"Drive to the Collective Farm!" – 1920s Yiddish-language poster featuring women kolkhoz workers"Kolkhoz-woman with pumpkins", 1930 painting
Collective farming and communal farming are various types of "agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise".[1] There are two broad types of communal farms: agricultural cooperatives, in which member-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective; and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries (including the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, China and Vietnam), there have been both state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy (cooperative-run farms) and sovkhozy (state-run farms).
Under the Aztec Empire, central Mexico was divided into small territories called calpulli, which were units of local administration concerned with farming as well as education and religion. A calpulli consisted of a number of large extended families with a presumed common ancestor, themselves each composed of a number of nuclear families. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it each day. When the Spanish conquered Mexico they replaced this with a system of estates granted by the Spanish crown to Spanish colonists, as well as the encomienda, a feudal-like right of overlordship colonists were given in particular villages, and the repartimiento or system of indigenous forced labor.
Latter-day Iroquois longhouse housing several hundred people
The Huron had an essentially communal system of land ownership. The French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals. The Huron had "as much land as they need[ed]."[2] As a result, the Huron could give families their own land and still have a large amount of excess land owned communally. Any Huron was free to clear the land and farm on the basis of usufruct. He maintained possession of the land as long as he continued to actively cultivate and tend the fields. Once he abandoned the land, it reverted to communal ownership, and anyone could take it up for themselves.[3] While the Huron did seem to have lands designated for the individual, the significance of this possession may be of little relevance; the placement of corn storage vessels in the longhouses, which contained multiple families in one kinship group, suggests the occupants of a given longhouse held all production in common.[4]
The Iroquois had a similar communal system of land distribution. The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation. The land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers' Council gathered.[5] Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned and eventually punished by the Clan Mothers' Council by having the land redistributed to another clan.[6] Land property was really only the concern of the women, since it was the women's job to cultivate food and not the men's.[5]
The Clan Mothers' Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans. Food from such lands, called kěndiǔ"gwǎ'ge' hodi'yěn'tho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings.[6]
Russian Empire
The obshchina (Russian:общи́на,IPA:[ɐpˈɕːinə], literally: "commune") or mir (Russian: мир, literally: "society" (one of the meanings)) or Selskoye obshestvo (Russian: сельское общество ("Rural community", official term in the 19th and 20th century) were peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word о́бщий, obshchiy (common).
The vast majority of Russian peasants held their land in communal ownership within a mir community, which acted as a village government and a cooperative. Arable land was divided into sections based on soil quality and distance from the village. Each household had the right to claim one or more strips from each section depending on the number of adults in the household. The purpose of this allocation was not so much social (to each according to his needs) as it was practical (that each person pay his taxes). Strips were periodically re-allocated on the basis of a census, to ensure equitable share of the land. This was enforced by the state, which had an interest in the ability of households to pay their taxes.
Leon Trotsky and the Opposition bloc had originally advocated a programme of industrialization which also proposed agricultural cooperatives and the formation of collective farms on a voluntary basis.[7] According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation.[8] Other scholars have argued the economic programme of Trotsky differed from the forced policy of collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928 due to the levels of brutality associated with its enforcement.[9][10][11]
As part of the first five-year plan, forced collectivization was introduced in the Soviet Union by general secretaryJoseph Stalin in the late 1920s as a way, according to the policies of socialist leaders, to boost agricultural production through the organization of land and labor into large-scale collective farms (kolkhozy). At the same time, Joseph Stalin argued that collectivization would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the kulaks (farmland owners).
