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The Crisis of Collectivisation: Socialist Development and the Peasantry

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The Crisis of Collectivisation: Socialist Development and the Peasantry The Crisis of Collectivisation: Socialist Development and the Peasantry Mark Selden Introduction* military power in much of Eastern Europe, and with At the centre of the 1970 and 1980 eruptions of strike autonomously generated socialist states in Yugoslavia, activity culminatingin an independent workers' China, Vietnam and Korea, the Soviet state vigorously movement and the formation of Solidarnosc in Poland pressed collectivisation as the model for universal was widespread resentment over the acute shortage implementation, the path for agrarian development and rocketing prices of food. The Polish case well and a centrepiece for the class and accumulation exemplifies aspects of the long term systemic crisis of strategies which were to underlie rapid industriali- agrarian development which socialist states have sation. In the late 1940s and early 1950s each new confronted and continue to confront. The Soviet socialist state, with certain interesting variations, in Union, China, Yugoslavia and Poland, all substantial turn followed the sequence of land revolution- food exporters prior to the revolution, became food imposed collectivisation. Three decades later, despite importers and, in the Soviet and Chinese cases, two of widespread criticism of the Stalinist agrarian strategy, theworld'slargestimporters.Inrecentyears, collectivisation remains widely regarded as the central moreover, each has embarked on a desperate search feature of socialist rural development. And, for all the for viable agrarian institutions, incentive practices and human costs imposed and the setbacks dealt to marketing relationships. In the Soviet Union the agrarian development, Soviet style collectivisation is kolkhoz (collective farm) has declined in importance still widely viewed as essential to Soviet achievements vis-à-vis both the sovkhoz (state farm) and an of high accumulation and rapid industrialisation. expanded private sector; Yugoslavia and Poland years ago acknowledged the failure of collectivisation and This article addresses two issues: restoredprivateagriculturetoapositionof - the origins of cooperative and collective approaches dominance, within a system of restrictive marketing to the 'agrarian question' in Marxist and Leninist and purchase practices. China, which appeared until thought and early Soviet practice; recently to be the most successful in addressing rural - the formative experience of the Soviet Union problems, has since 1978 introduced a wide range of culminating in 'the great turn' in the years 1928-33 as new incentive, managerial and marketing systems the socialist model for agrarian development, and its which some see as the prelude to the abandonment of consequences for Soviet socialism. collective agriculture, and which unquestionably mark the most thoroughgoing reforms since the Its goal is to rediscover the most promising elements of formation of the communes. theory and praxis toward the creation of a socialist Viewed in global perspective, sustained and growing agrarian strategy, and to explore the problems and food imports by socialist states to combat food limits of previous approaches. Its premise is that the shortages provide dramatic signs of weakness and agrarian question continues to bedevil all socialist incorporation in the capitalist world economy from a societies committed to the full development of the position of vulnerability. Yet the issues of agriculture productive forces and to the flowering of socially cutfardeepertothe veryheart of socialist rooted cooperative institutions. development. This article argues that the unresolved agrarian question constitutes perhaps the central The 'Agrarian Question': from Marx to dilemma of the political economy of the transition. Engels to Lenin With the proliferation of socialist states following If the writings and politics of the mature Marx reflect a World War II as a result of the expansion of Soviet preoccupation with the proletariat and capitalist development, he also wrote extensively on important 'This essay develops themes explored in detail with respect to Chinese cooperative experience in my article 'Cooperation and conflict: aspects of what came to be called the 'agrarian cooperative and collective formation in China's countryside', in question' {Draper 1978:317-452]. Mark Selden and Victor Lippit, eds, The Transition to Socialism in China (M. E. Sharpe: Armonk, 1982), and with respect to Soviet, In an important passage in the section on 'So-called Yugoslav and Chinese practice in 'Imposed collectivisation and the crisis of agrarian development in the socialist states', in Albert primitive accumulation' in Capital I, Marx summed Bergesen, ed, Crises