Agrarian socialism in the context of "Socialist-Revolutionary Party"

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⭐ Core Definition: Agrarian socialism

Agrarian socialism or agricultural socialism is a political ideology that promotes social ownership of agrarian and agricultural production as opposed to private ownership. Agrarian socialism involves equally distributing agricultural land among collectivized peasant villages. Many agrarian socialist movements have tended to be rural (with an emphasis on decentralization and non-state forms of collective ownership), locally focused, and traditional. Governments and political parties seeking agrarian socialist policies have existed throughout the world, in regions including Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America, Africa and Australia.

Examples of agrarian socialist parties in Europe include the Socialist Revolutionary Party (the SRs). The SRs were a prominent agrarian socialist political party in early 20th-century Russia during the Russian Revolution. The SRs garnered much support among Russia's rural peasantry, who in particular supported their program of land socialization as opposed to the Bolshevik program of land nationalization—division of land among peasant tenants rather than collectivization in authoritarian state management.

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Agrarian socialism in the context of Socialist Revolutionary Party

The Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR; Russian: Па́ртия социали́стов-революционе́ров, romanizedPártiya sotsialístov-revolyutsionérov,, lit.'Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries') was a major socialist political party in the late Russian Empire, during both phases of the Russian Revolution, and in early Soviet Russia. The party members were known as Esers (эсеры, esery, from "SRs").

The SRs were agrarian socialists and supporters of a democratic socialist Russian republic. The ideological heirs of the Narodniks, the SRs won a mass following among the Russian peasantry by endorsing the overthrow of the Tsar and the redistribution of land to the peasants. The SRs boycotted the elections to the First Duma following the Revolution of 1905 alongside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, but chose to run in the elections to the Second Duma and received the majority of the few seats allotted to the peasantry. Following the 1907 coup, the SRs boycotted all subsequent Dumas until the fall of the Tsar in the February Revolution of March 1917. Controversially, the party leadership endorsed the Russian Provisional Government and participated in multiple coalitions with liberal and social-democratic parties, while a radical faction within the SRs rejected the Provisional Government's authority in favor of the Congress of Soviets and began to drift towards the Bolsheviks. These divisions would ultimately result in the party splitting over the course of the fall of 1917, with the emergence of a separate Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Meanwhile, Alexander Kerensky, one of the leaders of the February Revolution and the second and last head of the Provisional Government (July–November 1917) was a nominal member of the SR party but in practice acted independently of its decisions.

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Agrarian socialism in the context of Bolshevism

Bolshevism (derived from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Leninist and later Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

Bolshevism originated at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia and was associated with the activities of the Bolshevik faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party led by Vladimir Lenin, Bolshevism's main theorist. Other theoreticians included Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. While Bolshevism was based on Marxist philosophy, it also absorbed elements of the ideology and practice of the socialist revolutionaries of the second half of the 19th century (Sergey Nechaev, Pyotr Tkachev, Nikolay Chernyshevsky) and was influenced by Russian agrarian socialist movements like the Narodniks.

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Agrarian socialism in the context of Narodniks

The Narodniks were members of a movement of the Russian Empire intelligentsia in the 1860s and 1870s, some of whom became involved in revolutionary agitation against tsarism. Their ideology, known as Narodism, Narodnism, or Narodnichestvo, was a form of agrarian socialism, though it is often misunderstood as populism.

The Going to the People campaigns were the central impetus of the Narodnik movement. The Narodniks were in many ways the intellectual and political forebears and, in notable cases, direct participants of the Russian Revolution—in particular of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which went on to greatly influence Russian history in the early 20th century.

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Agrarian socialism in the context of United People's Party (Poland)

The United People's Party (Polish: Zjednoczone Stronnictwo Ludowe, ZSL) was an agrarian socialist political party in the People's Republic of Poland. It was formed on 27 November 1949 from the merger of the pro-Communist Stronnictwo Ludowe party with remnants of the independent Polish People's Party of Stanisław Mikołajczyk.

ZSL became – as intended from its beginning – a satellite party of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), representing the PZPR in the rural areas. It was a member of the Front of National Unity until 1982, and from 1982 it was a member of the Front's successor, the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth. To keep up the appearance that Poland was ruled by a coalition, the Marshal of the Sejm (parliamentary speaker) was always a member of the ZSL.

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