The first stage (early 20s – mid-30s) was characterized by theoretical research on the means of scientific substantiation of social phenomena in the new economic conditions; The leadership of post-revolutionary Russia suffered a very heavy economic defeat on the economic front and consciously raised the question of a new economic policy, “On the economic front, with an attempt to transition to communism,” he wrote. V. I. Lenin (1870-1924), by the spring of 1921, we had suffered a defeat more serious than any defeat inflicted on us by Kolchak, Denikin or Piłsudski, a defeat much more serious, much more substantial and dangerous. It was expressed in the fact that our economic policy at its top was detached from the bottom and did not create that rise of the productive forces, Which one… recognized as a basic and urgent task” (Lenin V.I. Poln. Sobr. Vol. 44. pp. 158 – 160).
The immediate communist approach to the tasks of construction in the city hindered the rise of the productive forces and turned out to be the main cause of the deep economic and political crisis in the spring of 1921. Concessions with foreign capitalists, the leasing of private capitalists – all this was a direct restoration of capitalism and all this was connected with the roots of the new economic policy, “For the destruction of the sweep means for the peasants free trade in agricultural surpluses not taken by tax, and the tax takes only a small fraction of the products.” The peasantry made up a gigantic part of the entire population and the entire economy, and therefore capitalism could not but grow on the basis of free trade. This basic economic alphabet, taught in the principles of economic science, passed both the leadership of post-revolutionary Russia and all segments of the population.
In explaining and forecasting the possible outcomes of the economic situation, such theoretical economists as N. I. Bukharin, A. A. Bogdanov, N, D, Kondratyev,
A. V. Chayanov and others.
N. I. Bukharin (1888–1938) paid special attention to the correlation between the problems of economic policy and “war communism.” He structured the problem of the new economic policy, turning it into a number of particular problems: the need for policies that allowed for market relations; The nature of this new policy. the relationship between it and “war communism”; the essence of “war communism”.
As an economist-analyst, N. I. Bukharin believed that the specific feature of the then state of the economy was not the new economic policy as such, but its size and volume of market relations. If we take another country, where the share of small producers is not so large, then the volume of market relations there will be different. The logic of reasoning leads N. I. Bukharin to the conclusion: the more industrially developed the country, the more it is industrialized, the less important the role of market relations in it. With the development of the economic mechanism, the volume of market relations will be smaller, according to N. I. Bukharin, the rate of their disappearance will accelerate, as will the rate of development of the socialist economy, which represents a single homogeneous organism (Bukharin N.I. Problems of the Theory and Practice of Socialism.
M., 1989.S. 213).
N.I. Bukharin determined the essence of the new economic policy and its “universality” based on the identification of state capitalism and socialism. One does not need to think long to understand that the socialist economy, which is a single homogeneous organism, is nothing more than an example of an all-consuming state monopoly that has lost the possibility of rapid and flexible development. Thus, the formation of the sociology of economic life really took place as a justification, albeit at the highest intellectual level, of the ways of socialist development in the new economic conditions.
Noteworthy is N. I. Bukharin’s analysis of the relationship between “war communism” and the new economic policy. At that time, some theorists believed that “war communism” was the first and necessary phase of the development of society during the civil war. Others thought that after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, there was no need for “war communism.” N. I. Bukharin considered these allegations unfounded. In addition, he was of the opinion that it did not make sense to tie his hands with one-sided formulations, it was not yet known with complete certainty how the circumstances would develop.
A significant contribution of N. I. Bukharin to the comprehension and substantiation of the economy of the transition period was the creation of a general theory of the transformation process. Giving an analysis of the transitional era, he formulates the main provisions of this theory, which explains the process of transformation of society from one socio-economic state to another. Abstracting from the ideological form, we will highlight the main points of the transformation process in its most general expression.
The analysis of the transition period allowed N. I. Bukharin to reveal that the hierarchical technical-production system, which at the same time is an expression of socio-class relations and relations of production, inevitably disintegrates into constituent elements. No matter how small (concrete-historically) this intermediate moment of production revolutionary “anarchy” may be, nevertheless it is a necessary moment in the general chain of development.
