THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING ATOMIZED: HOW HUNGARIAN PEASANTS COPED WITH COLLECTIVIZATION
Rev, Istvan
In that part of the world where political legitimacy is derived from the universal law of continuous technical development, industrialization, concentration, and centralization, the strength of...
...22 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol...
...But one of the first acts of the new government was to abolish the delivery system...
...But since the state's interpretation of these acts differed significantly from the peasants', the actual and the conventional meanings of the acts of resistance were not the same...
...Nobody said a word, there was no sound . . . except, as Simon & Garfunkel would have said: "The sounds of silence...
...reading Proust is not an expression of aesthetic taste but of a Weltanschauung, being concerned with the family is not a sign of love but of petty-bourgeois mentality...
...The new prime minister—who later on, in October 1956, would become prime minister once more, and finally be executed in 1958— had been minister of agriculture in 1945 at the time of the land reform...
...Sometimes kulaks were forced to levy execution on other kulaks' goods, poor peasants were obliged to give transportation when a kulak's produce was seized, family members were taken hostage as a means of pressure on the other members of the family...
...Descombes was guillotined...
...8 Anthony Giddens, "Hermeneutics in Social Theory," in Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica, eds., Hermeneutics (Amherst: Univ...
...But those who have memories of earlier crises, who know that this campaign will lead only to the next one, and so try to sabotage the momentary priority, end up as members of a faction as well...
...As the peasant understood that the only way to success was through strictly individual, silent action, the community was undermined...
...And the latter saw how to put the amorphous, atomized acts into an institutional framework...
...As the possibilities of open, formal political actions narrowed, resistance became "present everywhere in the power network . . . there [was] no single locus of great Refusal," which would have been easy for a centralized state to liquidate...
...Without romanticizing the interpretation, my sources prove that the peasants were for something truly important...
...When, because of the widespread resistance, the local apparatus was not willing to cooperate any longer with the central decision makers, when increasing the repression was no longer possible because the peasants had learned how to cope with it, there was no other alternative but some drastic change...
...The more successful the peasants were, the more incentive they had to resist...
...Every kind of organized opposition must disappear before the full force of terror can be let loose...
...2 In a crisis situation there are two typical reactions: the campaign syndrome, which leads to immediate action, and the inertia of the local apparatus, which is fed by a déjà-vu feeling...
...If the figures for leather glove production were altered, the figures for leather inputs had to be changed...
...141-42...
...There were branches of the economy that got their plans only during the second half of the year or not at all...
...then actions on the micro level will have very serious consequences on the macro level...
...shut their eyes when the peasants organized pseudocooperatives...
...THE CREATION OF A MORE OR LESS UNIFORM landholding system with hundreds of thousands of small farms—all about the same size —helped to establish a uniform delivery structure in which all the farms had the same kinds of obligation...
...25 Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 34...
...286-287...
...And—at least theoretically—there 347 may be a point where careful analysis can conclude that the mutual accommodation process has basically altered the original political structure...
...Instead of having been liquidated, politics becomes dispersed, hidden but present everywhere...
...The more skilled the peasants became in fighting the system, the more lonely they became in the village...
...And as anything is good for such an art, so anything would do for resistance: life is art, life is resistance...
...Revolutions eat up their children and there are numerous theories to explain this strange habit...
...When dekulakization became the Number One priority, the kulaks were imprisoned, sent to internment camps, and their land confiscated, which decreased the taxable production further...
...Besides socalled "public-supply crimes" and "propaganda against the interest of the state," the most frequent cases appearing in the documents of the Supreme Court were murders and attempted murders...
...The documents of the Supreme Court show that the victims of everyday "routine brutality" were in most cases members of the village community...
...And the peasants knew...
...There seemed to be no alternative but to increase repression once more...
...8 They must be able to write manifestoes, to leave written documents behind them...
...Delivery meant not only a heavy and progressive tax in kind...
...If there is no formal, confinable arena for political discourse, if there is no open political talk, then all talk can acquire a political meaning...
...and the individual welfare to the welfare of other individuals...
...From the very beginning everybody was sure that there would be an inevitable failure at the end of the year, and as a consequence the Ministry of Supervision would start an investigation to find those who were responsible for the catastrophe...
...Had the farms been specialized it would have been impossible to keep records of all the different social and economic categories of the farmers...
...Sometimes the murder was the result of an ordinary vendetta, retaliation for the rape of a sister or a daughter, or the natural end of a dispute at the local pub...
...The director of a state-owned farm reported in 1953 that an enormous loss of grain was due to the installation of new vacuum equipment that had dried the grain too much...
...PERHAPS IT WOULD BE TOO STRONG an assertion to say that the peasants overthrew the government, but I do not think that I am too far from the truth when I argue that the changes were primarily the result of resistance coming from the countryside...
...history is made even in the internment camps and prisons by those who have seemingly no authorization, no power to make history—by those who are atomized...
...If people cannot act, cannot speak openly, then all private acts and all private talk can be suspected of having a secret political connotation...
...The peasants had to lie constantly to the authorities, success was dependent on dissimulation...
...340 system a "campaign" economy...
...It was believed that the most important advantage of planning over the market was that, while the latter regulated production and consumption ex post, the former regulated the economic processes ex ante...
...As Michael Walzer argues, "Foucault is concerned not with the dispersion of power to the extremities of the political system, but with its exercise at the extremities...
...The Central Statistical Bureau required an additional 55,000 figures...
...Or at least they have to employ some intellectual experts who will articulate their unconscious needs and wills...
...to their minimum disadvantage...
...16 John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (3, Summer 1985), p. 242...
...The first and most important changes after that summer took place in agriculture, as the new govern343 ment tried a relatively liberal course in its agricultural policy...
...The least successful year of the delivery system was 1954...
...The narrow strips belong to the collective farm and are tilled on a share-cropping basis—the peasants are entitled to one-third of the produce of these plots—while the larger fields on the other side of the road are the small private holdings, cultivated on a spontaneous collective basis...
...As John Rawls formulates it in his article, "Justice as Fairness," people can be free only if "they regard themselves as self-originating sources of valid claims . . . [only if] they think their claims have weight apart from being derived from duties or obligations owed to society...
...contributed to hiding animals in the woods or grain under the ground...
