CHAYANOV'S RULE

There is a more exact way of appreciating this unintensive use of productive forces. I offer a mixed series of theoretical and statistical reflections mounting to the conclusion that the domestic system sets norms of livelihood limited not only absolutely but in relation to the society's potential; that indeed, in the community of domestic prod­ucing groups, the greater the relative working capacity of the house­hold the less its members work. The last is a capital discovery of A. V. Chayanov, here acknowledged by calling it "Chayanov's rule."

A preliminary understanding is that the three elements of the DMP so far identified—small labor force differentiated essentially by sex, simple technology,and finite production objectives—are systematical­ly interrelated. Not only is each in reciprocal bond with the others, but each by its own modesty of scale is adapted to the nature of the others. Let any one of these elements show an unusual inclination to develop, it meets from the others the increasing resistance of an incompatibility. The normal systematic resolution of this tension is restoration of the status quo ("negative feedback"). Only in the event of an historic conjuncture of additional and external contradictions ("overdetermination") would the crisis pass over into destruction and transformation. Specifically, the norm of domestic livelihood tends to be inert. It cannot move above a certain level without testing the capacities of the domestic labor force, either directly or through the technological change required for a higher output. The standard of livelihood does not substantially increase without putting into ques­tion the existing family organization. And it has an ultimate ceiling set by the possibility of any household order to provide adequate forces and relations of production. So long, therefore, as the domestic mode prevails, the customary idea of livelihood will be suitably re­strained.

Moreover, if the internal contradictions set off by rising standards thus define an absolute limit, the external contradictions will de­termine an equilibrium which is low relative to the society's economic capacities.

Because, whatever the nature of social relations between house­holds, from the anarchy of nature to the amity of kinship, the customary norm of welfare has to be fixed at a level attainable by the larger number of them, leaving underexploited the powers of the most effi­cient minority. Potentially, the several households of a community differ greatly in per capita output, if only because they are at different stages of the familial development cycle, so must vary in their ratio of effective producers to dependent children and elders. But suppose the conventions of domestic well-being were adapted to the house­holds of greatest working capacity. Society is then faced with one of two intolerable conditions, depending on the proximity of existing interhousehold relations to the poles of anarchy and solidarity. No relations prevailing, (or hostile relations) the success of only a few and the inevitable failure of the many is an economic invitation to vio­lence. Or, given an extensive kinship, distribution by the happy few in favor of the many poor merely creates a general and permanent discrepancy between the convention of domestic welfare and the reality.

Taking together then these abstract and preliminary reasonings: on pain of engaging internal and external contradictions, revolution and war, or at least continuous sedition, the customary economic targets of the DMP have to be held within certain limits, these inferior to the overall capacity of the society, and wasteful particularly of the labor-power of more effective households.

"In the family farm," writes A. V. Chayanov, "rates of labor inten­sity are considerably lower than if labor were fully utilized. In all areas investigated, farm families possess considerable stocks of unused time" (1966, pp. 75-76). This observation, summing up extensive research on Russian agriculture of the immediate prerevolutionary period, allows us to continue the argument in an entirely different register without missing an essential beat. True that Chayanov and his co-workers developed their theory of precapitalist domestic economy in the special context of simple commodity circulation.²⁹

29. Long unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, Chayanov's work (1966) assembles a large array of statistical information and intellectual ponderation of passionate inter­est to the student of precapitalist economies. (This praise is not to be tempered by the obvious disagreement between the theoretical perspective of the present work and the marginalist reading Chayanov gives in the end to his more substantial reflections.)

Yet, paradoxically, a fragmented peasant economy may more clearly than any primitive community present on the empirical level certain profound tendencies of the DMP. In the primitive case these tendencies are concealed and transfigured by general social relations of solidarity and authority. But the peasant domestic economy, articulated rather to the market by exchange than to other households by corporate kinship, without pretence manifests to inspection the deep structure of the DMP. It manifests in particular an underuse of labor-power, as many of Chayanov's tables testify. Table 2.9 is typical. Chayanov moved beyond the mere observation of a general underuse of manpower. He investigated in detail the variation in intensity by household. Bringing to bear a study of his own among 25 Voloko­lamsk farm families, he was able to show, first, that these differences are quite remarkable: a threefold range of variation from 78.8 working days/worker/year in the least industrious household to 216.0 working days per worker in the most industrious.³⁰

30. Chayanov supplies the complete table for 25 families (1966, p. 77). The average number of working days/worker/year was 131.8; the median, 125.8.

Then, most revealing, Chayanov plotted the differences in intensity/household against vari­ations in domestic composition figured in terms of number of consum­ers. A ratio of household size to effective manpower (dependency ratio), the last is essentially an index of household economic strength in relation to its appointed tasks of livelihood. The relative working capacity of the domestic group can be understood to increase as the index descends towards unity. Chayanov demonstrates (Table 2.10) that the intensity of labor in the domestic group decreases accordingly.

Chayanov's demonstration might seem a superfluous refinement of the obvious, particularly if the domestic economy of finite objectives is taken for granted. All it says statistically is what one would then expect logically; namely, the smaller the relative proportion of work­ers the more they must work to assure a given state of domestic well-being, and the greater the proportion the less they work. Phrased more generally, however, and in a way that says nothing about the finality of the DMP except by the invitation to comparison with other economies, Ch'ayanov's rule suddenly seems magnified several theo retical powers: Intensity of labor in a system of domestic production for use varies inversely with the relative working capacity of the producing unit.