In 1932–1933, an estimated 11 million people, 3–7million in Ukraine alone, died from famine after Stalin forced the peasants into collectives (see: Holodomor). It was not until 1940 that agricultural production finally surpassed its pre-collectivization levels.[12][13]
Collectivization throughout the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was not aggressively pursued until the early 1960s because of the Soviet leadership's focus on a policy of Russification of Moldavians into the Russian way of life[citation needed]. Much of the collectivization in Moldova had undergone in Transnistria, in Chişinău, the present-day capital city of Moldova. Most of the directors who regulated and conducted the process of collectivization were placed by officials from Moscow.[citation needed]
The efficiency of collective farms in the USSR is debatable. A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by privately farmed plots despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms.[14] In 1935, the establishment of Personal Subsidiary Farms (LPH) on collective land was allowed- in the range of .25-1 hectare. [15][16] Private cattle ownership existed after 1935, but was severely restricted by decree in 1956. [17]
1962 stamp commemorating the "completion" of land collectivization
In Romania, land collectivization began in 1948 and continued for over more than a decade until its virtual eradication in 1962.[18]
In Romania, force sometimes had to be used to enforce collective agricultural practices. Collective farming in Romania was an attempt to implement the USSR's communist blueprint. These attempts often fell short. By strictly adhering to this Soviet blueprint, the implementation of communism in Romania inevitably created dilemmas and contributions that led to violence. Kligman and Verdery state "The violence collectivization, emerges then, less, as an abhoration than as a product of sociocultural shaping and of deep problems with how the soviet blueprint came to be implemented... instead of a gradual and integrated process of moving from one form of society to another, Romanian society in the Soviet orbit was being completely rearticulated, a process in which violence was inevitable."[19]
On the other hand, as Kligman and Verdery explain, "Collectivization brought undeniable benefits to some rural inhabitants, especially those who had owned little or no land. It freed them from laboring on the fields of others, and it increased their control over wages, lending to their daily existence a stability previously unknown to them."[19]
In Hungary, agricultural collectivization was attempted a number of times between 1948 and 1956 (with disastrous results), until it was finally successful in the early 1960s under János Kádár. The first serious attempt at collectivization based on Stalinist agricultural policy was undertaken in July 1948. Both economic and direct police pressure were used to coerce peasants to join cooperatives, but large numbers opted instead to leave their villages. By the early 1950s, only one-quarter of peasants had agreed to join cooperatives.[21]
In the spring of 1955 the drive for collectivization was renewed, again using physical force to encourage membership, but this second wave also ended in dismal failure. After the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party opted for a more gradual collectivization drive. The main wave of collectivization occurred between 1959 and 1961, and at the end of this period more than 95% of agricultural land in Hungary had become the property of collective farms. In February 1961, the Central Committee declared that collectivization had been completed.[22]
In Czechoslovakia, centralized land reforms after World War I allowed for the distribution of most of the land to peasants and the poor, and created large groups of relatively well-to-do farmers (though village poor still existed). These groups showed no support for communist ideals. In 1945, immediately after World War II, new land reform started with the new socialist government. The first phase involved a confiscation of properties of Germans, Hungarians, and collaborators with the Nazi regime in accordance with the so-called Beneš decrees. The second phase, promulgated by so-called Ďuriš's laws (after the Communist Minister of Agriculture), in fact meant a complete revision of the pre-war land reform and tried to reduce maximal private property to 150 hectares (370 acres) of agricultural land and 250 hectares (620 acres) of any land.[23]
The third and final phase forbade possession of land above 50 hectares (120 acres) for one family. This phase was carried out in April 1948, two months after the Communist Party of Czechoslovakiatook power by force. Farms started to be collectivized, mostly under the threat of sanctions. The most obstinate farmers were persecuted and imprisoned. The most common form of collectivization was agricultural cooperative (Czech: Jednotné zemědělské družstvo, JZD; Slovak: Jednotné roľnícke družstvo, JRD). The collectivization was implemented in three stages (1949–1952, 1953–1956, 1956–1969) and officially ended with the 1960 implementation of the constitution establishing the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which made private ownership illegal.
