con­structs we turn it from an object of observation to a subject creating its own existence, and attempt to make clear to ourselves the internal considerations and causes by which it forms its organizational produc­tion plan and carries it into effect.
With particular insistence, Russian critics of our early works usually call our theory a consumer theory of the peasant farm and
118
The Organizational Plan of the Peasant Farm      119
contrast it with the acquisitive concept of the farm. In this, there is either a great misunderstanding or a wish, for the sake of polemics, to give our views an obviously distorted image.
Any economic unit, including the peasant farm, is acquisitive— an undertaking aiming at maximum income. In an economic unit based on hired labor, this tendency to boundless expansion is limited by capital availability and, if this increases, is practically boundless. But in the family farm, apart from capital available expressed in means of production, this tendency is limited by the family labor force and the increasing drudgery of work if its intensity is forced up. The labor-consumer balance we have analyzed is the expression of the mechanism for limiting the peasant family's consumer tendencies. Given high labor productivity, the peasant family will naturally tend not only to meet its personal demands but also to expand the farm's capital renewal and in general to accumulate capital.
Of course, in speaking of the peasant farm we still do not need to conceive of its organizational plan in nature as a conscious structure, written out with all its tables and maps into a large in-folio volume. It is equally undoubted, however, that like Moliere's Jourdain who had talked prose for 40 years without suspecting it, our peasant for hundreds of years has been carrying on his farm according to definite, objectively existing plans, without, perhaps, fully recognizing them subjectively.
The very advantage or disadvantage of any particular economic initiative on the peasant farm is decided, not by an arithmetic calcu­lation of income and expenditure, but most frequently by intuitively perceiving whether this initiative is economically acceptable or not. In the same way, the peasant farm's organizational plan is constructed at the present time, not by a system of connected logical structures and reckonings, but by the force of succession and imitation of the experience and selection, over many years and often subconsciously, of successful methods of economic work. Therefore, we do not aim at issuing our further logical constructs as a priori deliberations of the peasant organizing his farm. Rather, we conceive them as a method for the a posteriori organized recognition of our subject, and merely hope that in time, given the development of our social agricultural science, some of our a posteriori considerations may also become prac­tical methods which our peasants may use for the practical arrange­ment of their farms.
The tentative nature of our further considerations frees us from a full and exhaustive calculation of the entire farm structure and
120      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
allows us to limit ourselves to certain organizational considerations of a general character. These are essential to us either for a deeper understanding of what has been expounded in the preceding chapters or for subsequent chapters. We will, therefore, not aim at giving guidance for the practical composition of organizational plans but propose mainly to stress those predominantly technical connections and norms which bind the separate elements of the farm together and will be essential for our understanding of the economic phenomena which arise on the basis of them.
From what we have said in preceding chapters, it is clear that the family of the peasant-run farm, beginning to organize production, tends in the final result to satisfy its demands to the fullest extent possible and to ensure the further stability of the farm by a process of capital renewal with the least expenditure of energy. For this purpose, it aims at ensuring such applications for its labor as would ensure the highest of all possible payments per, labor unit.
Each peasant farm is a constituent part of the general system of the national economy and is determined by those static and dynamic factors peculiar to its current phase of development. Undoubtedly, outside general national economy analysis we cannot fully understand the nature of a single private economic undertaking. However, to understand the foundations of any private undertaking and to make clear the general economic processes themselves we must fully eluci­date to ourselves the work mechanism of the economic machine which, subject to the pressure of national economic factors, organizes a productive process within itself and, in its turn, with others like it, influences the national economy as a whole. Our task is to study the structure of this machine and its mechanism for work performed within the limits of the organizational plan.
