Letter: Learn from Chayanov

"How the labour movement can change agriculture" (Solidarity 768) was a welcome contribution on a subject that has been neglected for too long. Rhodri Evans mentions the Land Workers’ Alliance whose work also deserves to be better known. I want to put in a plug for the bi-annual journal, The Land, which I have read (somewhat unsystematically) for a number of years.

It contains a wealth of material covering almost all aspects of agriculture, land ownership, economics, ecological issues etc. It is from reading The Land that I learned about the work of A V Chayanov, who at one time held the leading chair of agricultural economics in the Soviet Union. His Theory of the Peasant Economy is considered a classic of its kind and was first published in Berlin in 1923. An English translation is available from the American Economic Association, published in 1966.

An independent thinker, his writings were increasingly viewed with suspicion by the Stalinist authorities. In 1930 he was accused of involvement in a "counterrevolutionary conspiracy", just at a time when Soviet agriculture desperately needed someone who actually knew what he was talking about. He was arrested and shot by firing squad in 1937.