Diggers The
Diggers, a 17th-century group of religious and political dissidents in England, are associated with agrarian socialism.
Agrarian socialism in rural Hungary The rise of Agrarian Socialism in
Hungary began in the late 19th century in Viharsarok, Hungary. The socialist movement was sparked as a response to the
exploitation of rural laborers and landless peasants who worked as farmers under feudalism in southeastern Hungary during the
Habsburg Monarchy. In 1890, the Magyarországi Szociáldemokrata Párt (
MSZDP) started to mobilize and organize agricultural workers, which resulted in rural laborers and poor peasant farmers protesting feudal landlords and local magistrates. The MSZDP advocated for an increase in the wages of farmers and the elimination of
corvée. The jailing of Várkonyi came after a group of socialist women from Orosháza published an article detailing their demands for livable wages for agrarian women workers. As a result of the crackdown, the MSZDP distanced themselves from socialist activists, and the movement went underground, which gave birth to woman-led movements and groups that advocated for agrarian socialism, such as the Feminist Association. On April 6, 1908, a second wave of agrarian socialism was birthed in Balmazújváros when a group of 400 peasants led by agrarian socialist leaders met to create the National Agricultural Party (Országos Földmívelő Párt). The party called for "equal suffrage and full freedom of the press, and the unrestricted right of assembly and association." The National Agricultural Party, in contrast to the MSZDP, openly advocated for women's suffrage and encouraged women to organize under the party's banner. In 1918, the
Communist Party of Hungary was founded, and shortly after, the
Hungarian Soviet Republic was established, but it was short-lived. The National Peasant Party was formed in 1939 and advocated for land distribution among peasant agrarian workers. Communist rule was revived in June 1948, and the
Hungarian Working People's Party came into power, which resulted in the establishment of the Hungarian People's Republic. Starting in the late 1940s, Hungary adopted the Soviet
Kolkhoz model, which was an agricultural collectivization system that originated in the
Soviet Union, where peasants were compelled to fully merge their agricultural resources in an effort to increase agricultural production. The result of forced collectivization and the subsequent poor operation and management of these cooperatives resulted in food shortages in the 1950s. Following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Hungary abandoned the rigid Kolkhoz model, opting for a more flexible form of cooperatives where modestly sized individual holdings were allowed but the bulk of the land was jointly cultivated.
Russian populist tradition and Socialist Revolutionary Party The
Socialist Revolutionary Party was a major political party in early-20th-century Russia and a key player in the
Russian Revolution. After the
February Revolution of 1917 it shared power with liberal, social democratic, and other socialist parties within the
Russian Provisional Government. In November 1917, it
won a plurality of the national vote in Russia's first-ever democratic elections (to the
Russian Constituent Assembly), but the
soviets had gained control of the country, and the
Bolsheviks maneuvered and eliminated the other parties within the soviets, including the Socialist Revolutionaries, and seized power. That sparked the
Russian Civil War and the subsequent persecution. The Socialist Revolutionaries' ideology was built upon the philosophical foundation of Russia's
narodnik, a movement of the 1860s and the 1870s whose its worldview was developed primarily by
Alexander Herzen and
Pyotr Lavrov. After a period of decline and marginalization in the 1880s, the narodnik school of thought about social change in Russia was revived and substantially modified by a group of writers and activists known as "neonarodniki" (neo-populists), particularly
Viktor Chernov. Their main innovation was a renewed dialogue with
Marxism and the integration of some of the key Marxist concepts into their thinking and practice. In that way, with the economic spurt and the industrialization in Russia in the 1890s, they attempted to broaden their appeal to attract the rapidly growing urban workforce to their traditionally peasant-oriented program. The intention was to widen the concept of the "people" so that it encompassed all elements in the society that were opposed to the
Tsarist regime. The party's program was both
socialist and
democratic in nature and garnered much support among Russia's rural
peasantry, which particularly supported the program of
land-socialization, as opposed to the
Bolsheviks' program of nationalization of the land. The Socialist Revolutionaries wanted the division of land for the peasant tenants, rather than the Bolsheviks' desire of
collectivization in authoritarian state management. The SR policy platform differed from that of the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Parties, both Bolshevik and
Menshevik, in that it was not officially Marxist though some of its ideologues considered themselves to be Marxists. The SRs believed that the "laboring peasantry" and the industrial proletariat were revolutionary classes in Russia, but the Bolsheviks considered the industrial proletariat to be exclusively revolutionary. The Socialist Revolutionaries defined class membership in terms of ownership of the means of production, but Chernov and other theorists defined class membership in terms of extraction of surplus value from labor. Under the first definition, smallholding subsistence farmers who do not employ wage labor are, as owners of their land, would be members of the petty bourgeoisie. Under the second definition, they can be grouped with all who provide, rather than purchase, labor power and hence with the proletariat as part of the "laboring class". Chernov, nevertheless, considered the proletariat the "vanguard", with the peasantry forming the "main body" of the revolutionary army. == Asia ==