NEO-POPULISM AND MARXISM 51 any discussion of the mutually contradictory economic assumptions of the two frameworks. 5 D Thorner, "Introduction" to Chayanov, op cit, p ii. 6 See K Marx, Capital, Vol I, Part VIII; R H Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the 16th Century, London, 1912; M Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1946, pp 120-188, 224-237. 7 D Thorner, "Introduction" to Chayanov, op cit, p iii. 8 M Harrison, "Chayanov and the Study of the Russian Peasantry", Mimeo, Cambridge, 1972. Harrison presents a critical evaluation of Chayanov basing himself mainly on Chayanov's budget studies using Starobels'k zemstvo data, published as "Byndzhety Kresty'an Starobel'skogo Uyezda", by A V Chayanov, Kharkov, 1910. This is not available in English translation. 9 J R Hicks, A Theory of Economic History, London, Oxford University Press, 1969. When we talk of a "descriptive" as opposed to an "analytical" concept, we have in mind the attempt to put forward, as an abstract historical category, a concept which merely describes a given empirical situation, and is not located within any theory of historical transition. 3 o in Chayanov's "Peasant Farm Organisation", no data are given on the distribution of population and area cultivated by size of holdings, nor are the sources of his tables cited in most cases. Accordingly we rely on the work of M Harrison (q v), who has reworked the original budget studies data from Starobels'k on which Chayanov based his first major (hitherto untranslated) work, and which strongly influenced his subsequent generalizations. Harrison shows that the same data when grouped by sown area show a picture of economic differentiation similar to that established by Lenin in his analysis of the data of 17 uyezds in The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Starobels'k was located in one of the most backward, commercially undeveloped areas of the black-earth belt (Kharkov province, located in the estern Ukraine) and the degree of economic differentitation within the peasantry was considerably less than that in all other regions in Russia except the Central Agricultural Region. Harrison adduces this as one possible reason for Chayanov's later insistence on the homogeneity of the peasantry, namely, that Chayanov was basically generalizing from the situation in Starobels'k. 11 Chayanov, op cit, p 68. Emphasis added. 3 2 Before 1905, the obschina or village land commune prevailed over most of European Russia, being absent however in the western provinces of White Russia and Ukraine. Of the allotment land, 22.8 percent was "heritable household tenure", that is, land which was not communally held for redistribution, and this was concentrated in the Baltic, Lithuanian and Ukraine provinces. In the remainder of European Russia, with 73 percent of the allotment land in over 70 percent of communes the mir still effected general redistributions, in about 10 percent there were partial redistributions, while in 17 percent no redistributions had taken place in the preceding 23 years. Thus about 60 percent of total allotment area was st1!! subject to general or partial redistribution (100—17^ 83 percent of 73 percent). See L A Owen, The Russian Peasant Movement 1906-1917, London, P S King and Son, 1937, pp 56-57, for these estimates. With regard to the share of allotment area in total peasant operated area, the data given by Francis M Watters in "The Peasant and the Village Commune", W S Vucinich (Ed), The Peasant in 19th Century Russia, Stanford University Press, 1968, enables us to construct the following picture for the turn of the century: Roughly 1900: Area Operated by Peasants (million dessyatines) Allotment Area 146.07 of which (a) communally held S 116.85 (b) privately held ^ 29.22