...It was not only the inherent need of mobilization that gave birth to the subsequent "campaign," but the constant reproduction of bottlenecks, the combined result of centralization and resistance to centralization...
...it always is the result...
...6 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 598...
...t was always an impossible task to maneuver between the Scylla and Charybdis of the left and right oppositions...
...The result of the grain campaign is a critical shortage of fodder, the shortage of fodder will lead to the slaughtering of the 339 animals, and the meat shortage comes next year...
...The number of peasants in prison was not only a sign of the determination of the government and the escalation of terror, but of the extent of the peasants' resistance...
...So the government had to import more beer from Czechoslovakia, and in return to export more of something else, which changed the plans for that particular industry and the agricultural inputs it needed, and so on and so forth...
...He who was able to produce the best story won—at least until the next judgment day...
...Any sound could be music," said John Cage, and "anybody could be an artist," proclaimed Andy Warhol...
...The ideal type of planned economy is a system without spontaneity, unforeseen factors, or unintended consequences, in which everything works according to a single central will...
...The increase of violence recorded in the crime statistics showed the growing tension, the increasing unrest in the countryside...
...Social scientists are usually not so cautious...
...in the very same year, after fulfilling obligatory deliveries a peasant family was left with 80 kilograms of grain to feed itself and to seed the following year...
...28 Paul Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," in John Thompson, ed., Paul Ricoeur, p. 289...
...Individual quotas differ according to the quality of land, the size of the holding, the type of the holding, the social category of the peasant before World War II, his or her political activities during the old regimes, and his or her suspected political sympathies...
...And although everybody was busy producing data, it was in everybody's best interest to report as distorted information as possible...
...In 1952, when the minister of deliveries appeared with a strong police force in a small mountain village to force the peasants to give over the levied deliveries, and the peasants told him that they had been persuaded and were just on their way to enter the cooperative, the minister, who knew the advantages of cooperation perfectly well, said: "It was only a trick...
...9 E. J. Hobsawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), p. 2. 10 Genovese, op...
...Eric Hobsbawm writes that in a remote village in the Peruvian highlands in 1963 the peasants were able to recall without any written documents the exact distribution of the land as it had been determined in 1607...
...The basic unit of the plan is the individual producer, more so in agriculture since individual quotas are determined with regard to the economic, social, and political status of the individual peasant...
...The acts of resistance had their conventional place in everyday life, and their conventional meaning for the peasants...
...The peasants forced the regime to change, but the regime forced the peasants to reinterpret their own actions...
...These changes are usually explained as a direct consequence of Stalin's death and the changes that occurred in the Soviet Union...
...If they succeeded in fulfilling this politically important plan, they were then unable to meet the delivery obligations of the village...
...Whenever there is a shortage of meat, the meat front is opened and meat becomes the main priority...
...The actors understood each other perfectly...
...While they made the oath—according to the old Rumanian formula they swore to God, to the sun, to salt, and to the church—they would breathe into their fur cap to hide the soul there and after the false oath they were able to absorb their clean soul from the lambskin cap...
...During the 1927 grain crisis in the Soviet Union it was very difficult to push the local apparatus, which remembered the 1925 grain crisis and the way it was solved by the central authorities...
...IN 1954 A SURVEY CARRIED OUT BY THE Ministry of Supervision revealed that more than 1,300,000 acres of land were left out of the delivery system...
...19 But it is the tragic irony of terror that by the expansion of regulation, less becomes enough for breaking the rule...
...There were five hundred different ways of calculating the quota of a single acre, but in the end these quotas somehow had to equal the gross obligation of the village, the obligations of the villages had to equal the quotas of the boroughs, and at the very top the particular obligations had to equal the overall plan of the Planning Office...
...Acts that do not have any political significance under more democratic conditions are labeled and treated as serious political actions in a centralized system...
...The landscape cautions the tourist: this is a part of the world where real processes move beneath the surface...
...those who were accused at the political trials were not innocent, they were very real enemies...
...By 1953 the percentage of peasants who had been imprisoned and sent to internment camps exceeded 20 percent of the total village population...
...Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argued that totalitarian movements depended less on the structurelessness of a mass society than on the specific conditions of an atomized and individualized mass...
...Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power...
...In 1954 in a small county town the peasants put a delivery officer's eyes out, cut off his nose and ears, and broke his head...
...24 There was no possibility of any previous action, conspiracies were too risky, and since everyone was atomized, it was too costly to organize...
...In 1952, the average Hungarian peasant's income was 50 percent that of the urban industrial worker's...
...They have access to the party bureaucrats and government officials, they are members of the different consultative bodies, they are able to seize the opportunity and persuade the officials to legalize the illegal underworld—at least part of it...
...In 1953 the deputy minister of deliveries referred to the fact that last year "the weight loss of maize and sunflower seed increased due to the higher than average water content of the harvested produce...
...By an agreement with the War Department, the armies at the front were ordered to be very careful of sacks and send them back to the rear, and the soldiers were to receive bonuses at the rate of 10 to 20 kopecks for every sack returned in fair condition...
...21 What Walzer meant here was the freedom from obligations...
...Fulfilling the obligations would have undermined the political system...
...This is the superficial view from the top, the vision of the backdoor Kremlinologists: history is made behind the closed doors of party headquarters, in economic research institutes, at trade negotiations with Western bankers on Wall Street, in Rockefeller Center, in the City of London, in Geneva...
...336 Socialist society in its East European version is by definition anti-individualistic...
...It comes from the necessity of economic efficiency, which we see as the infallible mark of the fruitful convergence between market and planned economy...
...The construction of the anti-individualistic, collectivist, centralized society starts with unprecedented individualization...
...Depoliticization of the public sphere creates millions of secret enemies...
...3 Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Order (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 215...
...The producers possessed the monopoly of information...
...17 Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. ix...
...They knew that even the apparatus joined them secretly, that individual officials hoped that the peasants' resistance would provide the necessary alibi for their survival...
...But without basic changes in the structure, liberalization was no alternative at all...
...It was less than one-third of the amount a typical French peasant family had in an average year in the eighteenth century...
...The planner became a prisoner of his vision, since he had to report more spectacular results than those of the previous day...
...350...
...According to Moshe Lewin, Imlemories of this earlier crisis may explain the lack of vigilance on the part of the local authorities...
...And the peasants grew even more recalcitrant once they saw that the authorities were unable to act...