Without deep acquaintance with this apparatus, we will never fully understand how the peasant farm feels the pressure of national economic factors and how it reacts to the pressure. In this respect, the farm family uses, within its power, all the opportunities of its natural and historical position and of the market situation in which it exists. But since the combination of natural and market conditions is ex­tremely varied in different areas, in studying peasant farm organiza­tional structure we will naturally come up against a still greater vari­ety of types and forms of structure. Natural and national economic area differences are also complicated for individual farms by differ­ences in family composition, landholding, and availability of capital. Among these differences in the farm's organizational plan, the most
The Organizational Plan of the Peasant Farm      121
basic one which determines the whole character of the farm's struc­ture is the degree to which the farm is linked with the market—the development of commodity production in it.
In this chapter, we are not setting ourselves the task of making clear the causes which oblige peasant farms to expand or contract commodity production elements. The development of the market in a seminatural agricultural country is one of the most complex prob­lems in the theory of the evolution of the national economy and thus is beyond the limits of our study. So, in the meantime, we limit our­selves to organizational analysis of the private economy. Therefore, in studying the peasant farm in this chapter from a private economic viewpoint we take the particular degree to which it is money based as something given, supposing that circumstances do not give it the opportunity to develop commodity production with advantage more extensively than has been done.
The budget materials at our disposal enable us to establish the levels of money (commodity) nature shown in Table 4-1 for various areas of Russia.
TABLE 4-1
Peasant Farm Incomings and Outgoings in Money and in Kind Incomings Outgoings
Percent Percent
In        In in In        In in
Uezds Kind   Money    Total   Money      Kind   Money    Total   Money
Volokolamsk ...... 670.0 528.1 1198.1 44.2 554.9 500.1 1055.0 47.3
Gzhatsk  .......... 451.9 247.0 713.9 34.4 463.2 251.1 714.3 35.2
Porech'e   ......... 621.0 198.6 819.7 24.2 628.0 198.6 826.7 24.0
Sychevka  ......... 485.5 288.2 773.7 37.3 488.0 284.1 767.1 37.0
Dorogubuzh  ...... 650.1 180.3 830.4 21.7 640.2 213.4 853.6 25.0
Starobel'sk   ....... 568.1 442.0 1010.1 43.7 499.0 436.5 934.5 47.7
Vologda .......... 238.5 209.6 548.1 38.3 238.7 217.7 556.4 39.1
Vel'sk ............ 361.2 121.9 438.1 27.8 317.0 123.5 440.5 58.0
In order to understand from an organizational point of view the meanings of differences in the extent to which money and commodity elements are developed, we allow ourselves to compare two farms which are characteristic in this respect—an almost natural-economy Tot'ma farm and a largely money-based, flax-growing Volokolamsk farm. From the zemstvo statistical handbook for Tot'ma uezd, Vo­logda guberniya—one of the most obscure, nonmonetary corners of the country—let us extract the summary graphs of the budget tables relating to the farm group that sows the largest area. Then let us com­
122      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
TABLE 4-2
Consumer's Budget on a Nonmonetary and a Monetary Farm: Expenditure in Kind and in Money (Rubles)
 
Tot'ma Uezd Volokolamsk Uezd   
In Kind In Money In Kind In Money   
Rye   .................... ...  58.5 26.0 40.0   
Barley .................. ...  13.3   
Wheat .................. ...    9.5 0.6 7.5   
Oats ................... ...    4.4 0.1 5.0   
Malt ................... ...    3.9   
Groats ................. ...    7.8 13.5   
Peas ................... ...    3.8   
Potatoes   ............... ...    5.8 12.0   
...    0.3 0.0   
Cucumbers   ............ ...    0.1 11.0   
Onions   ................ ...    1.3 0.0 1.0   
Other vegetables........ ...    1.7   
Vegetable oil ........... ...    2.2 1.0 18.8   
Fungi .................. ...    4.1   
Berries ................. ...    2.3   
Payment for milling .... 3.6 4.5   
