Nigel
Swain (The University of Liverpool, UK, Foreign
Fellow, SRC, 2003-04)
In this short
essay I want to explain why it is that studying the post-socialist
rural transition in Central and Eastern Europe is not the marginal,
rather esoteric activity that most readers probably imagine, but
central to our understanding of post-socialist economics, politics and
society.
Socialist
agriculture, in particular the collective farm, was far from
marginal. In fact it embodied three essential features of the
socialist project. First, it represented a unique experiment in
attempting to transpose to agriculture an industrial scale and pattern
of work organisation, with such "modern" features as a complex,
hierarchical division of labour and extensive use of managerial and
service staff - rational, large-scale, mass agricultural production
(see pictures of co-operative farms).
Yet the
collective farm also retained within it the very antithesis of this
"modern" agriculture - small-scale, household-oriented production (see
pictures of household livestock and gardens); and the symbiotic
interactions between small-scale, household, "second economy" farming,
and large-scale, "socialist", modern, "first economy" production proved
to be central to our understanding of both socialist Hungary's
agricultural success story in the middle-to-late socialist years, and
how "actually existing socialism" could be made to work.
In the 1980s,
however, the weaknesses of relying on two equally non-market economic
systems became apparent. Stuck in a "modern" but non-market
paradigm, the "first" economy could not become efficient, while the
"second" economy remained too small, too subsistence-oriented, and too
dependent on compensating for the inadequacies of the "first" economy
to become market-driven itself.
If the
collective farm combined the modernist bent of socialist production
relations with the symbiotic interaction of the "first" and
"second" economy that made "actually existing socialism" function
reasonably successfully (for a time at least), it also embodied a third
essentially socialist feature, namely the attempt to create a socialist
community, a working and living environment imbued by socialist
values. Collective farms had an especially close relationship
with the local authorities in whose jurisdictions they operated, one
which was based on "socialist co-operation" in the creation of this
"socialist" culture, which was made up, in fact, of a mixture of
bourgeois, paternalistic and modernist ideals (see picture of House of
Culture).
Given this
embodiment within the collective farm and socialist agriculture of
three essential features of the socialist project, it follows that the
demise of the collective farm provides a lens through which to
illuminate the changes brought about by post-socialism in these three
respects. What happens when socialist ownership is replaced by
private ownership, when socialist assets are taken over by their
managers or reclaimed by the heirs of their original owners (see
picture of restituted farm)? What happens to non-owners once the
socialist obligation to provide
employment has been removed? What happens when interactions
between "first" and "second" economy are destroyed by the all-embracing
power of the market? What happens when socialist community and
political values are opened up to competition from other ideological
and political influences?
The above are
all fundamental questions about the nature of post-socialism, which,
individually, are being investigated by many branches of the social
sciences. But they are also interrelated questions which would
benefit from research in the round, because they impact on people in
combination not singly. The one research field where it is
possible to investigate concurrently both market impacts (on
socialism's modernist, non-market production relations as well as its
integration of the "first" and "second" economy), and the consequences
of political and cultural pluralism for the anti-democratic, modernist,
bourgeois, paternalism of socialist culture is the post-socialist
countryside, because that is where they all came together. Hence
the centrality of the rural.
SRC Home
If the
collective farm combined the modernist bent of socialist production
relations with the symbiotic interaction of the "first" and
"second" economy that made "actually existing socialism" function
reasonably successfully (for a time at least), it also embodied a third
essentially socialist feature, namely the attempt to create a socialist
community, a working and living environment imbued by socialist
values. Collective farms had an especially close relationship
with the local authorities in whose jurisdictions they operated, one
which was based on "socialist co-operation" in the creation of this
"socialist" culture, which was made up, in fact, of a mixture of
bourgeois, paternalistic and modernist ideals (see picture of House of
Culture).
Given this
embodiment within the collective farm and socialist agriculture of
three essential features of the socialist project, it follows that the
demise of the collective farm provides a lens through which to
illuminate the changes brought about by post-socialism in these three
respects. What happens when socialist ownership is replaced by
private ownership, when socialist assets are taken over by their
managers or reclaimed by the heirs of their original owners (see
picture of restituted farm)? What happens to non-owners once the
socialist obligation to provide
employment has been removed? What happens when interactions
between "first" and "second" economy are destroyed by the all-embracing
power of the market? What happens when socialist community and
political values are opened up to competition from other ideological
and political influences?