...Peasants have a long tradition of what Eu341 gene Genovese describes as resistance in accommodation and accommodation in resistance.' We have records of cheating the landlord in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the so-called Methodus Decimationis from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals the techniques the church used against the peasants who tried to deceive the tithe collectors...
...Under such circumstances there are no formal rules for political activity...
...The peasants were allowed to slaughter their pigs only after the whole village fulfilled the delivery obligations...
...12 Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 276...
...Less land meant lower obligations, and when land that had reportedly been missing was secretly taxed without the knowledge of the higher levels of the hierarchy, the local apparatus was able to overfulfill the original plan, or at least find some compensation for failures at the end of the year...
...I 3 James Scott, who in his latest book—Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance—argues for the possibility of individual, unorganized forms of resistance, thinks that [w] here institutionalized politics is formal, overt, concerned with systematic, de jure change, everyday resistance is . . . concerned largely with immediate, de facto gains...
...In the late 1940s and early 1950s there were still peasants in the villages who remembered the stories told by their grandparents who had been serfs before 1848...
...20 "There is a sense," says Michael Walzer, "in which oppression makes men free, and the more radical the oppression the more radical the freedom...
...The response of the state was more extensive centralization, which, in turn, gave birth to new individual actions...
...Land was lost when cooperatives were formed or disintegrated, when kulaks were deported from the villages, during the formation of adjoining fields for the collective farms (when the remaining private landowners got new parcels outside the village), when an owner divided land among family members in order to escape the progressive tax system, when the village reported afforestation (and when some years later the investigating committee was unable to find a single tree in the vicinity), when the peasants just left the land and fled to the cities, or when owners were unable to recognize their own land when questioned by officers from the Ministry of Supervision...
...Compared to the cities, the countryside was relatively quiet...
...1] error can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and . . . therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about...
...Those who go too far in organizing cooperatives, slaughtering pigs, imprisoning kulaks, collecting acorns in the woods, find themselves in the left opposition...
...Had they done what they were told, they would have given up the possibility of rational calculation, and had they given up the possibility of rational calculation they would have given up their human quality...
...Following Stalin's death and the uprisings in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and East Berlin in 1953, important changes took place in most of the Eastern and Central European countries...
...14 And although I agree with Scott that peasants resist the day-to-day workings of the system and do not attack the central power structure, the symbolic locus, the notion of working the system to their minimum disadvantage suggests what Charles Tilly called the reactive form of collective action.I 5 This implies that the peasants defended a traditional structure, a traditional culture against the progressive penetration of the modern state, that they fought for an important but reactionary cause, and that their fight was inevitably doomed to failure...
...If the priority is poultry, the next campaign will focus on eggs...
...not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere . . . power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations...
...Otherwise, as Eric Hobsbawm writes, "they are prepolitical people who have not yet found, or only begun to find a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world...
...10 But as I see it, there are times and circumstances when no other kinds of action are possible, or more exactly, when these kinds of action are treated by the government as political...
...Loss of Community BUT IN CENTRAL EUROPE, after 1945, the atheist state was not in the position to blame God, or interpret economic hardships as a metaphysical punishment...
...Forcing The Regime to Change WHAT ALL THIS DEMONSTRATES is that the economies and societies of the 1950s in Eastern and Central Europe resembled neither Stalin's high-technology precision clockwork nor the famous Polish economist Wlodzimierz Brus's "command economy...
...It was a clever, if unscrupulous, move on the part of the Revolutionary Government to place among the accused at the Hebertistes trial a Parisian food commissioner, Antoine Descombes, who had made his weight felt in the interests of Parisian needs...
...it is always a fraction of the apparatus contaminated with left or right deviation that goes too far, endangering the cause of the revolution...
...And since more land was needed for fodder, the land for other agricultural produce was reduced, let's say for hops, and this had a serious effect on the beer-brewing industry...
...The delivery system eliminated real class divisions in the villages, making the party, the government, the system more vulnerable...
...But in this case she or he will be seriously mistaken...
...Just the opposite of what Francois Simiand, and following him Fernand Braudel, called "l'histoire évenementielle...
...While conventional political reasoning sees a basic antagonism between those in power and the powerless producers, my sources show a strong interdependency...
...When one can get a long prison sentence for nothing, when one can expect indefinite internment just for one's parents' social status before World War II, when official justice works by terror, moral constraints become weaker too...
...But the kulak was the most unsuitable person to blame...
...The kulaks transferred their animals to the small peasants, small peasants to their relatives in the cities...
...They were atomized, but not completely lonely...
...There was a real buffer zone protecting the central authorities...
...17 Reformers assign a different value to acts of resistance...
...tolerated the division of land on paper among family members...
...They survived, however, and were able to spend 3.5 billion working hours on their small plots in 1981...
...But the actual reforms, the legalization of illegal practices, marked the real change of the system— as a consequence of the atomized resistance as the reformers articulated it and the state interpreted this articulation...
...The producers had not much to lose except their freedom, but the members of the apparatus could lose their positions with all the accompa338 nying privileges...
...It was the repetitive performance, the reexperience of known forms, as Victor Turner calls it, that helped the peasants to keep alive these useful memories...
...It is not easy to reconstruct the cases...
...Just like their forebears who in 1815, in a small Transylvanian village hidden in the snowcapped mountains, cornered a fellow peasant in the village church...
...In a country where in eight years, between 1945 and 1953, nineteen million acres, or the equivalent of the entire arable land of the country, changed hands one or more times, it is no wonder that a considerable amount of land could be lost...
...they saw what the others were doing secretly...
...It was not the historian, but the state that gave this special meaning to everyday life...
...they were forced into their role...
...their interpretation differs from the peasants' and from that of the apparatus...
...They lived their lives, produced nonevents...
...A specialized entrepreneur is always more dependent on the market, on the forces of the economy over which he has no considerable influence, than the autarkic or pseudo-autarkic small farmer...
...It was not necessary that the alibis be true...
...At that point the apparatus became hopelessly dependent on the individual...
...Yes, the work was inscribed nowhere...
...24 Paul Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text," in John B. Thompson, ed., Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 202...
...it was not necessary to ask questions, since the discourse referred to immediate, concrete things...
...the same delivery system that established disguised state-ownership in agriculture "liberated" the peasants from the uncontrollable forces of the market...
