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Promysly (Russian)Teodor Shanin aa Manchester University ,Published online: 05 Feb 2008.

To cite this article: Teodor Shanin (1975) Promysly (Russian) , The Journal ofPeasant Studies, 2:2, 224-225

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066157508437929

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224 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

shielding the capitalist farmer; or the capitalist sector may be reluctant toexpropriate the peasantry because of the ideological necessity of such asector as a system-supporting element. In other words, the internal dynamicof the peasant sector that does produce surplus has to be blocked throughits articulation into the capitalist economy if no transformation is to occur.This blocking may have various functions, but it always involves the extrac-tion of surplus out of the peasantry.

CAGLAR KEYDERMEJU and St. Antony's College, Oxford

REFERENCESAmin, S., 1974, Accumulation on a World Scale, New York.Baran, P., 1957, The Political Economy of Growth, New York.Baran, P. and P. Sweezy, 1968, Monopoly Capita/, New York.Childe, V. Gordon, 1946, What Happened in History?, New York.Oobb, M., 1946, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, London.Emmanuel, A., 1972, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade,

New York.Engels, F., 1956, preface to Capital vol 2, Moscow.Gough, I. R., 1972, 'Marx's Theory of Productive and Unproductive Labour',

New Left Review, 76, November-December.Harris, M., 1959, 'The Economy has no Surplus?', American Anthropologist,

April.Harrison, J., 1973, 'Productive and Unproductive Labour in Marx's Political

Economy', CSEB, autumn.Herscovits, M. J., 1952, Economic Anthropology, New York.Mandel, E., 1968, Marxist Economic Theory, New York.Marx, K., 1889, Capital, London, vol. 1.Marx, K., 1909, Capital, Chicago, vol. 3.Marx, K., trans. M. Nicolaus, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth.Pearson, H., 1957, 'The Economy has no Surplus.' Critique of a Theory of

Development' in K. Polanyi, C. M. Arensberg and H. Pearson, eds.. Tradeand Market in the Early Empires, Glencoe.

Preobrazhensky, E., 1965, The New Economics, Oxford.

Promysly (Russian)As a noun and as the related verbs, the term appears repeatedly in thereported speech and records of the Russian peasant countryside at the turnof the nineteenth century. Peasant usage is transmitted to us through therecorded decisions of peasant magistrates and communes as well asethnographic descriptions of the period. It was also commonly adopted inthe works, categories and statistical tables of the rural statisticians andeconomists of those times. There are two surprising points here.

Firstly, at least initially the meaning of the term in peasant usage seems tohave been extremely heterogeneous and contradictory. It was used as ageneral term for peasant handicrafts in the villages, from making woodenspoons to painting icons, but at the same time could mean agricultural workoutside one's farm. It could also signify hunting, fishing, seasonal factorywork, construction work, the transport of goods using one's own horses(izwoz) and felling trees. It encompassed wage work, labour gangs ofvillagers sharing profits (artel') and small enterprises in the form of partner-ships, sometimes employing wage labour to work alongside the partners.It could be carried out within one's village or outside it (in which case itwas at times additionally designated as otkhozhii). Altogether the categorisingusefulness and internal cohesion of a term which covers so many activities

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CONCEPTS AND TERMS 225

of such differing nature seems doubtful. Yet the Russian peasants and thoseclose to them stick to it, evidently finding it useful.

Secondly, the contemporary usage of the term outside the peasantenvironment differs. To begin with, it seldom occurs in literary usage andhas a distinctly archaic sound. The principal dictionaries provide us herewith the most interesting evidence. The term does not appear at all as anentry in either the main pre-Soviet authority, the Encyclopaedical Dictionary(Brokhauz and Efron, vol XXV, 1898) or the Soviet Encyclopaedia i.e.Bol'shaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya—the accepted compilations of the con-ceptual wisdom of a cultured Russian of that time. It appears in these pub-lications only indirectly, as 'sea P.' designated as fishing, 'P. tax'—a tax onany human productive activity and 'God's P.' i.e. God's deed. The two mainethnological dictionaries refer to it as work outside one's household, doinga job, looking after one's family well and being smart. They also show thecommon root of the word with the verb 'to think' (Myslet') and with themuch more recent word promyshlennost'—industry. Then a peasant sayingis quoted in Oal's work which looks surprising and inexplicable in the context:'A man lives by his bread and not by his P.'

It" seems that the continuous and consistent use of the term Promysly bypeasants is due not to 'woolliness' of thought but to a clear and quitedefinite content attached to it. It is this specific social context which maymake its logic inaccessible to an outsider. Promysly seems to operate as abasic residual category, arising from a fundamental duality in peasant under-standing of his own productive activity and the peasant's efforts to provide forhis family. It means simply all such activities which fall outside the 'usual' (andat time normatively 'proper') peasant work, i.e. the work of a man and hisfamily on their farm within the assumed integral unity of the peasant house-hold. That seems to account for the peculiarities mentioned above: the contextof peasant usage (and that of the scholars who adopted it), the terminologicaldifference between village and town, the peasant saying quoted above whichfinds its meaning as a normative judgment preferring 'normal' peasants whofind their main livelihood in agriculture on their family farm to those whoare, or are becoming, 'not quite the thing'.

Finally, to make all this clearer one should place the term in its historicalcontext. The period is that of early industrialisation, the encroachment ofthe market and money exchange on the peasant economy and increasing'shortage of land' (i.e. a rise in the rural population without a rise in produc-tivity to match it). In the Russian peasant economy, crafts were generallyused to supplement one's income and make ends meet, especially duringthe long winter when no alternative work existed. In the new context develop-ing, the peasants were more and more pressured or tempted into a varietyof jobs increasingly exceeding the traditional handicrafts pursued to sup-plement agriculture. Yet, at the same time, most of them held on to theirhousehold economies and/or their rights to communal village lands. Eventhose who settled in town and were doing relatively well tended to keeptheir rural contacts and more often than not seem to return at some stageto 'normal' peasanthood. (For the best description available in English seeG. T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime, Macmillan, 1949). It isthis period, transitional and dramatic as it was, which underlies the socialsignificance of the term and the whole issue of Promysly. It also explainshow a figure of day to day speech used by 85 per cent of the populationcould fail to appear in the contemporary definitive publications of 'the cul-tured', and to be relegated to the dictionaries of linguistic curiosities or to theprofessional jargon of the small mafia of students of the Russian peasantry.

TEODOR SHANINManchester University

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