in the World-System, vol 6, Political Economy of up the shared limitations of pre-capitalist forms of the World-System Annuals, forthcoming (Beverley Hills, Sage). small-scale peasant agriculture and artisanal industry: But/otis,1982, vol 13no4, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex 4 this mode of production presupposes the frag- agricultural cooperatives' he held, 'would convince mentation of holdings, and the dispersal of the also the last of thestillresistant small-holding other means of production. As it excludes the peasants, and surely also many big peasants, of the concentration of these means of production, so it advantages of cooperative, large-scale production'. also excludes co-operation, division of labour The peasantry, would be won to the virtues of large- within each separate process of production, the scale cooperative agriculture by the power of example, social control and regulation of the forces of not, as all agreed, by coercion. society. [Marx 1867:927-8] Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, Marx assumed that capitalist development on a world sharing many of the perspectives on the agrarian scale would sweep away allvestiges of such a question of Marx and Engels enumerated above. In fragmented 'mode of production' [Marx 1867:9281. 1907, to clear the land 'of all medieval lumber', Lenin Quite incorrectly, both because the household farm had urged 'the nationalisation of the land, the has shown extraordinary vigour and resilience under abolition of the private ownership of land, and capitalism and because it has been left to socialist transfer of all the land to the state, which will mark a revolution everywhere to confront its living legacy in complete break with feudal relations in the country- myriad forms of peasant agriculture. side' [Lenin 1907:169]. In his April 1917 Theses and then in the Bolshevik Party's resolution on the While Marx perceived in the small-scale, fragmented agrarian question, however, Lenin combined the pattern of peasant agriculture a barrier to cooperative principle of land nationalisation with 'the immediate production, the division of labour, and the develop- transfer of all lands to the peasantry organised in ment of the productive forces, he did not rely on the Soviets of Peasants' Deputies, or in other organs of objective workings of capital and the market to solve local self-government elected in a really democratic the agrarian question. We find in Marx the origins of way and entirely independent of the landlords and the concept of the worker-peasant alliance as the officials'. In short, the right to cultivation of the bulwark of proletarian revolution. While viewing the nationalised landisvested'inlocal democratic rural proletariat as the most important ally in the institutions' [Lenin 1917:190]. However, it is by no countryside, Marx insisted that it was possible and means clear whether the power of 'organs of local necessary to win over to the revolutionary camp at self-government' implied a shift to cooperative forms least a portion of the peasantry. But how? While Marx, of agricultural production or whether itsimply as a revolutionary, never unequivocally ruled out land marked the Bolshevik acceptance of household based redistributive strategies, his approach to the agrarian agricultural production. The attempt to win the question centred on the eventual elimination of support of the peasantry, coupled with the absence of private land ownership and the socialisation of any significant Bolshevik presence in the rural areas, agricultural production. This perspective was mediated resulted in the abandonment of nationalisation in by a clear awareness of the necessity for revolutionaries favour of the programme long advocated by the Social to develop an agrarian strategy based solidly on the Revolutionaries in which land-hungry peasants were protection of peasant interests and winning active encouraged to seize and subdivide the large estates peasant support. Marx's notes on a polemic of into individually cultivated holdings [Hussain and Bakunin make the point well. The proletariat, he Tribe 1981:80-99]. Land parcellisation and redistri- insisted, must: bution thus entered the Bolshevik arsenal as a weapon which stood in direct conflict with the principal take measures whereby the peasant seeshis strategies advanced earlier by Marx, Engels and Lenin situation immediately improved and which there- himself; such land reform was carried out in virtually fore win him over to the revolution - measures all subsequent socialist revolutions with the exception however, which in embryo facilitate the transition of Cuba. from privatepropertyinland tocollective property, so that the peasant comes to it by himself, It is customary to pass quickly over the policies of the for economic reasons. [Draper 1978:409] War Communism period (1917-20) as a
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