...Behind the individual there still stood remnants of community, the village that had lost its autonomy but which was reproduced by the daily repetition of everyday life...
...During World War I there was a grain delivery system in Russia...
...They had special techniques for hiding sheep in the well, for slaughtering pigs during the night by the light of the floating wick, for milking the cows secretly, for keeping chickens and even pigs under the bed...
...For the members of the apparatus to survive, the survival strategies of the producers were indispensable...
...The interpretation of the state was necessary for the peasant's life to become resistance...
...Those who had less fertile imaginations or did not cooperate with the peasants were disqualified...
...As their forefathers hid the lambs with the Ruthenian, who were not obliged to pay the lamb tithe, after 1945 the peasants hid their animals with the gypsies, who were exempt from delivery obligations...
...Instead of using the term "planned" economy, it would be more precise to call this *Although the sack stands here as a metaphor, sometimes the sack becomes very real...
...The stronger the coercion and the more extensive totalitarian rule becomes, the smaller the space left for autonomous human exis346 tence...
...The actions available to the peasants in the villages were simple actions in Paul Ricoeur's sense, actions "which require no previous action in order to be done...
...But the individual quotas are determined not only according to the gross obligation of the whole village, but according to the individual's specific status as well, regardless of the village obligation...
...26 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (London: Allan Lane, 1971), p. 32...
...The ideal-typical planned economy is Stalin's monstrous clockwork where the individual cog-wheels neatly fit into each other, serving without question the grandiose work of the machinery...
...The majority of the delegation consisted of agricultural experts...
...With the consolidation of the new political system and later of one-party rule, financial institutions, industry, and commerce were gradually socialized...
...Perhaps "never" is too strong a statement...
...4 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1966), pp...
...During the last half-century convictions have not changed about these matters...
...We can rely only on the "archives of repression" 29—as a distinguished Italian historian called it—on the documents of the Ministry of Supervision, the Ministry of Deliveries, the archives of the Supreme Court...
...12 And Hannah Arendt argues that the hallmark of isolation "is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together . . . isolated men are powerless by definition...
...the atomized peasants not only had political power, they had direct power...
...The prime minister was fired from the party, and the old leaders returned...
...By overdramatizing they are able to show that they really care and that the situation is just too, too complicated to handle on a local level...
...Anything they did had a direct effect on the very center of political authority...
...By the spring of 1794 .. . the first round of requisitions had been fully discharged and Paris had some reserves with which to look ahead...
...Although the individual's power is but part of the structure of the system—it was delegated to him in order to guard the existing power relations—and there is no other ground of resistance but the ground created by the same system, still, resistance even on the terms of the system may be fateful for the political structure...
...The reformers act as intermediaries...
...28 and 30...
...Only the results could legitimize his existence...
...26 But the peasant is the 348 archetype of the conceptual artist...
...The points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities...
...peasants used beater, sickle, cart rack, carriage beam, and axle tree against the officers...
...the adjoining fields hide small-scale family production...
...These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network...
...Violence sometimes took medieval forms...
...The contrast and tension between the growing sphere of state property and privately owned small-scale agriculture steadily increased...
...One village officer who was called to account for the loss of ten tons of corn said that the corn that was stored in a barn was perhaps eaten by the chickens...
...The central authorities determined the timetable of all farm works...
...To produce this data, the ministries collected millions of pieces of information from the counties, the counties from the boroughs, the boroughs from the villages, the village officers from individuals...
...Isolation may be the beginning of terror...
...But as I argued earlier, by resisting the claims of the state the peasants were defending the state they were fighting against as well...
...3 They were waiting for central measures, knowing that a local campaign would make them vulnerable...
...23 Michael Walzer, "The Politics of Michel Foucault," Dissent (Fall 1983), p. 483...
...Peasants sometimes have exceptionally good memories...
...Delivery officers were killed by scythe, hoe, and pitchfork, were beaten by thrasher, hammer, and yoke-pin...
...In my view, campaigns give birth to the "dizzywithsuccess effect": the party cannot blame itself or the system it has created...
...everybody was waiting for more liberal measures...
...To seed in January, to give over all the cows, to slaughter all the pigs are acts against the public interest, against every sort of rationality...
...In the 1932 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences we find the following statement: " [T] he most marked structural distinction between a primitive society and a civilized society is the paucity of specific associations in the one and their multiplicity in the other...
...They were not able to break the strength of silent solidarity against the outside world, but managed to brutalize village life...
...But oppression makes people free in another sense as well: when there is no room for open political activity, people can use whatever means are available to them...
...One was not able to gain anything by anti-kulak sentiments...
...Perhaps the Russian government was able to eliminate the sack shortage this way, but the likely consequence was a shortage of soldiers next year in the trenches...
...But if the apparatus is too successful, then it is made responsible for the next inevitable catastrophe...
...John Walter and Keith Wringston observed: To meet the metaphysical problem posed by dearth [in early modern Europe], there existed a body of explanation which rendered the arbitrariness of the weather intelligible if not predictable...
...But the peasants do not talk in the courtrooms...
...And these are just two instances...
...The most important inputs in a technically underdeveloped agriculture, in which deliveries are levied on an individual basis, are land and people...
...By the first of May it had been possible to import from abroad only 60 million sacks, which, with the domestic production, furnished but one-half of all requirements...
...Repetition preserved that "tacitly employed mutual knowledge" which was the repertoire of the atomized resistance...
...When people are oppressed they do not owe anything to the state...
...What cannot be said . . . is what has to be done"25—as Anthony Giddens wrote...
...The local authorities try to wait as long as possible, but since simple inactivity looks like sabotage, they overdramatize the situation...
...Although the actors were atomized, the framework and rules of the ruined community were still preserved by everyday coexistence...
...There was no possibility to speak, but there was no need to speak either...
...the state also exercised its right to determine what, when, how, and in what quantity the peasants should produce...
...It was not the peasants who invented this art form of resistance...
...They pushed him to the altar, and without saying a word crushed him to death with the weight of their bodies...
...IT WAS NOT ONLY THE POLITICAL SYSTEM that changed, but slowly the village community as well...
...In their book The Rebellious Century, the Tillys quote Robert Michels's book, published in 1915, and this quotation could have been the motto of the entire book: "The principle of organization is an absolutely essential condition for the political struggle of the masses...
