Transitional puzzles~I >From An Agricultural To An Industrial Society Amlan Datta | The Statesman | March 02, 2007
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=3&theme=&usrsess=1&id=148562 Love and war, war and love, constitute the major theme of the ancient epics and, indeed, of human history. But man must live before he loves and fights. So the story of man includes economics, which originally meant "the art of household management". That art has evolved and grown more complex with time and it has come to be used to designate stages of the evolution of human society. The major features of the present age, including its forms of government, arts and technology, morals and styles of life, are meaningfully yet loosely related to a central drama, a story which takes its character from an intricate combination of wars, local and global, and the transition from an agrarian to a predominantly industrial economy. This transition to an industrial society did not take place at the same time in all parts of the globe. Its design was not the same everywhere. Nor has the process been completed yet. History reveals alternative paths of growth. In what way and how far to carry this process forward is an important question for the future of human society. Safe future On the answer to that question will depend vital changes in the physical environment of our planet during the coming decades as also prospects of sustainable development and a safe future for mankind. To argue that man can have no control over the process of this great transition is to offer a counsel of total despair and loss of faith in the power of reason. We have to look at the past, try to understand the nature of the problem and chart out our course for the future. Let us take a quick look at past history, hoping to gain some understanding of roadblocks and guideposts for the future. England was among the first countries to make regular and substantial transfer of land from production of crops to other productive uses. Plots of land scattered in open fields had to be enclosed to facilitate this process. This was done quite early to facilitate sheep farming. The Enclosure Acts of the 18th century came closer to what can be properly called the Industrial Revolution. There are a few special points to bear in mind for an understanding of the English experience. It was common among families of English landlords to send out younger brothers for non-agricultural occupations, such as long-distance commerce, leaving the management of land to the care of the eldest brother. Thus the English family system could be more easily adjusted to the requirements of an industrial transition. Add to this the fact that, thanks to geographical discoveries, a "new world" had already opened up where people could migrate to seek fortunes abroad. Despite these favourable circumstances, the English experience of the transition to industrial society was by no means happy. In fact, this was a particularly unhappy period in the life of the English people. This is a view which is clearly reflected in the literature of that period. It finds eloquent confirmation in the laws enacted at that time to enforce order. The blessings of democracy were enjoyed by a small upper class in society. The poor laws bear unmistakable testimony to the misery of the common people which imperialist plunder in colonies did little to alleviate. There was a great increase in the number of uprooted "vagabonds" thrown up in the turmoil of the industrial transition in England and extremely harsh methods were prescribed to deal with these restless and hapless people. The moral fervour in Marx's denunciation of capitalism is easy to understand and easier to sympathise with against this social background. There is enough evidence of man's inhumanity in the social history of England in the 19th century to make any knowledgeable person with a modicum of conscience sit up and think of an alternative path of development. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union failed to show the desired alternative. In some ways the problem of transition to an industrial society in Stalin's Russia was very different from what it was in England in an earlier century. One basic difference can be very simply stated. England is a comparatively small country with a high density of population. The Soviet Union, by contrast, is a huge land mass with more sparsely populated areas. In the drive towards industrialisation, it is not the acquisition of land for setting up industry which presented the main problem in the USSR. Rather, it was the procurement of surplus food stock from the farmers to feed the towns which appeared as a crucial bottleneck. In the late 1920s, the Stalinist leadership resolved to launch an all-out collectivisation campaign in the agricultural sector. It was argued that collective farms would provide an organisational base for higher productivity. However, there was also a more compelling consideration. It was guessed rightly that collectivisation would strengthen the control of the party over the agricultural sector and so make it easier to achieve higher targets of centralised procurement of grain to meet the needs of the industrial sector. The campaign for rapid collectivisation started in 1929 and some writers have designated the next five years the period of "the Soviet Great Leap Forward". Statistics relating to progress of collectivisation and changes in agricultural production and procurement over these years are available from Moscow and these tell a grim story. The percentage of crop area collectivised rose from 33.6 in 1930 to 87.4 in 1934; grain harvest in million tons is estimated to have declined from 83.5 in 1930 to 67.6 in 1934; and, despite this decrease in production, state grain procurement in million tons rose from 10.8 in 1928 to 22.1 in 1930 and stood at approximately the same height thereafter (22.6 million tons in 1933). It remains only to add a brief note on the methods by which this extraordinary operation was carried out. Ruthless force Stalin's speech at the 15th Party Congress (December 1927) on the subject of transition from agriculture to industrialisation sounded moderate and reasonable. Referring to the economic situation prevailing in Russia at that juncture, he said: "What is the way out? The way out is to unite the small and dwarf peasant farms gradually but surely, not by pressure but by example and persuasion, into large farms based on ... collective cultivation of the land." The Soviet "great leap forward" was actually executed not by "persuasion" but by a massive and ruthless use of force. A very large number of people who refused to cooperate were exiled forcibly to Siberia and a very large number perished. Demographic studies put the number of unnatural deaths in these disturbed times at several millions and the horror of it all is unforgettably depicted in Russian literature by great writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak. Among the leaders of the CPSU in the 1920s, there was no discord on the need for industrialisation. But Bukharin proposed a strategy of economic development that would have been more peaceful. It did not fit in with Stalin's power game and was rejected. Yet it helped inscribe on the agenda of history the need for a peaceful transition from agriculture to industry. (To be concluded)
