Agricultural communes: basis for rural socialism?

[Die Neue Zeit]

In one thread I considered one extreme in regards to "socialization" of agricultural production, industrial farming (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=65638&st=0) under state ownership. However, as of late I ventured into a polar-opposite extreme in the works of "late" Marx regarding the Russian agricultural commune, thanks to points made out in that thread:

Communist Manifesto, 1882 Russian Edition Preface (http://marx.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1882)
First Draft of Letter To Vera Zasulich (http://marx.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm)

And then these commentaries:

Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and 'the Peripheries of Capitalism' (http://www.ruralworlds.msses.ru/eng/shanin-marx/chap1.html)
A critique of Teodor Shanin: The late Marx, Lenin and the Russian Road (http://www.marxmail.org/archives/july98/shanin.htm)

Is it possible for small farmers - post-revolution - to band together in such communal endeavours, co-existing with industrial farm labourers employed by the DOTP state? Although much concentration has occurred in agriculture, I don't foresee any absolute form of industrial farming coming about under the present era of monopoly-capitalist relations (just as much as Lenin dismissed the notion of absolute monopoly under single capitalists in other sectors of the economy); "peasants" will still be around.



[The funny thing about my Internet readings is that the same guy who heralded "the retreat of globalization" (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3826) - Walden Bello - also came out with a rather pro-peasant article (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3826), mentioning one or two of Marx's remarks on the peasantry in a rather negative light.]

[Floyce White]

1950s China has far and away the best examples of agricultural communes. The commune movement was so rapidly expanding the size and scope of common activity that the state was in an all-out frenzy to break them up and restore private plots. Please recall that the most-effective urban-commune movement ever was in China during the labor uprising in coastal cities in 1926-27. Many of these same activists had family in the countryside, and were alive and struggling in the '50s.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ Care to provide more detailed information on the Chinese experience?

[Floyce White]

Over the years, I've read a lot of material on it. Some university libraries have a whole shelf on the subject. William Hinton wrote many articles and a couple of good books. There's a lot less on the Internet since it's not all that recent. I see it as a fight between the lower class and the many factions of the upper class. Some comrades see it in "left versus right" terms. Here's a tidbit from one of the ex-"Maoist" groups, PLP:

"The Great Leap period of 1958-59 is very complex because all the conflicting class forces in society and within the Party participated and put forward very different ideas and goals for the movement. For the Left, it was an attack on all the aspects of 'bourgeois right' that had been primary up to that time in Chinese institutions; it put into question and often eliminated material incentives, piece-rates, managerial authority, high pay differentials, etc. It challenged the existence of the standing army and the wage system for cadres. For the Left, the large-scale RPCs, amalgamating the former APCs into units often containing 5,000 to 6,000 households and changing the existing system of income distribution, were the organizational means for beginning the transition to communism. The system of free supply of grain was introduced into the RPCs along with communal mess halls, nurseries, laundries, etc., so that the principle of distribution 'to each according to his needs' was no longer a distant goal separated from the present by a long process of economic development, but a living reality. The commune eliminated the private plots of land and raised the socialization of property to a new level. The income earned by any individual household was determined not, as previously, by its own individual performance or that of the small work team of which it was a part, but as a share, based on a political calculation of needs, of the total output of the commune. Working for the commune, rather that for oneself, became, at least in part, a living principle."

(From the subsection "The Great Leap Forward and the Rural People's Communes (RPCs)" of "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution & the Reversal of Worker's Power in China (http://www.plp.org/rr3/gpcr.html)," originally published in PL Magazine, "Special Issue" Vol. 8, No. 3, November 1971, pp. 25-49.)

[Die Neue Zeit]

Forgive me for my skepticism, but that same non-industrial model is being tried right now in Venezuela:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/17/ame...17venezuela.php (http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/17/america/17venezuela.php)


For centuries, much of Venezuela's rich farmland has been in the hands of a small elite. After coming to power in 1998, and especially after his re-election in December, President Hugo Chávez vowed to end that inequality, and has been keeping his promise in a process that is both brutal and legal.

Chávez is carrying out what may become the largest forced land redistribution in Venezuela's history, building utopian farming villages for squatters, lavishing money on new cooperatives and sending army commando units to supervise seized estates in six states.