...And since in the theory of the period the concept of a collective legal person hardly existed, responsibility could be nothing but individual...
...In that same year, according to the official statistics, 800,000 peasant families ought to have died of hunger...
...13 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 474...
...concentration may mean dispersion, divided plots cooperation...
...THOSE WHO REALLY COOPERATED With the peasantry had the best chances...
...At each point of time, the centralized state is a momentary reflection of the historical fight going on between the forces of centralization and the resistance against it...
...After long decades of extreme but successful individual, atomized resistance, it is hard to learn to act openly, to act in "concert," to trust one another...
...To reach this point is not easy at all...
...This was the doctrine of judgments...
...When the construction of new "socialist cities" began, it became the obligation of the villages to send workers to construction...
...But the peasants had their own language of gestures, which was common to all...
...The peasants' actions grew out of the historical tradition of village life...
...Concentration is hidden behind the narrow strips...
...Campaigns push the apparatus into extremes, and when the inevitable next catastrophe appears on the horizon, those who prove their loyalty, who take the campaign seriously, are labeled as deviants, members of a faction...
...The history of brutality is not only the story of horrors but the story of widespread opposition as well...
...23 But by taking these sentences out of their context, one can arrive at a completely antiFoucaultian conclusion: since complete coercion can be maintained only by granting power to individuals at all points of the system, the individuals are not completely powerless...
...The peasants knew the hardships of the kulaks, knew that half of the kulaks had no land at all, and that typically they were worse off than the small peasants...
...When the Planning Office works out the national plans, it divides them among the different ministries, directorates, and counties, which further divide them among the firms, boroughs, and villages, which in turn divide them among workers on the shop floor, among individual peasants...
...These suspicions "were confirmed by the government...
...Growth— yearly, monthly, daily—kept the centralized system alive, and the prospect of still more spectacular growth legitimized its methods, forced the planners and centralizers to find still 337 more effective means of control...
...19 Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharp, 1978), pp...
...The local apparatus refused to use extreme measures, more and more civil servants left the local soviets and the delivery offices, so that by the end of 1952 there was a critical shortage of officers...
...The officers at the lower levels of the hierarchy knew that the information on which the plan was based was completely distorted, since it was they who produced this information...
...The tension was present in the everyday life of the village...
...Both the working of the centralizing state and the successful individual resistance against it helped to undermine the basis of communality...
...they have instant explanations for the refreshing sight: the paradoxical division of the fields is natural, a result of the death of charisma, of inevitable routinization, normalization, and consolidation in the era of detente...
...In this sense it is a paradox that the anti-individualist centralizer's mind is constantly occupied by the problems of the individual...
...the quotation is from Robert Michels, Political Parties (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1915), p. 26...
...everybody knew that these were fake figures, cooked justifications...
...The more the peasants succeeded in hiding their produce, the higher the prices rose on the black market...
...The authorities were not successful in increasing the amount of agricultural produce collected, but succeeded in increasing distrust in the villages...
...There was no longer a buffer zone...
...Peasants did not fight for village autonomy, but for access to the market...
...What is appearance and what is reality...
...The totalitarian system has to delegate power to the lower levels of the hierarchy, to individuals in order to make the closed structure of power complete...
...16 What the regime tried to do was to force the peasants to give up not only their claims, but their obligations owed to society as well...
...Employees at the state-owned farms were not interested in the right of collective bargaining, but in guarantees of the second economy...
...But since today's results became the basis of tomorrow's more ambitious plans, everybody responsible for the production tried to hide the real output, or produce less than would have been possible...
...By resisting the workings of the system, the peasants defended their right to rationality...
...The emergence of the reformers was already a sign of the regime's accommodation to the resistance...
...In this sense, the expansion of coercion creates more room for resistance...
...By centralization, local autonomy was lost...
...7 E. J. Hobsbawm, "Peasant Land Occupations," Past and Present 62 (1974), pp...
...According to the Foucaultian text and intention: "resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power...
...By isolating themselves from each other in the course of the resistance, they completed the work of centralization: individualization in the sphere of production, atomization in the public sphere, isolation in the sphere of private life...
...Cooperatives—unlike villages or boroughs—got quota reductions (that was all they got as an economic incentive), so more cooperatives meant more reductions without a change in the original overall plan of the village...
...Post-War Land Reform IN 1945 THE COMMUNIST PARTY, learning from the failures of the first Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 when the party organized collective farms and lost the peasants' support, agreed to parcel out the large agricultural holdings...
...9 Or as Eugene Genovese puts it: "Strictly speaking, only insurrection represented political action...
...The planner must locate the economic tasks of each producer, the centralizer must find the most appropriate place for each citizen in the political machinery...
...Everybody can use whatever he or she finds appropriate...
...But life took priority over the intentional design, the campaign over the plan, and it was only constant fear ex ante that regulated the working of the system...
...But is has seldom been noticed that when all possibility of meaningful action has been eliminated, when there is no formal framework of political expression left, then everything becomes a potential political issue...
...Perhaps it sounds surprising, but it was in the apparatus's best interest to get distorted information, to be cheated...
...The daily reports of constant growth confirmed the system's superiority over all preceding social and economic formations...
...It was the invisible hand of resistance, the micro actions, having a profound effect on the macro sphere of politics...
...7 In Hungary the peasants remembered that during the late Middle Ages and early modern times the old folks in the Transylvanian villages always swore falsely when questioned about the exact quantity of the harvest...
...The historian is not in a position to uncover facts that "are buried in documents, just like, as Leibnitz would have said, the statue of Hercules was lying dormant in the veins of marble...
...After the land reform there were no more landlords, and the middlemen were nationalized...
...It was in the planners' interest to transform the small individual farms into Lilliputian agro-economies, to make all peasants completely dependent on a single political and economic center...
...The whole village stood silent in the church, just as later on they stood silent in front of the judges...
...When planning was introduced in the state-owned sector of the economy, maintaining the delivery system in agriculture seemed an appropriate substitute for planning in the private sector...
...After the end of that year it became impossible to increase the repression...
...By guarding their right to self-employment, the right of economic autonomy, thus fighting for a purely economic cause, they were guarding their right to self-determination, and guarding the collective interest of society...
...18 But besides this kind of explanation there was another main strand of popular explanation about dearth and its causes: the secret activities of the middlemen in the victualing trade who artificially and purposefully produced shortages even in times of plenty...
