Agrarian socialism is a political ideology that promotes social ownership of agrarian and agricultural production as opposed to private ownership. Agrarian socialism involves equally distributing agricultural land among collectivized peasant villages. Many agrarian socialist movements have tended to be rural (with an emphasis on decentralization and non-state forms of collective ownership), locally focused, and traditional. Governments and political parties seeking agrarian socialist policies have existed throughout the world, in regions including Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Australia.
An example of an agrarian socialist party in Europe is the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party (known as the SRs). The SRs were a prominent agrarian socialist political party in early 20th-century Russia during the Revolution. The SRs garnered much support among Russia's rural peasantry, who in particular supported their program of land socialization as opposed to the Bolshevik program of land nationalization—division of land among peasant tenants rather than collectivization in authoritarian state management.
Examples in Asia include the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from the 1940s to the 1970s, along with the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) in the 1970s. Throughout the mid-20th century, the CCP pursued an agrarian socialist policy agenda in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the WPK pursued an agrarian socialist policy agenda as the Korean-style socialist rural construction" by sweeping land reforms in 1946 which was seized from landlords and distributed it to peasants, by the late 1950s, this was transitioned into a system of collective and state farms of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Inspired by the CCP's Great Leap Forward, from 1975 to 1979, the CPK and the Khmer Rouge implemented an extreme policy of forcibly relocating the entire Cambodian urban population to the countryside to become farmers, which led to a famine.
Examples of agrarian socialist parties in North America include the Socialist Party of Oklahoma and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Canada. In the United States, the Socialist Party of Oklahoma enjoyed local political significance in the first 20 years of the twentieth century as an agrarian socialist party. In 1944, the CCF formed North America's first democratic socialist government, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.
Examples in Latin America include agrarian socialist movements and sentiments that were developed in 19th-century Mexico by the indigenous Huastecan culture as part of its clash with Spanish imperialism. In the 20th century, examples include the Landless Workers' Movement of Brazil and the Communist Party of Cuba. Founded in 1984, the Landless Workers' Movement of Brazil was a socialist movement pursuing land reform in Brazil. Following the Cuban Revolution, the new Communist Party of Cuba pursued agrarian socialist policies, including the Agrarian Reform Law of 1959 and the Agrarian Reform Law of 1963.
Theory and praxis Agrarian socialism is a political ideology combining principles from agrarianism and socialism. Agrarian socialism pursues the collectivization of rural populations as opposed to agricultural policies that promote capitalistic farming. Agricultural collectivization seeks to contribute to the efficiency and productivity of large-scale farming while mitigating related issues of landlessness or overmigration to urban districts.
Agrarian socialism emphasizes the social control, ownership, and utilization of the means of production (such as farms) in a rural society. Additionally, principles like community, sharing, and local ownership are emphasized under agrarian socialism. For instance, in rural communities in post-Soviet Russia, "social organization of labor in the peasant household is based upon highly dense networks of mutual trust and interdependences" that diminished the need for manager-employee styles of labor. Nationalist ideology can also be seen coupled with agrarian socialist ideology, sometimes serving as the foundation for peasant-led revolutions. For instance, nationalist propaganda from the fledgling Chinese Communist Party during the Sino-Japanese War era "furthered the mobilization of the masses and helped determine the form this mobilization took."
Europe Diggers The Diggers, a 17th-century group of religious and political dissidents in England, are associated with agrarian socialism.Campbell, Heather M (2009), The Britannica Guide to Political Science and Social Movements That Changed the Modern World, The Rosen Publishing Group, 2009, pp. 127–129.
Agrarian socialism in rural Hungary The rise of Agrarian Socialism in Hungary began in the late 19th century in Viharsarok, Hungary. The socialist movement was sparked as a response to the exploitation of rural laborers and landless peasants who worked as farmers under feudalism in southeastern Hungary during the Habsburg Monarchy. In 1890, the Magyarországi Szociáldemokrata Párt (MSZDP) started to mobilize and organize agricultural workers, which resulted in rural laborers and poor peasant farmers protesting feudal landlords and local magistrates. The MSZDP advocated for an increase in the wages of farmers and the elimination of corvée.