...

Bella Vista is one of 12 "communal towns" that Chávez plans to build this year. It has neat rows of identical three-bedroom homes for 83 families, a reading room, a radio station, a building with free high-speed Internet service, a school and a plaza with a bust of Simón Bolívar, Venezuela's national hero.

...

But while some of the newly settled farming communities are euphoric, landowners are jittery. Economists say the land reform may have the opposite effect of what Chavez intends, and make the country more dependent on imported food than before.

The uncertainties and disruptions of the land seizures have led to lower investment by some farmers. Production of some foods has been relatively flat, adding to shortages of items like sugar, economists say.

...

Top-down land redistribution projects have a troubled history in Latin America, including Venezuela itself, which last tried it in the 1960s. Even neighboring countries like Brazil, with a flourishing agribusiness industry, still struggle with militant demands for land from the rural poor.

But Venezuela, unlike many of its neighbors, has long imported most of its food, and uses less than 30 percent of its arable land to its full potential, according to the United Nations.

That last part, while acknowledging the existence of private businesses operating Brasilian farms (not my preference, of course), also implies industrial farming as the key.

[Labor Shall Rule]

To Marx, the fact that the Russian commune was relatively advanced in type, being based not on kinship but on locality, and its 'dual nature' represented by 'individual' as well as 'communal land' ownership, offered the possibility of two different roads of development. The state and the specific variety of state-bred capitalism were assaulting, penetrating and destroying the commune. It could be destroyed, but there was no 'fatal necessity' for it. The advanced aspect of the commune's existence could prevail, once revolution had removed the anti-commune pressures and the advanced technology developed by Western capitalism was put to new use under the communal control of the producers who would implement new methods of agricultural and put themselves on the road to industrial development. Such a solution would indeed be best for Russia's socialist future. The main limitation of the rural commune, i.e. their isolation, which facilitated a Russian edition of 'centralised despotism', could be overcome by the popular insurrection and the consequent supplementing of the state-run volost by 'assemblies elected by the communes - an economic and administrative body serving their own interest". That is, shockingly, peasants running their own affairs, within and as a part of socialist society.

In places like Mexico, Marxists should defend the peasant communal farms called ejidos that NAFTA outlawed and the Zapatistas challenged. Marxists should defend communal land movements like the landless peasants movement (MST) in Brazil. Such collective approaches to agriculture make the peasant a revolutionary partner to the collective industrial worker.

[Floyce White]

RedDali, I wouldn't put it that way, and I'll explain way.

The word "collective" is a bourgeois euphemism. It is used by both the right wing of capital and by the left wing of capital; the only difference is that rightists claim that it is "bad" while leftists claim that it is "good." The euphemism is used to assert that whatever social form in question is a "collective" property-ownership association with a "collection" of ownerships of physical means and a "collection" of purchases of laboring power. "Collective" does not mean "collective efforts." If it did, Boeing and General Motors would be "collectives." The quickest and easist way to explain it is to say that capitalists say "collective" to mean the same idea as "collectors" who "collect" and trade antiques for profit.

When we study the history of working-class action, we must be aware of the fact that almost all of our readings were written by petty-bourgeois leftists who have definite family property interests. They use language to co-opt, corrupt, and confuse workers with pro-property propaganda. These writers are not capable of understanding the concept of no property at all. As far as they do understand it--as perhaps some kind of hypocritical trick by others who want to grab their properties--they either outright oppose it or hypocritically use it as if it were just another debaters' trick to "win" the argument.

Hammer, I can understand why you are "skeptical" of various leftist approaches to "collectivization." So why not just ignore such phraseology? Instead, we should study why the non-escapist, non-utopian, Paris Commune form and the very similar soviet/council form are a recurring element of organization of lower-class struggle. In doing so, we can easily distinguish the associations of the dispossessed from feudal landholding-family "village elder" obschinsci and USSR-style property-partnership co-ops falsely labeled as komuna.

Generally speaking, the institutional forms and practices of very advanced and successful lower-class struggle don't make much sense in today's context. However, the more we understand the failures of the general strike model, the prolonged popular war model, etc., the more we can appreciate the successes of the commune model.