Many early cooperatives collapsed and were recreated. Their productivity was low since they provided tiny salaries and no pensions, and they failed to create a sense of collective ownership; small-scale pilfering was common, and food became scarce. Seeing the massive outflow of people from agriculture into cities, the government started to massively subsidize the cooperatives in order to make the standard of living of farmers equal to that of city inhabitants; this was the long-term official policy of the government. Funds, machinery, and fertilizers were provided; young people from villages were forced to study agriculture; and students were regularly sent (involuntarily) to help in cooperatives.
Subsidies and constant pressure destroyed the remaining private farmers; only a handful of them remained after the 1960s. The lifestyle of villagers had eventually reached the level of cities, and village poverty was eliminated. Czechoslovakia was again able to produce enough food for its citizens. The price of this success was a huge waste of resources because the cooperatives had no incentive to improve efficiency. Every piece of land was cultivated regardless of the expense involved, and the soil became heavily polluted with chemicals. Also, the intensive use of heavy machinery damaged topsoil. Furthermore, the cooperatives were infamous for over-employment.
In the late 1970s, the economy of Czechoslovakia entered into stagnation, and the state-owned companies were unable to deal with advent of modern technologies. A few agricultural companies (where the rules were less strict than in state companies) used this situation to start providing high-tech products. For example, the only way to buy a PC-compatible computer in the late 1980s was to get it (for an extremely high price) from one agricultural company acting as a reseller.
After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989 subsidies to agriculture were halted with devastating effect. Most of the cooperatives had problems competing with technologically advanced foreign competition and were unable to obtain investment to improve their situation. Quite a large percentage of them collapsed. The others that remained were typically insufficiently funded, lacking competent management, without new machinery and living from day to day. Employment in the agricultural sector dropped significantly (from approximately 25% of the population to approximately 1%).
Collective farms in the German Democratic Republic were typically called Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG), and corresponded closely to the Soviet kolkhoz. East Germany also had a few state-owned farms which were equivalent to the Soviet sovkhoz, which were called the Volkseigenes Gut (VEG). The structure of farms in what was called East Elbia until German partition was dominated by latifundia, and thus the land reform which was justified on denazification grounds[24][25] and with the aim of destroying the Prussian Junker class – which had been hated by the left during the Weimar Republic and which was blamed for Prussian militarism and the authoritarian tendencies of the German Empire and later Nazi Germany – was initially popular with many small farmers and landless peasants. East German President Wilhelm Pieck coined the slogan Junkerland in Bauernhand! ("Junker land into farmer's hand!") to promote land reform, which was initially pledged to be more moderate than full-scale collectivization. Although the ruling Socialist Unity Party and the Soviet Military Administration in Germany promised to allow large landowners to keep their land, they were expelled as the LPG were introduced in 1953. After 1959 all farmers were required to surrender independently owned land and join the LPGs.[26] Similarly to the Soviet Union, ultimately most of the land was transferred into de jure or de facto state controlled entities with the former farmers becoming employees – now of the state instead of the erstwhile Junker class.[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][excessive citations]
The Polish name of a collective farm was rolnicza spółdzielnia produkcyjna, 'agricultural production cooperative'. Collectivisation in Poland was stopped in 1956; later, nationalisation was supported.
