I must admit that I found trying to read this article rather tedious. Whether it be because all of those acronyms were annoying or I just flat out didnt understand the article... At any rate, I found the discussion of the article to be fascinating. Seriously. There is a lot that can be learned from this article.
It is interesting to me that the peasants have only recently come under study. And I think that many good points were brought up as to why this was the case. But their importance in deceptive. Yes, these may be "only peasants" as opposed to workers who kept the cities running. Plus workers rebelling in a worker oriented state would seem to be much more telling than mere farmers. This of the PR nightmare! The state would be a laughingstock! However if one sits down and thinks for a moment, farmer discontent is an excellent marker of a regimes success. After all, how the agriculture sector of the economy is doing is an indicator of how the economy is doing as a whole.
It never fails to amaze me just how, pardon me, idiotic some people can be. I mean seriously, I am not joking. I do not understand why someone thought that he was just so smart and important that though he had absolutely NO knowledge of farming, that he would make rules regarding how that sector should run (quotas, LPGs...etc). Actually, it wasn't even just one person but a whole GROUP of men. What on earth!? How are these men in leadership positions? How can you be so arrogant and to believe you know everything? This arrogance is their greatest weakness and that is clear to see in this revolt by the peasants. They knew that the demands on them were absurd and ridiculous to maintain. Hence the uprising.
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I'm glad that the discussion helped you to better understand the article and its significance. Overall, the purpose seems to be to illustrate that the protest movement of 1953 was more widespread than initially depicted and to argue that rebellion occurs in many forms. It also argues that the protest movements delayed the forced transition to a socialist economy in East Germany as the state attempted to come terms with its citizens, especially in the countryside with the slowing of collectivization.
ReplyDeleteYou know when you think about it would be very easy for student especially in the United States to ignore the peasant class. Because we never had a feudal society in the United States we never had a peasant class. Our Bourgeois society has always been divided between the blue color and the business owners. We never really had that left over poor rural class making up the remaining fallout from a failed feudal system. To be honest until this course I really didn’t know a peasant class still existed anywhere in western society (outside of perhaps Russia) in the mid to late 1800s.
ReplyDeleteAs far as people thinking they knew about farming when they really don’t. I can’t help but feel that happens all the time, especially in Government. The government takeover of the auto industry in the past year in the united States for instance. Had the House or Senate ever run a car company? No. So it isn’t impossible to fathom that the government would think they know what they were doing in regards to the peasants, in fact I think if they didn’t I’d be more surprised.
I agree with all of that. The sad thing is that the same thing happens today, but moving away from that. I think that peasants are highly under rated as far as a historical way to judge how the people see a regime.Also, when we take a look at the past regimes, it's not hard to find examples of groups being given power and having the arrogance to assume that they know everything better than the people that do the job everyday. That kind of arrogance is what eventually brings down those groups.
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