...318, 474...
...they were engaged in producing hiatuses, holes in the texture of history—making the historian's life very difficult...
...What is a 'fluttering bird (of some kind)' to me is a 'diseased sparrow hawk' to you...
...By defending their right to self-directedness the peasants were defending their autonomy, their right to be human...
...the centralizer had to rely on the information provided by individuals...
...they have the opportunity and the skills to articulate the pragmatic consciousness of the atomized citizens, of individualized producers...
...The large is the small, the small is the large...
...their acts became politicized...
...To be politically active it is not necessary to join an organization, to lobby for legislation, to sign petitions, to raise money for political advertisements, to agitate for a majority vote...
...The forgotten potato is a sign of success...
...Although political scientists usually think that demobilization, individualization, and atomization signal the end of politics, in my view, when the full force of terror is let loose, politics does not die but gets out of hand...
...From that point of view, those activities which others call 'day-today resistance to slavery'—stealing, lying, dissembling, shirking, murder, infanticide, suicide, arson—qualify at best as prepolitical and at worst as apolitical...
...The higher the prices on the black market, the less incentive the peasants had to give over their goods...
...Apart from the influences of the context, this division of meaningful labor is, broadly speaking, a function of the differences among people in social experience and interest...
...At all levels of the hierarchy some land was lost...
...While in 1943 there were five administrative employees per hundred physical workers, in 1955 there were thirty-five...
...I cannot imagine anybody willing to enter a cooperative...
...There has always been somebody standing between the symbolic and real center of power on the one side and the political periphery, the countryside, the peasants working in the fields, on the other...
...But this forced autarky (or pseudo-autarky, since the producers were required to produce a certain amount of surplus above the needs of the family) decreased the peasants' dependency on their surroundings...
...The peasants suspected that he had disclosed the real amount of the harvest to the tax authorities...
...A certain amount of violence is the normal incident of village life...
...And an ex-official without any privileges was worse than dead in Eastern Europe during the 1950s...
...And this changed the plans for calf-breeding, meat production, the seed for fodder...
...In June 1953, a Hungarian delegation was called to Moscow and when the delegation returned the whole government was changed...
...The central and local apparatuses worked day and night persuading the peasants by propaganda, administrative measures, and sheer force to enter cooperatives...
...28 The task is, rather, to find the traces of nonobjects hidden by the peasants in the ground...
...History is made sometimes in the peasant cottages, in the fields, in the villages under the cover of night...
...Life was extremely violent in the countryside during the 1950s...
...BETWEEN THE PEASANTS-Or the producers, in general—and the professional reformers there is what Marshall Sahlins—following Hilary 345 Putnam—calls a "division of linguistic labor...
...Each individual had to rely on him- or herself, and although the individual resistance helped the whole community, it was not a communal undertaking...
...Perhaps he thought that the future does not belong to the fainthearted, but to those who have the courage to say what is most unbelievable: for 1952 was the most drought-stricken year in two decades...
...In a country where for decades an artificially high disparity has existed between agricultural...
...22 In the context of the Foucaultian vision these sentences have a completely different meaning from my interpretation of the atomized resistance...
...If one single item was changed it had an infinite snowball effect...
...The ministries wanted more from the directorates than what they were willing to produce, the directorates demanded far more from the firms than what they reported themselves able to produce, the villages were under pressure from the boroughs, the peasants from the village authorities...
...At the beginning of each year everybody in the different offices, even the chairman of the Planning Office, knew perfectly well that it was impossible to fulfill the plan...
...18 John Walter and Keith Wringston, "Dearth and Social Order in Early Modern England," Past and Present 71 (May 1976), pp...
...The delivery system forced each peasant to produce the same variety of produce as all the other peasants, to produce everything, in fact, that the household and the country needed...
...What for the peasants was the natural drive for survival and for the state the conspiracy of the class enemy, was for the reformers the sure sign of disease...
...For at a time when such inherited ideas were being undermined by the realities of the economic life, the state chose to articulate and reinforce them...
...The political culture became a culture of mutual lies...
...it certainly is its most fertile ground...
...Cooperative members were not fighting for higher incomes, but for the security of the household plot...
...According to bookish social scientists political movements must have concrete, articulated political aims...
...The apparatus that had become used to repression, that had learned how to use force, now became confused...
...It was an excellent time to make some concession to the hard-pressed authorities of the grain districts...
...The system tried to force the peasants to give up their rational interest, and give up the ideas they had about the interest of the society as a whole...
...The rationale behind its establishment is to solve the antagonism between production on a social scale and individual expropriation...
...At the first sign of liberalization everything stopped...
...politics became equivalent to cheating, dissimulation, and suspicion...
...In a centralized economy there are always bottlenecks, and where there are bottlenecks there are priorities, and where there are priorities there are campaigns...
...As Marcel Duchamp said when he stopped painting: "My art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere...
...meaning was not detached from their action...
...Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal...
...But it is not easy to hide the output, or the potential output, if one does not hide or falsify the available inputs as well...
...The officers, like the tithe collectors during the Middle Ages and early modern times, became frightened...
...As Barrington Moore observed, in a totalitarian society there is no "social and cultural space, no more or less protected enclaves within which dissatisfied or oppressed groups have some room to develop distinctive social arrangements, cultural traditions...
...This lost territory, which was impossible to find, equaled the entire arable land of one of the largest counties of the country...
...But this new wave of terror could not last for long...
...THE CENTRALIZED STATE was not prepared for, had no technique to cope with, millions of individual acts—which were the response to centralization—and was too inflexible to defend itself against challenges from all directions...
...If there is any plan at all, it quickly becomes invalid...
...21 Michael Walzer, Obligations: Essays on Disobedience and Citizenship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 62...
...But there was no way to avoid the catastrophe except by finding plausible alibis...
...Already during the Great Depression withdrawal behind the walls of autarky was a typical self-defense mechanism of the Central European peasantry...
...Resistance by accommodation forced the regime to accommodate to the resistance...
...Centralization and Direct Power BEFORE THE SOCIALIZATION OF THE ECONOMY and the centralization of the society, before individualization and atomization, there was no direct relationship between the political center and the peasants...
...Documents of the Ministry of Delivery show that after the summer of 1952, the peak of the terror, it became more and more difficult to send officers to the villages...