Beef ................... ...    3.9 1.2 6.0   
Veal ................... ...    1.8 20.0   
Mutton ................ ...    3.9   
Pork ................... ...    6.8 1.4 5.0   
Eggs ................... ...    5.2 0.0 0.5   
Milk and milk products . ...  51.3 150.0   
Poultry  ................ ...    0.2 0.5   
Fish  ................... ...    2.1 4.5 10.0   
Salt   ................... 1.8 2.0   
Condiments   ........... 0.6 16.8   
Tea and sugar ......... 11.8 50.0   
Tobacco  ............... 0.3   
Alcohol ................ ...    3.5 6.1 21.0   
Hops  .................. ...    0.1 0.5   
Clothing ............... ...    4.3 10.8 145.0   
Games ................. ...    0.0 0.3 3.0   
Flax spinning .......... ...    4.0   
Wool  .................. ...    2.5   
Sheepskin .............. ...    1.2   
Soap................... 1.1 12.0   
Lighting  ............... 1.9 4.0   
Firewood   .............. ...    8.6 3.6 20.0 50.0   
Utensils ................ ...    0.0 1.8 2.0   
Spiritual needs ......... 4.8 4.5   
Total ............ ... 218.4 57.8 253.0 497.8   
276.2 750.8   
Percentage ....... ... 70.1 20.9 33.7 66.3  
100.0 100.0
pare the average figures obtained with an ordinary Volokolamsk farm which we have picked at random from the 25 budget monographs for 1910 (Table 4-2).
The Organizational Plan of the Peasant Farm      123
Tot'ma Uezd Volokolamsk Uezd
 
In Kind In Money In Kind In Money   
Rye   ................... ...  74.4 6.5 27.0   
Barley ................. ... 21.7   
Wheat ................. ...  12.5 0.7   
Oats ................... ...  59.5 19.4 55.0   
Potatoes   ............... ...    7.5 18.0   
Flax seed .............. ...    2.1 0.8 25.0 140.0   
Flax fiber .............. ...    5.6 3.3 306.0   
Peas ................... ...    4.3   
Cabbage  ............... ...    0.3   
Cucumbers ............. ...    0.1   
Onions   ................ ...    1.2 1.0   
Other vegetables........ . . .    1.7   
Beef ................... ...    4.0   
Veal ................... ...    2.1 20.0   
Mutton  ................ ...    3.9   
Pork ................... ...    6.8   
Milk and milk products . ...  52.1 7.6 150.0   
Hides and wool......... ...    5.8 0.5 1.0 7.5   
Poultry products ....... ...    0.6 0.6 1.0   
Total ............ ... 2661 39.4 298.0 453.5   
Crafts and trades ....... _ 48.9 _ 85.0  
The table allows us to see real differences at first glance. In looking at the table, we see that the money expenditure of the consumer's budget in Tot'ma farms comes to only 22.0 percent of the total, while in the Volokolamsk farm it reaches 61.1 percent. In other words, the almost natural economy of the Tot'ma peasant farm is an isolated economic machine with few social and economic links with the out­side world. Conversely, the Volokolamsk peasant farm has been drawn into the world's economic circulation and lives, not merely by its own home produce, but by a share of the general national income, and fulfills part of the work of the common national machine of the economy. Naturally, such a structure of a money-based farm could not but affect its production organization. Numerous items of the consumer budget met in kind in Tot'ma uezd demand of the farm a complex organization, giving 32 forms of produce. In Volokolamsk uezd, however, the 10 items of the budget met in kind allow a great simplification of economic organization. We can, in part, judge the comparative complexity of the arrangements in both these farms from Table 4-3.
Thus, in the Tot'ma farm, 87 percent of the total income is con­sumed on the farm in kind, and its production is determined qualita-
TABLE 4-3
Income in Kind and in Money, Tot'ma and Volokolamsk Farms (Rubles)
124      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
rively and quantitatively by consumer demands. In the Volokolamsk farm, though, only 39.6 percent of what is produced is prepared for direct family consumption; the remaining 60.4 percent is thrown onto the market and serves family consumption only in the sense that necessary objects may be acquired for the money received. Farms from other areas give us various rates of commodity production inter­mediate to the extreme types we have looked at.