It should be noted that, firstly, not all socio-economic bundles disintegrate, but bundles of a hierarchical type. Ties between the working class, on the one hand, the technical intelligentsia, the bureaucracy, and the bourgeoisie, on the other, can be broken. But the relations of production, which express the attitude of the worker to the worker, the engineer to the engineer, the bourgeois to the bourgeois, are not broken. In other words, the general delimitation of social strata and the rupture of the human organizational and technical apparatus occurs primarily through hierarchical ties. Consequently, socio-economic ties within social subjects (social groups, strata, communities) are not broken. Second, elements of the new society grow up in the old society. And since we are talking about phenomena of an economic order, i.e. issues of economic structure, production relations are touched upon, it is necessary to look for elements of a new society in the production relations of the old one. In other words, the question must be posed in this way: what kind of production relations of the old society can form the basis of a new production structure? Thirdly, in the process of revolutionary, rupture of production ties, the disintegration of the material and technical basis of society is not at all necessary. It is not included in the concept of production relations, but refers to the productive forces. Cars, apparatus, factory buildings, etc., of course, suffer during social upheavals. But this is not the basis of the devastation. The destruction of the material apparatus is mainly a consequence of the disintegration of the human apparatus and the cessation of the continuity of the labor process. Consequently, the solution to the problem of building a new society is primarily associated with the analysis of the state of socialized labor.
Fourth, the specific problem of building a new society consists in a new combination of ruptured social strata and in the correct vision of the general element that embodies first and foremost the material basis of the future society. This decisive and basic layer in the course of the revolution only partially disintegrates. On the other hand, it is extraordinarily united, re-educated, organized. Empirical proof of this was provided by the Russian Revolution with its relatively weak proletariat, which nevertheless turned out to be an inexhaustible reservoir of organizational energy.
Convincingly substantiating the ways of formation of a new society, N. I. Bukharin used ideological doctrines to the least extent, and most relied on the analytical apparatus of the theory of the transformation process built by him in the context of the development of the world economic system. The crisis of moderate economic policy in the late 20s led to an intensification of the confrontation of N. I. Bukharin, with the ruling elite of the Soviet state and his arrest in 1937 In March 1938, at the trial of N. I. Bukharin “fought for his reputation in the world, for his place in history”; On March 15, 1938, he was executed by firing squad. However, his theoretical legacy, consisting in the disclosure and explanation of contradictory processes in the transition period, can form the core of the modern theory of the transformation process, so relevant and necessary for modern society.
Another outstanding scientist of that time was A. V. Chayanov (1888-1938). The central direction of research of the school of A. V. Chayanov was the development of the theory of family labor peasant farming. As early as 1911, he gave a classical definition of the purpose of the peasant economy: “The task of the peasant labor economy is to deliver the means of subsistence to the economic family by making the fullest use of the means of production and labor power at its disposal.” Such management was opposed by A. V. Chayanov to capitalist entrepreneurship based on hired labor.
In 1922-1925, A. V. Chayanov managed to build a holistic theory of the organization of the peasant economy. During the NEP years, the first edition of his book on the organization of the peasant economy, a collection of early works on the economy of the peasant economy, and a guide to the organization of peasant farms in the non-chernozem region were published. This series of works was completed by a major monograph on the organization of the peasant economy. A. V. Chayanov began his book with a generalization of the facts empirically established by D. I. Kirsanov, P. P. Maslov,
N. P. Nikitin, V. A. Kosinsky and other agrarians who dealt with the issues of peasant economy. Why do peasants not want to introduce profitable threshers, pay “hungry rents” that exceed the capitalist price of land, breed labor-intensive and unprofitable crops such as potatoes and flax, are distracted by latrines, undermine already weak agriculture? Why is there an inverse relationship between prices and “wages” in the economy? Classical economic theory did not provide answers to these questions. A new approach was needed.
The presentation of the new methodology for the study of the peasant economy A. V. Chayanov gives in a debatable form as answers to critics – L. N. Kritsman, G. E. Meerson and other economists who accused him of static analysis, ignoring Marxism, exaggerating the role of agriculture in the Russian economy of the 20s, idealizing patriarchal forms of production. Responding to opponents,
And V. Chayanov sets out the basics of his methodology. Already in the first chapter of the monograph, he raises the question of the labor potential of the peasant family and the wave-like process of its growth and disintegration. New materials have shown a complex contradictory process of growth of low-sowing farms, on the one hand, and disintegration of multi-sowing farms, on the other.