...It was most unlikely for the peasants to imagine that the kulaks were responsible for the shortages and hardships...
...5 Atomization is thus seen as the termination of political discourse and political action, the death of politics...
...and industrial terms of trade, and where this has functioned not only as a means of exploiting agriculture to help industrial development, but also of helping statisticians by using extremely low agricultural prices to prove industry's high contribution to the gross national product—in such a country the high contribution of agriculture to the well-being of the population is not part of the natural course of events...
...At the time of land reform an obligatory agricultural delivery system was in effect that had been introduced during World War II and was justified following the war by the unprecedented shortages, especially in the cities...
...20 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Institution of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 305...
...There was a constant fight going on between the planners and the producers, between the higher and the lower levels of the hierarchy...
...Paris might be indestructible, its food commissioners were not...
...The price of changing the political system was a change in the community...
...IN ORDER TO WORK OUT reliable plans—or to be more precise, to work out plans as ambitious as possible—the authorities had to control all the resources and inputs, i.e., all the information relevant to the production process...
...they must be capable of giving a compact political analysis to the scientist who comes to interview them...
...14 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp...
...In 1952 the Five-Year Plan was rewritten 472 times, the yearly plan 113 times...
...BRUTAL REPRESSION GAVE BIRTH to traditional violence...
...In that part of the world where political legitimacy is derived from the universal law of continuous technical development, industrialization, concentration, and centralization, the strength of dispersed small-scale agricultural production and the relative well-being of the peasantry are not self-evident...
...Such forced autarky mirrored the autarky of the national economy—and of the Soviet economy (based on its vast resources) between the two world wars...
...cit., p. 598...
...By resisting, the peasants defended the regime...
...From a closer look, all the important and longlasting economic and social reforms in all the Central European countries appear as nothing but the legalization of already existing illegal or semilegal practices...
...The technique of the resistance is the nonevent, the means is the nonobject, the actors are anonymous...
...a body of explanation which was principally the reserve of the church and of the more moralistic, especially puritan laity...
...It was not a good story...
...They allowed the peasants to sell their cows on the black market and reported the sudden loss of animals in the village...
...Had they fulfilled their obligations they would have caused a critical shortage the consequences of which would have led to serious political instability...
...Not only because of the rigidity of the political system, but because the atomized mood of resistance blocks the formation of a democratic political culture...
...According to their timetable the peasant would have to seed in January...
...And since the economy was individualized, and every producer had his or her individual quota, the small peasants would not have been better off had they pressed the kulaks to fulfill their obligations...
...But the plans were never fulfilled...
...It was in the planners' and the centralizers' interest to transform small individual farms into complete national agro-economies on a micro scale, to force everybody to produce everything...
...And when the government was overthrown in November, those who returned to power had no choice but to uphold this decree...
...The father was the village party secretary...
...There was no real possibility of fighting for the community, and there was nobody who would have taken the risk to fight for it...
...From the archives of the Supreme Court one can reconstruct the ethnography of the agricultural techniques of the period...
...To be understood, to be granted any political significance they have to possess what Anthony Giddens calls "discursive consciousness...
...27 Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur l'Histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), p. 12...
...A Politics of Resistance WHAT IS INDIVIDUALIZATION Of the producers in the sphere of the economy is atomization of the citizens in the arena of politics...
...27 They not only just lived their lives...
...helped the peasants falsify their birth certificates so that the population suddenly grew old, and those above 65 years of age became eligible for quota reductions...
...And a new campaign will start which will last until the next crisis, until the next campaign...
...The term "command economy" presupposes the government's or the party's ability to carry out its will, to operate the economy according to the plan...
...I have stopped all forced deliveries...
...11 R. M. Maclver, "Interests," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 147...
...The average-size holding was about ten acres...
...The Planning Office knew that the plans were based on socalled progressive planned figures and that the planned harvest yields became higher every year while the actual harvest results were constantly decreasing...
...The centralized state became a victim of centralization...
...The party tried to find scapegoats, to divide the society, to deflect attention from the responsibility of the political center...
...In this way they were able to shut out the hostile external political and economic world...
...4 And in The Crisis of the Republic she goes on to say: " [T]he effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomization...
...The delivery system forced them to seed grain in four consecutive years on the same parcel of land...
...1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp...
...There were government agents, secret police, military in the villages, too...
...5 Hannah Arendt, The Crisis of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 154...
...They just lived their lives and their way of living gradually changed the political system around them...
...And so began the unrestricted warfare for information...
...There was nobody, nothing left to blame but the state, the government, the party, the system...
...Withholding performance at the working place is not an economic act but a political one...
...But forced autarky increased the independence of the peasantry...
...The peasants were unable to engage in any extraordinary actions...
...But the dramatic increase of everyday brutality during the 1950s in the 342 countryside was a direct consequence of the brutalization of politics...
...What seems to be the work of the professional reformers (experimentation with and revitalization of the market, the coexistence of the small and the big in agriculture, the convergence of the first and the second economies, the granting of concessions to small-scale private enterprises, the liberalization of the planning mechanism) is in fact the consequence of continuous atomized resistance...
...In asylums, as Erving Goffman writes, "[we] find a multitude of homely little histories, each in its way a movement of liberty...
...The delivery system, through direct and total state intervention, served to establish disguised state-ownership while formally maintaining private and cooperative property...
...The collection of sacking for the 1916-1917 campaign was made still more difficult, apart from transport problems, by the increasing financial stringency...
...It was a usual practice to rewrite the plans at the end of the year to make them more consistent with reality...
...In 1952 the various ministries had to report monthly an average of 214,000 different economic indicators to the Planning Office...
...Most subordinate classes are, after all, far less interested in changing the larger structures of the state and the law than in what Hobsbawm has appropriately called "working the system...
...What was more important, those in power were desperately in need of the producers' falsifications...
...Or is it the other way around...
...But by resisting, the peasants forced the system to change...
...But this theatrical trick is a double-edged sword: the central authorities become alert, put more pressure on the local apparatus, demand more serious action, send investigators to the spot, who are not paid to leave with empty hands...
...They knew that they were part of a secret mass of more than two million...
...One can argue that the liquidation of all parties, associations, unions, organizations, and clubs, which are then replaced by one single centralized, formal, over-ritualized organization—one riling party, one centralized trade union, one youth organization, one women's association— is the end of politics...