Commodity type farms are distinguished from nonmonetary farms by other real differences in the character of their economic calcula­tions, apart from the considerable simplification of their organiza­tional plan which we have already looked at. In the nonmonetary farm, the activity of the man that ran it was directed to a whole series of separate consumer demands and in many ways had a qualitative hue. It was necessary to obtain for family consumption such and such products, precisely those and no others. The quantity could be mea­sured only for each demand separately: "there's enough," or "there's not enough," and is there much "not enough"? Thanks to the elas­ticity of consumer demand itself, such a measurement could not be very exact.
Therefore, in the nonmonetary farm the question of whether it is more advantageous to sow rye or mow hay, for example, could not arise, since they could not replace each other and thus had no com­mon scale for comparison. The value of the hay obtained was mea­sured in terms of the need for fodder, and the value of the rye in terms of feeding the family. You could even assert that meadows in­creased in value the poorer they were and the more labor they re­quired to obtain each pud of hay.
The farm's tasks take on quite another character as soon as it enters into the sphere of monetary and commodity circulation. Economic activity loses its qualitative hue. Demands may now be satisfied by purchases; concern with "quantity"—obtaining the greatest quantity which, being exchanged, may take any "qualitative" form needed to meet family demands—now steps into the foreground. As its monetary nature develops, the "quantity" obtained more and more frees itself from "quality," and starts to have the abstract character of "value."
Given widely developed commodity exchange, what its labor is expended on makes no difference to the farm family, provided only that it is utilized as fully as possible and well paid by the market at the value of the produce obtained. And since the level of payment for labor invested in various products is finally determined by the state of the market, it is self-evident that as the commodity nature of
The Organizational Plan of the Peasant Farm      125
TABLE 4-4*
 
Money Receipt from Agriculture per Worker (Rubles) Assumed Net Income (6 Rubles per Worker in Groups of Farms by Desyatinas of Land Used per Worker)   

0.0-2.5         2.5-5.0        over 5.0   
0-60   ........ 50              69              -   
60-120 ........ 144             134             110   
>120........ -              204             154  
* Editors' note.—The meaning of this table is not entirely clear in the Russian original.
The reader who has attentively studied the first chapters of our inquiry can clearly see that the subject of our analysis is precisely such a farm which has been drawn into commodity circulation. If we speak of its consumer character, we understand by this the consumer demand influence in establishing the basic economic equilibrium of the labor farm and not the qualitative influence of consumption on farm structure. This qualitative influence takes place in the nonmon­etary farm and is retained to a very small extent in the farms we have studied which have passed over to monetary and commodity produc­tion. Only that which is advantageous to have in kind is retained. Usually, depending on area and type of farm, this is vegetables, pota­toes, milk, meat, oats, and some other grains. (See Table 4-5.)
1 Editor's note.—Reading kon"yunktury, instead of kuVtury.
zSel'skoe i Lesnoe khozyaistvo [Farming and Forestry], Nos. 5-6 (1922), p. 21. See there, too, tables for Vologda budgets for the dependence of conventional net income on amount of money received per desyatina of land for use.
the farm develops the farm's organization in a nonmonetary system, totally established by family consumer demands, begins to be more and more influenced by the market situation1 as regards farm compo­sition, retaining the pressure of consumer demands only in determin­ing the total volume of activity. Such is the internal organizational and economic meaning of a transition from a nonmonetary farm structure to a monetary and commodity one.
The farm is freed from the "qualitative" effect of consumer de­mands, and in commodity production, by constantly adapting to a changing market situation it is able to increase considerably the quan­tity of values acquired and its labor payment. Thus, for example, I. N. Zhirkovich,2 on the basis of Volokolamsk budget materials, es­tablished the effect of the development of a farm's marketability shown in Table 4-4.
126
THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
TABLE 4-5 Percentage Marketed of Certain Items
Volokolamsk     Gzhatsk     Porech'e   Sychevka     Dorogobuzh
Rye    Srain)
straw).....