The first uprising of the agrarian socialists began on May 1, 1891, in Orosháza and Békéscsaba. The uprising occurred after local authorities and the gendarmerie tried to prevent May Day celebrations among peasants and refused to recognize worker associations among peasants legally. The uprisings led to hundreds of rural workers and peasants being arrested. A key figure in the MSZDP was János Szántó Kovács, who advocated for land distribution among peasant farmers. On April 22, 1894, after Hungarian authorities confiscated socialist materials from workers' associations and arrested János Szántó Kovács, protesters stormed the town hall of Hódmezővásárhely which resulted in the military firing shots into a crowd of several thousand protesters. The violent reaction to the uprising garnered the attention of socialist philosopher Friedrich Engels. The uprising led to the Austria-Hungarian government declaring a state of siege, which resulted in mass arrests of socialist activists and brutal treatment of peasants in rural Hungary. The government continued its efforts to squelch the agrarian socialist movement, and in 1898, authorities imprisoned István Várkonyi, who edited an agrarian socialist journal Földmivelő. The jailing of Várkonyi came after a group of socialist women from Orosháza published an article detailing their demands for livable wages for agrarian women workers. As a result of the crackdown, the MSZDP distanced themselves from socialist activists, and the movement went underground, which gave birth to woman-led movements and groups that advocated for agrarian socialism, such as the Feminist Association.
On April 6, 1908, a second wave of agrarian socialism was birthed in Balmazújváros when a group of 400 peasants led by agrarian socialist leaders met to create the National Agricultural Party (Országos Földmívelő Párt). The party called for "equal suffrage and full freedom of the press, and the unrestricted right of assembly and association." The National Agricultural Party, in contrast to the MSZDP, openly advocated for women's suffrage and encouraged women to organize under the party's banner.
In 1918, the Communist Party of Hungary was founded, and shortly after, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was established, but it was short-lived. The National Peasant Party was formed in 1939 and advocated for land distribution among peasant agrarian workers.
Communist rule was revived in June 1948, and the Hungarian Working People's Party came into power, which resulted in the establishment of the Hungarian People's Republic. Starting in the late 1940s, Hungary adopted the Soviet Kolkhoz model, which was an agricultural collectivization system that originated in the Soviet Union, where peasants were compelled to fully merge their agricultural resources in an effort to increase agricultural production. The result of forced collectivization and the subsequent poor operation and management of these cooperatives resulted in food shortages in the 1950s. Following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Hungary abandoned the rigid Kolkhoz model, opting for a more flexible form of cooperatives where modestly sized individual holdings were allowed but the bulk of the land was jointly cultivated.
Russian populist tradition and Socialist Revolutionary Party
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 liberal, social democratic, and other socialist parties within the Russian Provisional Government. In November 1917, it won a plurality of the national vote in Russia's first-ever democratic elections (to the Russian Constituent Assembly), but the soviets had gained control of the country, and the Bolsheviks maneuvered and eliminated the other parties within the soviets, including the Socialist Revolutionaries, and seized power. That sparked the Russian Civil War and the subsequent persecution.
The Socialist Revolutionaries' ideology was built upon the philosophical foundation of Russia's narodnik, a movement of the 1860s and the 1870s whose worldview was developed primarily by Alexander Herzen and Pyotr Lavrov. After a period of decline and marginalization in the 1880s, the 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 the integration of some of the key Marxist concepts into their thinking and practice. In that way, with the economic spurt and the industrialization in Russia in the 1890s, they attempted to broaden their appeal to attract the rapidly growing urban workforce to their traditionally peasant-oriented program.
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 socialist and democratic in nature and garnered much support among Russia's rural peasantry, which particularly supported the program of land-socialization, as opposed to the Bolsheviks' program of nationalization of the land. The Socialist Revolutionaries wanted the division of land for the peasant tenants, rather than the Bolsheviks' desire of collectivization in authoritarian state management. The SR 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 to be Marxists. The SRs believed that the "laboring peasantry" and the industrial proletariat were revolutionary classes in Russia, but the Bolsheviks considered the industrial proletariat to be exclusively revolutionary.
The Socialist Revolutionaries defined class membership in terms of ownership of the means of production, but Chernov and other theorists defined class membership in terms of extraction of surplus value from labor. Under the first definition, smallholding subsistence farmers who do not employ wage labor are, as owners of their land, would be members of the petty bourgeoisie. Under the second definition, they can be grouped with all who provide, rather than purchase, labor power and hence with the proletariat as part of the "laboring class". Chernov, nevertheless, considered the proletariat the "vanguard", with the peasantry forming the "main body" of the revolutionary army.Hildermeier, M., Die Sozialrevolutionäre Partei Russlands. Cologne 1978.
Asia