Dialectical Materialism Serves Voluntarist Productivism: The Epistemic Foundation of Lysenkoism in Socialist China and North Vietnam

Abstract

This essay asks why Chinese and North Vietnamese agricultural scientists in the 1950s and 1960s willingly adopted the Soviet agricultural sciences represented not only by agronomists Ivan Michurin and Trofim Lysenko but soil scientist Vasili Williams. The answer, I argue, is that they were fascinated by the promise of Soviet agrobiology that I conceptualize as a combination of dialectical materialism and voluntarist productivism: if one masters the interconnectivity between plants, microbes, organic and inorganic materials, and soil, one can overcome the given biological and environmental limits, manipulate and optimize the material flow, and ceaselessly maximize agricultural production. Engaging the historiographical debate about Lysenkoism-which has mostly paid attention to the Euro-American cases (the Soviet, Eastern European and even "capitalist" Western), genetic controversies, and geopolitical specificities of each locale-as a global phenomenon, I shed fresh light on the understudied Chinese and North Vietnamese cases, the intersection between Lysenko's theories and Williamsian soil science, and epistemic commonality across national differences.