Oats  straw>
grain).....
Potatoes ........
Flax    fibey)
seed).....
Vegetables ......
Clover hay .....
Meadow hay
Milk ...........
Meat ...........
4.1 0.0
10.5 1.2
1.2
99.5 51.7
10.0
1.9
1.3
0.4
0.0
0.0 0.0
0.0 0.0
0.0
100.0 64.8
0.0
0.2 0.0 0.0
0.0 6.0
3.8 7.2
1.2
85.3 58.9
0.9
4.1 0.0 0.0
0.0 0.7
0.0 0.0
0.2
97.2 62.4
0.0
3.7
6.7
0.0
0.0
0.0 2.4
0.0 0.9
3.8
79.5 56.6
1.1
0.0
0.1
0.0
0.0
Thanks to its contact with the market, the farm is able to throw out of its organizational plan all production sectors which give little income and in which the product is obtained on the farm with greater effort than that required to obtain its market equivalent by other forms of economic activity which give greater income. Only that which either gives a high labor payment or is an irreplaceable pro­duction element for technical reasons remains in the organizational plan.
In differing soil and climatic production conditions and in differ­ent states of the local market situation, the combination of produc­tion elements will vary widely. In direct proximity to large industrial centers, we will encounter farms forcing up fresh milk or vegetable production; farther off on sands we will see farms with extensive potato crops, and on clayey loams, flax. In northern areas with abun­dant fodder, we will come on dairying for export, and, within the sphere of influence of ports, on the deep black earth soils we will find extensive grain production.
Given an unmodified type of peasant farm, the basis of which we have analyzed in preceding chapters, we will always encounter in it the most varied systems of agricultural production. Wishing to recog­nize a pattern in the way these economic structures are formed, we can follow, link by link, all of their organizational plan, using the usual methods of organizational calculation elaborated by the Ger­man schools of Goltz and Aereboe, and introducing certain additions and alterations due to the peculiarities of the labor farm. The classi­cal method for drawing up an organizational plan is to establish a se­
The Organizational Plan of the Peasant Farm      127
quence of organizational considerations and calculations such that each subsequent stage could be rather fully constructed on the data and figures obtained as a result of work on preceding stages.
In order to look at the peasant farm's organizational plan in all its detail, it is essential for us to review the following sequence of organizational considerations, which we have adjusted to the peculiar features of the family farm.
1. Choosing the farm's trend on the basis of available information on income from individual crops, methods of raising crops, and livestock ac­cepted or capable of being adopted in the particular area.
2. Organizing individual sectors of the peasant farm and making sub­sidiary estimates.
a) Account of the family labor force and its consumer demands.
b) Account of land held and possible land for use.
c) Organization of field-cropping.
d) Organization of draft (workhorses).
e) Organization of feed-getting.
f) Organization of commercial livestock.
g) Organization of manure.
h) Organization of the kitchen garden, orchard, and other sectors.
i) Physical organization of the area. j) Account of all work in agriculture. k) Organization of equipment.
I) Organization of technical production, cottage industry, and crafts and trades away from home.
m) Organization of buildings.
n) Organization of capital and money circulation.
3. Verifying the balances.
a) The balance and organization of labor.
b) The estimate and calculation of income.
As will be seen subsequently, the organizational problems we have listed are given in an order more or less corresponding to the se­quence of organizational considerations. Another sequence, of course, might also be proposed. However, practical experience shows, what­ever the sequence adopted, that in working out any of the organiza­tional sections we would always have to take account more or less hypothetically of all the others, and frequently, in going through a whole series of the first sections, we would have to encounter diffi­culties and to return again to the first section, starting the work afresh. Only by means of gradual and repeated amendment of the calculations can one finally balance up all the farm sectors into an entire system.
