Kritsman and the Agrarian Marxists by Terry Cox & Gary Littlejohn

Author:Terry Cox & Gary Littlejohn [Cox, Terry & Littlejohn, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781138890930
Google: It4JogEACAAJ
Goodreads: 23504375
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

One must conclude that the demise of NEP was largely a result of its faulty implementation. The dangers of an incorrect method of implementing NEP were signalled as early as the ‘Scissors Crisis’ of 1923, but they should have been clear enough by the time of the cereal crisis of 1925, when the restoration of the economy to pre-war levels was virtually complete. As Grosskopf points out, Dzerzhinsky clearly analysed the general lines NEP should take prior to his death in 1926. During 1926–7, the Soviet government implemented its agrarian policy in a manner which suggested it had learned the lessons of the previous year. The change of course in the following year seems primarily to be related to the struggle going on in the Party leadership at the time. The XV Party Congress had not been a clear victory for Stalin, and this appears to be related to his clandestine use of ‘extraordinary measures’ against the peasantry, mobilising the support of that section of the party which had always seen NEP as a retreat and who were only too ready to believe that Kamenev’s mythical ‘kulak grain strike’ had again become a reality in the autumn of 1927.

Clearly in this situation, the emphasis of the Agrarian Marxists, and particularly of Kritsman, on the careful evaluation of the mechanisms of class differentiation, its extent and its implications for the construction of economic plans, was completely vindicated. While the Kritsman school were not the only ones to supply important evidence on the state of agrarian class relations in the 1920s and to attempt to relate it to economic policy, they were just reaching the point of sufficient pre-eminence in the field to have a real potential for influencing Party policy in favour of continuing NEP as a means of industrialising the economy and collectivising the peasantry, when Stalin intervened so dramatically to neutralise them as a potential political force. It will never be known how the Agrarian Marxist school would have developed, but their careful work clearly has implications for current policy in some developing countries. They were interested in the agrarian class structure not just as a matter of academic curiosity, but as a vitally important component of a rural (and urban) development strategy. Precisely because the class structure affects the capacities of various economic agents, it has a considerable impact on the effectiveness of state policy.

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