Henry Berstein, "V.I. Lenin and A.V. Chayanov: looking back, looking forward"
Journal of Peasant Studies, January 2009

And politics? The political economy in this paper is not deployed in any ‘antipeasant’ spirit or prescriptive stance on petty commodity production. Nor do any of my observations suggest withdrawing political sympathy and support for progressive struggles because they fail to satisfy the demands of an idealised (class-purist or other) model of political action. Rather, I have suggested that part of the problem with the ‘new’ agrarian question sketched is how it posits a unitary and idealised, and ostensibly world-historical, ‘subject’: ‘farmers’ or ‘peasants’ or ‘people of the land’. The point, then, is first, to recognise and, second, to be able to analyse, the contradictory sources and impulses – and typically multi-class character – of contemporary struggles over land and ways of farming that can inform a realistic and politically responsible assessment of them. This means rising to the challenges posed by a re-energised and radical agrarian populism, to engage both seriously and critically with the agrarian movements of the present time, and thereby to recover the spirit of Lenin’s ‘fresh and creative impulses’ of the early 1920s, and of Chayanov’s contributions to ‘practical theory’.