128      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
Readers acquainted with the methods for drawing up organiza­tional plans in capitalist agriculture can observe that our system is quite close to that of, say, Goltz, and at first glance will not find in it anything specifically peculiar to the labor farm. Therefore, in ap­proaching an item-by-item survey of the organizational plan, we draw the reader's attention with particular insistence to the nature of our further considerations, since the peculiar features of peasant farm organization do not consist in the sequence of these considerations, but in the criteria with the help of which they are effected.
Account of the Family Labor Force and Its Consumer Demands
For us, the farm family is the primary initial quantity in construct­ing the farm unit, the customer whose demands it must answer and the work machine by whose strength it is built. To avoid misunder­standings, we consider it essential to repeatedly state that the forms of farm and production created by the family are largely preordained by the objective general economic and natural conditions in which the peasant farm exists. But the volume of economic work itself and the mechanism for constituting the farm derive predominantly from the family, taking into account all other elements of the economic circumstances.
We have reviewed in detail family composition and the work force structure at different phases of its development in Chapter 1, and there is no point in repeating them here. Therefore, we limit our­selves to a brief inquiry into the quantitative expression of the con­sumer demands, which are the basic stimulus in the labor family's economic activity, and into their elasticity. Table 4-6, which we have taken from S. A. Klepikov's work, gives us a conception of the basic item of the peasant's personal budget—the actual consumption rates for various forms of food.
As is seen from the table, peasant diet is fairly stable and varies sharply only in produce, which to some extent is a "luxury." Con­sumption rates for clothing and other items in the personal budget vary much more, as may be seen from Table 4-7.
The elasticities we have shown by comparing individual items of the personal budget by areas appear with still greater prominence by comparing farms that differ in wealth. Thus, for example, we have the instances in Table 4-8 where consumption is constricted by a reduced level of well-being.
TABLE 4-6
Peasant Family Consumption in Terms of an Annual Male Consumer (Puds)
 
Grain   
Products: Milk,   
Flour, Vegetables Meat Sour   
Groats, and Vegetable and Cream,   
Guberniyas Legumes Potatoes Fruit Oil Sugar Fish Curds Butter Eggs   
Vyatka ........ .    28.5 4.7 4.5 0.06 0.13 1.08 17.6 0.16   
Vologda ....... .    20.3 7.4 2.0 0.08 0.38 1.29 13.8 0.09 0.06   
Olonets   ....... .    29.0 10.3 3.0 0.24 0.40 7.74 16.0 0.34 0.05   
Novgorod   ..... 26.8 10.5 4.2 0.14 0.45 1.39 15.5 0.11 0.11   
Kostroma ...... 19.3 6.0 4.6 0.23 0.42 0.84 10.1 0.12 0.14   
Moscow   ....... 17.1 15.5 3.7 0.40 0.44 1.91 18.1 0.21 0.04   
Kaluga ........ 17.7 11.3 5.9 0.25 0.34 2.00 0.01 0.00   
Tula .......... 21.3 27.8 7.0 0.23 0.34 2.19 11.6 0.06 0.15   
Penza  ......... 21.1 15.0 3.4 0.19 0.20 2.01 10.0 0.10 0.14   
Tambov ....... 21.1 15.7 6.9 1.74 17.3 0.02   
Khar'kov  ...... .    23.7 7.2 3.2 0.26 0.12 3.14 3.5 0.10 0.16   
Poltava   ....... .     19.7 14.3 8.4 0.19 0.20 3.24 7.4 0.09   
Kherson ....... .    34.5 10.8 3.2 0.27 0.18 2.84 0.1 0.10   
Average  . .    23.14 12.1 4.6 0.19 0.28 2.45 13.7 0.10 0.09  
130      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
 
TABLE 4-7   
Average Annual Expenditure per Consumer   
Soap   
Clothing (Russian Lighting   
(Rubles) Pounds) (Rubles)   
Novgorod guberniya .......    10.5 3.3 0.60   
Starobel'sk uezd ... ........    21.15 0.60   
Volokolamsk uezd . ........    24.94 9.8 1.12   
Gzhatsk uezd ...... ........     9.99 6.5 1.36   
Porech'e uezd...... ........     6.40 2.8 0.67   
Sychevka uezd ..... ........     7.78 3.8 1.01   
Dorogobuzh uezd .. ........     5.61 2.5 0.55   
Vologda uezd...... ........    12.73 3.9 1.04   
Tot'ma uezd....... ........     4.74 2.1 0.57   
TABLE 4-8   
Including (in Rubles)   
Total Annual Expenditure Food of Vodka, Tea,   
per Consumer on Personal Vegetable Sugar,   
Needs (Rubles) Origin Tobacco, Etc.         Clothing   
More than 90..... ..........    34.60 18.00 88.35   
70-90   ............. ..........    31.20 10.64 66.42   
50-70   ............. ..........    25.10 7.81 50.97   
Less than 50......, ..........    20.60 5.05 35.37  
Summarizing all expenditures on personal needs and expressing them in terms of one consumer, we have the rates in Table 4-9, which are the basic figures in organizing the farm.