In a similar vein, the more we understand the failures of using income, occupation, or other methods to define class, the more we can appreciate the strengths of defining class by property.

It is only too easy to prove that the state, business, state-owned business, and other property forms are not the methods/goals of the struggle of the dispossessed lower class. As forms of property, state farms cannot possibly be the self-organization and self-mobilization of the dispossessed. State farms cannot possibly be a "workers'" form of organization.

For decades, anti-communists have painted a false dilemma: that social conflicts are "Russian Bolshevism" versus "freedom." The rush to promote the USSR's business forms as the methods/goals of "workers" is just another variation on the false dilemma.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Originally posted by Floyce [email protected] 23, 2007 02:05 am
RedDali, I wouldn't put it that way, and I'll explain way.

The word "collective" is a bourgeois euphemism. It is used by both the right wing of capital and by the left wing of capital; the only difference is that rightists claim that it is "bad" while leftists claim that it is "good." The euphemism is used to assert that whatever social form in question is a "collective" property-ownership association with a "collection" of ownerships of physical means and a "collection" of purchases of laboring power. "Collective" does not mean "collective efforts." If it did, Boeing and General Motors would be "collectives." The quickest and easist way to explain it is to say that capitalists say "collective" to mean the same idea as "collectors" who "collect" and trade antiques for profit.

When we study the history of working-class action, we must be aware of the fact that almost all of our readings were written by petty-bourgeois leftists who have definite family property interests. They use language to co-opt, corrupt, and confuse workers with pro-property propaganda. These writers are not capable of understanding the concept of no property at all. As far as they do understand it--as perhaps some kind of hypocritical trick by others who want to grab their properties--they either outright oppose it or hypocritically use it as if it were just another debaters' trick to "win" the argument.
Do you even understand what I posted? The collective activity of many peasant traditions in certain corners of the globe is something that is not reactionary; unlike most plots of large and small proprietors, it is land that is toiled on in accordance to democratic decision, without the property relations of the average farmer existing. It is not a bourgeois euphemism, it's a factual element that persists in many rural centers. I think that the denial of such forms of agricultural production would be plain ignorance, and the denial that it is not progressive would also be plain ignorance.

[OneBrickOneVoice]

The People's Republic of China from he 1950s til 1978 was based on a system of people's communes which effectively eliminated top down exploitation and oppression. Everyone worked collectively, earned collectively, advanced (grew richer) collectively, ate collectively, slept collectely, and hung out like one big communal family.

[Floyce White]

RedDali, first of all, tribalism is a form of class society. "Common" land means the same thing to tribalism that "public property" means to capitalism. It's not the same thing as no property whatsoever.

Second, the peasantry ceased to exist in Mexico during the period of revolution that completed the capitalist, anti-feudal revolution (the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution and the reforms of the '30s). To say that there is a "peasantry" today without vassalage, a royalty, etc., is to make ahistoric rhetoric to dummy down the issues.

Third, euphemisms don't become "factual elements" just because you say so. Pointing out euphemisms isn't "ignorance" just because you say so. In my third post at RevLeft (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=42555&st=4) I said:

"To the upper class, there is nothing but the further development of property relations. The concept of the absence of class society is the negation of their existence, and that is impossible for them to admit. To them, 'communism' cannot mean 'struggle to abolish property.' Nothing can have that meaning in the here-and-now. To the upper class, the accumulation of property is the goal of all human endeavors. With all persons said to be in struggle for the same goal, the 'lower class' is just the less-propertied individuals. The very meaning of 'class' is annihilated--it becomes a swear word. The lower class is defined away, arbitrarily pigeonholed according to income, occupation, or beliefs, divisively propagandized as pseudo-classes such as 'middle class' and 'underclass,' and so on.

"To the upper class, all struggles are non-class abstractions of 'us against them.' The parliamentary farce behind the terms 'left' and 'right' is not the key. It could just as well be phrased as 'progress' and 'reaction,' or 'yin' and 'yang.' The upper class has no problem with their false dilemma being worded as 'rich' and 'poor' or 'upper class' and 'lower class.' It could even be phrased as 'propertied' and 'dispossessed'--as long as there is some inconsistency or exception or undefined area that makes the theory plausibly congruent to the idea of property accumulation by both sides."