Table 2.9. Distribution of peasant labor by sector in three areas of czarist Russia* (after Chayanov, 1966, p. 74) t

*n not given.

t It is regrettable that many of Chayanov's statistical tables, fashioned in the main from reports of Czarist agricultural inspectors, lack the kinds of precision that modern study must consider indispensable, notably with regard to the character of the sample, operational defintions of categories employed, and the like.

t The figures of this column evoke Lafargue's critique of the bourgeois revolution: "Under the Old Regime, the laws of the Church guaranteed the laborer ninety rest days, fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight holidays, during which he was strictly forbidden to work. This was the great crime of Catholicism, the principal cause of the irreligion of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie: under the revolution, when once it was in the saddle, it abolished all holidays and replaced the week of seven days by that of ten, in order that the people might no longer have more than one rest day out of ten. It emancipated the laborers from the yoke of the Church in order better to subjugate them under the yoke of work" (1909,p. 32 n).

Table 2.10. Intensity of work in relation to household composition: 25 Volokolamsk families (after Chayanov, 1966, p. 78)*

* The same relation between intensity of production and effectiveness of the domestic group is shown in another table, covering several peasant regions and using output/worker measured in rubles rather than intensity measured in workdays (p. 78). I excerpt part of that table:

Productive intensity is inversely related to productive capacity. The rule of Chayanov felicitously summarizes and supports several propo­sitions we had made along the way. It confirms the deduction that the norm of livelihood does not adapt to maximum household efficiency but settles rather at a level within reach of the majority, so wasting a certain potential among the most effective. At the same time, this means that no compulsion to surplus output is built into the DMP. But then, the plight of the least effective domestic groups, especially the substantial percentage that do not meet their own requirements, seems all the more serious. For the households of greater working capacity are not automatically extending themselves on behalf of the poorer. Nothing in the organization of production itself provides systematic compensation for its own systematic defects.

PROPERTY

On the contrary, rather than producing for others, a certain autonomy in the realm of property strengthens each household's devotion to its own interests.

We need not be so fascinated with "title" to property as with entitlement, nor with abstract claims of "ownership" so much as real privileges of use and disposition. A stockholder in A.T.&T. believed himself endowed by his five shares to chop down a telephone pole placed noxiously in front of his picture window. Anthropologists have likewise learned by experience to separate various rights of property— income, use, control—inasmuch as these may be divided among dif­ferent holders in the same thing. Also we have proved tolerant enough to recognize separate rights that are not exclusive by nature but differ mainly in the power of one holder to override decisions of the other: ranked overrights, as between a chief and his followers; or segmentary overrights, as between a corporate lineage and its constituent house­holds. The path of anthropological progress is now strewn with termi­nological corpses, the ghosts of most of which are better avoided. The issue of present concern is the privileged position of domestic groups, whatever the coexisting tenures.

For these coexisting tenures are typically superposed to the family rather than interposed between the family and its means of prod­uction. In the event, the higher "owners" in the primitive societies— chiefs, lineages, clans—stand in a relation of the second degree to production, as mediated by the entrenched domestic groups. Chiefly ownership—"of the land, the sea and the people," as the Fijians say—is a particularly revealing case. It is an "ownership" more inclu­sive than exclusive, and more political than economic: a derived claim on the product and productive means in virtue of an inscribed superi­ority over the producers. In this it differs from a bourgeois ownership that confers control over the producers by a claim upon productive means. Whatever the resemblances in ideology of "ownership," the two systems of property work differently, the one (chieftainship) a right to things realized through a hold on persons, the other (bour­geois) a hold on persons realized through a right to things:³¹

31. "In the first place the wealth of the old tribal and village communities was in no sense a domination over men. And secondly, even in societies moving in class antagonisms, insofar as wealth includes domination over men, it is mainly and almost exclusively a domination over men by virtue of, and through the intermediary of, the domination over things" (Engels, 1966, p. 205).

The household in the tribal societies is usually not the exclusive owner of its resources: farmlands, pastures, hunting or fishing territo­ries. But across the ownership of greater groups or higher authorities, even by means of such ownership, the household retains the primary relation to productive resources. Where these resources are undivid­ed, the domestic group has unimpeded access; where the land is allotted, it has claim to an appropriate share. The family enjoys the usufruct, it is said, the use-right, but all the privileges entailed are not obvious from the term. The producers determine on a day-to-day basis how the land shall be used. And to them falls the priority of appropria­tion and disposition of the product; no claim of any supervening group or authority legitimately goes so far as to deprive the household of its livelihood. All this is undeniable and irreducible: the right of the family as a member of the proprietary group or community to directly and independently exploit for its own support a due share of the social resources.

As an economic rule, there is no class of landless paupers in primi­tive society. If expropriation occurs it is accidental to the mode of production itself, a cruel fortune of war for instance, and not a system­atic condition of the economic organization. Primitive peoples have invented many ways to elevate a man above his fellows. But the producers' hold on their own economic means rules out the most compelling history has known: exclusive control of such means by some few, rendering dependent the many others. The political game has to be played on levels above production, with tokens such as food and other finished goods; then, usually the best move, as well as the most coveted right of property, is to give the stuff away.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1609