TABLE 4-9 Annual Expenditure in Kind and in Money
per Consumer (Rubles)
Volokolamsk uezd, Moscow guberniya...... 100.1
Novgorod guberniya ...................... 76.6
Starobel'sk uezd, Khar'kov guberniya....... 87.3
Gzhatsk uezd, Smolensk guberniya ......... 75.4
Porech'e uezd, Smolensk guberniya......... 72.9
Sychevka uezd, Smolensk guberniya........ 72.9
Dorogobuzh uezd, Smolensk guberniya ..... 72.0
Vologda uezd, Vologda guberniya.......... 64.1
Tot'ma uezd, Vologda guberniya .......... 51.8
In using these figures, we must not forget that they are not some­thing fixed but can, as we see, fluctuate within very wide limits. An increase in these rates depends not only on increased incomes and the larger budget which follows but also on an expansion of the de­mands themselves due to elements of higher urban culture that pene­trate into the countryside. In this case, apart from the quantitative
The Organizational Plan of the Peasant Farm      131
TABLE 4-10 Expenditure per Consumer (Rubles)
 
Percentage Gross Income   
in Money   
0-50 50-75 >75   
Grain....... .. 25.9 23.3 20.3   
Clothing ____ .. 20.4 20.80 26.0   
Vodka ...... ..   0.71 0.77 1.27   
Tea, sugar .. ..   0.85 0.84 1.82  
The influence of the extent to which the farm is money based may be noted still more sharply in the type of consumption in the north­ern countryside where there are crafts and trades. Thus, for example, for the Moscow and Smolensk guberniya flax area we have the rates in Table 4-11 for expenditure per consumer on clothing (rubles).
TABLE 4-11
 
Percentage of Personal Budget in Money   
Consumer Budget 1-40 40-50 50-100   
0-70.0 rubles.......
70.1-80.0 rubles____
80.1-90.0 rubles____
>90.0 rubles .... .. 5.60 .. 5.85 .. 6.85 .. 8.77 5.80 9.65 11.12 19.40 6.04 18.81 22.50 34.75  
As we see, in areas of commodity farming, and especially in areas of crafts and trades, under pressure of new urban habits and a range of new urban demands that penetrate the foundations of country life the structure of consumption and its level are subject to very considerable changes.
It is essential to remember that the consumption rates we have quoted are precisely rates of real consumption and by no means a quantitative expression of demands themselves as such. Speaking gen­erally, the demand for any product for personal consumption cannot be expressed by any one figure; and if, generally speaking, it can be expressed in figures, then it is in the form of a whole scale of con­sumption rates which corresponds to the gradual satiation of demand and its extinction.
increase in the budget, its structure also changes, as is seen from the following analysis of the influence of an increase in the extent to which the farm is money based, and in having crafts and trades. Thus, for Starobel'sk uezd, Khar'kov guberniya, see Table 4-10.