Collective farming was introduced as a League of Communists of Yugoslavia government policy throughout the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after World War II, by taking away land from wealthy pre-war owners and limiting possessions in private ownership first to 25, and later to 10 hectares. The large, state-owned farms were known as "Agricultural cooperatives" (zemljoradničke zadruge in Serbo-Croatian) and farmers working on them had to meet production quotas in order to satisfy the needs of the populace. This system was largely abolished in the 1950s. See: Law of 23 August 1945 with amendments until 1 December 1948.[34][bettersourceneeded]
At the end of the Land Reform movement, individual families in China owned the land they farmed, paid taxes as households, and sold grain at prices set by the state.[35]:109 Rural collectivization began soon after the CCP announced its 1953 "general line for the transition to socialism".[36] Over the next six years, collectivization took several incrementally progressing forms: mutual aid groups, primitive cooperatives, and people's communes.[36] As London School of Economics and Political Science Professor Lin Chun notes, researchers agree that communization proceeded on a largely voluntary basis that avoided both the violence and sabotage that occurred during the Soviet collectivization.[36] Like Professor Barry Naughton, she observes that China's collectivization proceeded smoothly in part because, unlike the Soviet experience, a network of state institutions already existed in the countryside.[36] Similarly, Professor Edward Friedman describes China's collectivization process as a "miracle of miracles".[37]
During 1954–1955, farmers in many areas began pooling their land, capital resources, and labor into beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (chuji nongye hezuoshe).[35]:109 In the complex system of beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives, farmers received a share of the harvest based on a combination of how much labor and how much land they contributed to the cooperative.[35]:109–110
By June 1956, over 60% of rural households had been collectivized into higher-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (gaoji nongye hezuoshe), a structure that was similar to Soviet collective farmering via kolkhozy.[35]:110 In these cooperatives, tens of households pooled land and draft animals.[35]:110 Adult members of the cooperative were credited with work points based on how much labor they had provided at which tasks.[35]:110 At the end of the year, the collective deducted taxes and fixed-price sales to the state, and the cooperative retained seed for the next year as well as some investment and welfare funds.[35]:110 The collective then distributed to the households the remainder of the harvest and some of the money received from sales to the state.[35]:110 The distribution was based partly on work points accrued by the adult members of a household, and partly at a standard rate by age and sex.[35]:110 These cooperatives also lent small amounts of land back to households individually on which the households could grow crops to consume directly or sell at market.[35]:110–111 Apart from the large-scale communization during the Great Leap Forward, higher-level agricultural producers' collective were generally the dominant form of rural collectivization in China.[35]:111
During The Great Leap Forward, the Mao Zedong-led Communist Party rapidly convert the Chinese economy to a socialist society through rapid industrialization and large scale collectivization.[38] Later, the country was hit by massive floods and droughts. This, combined with the usage of severely flawed policies of Lysenkoism and the Four Pests Campaign, caused "The Great Chinese Famine of 1959," where nearly 30 million people died of hunger. The party officially blamed floods and droughts for the famine; however, it was clear to the party members at the party meetings that famine was caused mostly by their own policies.[39] Recent studies also demonstrate that it was career incentives within the politburo system as well as political radicalism that led to the great famine.[40]
Collectivization of land via the commune system facilitated China's rapid industrialization through the state's control of food production and procurement.[41] This allowed the state to accelerate the process of capital accumulation, ultimately laying the successful foundation of physical and human capital for the economic growth of China's reform and opening up.[41] During the early and middle 1950s, collectivization was an important factor in the major change in Chinese agriculture during that period, the dramatic increase in irrigated land.[35]:111 For example, collectivization was a factor that contributed to the introduction of double cropping in the south, a labor-intensive process which greatly increased agricultural yields.[35]:116
Both land reform movement and collectivization largely left in place the social systems in the ethnic minority group areas of Chinese Central Asia and Zomia.[35]:118 These areas generally underwent collectivization in the form of agricultural producers' cooperatives during winter of 1957 through 1958, having skipped the small peasant landholder stage that had followed land reform elsewhere in China.[35]:122 Central Tibet was under the joint administration of the People's Liberation Army and the Dalai Lama's theocracy until 1959, and consequently did not experience land reform or collectivization until 1960 in agricultural areas and 1966 in pastoral areas.[35]:119
After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping reformed the collective farming method. From this time, nearly all Chinese crops began to blossom, not just grain. The reform included the removal of land from rich land owners for use of agricultural land for peasants, but not ownership. This policy increased production and helped reverse the effects of The Great Leap Forward. The two main reasons why China succeeded was because 1) the government chose to make gradual changes, which kept the monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party and 2) because the reform process began from the bottom and later expanded to the top. Throughout the reform process, the Communist Party reacted positively to the bottom-up reform initiatives that emerged from the rural population. Deng Xiaoping described the reform process as "fording the river by feeling for the stones". This statement refers to the Chinese people who called for the reforms they wanted by "placing the stones at his feet" and he would then just approve the reforms the people wanted. The peasants started their own "household responsibility system" apart from the government. After Chinese trade was privately deemed successful, all Deng had to do was approve its legalization. This increased competition between farmers domestically and internationally, meaning the low wage working class began to be known worldwide, increasing the Chinese FDI.[42]
A 2017 study found that Chinese peasants slaughtered massive numbers of draft animals as a response to collectivization, as this would allow them to keep the meat and hide, and not transfer the draft animals to the collectives.[43] The study estimates that "the animal loss during the movement was 12 to 15 percent, or 7.4-9.5 million dead. Grain output dropped by 7 percent due to lower animal inputs and lower productivity."[43]
In the late 1990s, the collective farming system collapsed under a strain of droughts. Estimates of deaths due to starvation ranged into the millions, although the government did not allow outside observers to survey the extent of the famine. Aggravating the severity of the famine, the government was accused of diverting international relief supplies to its armed forces. Agriculture in North Korea has suffered tremendously from natural disasters, a lack of fertile land, and government mismanagement, often causing the nation to rely on foreign aid as its primary source of food.
