Oh dear, it is always fun when the Right start to quote books. In this case it’s Andrew Bolt, responding to Barnaby Joyce’s economic nationalism, and his plan to have the gummint buy up, and redistribute, Cubbie Station. Headed “Lenin tried Barnaby’s plan too“, Bolt quotes Vlad form his 1907 “agrarian programme”:

“We have shown that the basic and chief component of the distributable land for which the peasants are fighting are the big feudal estates … Their abolition and their complete transfer to the peasantry undoubtedly coincide with the line of the capitalist evolution of Russian agriculture. Such a path of this evolution would mean the most rapid development of productive forces.”

One presumes that the Lenin mention is a cheap shot designed to impugn every redistributionist initiative with the memory of the disaster of Soviet agriculture. But the actual story is more fascinating. For a start, Lenin’s idea wasn’t a socialist one — it’s a capitalist maneouvre, breaking up large feudal estates, many of which lay idle, and allowing peasants to become agricultural entrepreneurs, both self-supporting and growing for sale.

The agrarian programme in question was adopted when Lenin and the Bolsheviks were one faction of the Russian social demcoratic party, which basically accepted that it would have to stage a capitalist revolution in Russia, and then start working towards socialism over decades. After 1917, they abandoned that briefly, but they went back to it in the early 1920s with the “New Economic Policy”, which followed exactly the line suggested above. Guess what? It worked. Agricultural production in the USSR boomed, until Stalin closed it down with collectivisation and the class genocide of the kulaks in the late 1920s.

OK, here’s what’s even more interesting. What Barnaby is drawing on comes not from the Left, but from the Right — specifically the Catholic social studies movement of the mid 20th century. In the 1940s, the CSSM proposed that new immigrants and returned soldiers be resettled in rural communes with a mix of individual and collective property, and a strong notion that such farms would be excluded from capitalism — that the land could not be sold, traded or consolidated into larger agribusiness concerns. The CSSM was of course the seedbed of BA Santamaria’s political work. It was quickly abandoned as the Cold War got underway, but its themes of nationalism, populism and local autonomy took root in rural areas — often through noxious groups such as the League of Rights.

Santamaria’s long alliance with capitalism would so bury these themes, that his next generation of activists — people like Tony Abbott and Greg Sheridan — would display no interest in them at all, or in the idea that global neoliberal capitalism might come into conflict with a conservative sense of the local and the grounded. Now, as the mining boom threatens to eviscerate whole settled areas of Australia, and conservative communities start to react, the Right is all at sea, threatened by Katter’s Party from without and Barnaby Joyce from within.

As always with these things, it’s impossible to know whether the Bolter is taking the piss — and thereby taking his audience for a ride — or whether he is just too genuinely stupid and ignorant to know what he’s saying.

*Guy Rundle reports from the US presidential campaign trial — read his dispatches and subscribe for the latest