132      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY
In accordance with what has been said, the rates we have quoted are not a quantitative expression of any "consumption living stan­dard," with which we are constantly reproached, but are degrees of satiation of demand corresponding to the on-farm equilibrium factors we have studied in earlier chapters. Hence, it is clear that the con­sumption levels we have quoted depend not only on the demand pattern of the families studied but also on the pattern and conditions of their productive work.
Thus, to sum up, we can establish that personal budget size per consumer fluctuates around 70-100 rubles, giving an average family an annual budget of 500-800 rubles. This is approximately the sum which the peasant family's economic activity should give to achieve the basic economic equilibrium, apart from income needed to renew capital circulating in the production process. Moreover, as we will see below, the family's level of well-being depends not so much on development of demands as on the production conditions available to peasant family labor.
Account of Land Held and Possible Land for Use
The organizational plan of an agricultural unit based on hired labor takes the organization of its area as the initial determinant in constructing its economy; and although it finally completes this sec­tion of the organizational plan corresponding to the situation in other sections, it may freely take the plan as the starting point for its con­siderations. But in the family farm where it is not land but the family labor and consumer elements which are given, the problems of orga­nizing the area naturally cannot be so significant.
In countries where, by the law or custom of nonpartible inheri­tance or because the economic machinery for production has become set in its routine, the land regime makes land use somewhat immo­bile, we encounter the land area as a determinant, even in family farms. Disharmony between family labor force and area worked is regulated either by hiring a work force and going to work on the side, or by combining the farm's intensity in such a way as to dis­place it from the optimal level as regards the market. But in countries where the land regime makes the land area extremely mobile, the determining significance of "available" area falls to zero.
Communal repartitions, long-term and short-term rentings, and (for countries where private property in land still exists) purchases and sales permit adequate adjustment of size of land for use to the
The Organizational Plan of the Peasant Farm      133
farm's requirements. A good illustration of this is the influence of family composition on size of land rented which we have established for Starobel'sk uezd: this can be seen from the table we have already quoted (Table 4-12). Looking at the table, we see that under pressure from the increasing burden of consumers on workers the amount of land rented obediently increases.
TABLE 4-12 Rented Arable per Worker (Desyatinas)
. W7 , Consumers per Worker per Worker     _t__
 
(Desyatinas) 1.00-130 131-1.60 >1.60   
0.1-2.0 .... 0.63 1.16 1.45   
2.1-3.0 .... 0.19 1.45 1.27   
3.0-7.0 .... 0.41 1.51 2.99   
Average ... 0.41 1.37 1.60  
Editors' note.—This table purports to be the same as Ta­ble 3-24, but the data are different.
The best confirmation, however, of the instability of peasant farm land areas is the results we have already quoted from the works of N. N. Chernenkov, P. Vikhlyaev, A. Khryashcheva, and K. Ku-shchenko on peasant farm dynamics. These are constructed by com­paring repeated censuses and show most clearly the small degree to which peasant farms retain their old land areas, even for compara­tively short periods of 10-15 years (see p. 67).
Therefore, if we do consider it essential for the peasant farm or­ganizer also to begin his considerations with the land, we take it, not as a "given" initial determinant, but as very important initial mate­rial which we should inevitably take into account in our further de­liberations. In approaching farm organization, we naturally should take account of how much land is available to the farm, its disposition, quality of soils, relief, and presence of exclusively meadow and ex­clusively pasture areas, i.e., those which, due to moisture or relief, cannot be used in any other way. Apart from this, it is essential to disclose the land rental opportunities which the farm may have. All this information is absolutely essential in order to construct the fur­ther sections of the farm's organizational plan, even though we did not take land as the initial material for our economic development.
Having finished the farm organization in its main sections, we will return again in the section to organization of the area in the land use measures meaning of the word. Prior to reviewing this section, we postpone all questions about the technical organization of the area.
134      THE THEORY OF PEASANT ECONOMY

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