Down for People's War, it is naive to repeat such tales. If the rural communes actually were one big happy family, why did the government violently smash the Shanghai Commune of 1967, and the urban commune movement that followed?

[Labor Shall Rule]

Originally posted by Floyce [email protected] 23, 2007 02:51 am
RedDali, first of all, tribalism is a form of class society. "Common" land means the same thing to tribalism that "public property" means to capitalism. It's not the same thing as no property whatsoever.

Second, the peasantry ceased to exist in Mexico during the period of revolution that completed the capitalist, anti-feudal revolution (the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution and the reforms of the '30s). To say that there is a "peasantry" today without vassalage, a royalty, etc., is to make ahistoric rhetoric to dummy down the issues.

Third, euphemisms don't become "factual elements" just because you say so. Pointing out euphemisms isn't "ignorance" just because you say so. In my third post at RevLeft (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=42555&st=4) I said:

"To the upper class, there is nothing but the further development of property relations. The concept of the absence of class society is the negation of their existence, and that is impossible for them to admit. To them, 'communism' cannot mean 'struggle to abolish property.' Nothing can have that meaning in the here-and-now. To the upper class, the accumulation of property is the goal of all human endeavors. With all persons said to be in struggle for the same goal, the 'lower class' is just the less-propertied individuals. The very meaning of 'class' is annihilated--it becomes a swear word. The lower class is defined away, arbitrarily pigeonholed according to income, occupation, or beliefs, divisively propagandized as pseudo-classes such as 'middle class' and 'underclass,' and so on.

"To the upper class, all struggles are non-class abstractions of 'us against them.' The parliamentary farce behind the terms 'left' and 'right' is not the key. It could just as well be phrased as 'progress' and 'reaction,' or 'yin' and 'yang.' The upper class has no problem with their false dilemma being worded as 'rich' and 'poor' or 'upper class' and 'lower class.' It could even be phrased as 'propertied' and 'dispossessed'--as long as there is some inconsistency or exception or undefined area that makes the theory plausibly congruent to the idea of property accumulation by both sides."

Down for People's War, it is naive to repeat such tales. If the rural communes actually were one big happy family, why did the government violently smash the Shanghai Commune of 1967, and the urban commune movement that followed?

RedDali, first of all, tribalism is a form of class society. "Common" land means the same thing to tribalism that "public property" means to capitalism. It's not the same thing as no property whatsoever.

I am not discussing 'tribalism', I am discussing communal relations that existed in rural agrarian economies in certain spots in the world. I think we are discussing whether the rural laborers on these plots are progressive or reactionary; it is a question of whether they would join in joint alliance with the urban proletariat. To ignore certain peculiarities in the relatonship that exists, and to slump them all into the same category without critically examining historical and material trends, is to denounce logic and to come nothing but a reductionist. I don't think that a simple 'stagist' view of an extended historical process is correct in examing this situation, since there is several tendencies in agricultural production that have fallen deaf to your ears. It is obvious that there is collective tendencies in agricultural plots that are not distinctly tribal. For example, across all of Spain there is still rural collectives; in the Basque and Aragon region, these techniques persist to this day, even after massive privatizations and state-imposed land redistribution through Franco and the Unión del Centro Democrático government.


While peasants may not play an essential role in capitalist production, they do play an essential role in the circulation of commodities and in the exchange process. Peasants’ strategic role in paralyzing circulation has the same impact as factory workers downing their tools and stopping production— both undermine capitalist profitability and lead to disaccumulation and crisis. Political intervention at the strategic locations in the circuit of capitalist reproduction has given some dynamic peasant movements a strategic role in the process of social transformation.

Marx could forsee a role for the peasantry, based upon the communal aspects of their mode of agricultural production. I think that, with this difference between private and collective plots, we should come to the realization that we need to work to politically and economically strengthen these communal movements, since they have collective tendencies, which is something that the peasantry is commonly casted off for not having.

Otherwise, if you have some sort of solution to undeveloped countries where the peasantry still predominates, such as Mexico, where campesinos are forced to become the pawns of large-landed estates that are tied to foreign capital, then I would like to hear it. There is to be an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, with the urban workers playing the position of the leadership; for without these prerequisite there can be no victory for the proletariat in the first place.