...of Massachusetts Press, 1959), p. 223...
...To carry out the intentional design of the centralizer undisturbed, to accomplish the grand social vision of the planner, all individual actions must be under strict central control to ensure that the billions of individual acts contribute to the gigantic task of social construction...
...It was in the interest not only of the producers to hide the land, but of the authorities as well...
...Still, even the rotten grain, unsuitable for human consumption, is a trace of the resistance...
...While marble survives, the hidden food vanishes beneath the surface...
...Special attention was, therefore, paid to the preservation of sacking for repeated use...
...The naive tourist, being informed about the existence of the second economy, will happily recognize in the narrow strips proof of the vitality of household production...
...The routine acts of survival changed to acts of political resistance...
...Thus, after 1948 a typical small farm with about ten acres of land had to produce and deliver grain, rye, barley or oats, maize, sunflower seed, hay, potatoes, beans, peas or lentils, poultry, eggs, milk, butter, wine, pigs, fat, and cows...
...And those who try to save the poultry for the sake of the egg, the cows for the milk, the peasants to feed the cities, end up at the next trial of the right opposition...
...93-96...
...It is the combined effect of internal and external factors: the positive demonstration effect of the West coming through ideological, technical, and trade channels, the rebirth of the pettybourgeois consumer mentality that strengthens the reforming, technocratic faction inside the ruling elite, the new class of the intellectuals...
...And since the basic unit of central planning was the individual, the authorities needed access to detailed information concerning each producer...
...Notes 1 P. B. Struve, ed., Food Supply in Russia during the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), p. 146...
...The regime proved to be incapable of forcing its will on the population, and the very methods used in controlling and coercing the producers contributed to the failure of the system...
...And this was just after World War II, when the peasants tried everything possible to survive the billeting of the German, Hungarian, and Soviet armies...
...Unlike the middlemen, the kulaks lived in the villages where there was no anonymity...
...Peasants make nonobjects: food that cannot be found, grain that has never been harvested, land that is nonexistent, people who are phantomized...
...The quota of each village is a certain percent of the gross obligation of the borough (depending on the amount of land and the number of people in the village) and the individual quota is a certain percent of the gross village obligation...
...On the morning of October 23, 1956, the very same day when the uprising started in the capital, the minister of deliveries wrote his last letter to the prime minister: The fact that by this time nothing serious has happened, that there is no open resistance, is due to my having ordered the delivery apparatus to show extreme patience and avoid any possible threatening situation, not to use any force which might cause open resistance...
...A WESTERN TOURIST TRAVELING through certain parts of the Hungarian countryside will see huge adjoining fields on one side of the road and narrow strips of land on the other...
...on which the weight of Parisian needs had fallen most heavily...
...33, XV...
...349 15 Charles Tilly, "Major Forms of Collective Action in Western Europe 1500-1975," Theory and Society 3 (3, 1976), p. 369...
...it is "deviation" that has to be blamed...
...The survival of the village was exactly equivalent to the successful resistance of the individual...
...The village had some administrative and legal autonomy, the church mediated between the peasants and the secular powers, and there were always landlords who exploited the producers, middlemen who could be blamed for hoarding in hard times...
...The state had a vision, similar to John Cage's and Andy Warhol's, and the peasants had no choice but gradually to accept the meaning ascribed to their lives...
...The survival techniques of the peasants are understood not as natural biological drives but as evil "anti-socialist" political practices...
...he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment...
...29 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. xxi...
...Those who rose in revolt were the workers and urban intellectuals...
...Since the guidelines for dividing the plan and summing it up were totally different, it would have been a real surprise if the initial figures and the end results, or the figures at the different levels of the hierarchy, had turned out to be the same...
...The peasants fought against anti-ecological, anti-economical, inhuman centralization, against a system that forced them to give up local ecological 344 wisdom, to produce everything independently of the quality of land, independently of the requirements of crop rotation, independently of common-sense experience...
...But compared to the prewar figures, the number of private—so-called "black"—slaughterings was increasing while state slaughterings were down considerably...
...Regimes in atomized societies do not artificially produce their enemies...
...Naturally, as a result of the course of events, the strength, aspirations, and ideology of centralization change...
...In the first volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault writes: [Plower is everywhere...
...THERE WAS A COOPERATIVE, for example, men tioned in my documents as the infamous "Moonlight" cooperative, where members worked on the fields only during the night in order to keep the exact amount of their land secret...
...apolitical peasants changed to political enemies...
...482-483...
...If the apparatus succeeds in slaughtering the available cows, the result will be a shortage of milk...
...The apparatus has to act like the sailor who tries to stop hundreds of leaks with a single sand sack.* The loyalty of the apparatus is judged according to its success at the ongoing campaign...
...S]o long as [people] can live their ordinary lives," said Henri Lefebvre, "relations are constantly re-established...
...The "Campaign" Economy WHEN THE FIRST WAVE of collectivization started in 1948 it became the main task of the apparatus to organize cooperatives...
...There is no art without reception, no resistance without reaction...
...So the apparatus was dependent on the producers not only for obtaining information...
...By the very act of atomization, peasants—like everybody else in the society—were granted political power...
...There was a kind of basic, elementary solidarity inside the village against the authorities— in most cases seizure of property was carried out by outsiders from other villages or more often by urban workers—and so the apparatus tried to divide the village community...
...After the 1945 land reform Hungary became a country of dwarf holdings and small peasants...
...They will find that the crisis is a result of negligence, of a conspiracy between the officials and the kulaks, sabotage, political deviance...
...There was no way to force the peasants to give over their produce...
...Planning is considered the appropriate means by which to put an end to the individualistic anarchy of the market, to create social harmony by substituting the social for the individual, the intentional design for the working of the invisible hand...
...And we can say that their resistance defended the state as well...
...2 R. C. Cobb, The Police and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp...
...I have another explanation, another story to 335 tell...
...the story was not bought, so he too went to prison...
...In a nearby village a son knocked his father's brains out with an axe...
...The interest of society was to have a continuous supply of foodstuffs, but by fulfilling the obligations of the actual campaigns the peasants would have prevented any future supply...
...They were the real victims of the regime...
Vol. 34 • July 1987 • No. 3
