Policy, response and alternative strategy: The process of change in a Polish highland village

Abstract

The issue of government policy towards development, and its effect in terms of peasant response and the transformation of the peasantry, is of particular interest in the study of states with centralised planned economies. In Eastern Europe this issue has regularly come to the fore as peasant farmers have responded, negatively or positively, to their governments' plans to collectivise or socialise agriculture. As the process of industrialisation follows its course, growing numbers of peasant-workers and worker-peasants form a new semiproletariat, partly integrated into the market or national economy, and partly maintaining traditional forms of subsistence agriculture. We can see how social change is simultaneous with economic change, as the family-centred peasant mode of production alters to facilitate new economic activities; as education and communications lessen the gap between the small rural communities and the ever expanding urban centres; and as the non-agricultural work of young villagers, of poorer villagers and of women leads to new patterns of authority, stratification and interaction. While social organisation is often affected by economic change, the reverse is also true. Social factors may be instrumental in determining the attitudes and actions of the peasants, and may place constraints on the ways in which they respond to change.