A. V. Chayanov dwells in detail on the factors of profitability of peasant farms, which he divides into two groups: intra-farm and national economic. The main on-farm factors were, in his opinion, the labor resources of the family and the intensity of labor. A very important conclusion is substantiated about the absence of a wage category in a non-capitalist economy and about its transformation into a net income (personal budget) of family members. In embryonic form, the idea of self-supporting income distributed among the members of the labor collective is expressed here, and, importantly, the stability and survival of such a collective are shown.
The specificity of the peasant economy, deprived of the salary category, set the task of “immersing” it in the system of national economic categories. A. V. Chayanov successfully coped with this task, pointing to the transformation of the forms of prices, interest and rent in the peasant economy and their impact on the internal system of the non-capitalist form of production. Having found out the measure of the “immersion” of family labor production in the national economy, A. V. Chayanov gropes for the dynamics of involving peasant farms in the general turnover. According to the author, it turns out to be a mechanism of “cooperative collectivization”, carried out on a voluntary, gradual basis, strictly stimulated by the state. The moments of the development of separate economic families into the system of “social and cooperative economy” are outlined by him dotted, but clearly enough to indicate the further fate of the peasant economy.
The last period of A. V. Chayanov’s work covers 1927-1930, the period of studying the processes of differentiation of the peasantry. In the conditions when large landlord and capitalist farms disappeared, differentiation, according to A. V. Chayanov, arose as a result of disharmonies of two types of farms: natural, accumulated in the most fertile central black earth regions, and simple commodity, gravitating to the markets of large cities and seaports. Being rebuilt from natural to commodity, the Russian peasantry experienced agrarian overpopulation, began to migrate, and therefore differentiated. For A. V. Chayanov, the stratification thus acted not as a social class process among the peasantry, but as a splitting from the main array of family labor farms of four types of independent enterprises: farming, credit and usury, commercial, auxiliary. Here his concepts of the organizational plan of peasant farms were developed, and most importantly – his view on demographic differentiation, which he began to consider as a background for socio-economic differentiation.
A. V. Chayanov contrasted L. N. Kritsman’s scheme of “kulak-middle-poor” with his classification, consisting of six types of farms: capitalist, semi-labor, wealthy family-labor, poor family-labor, semi-proletarian, proletarian. A plan was also put forward to resolve the contradictions of such differentiation—the cooperative collectivization of the second, third, fourth, and fifth types of farms, followed by the economic displacement of the kulak and the gradual involvement of the village proletarian in family and labor management through the cooperative credit system. This was a new approach to the allocation of social strata among peasant farms, and this classification has yet to be evaluated by historians-economists.
A difficult fate befell the teaching of A. V. Chayanov in the 20s. Almost all of his postulates, especially the thesis on the stability of the peasant family farm, were met with hostility by official economic science. In the late 20s, criticism of the theory of the family-labor economy gradually grew into a broad political campaign that put an end to the scientific activity of A. V. Chayanov. On June 21, 1930, he was arrested, in 1937 he was sentenced to death, and his name was forgotten. However, his theory of peasant farming continues to live on and is revived in serious scientific publications about his work. The main confirmation of the vitality of his doctrine of peasant farming was the survival of family and personal forms of agriculture in our country and around the world.
Along with the theoretical and methodological explanation of social phenomena in the new economic conditions, the conduct of specific sociological studies of social problems that are most acute for this stage of the economic and socio-cultural development of the country is gaining momentum. A large group consisted of studies of the population’s time budgets. They are very close to the problems of sociology of social life, since they characterize the activities and behavior of different groups of the population in both the production and non-production spheres. Thus, it becomes possible to compare the impact of the economic and social spheres on the life of the population.
From the mid-30s to the early 60s, there was a break in the development of sociology (and, accordingly, in the accumulation of knowledge about the relationship between the economic and social spheres of public life) associated with the dominance of centralized administrative methods of economic management, which made feedback knowledge “unnecessary”, In the early 60s, there was a restoration of the interrupted scientific tradition, due to the increasing role of the human factor in the development of the domestic economy and simultaneously with the reducing the effectiveness of managing the labor behavior of employees.