[Floyce White]

Why did the Mexican Indians revolt when NAFTA took effect? Because they grew cash crops--mostly maize--and the elimination of protectionist tariffs against US maize would lower the price below the Indians' cost of production. The Mexican Indians farm as business partnerships, same as US Indians own casinos. It makes perfect sense that, when their business activity was threatened, they responded with bourgeois national liberationism/separatism. Their struggle was never against the property system.

When facts don't jibe with propaganda, throw out the propaganda.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Originally posted by Floyce [email protected] 25, 2007 03:44 am
Why did the Mexican Indians revolt when NAFTA took effect? Because they grew cash crops--mostly maize--and the elimination of protectionist tariffs against US maize would lower the price below the Indians' cost of production. The Mexican Indians farm as business partnerships, same as US Indians own casinos. It makes perfect sense that, when their business activity was threatened, they responded with bourgeois national liberationism/separatism. Their struggle was never against the property system.

When facts don't jibe with propaganda, throw out the propaganda.
Their 'business activities' were their communal enterprises; as soon as they were exposed to the global integrated market, they found themselves under attack, and that their indigenous communities that sustained themselves on these land plots for centuries were under a new attack from multinational corporations that strived towards profits, forcing many campesinos to abandon these communal plots, which was the central reason for the rise of the Zapatistas in the first place.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Floyce, don't you think that collectivization in Hungary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivisation_in_Hungary) was much more successful than the Chinese case?

[Floyce White]

Hungary, like the rest of post-WWII Europe, was seething with struggles within the upper class and between the two classes throughout the '50s and '60s. I don't see any of them as particularly exemplary. Of course, news of one struggle affected others, and the same general worldwide conditions influenced all struggles in roughly similar ways.

[Lamanov]

Originally posted by [email protected] 03, 2007 09:07 pm
Floyce, don't you think that collectivization in Hungary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivisation_in_Hungary) was much more successful than the Chinese case?

It was not successfull, at all. For instance, 1952 saw the worst remembered crop outcome in Hungary. A days work on a collective farm could not have bought a kilo of bread.

P.S.

Instead of digging through theoretical texts, why don't you do a reasreach on the actual agricultural communes as they existed, such as ones in Aragon 1936-37?

[OneBrickOneVoice]

Down for People's War, it is naive to repeat such tales. If the rural communes actually were one big happy family, why did the government violently smash the Shanghai Commune of 1967, and the urban commune movement that followed?

um they didn't, the government promoted the Shanghai commune, but wanted it to happen all over the country spontaneously. That didn't happen. The Shanghai commune was isolated, and became a breeding ground for what it had been established to halt, the restoration of capitalism and revisionism. In short, material conditions weren't ready yet.

You have not a shread of evidence that the PRC tried to suppress the commune movement. The opposite is true. It was the PRC that promoted the communes. Try a google search on the "people's communes" and the "great leap forward".

[OneBrickOneVoice]

Originally posted by [email protected] 03, 2007 09:07 pm
Floyce, don't you think that collectivization in Hungary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivisation_in_Hungary) was much more successful than the Chinese case?
No the Chinese case was very good. In some 20 years of collectivism and economy built to serve the people, agricultural and industrial output nearly quadrupled.


It was not successfull, at all. For instance, 1952 saw the worst remembered crop outcome in Hungary. A days work on a collective farm could not have bought a kilo of bread.

what are you trying to prove? Yeah bad weather does have tough effects on crops..

[Lamanov]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2007 10:44 pm
what are you trying to prove? Yeah bad weather does have tough effects on crops..

Are you suggesting that ice storms sweaped through the whole Panonia plane for six months?

:rolleyes:

I'm pointing out to the failiure of the system of state monopoly capitalism forced collectivization.

[Janus]

That didn't happen
Because Mao essentially ended it soon after.


The Shanghai commune was isolated, and became a breeding ground for what it had been established to halt, the restoration of capitalism and revisionism.
Mao's explanation was a little different:
Talk with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_73.htm)


In short, material conditions weren't ready yet.
Except Mao didn't ever seem to be phased by inadequate "material conditions"; after all, China certainly didn't meet the Marxist model for proper material conditions back when Mao marched into Jinggangshan.