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam implemented collective farming although de jure private ownership existed. Starting in 1958 collective farming was pushed such that by 1960, 85% of farmers and 70% of farmlands were collectivized including those seized by force.[44] Collectivization however was seen by the communist leadership as a half-measure when compared to full state ownership.[45]
Following the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, South Vietnam briefly came under the authority of a Provisional Revolutionary Government, a puppet state under military occupation by North Vietnam, before being officially reunified with the North under Communist rule as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on 2 July 1976. Upon taking control, the Vietnamese communists banned other political parties, arrested suspects believed to have collaborated with the United States and embarked on a mass campaign of collectivization of farms and factories. Private land ownership was "transformed" to subsume under State and collective ownership.[46] Reconstruction of the war-ravaged country was slow and serious humanitarian and economic problems confronted the communist regime.
In an historic shift in 1986, the Communist Party of Vietnam implemented free-market reforms known as Đổi Mới (Renovation). With the authority of the state remaining unchallenged, private enterprise, deregulation and foreign investment were encouraged. Land ownership nonetheless is the sole prerogative of the state. The economy of Vietnam has achieved rapid growth in agricultural and industrial production, construction and housing, exports and foreign investment. However, the power of the Communist Party of Vietnam over all organs of government remains firm, preventing full land ownership. Conflicts between the state and private farmers over land rights have grown with the potential to spark social and political instability.[47]
Despite the reforms however, over 50% of all farms in Vietnam remain collective cooperatives (over 15,000 farming cooperatives in Vietnam), and almost all farmers being members of some kind of cooperative.[48] The state also heavily encourages collective cooperative farming over private farming.[49]
In the initial years that followed the Cuban Revolution, government authorities experimented with agricultural and farming production cooperatives. Between 1977 and 1983, farmers began to collectivize into CPAs – Cooperativa de Producción Agropecuaria (Agricultural Production Cooperatives). Farmers were encouraged to sell their land to the state for the establishment of a cooperative farm, receiving payments for a period of 20 years while also sharing in the fruits of the CPA. Joining a CPA allowed individuals who were previously dispersed throughout the countryside to move to a centralized location with increased access to electricity, medical care, housing, and schools. Democratic practice tends to be limited to business decisions and is constrained by the centralized economic planning of the Cuban system.
Another type of agricultural production cooperative in Cuba is UBPC – Unidad Básica de Producción Cooperativa (Basic Unit of Cooperative Production). The law authorizing the creation of UBPCs was passed on 20 September 1993. It has been used to transform many state farms into UBPCs, similar to the transformation of Russian sovkhozes (state farms) into kolkhozes (collective farms) since 1992. The law granted indefinite usufruct to the workers of the UBPC in line with its goal of linking the workers to the land. It established material incentives for increased production by tying workers' earnings to the overall production of the UBPC, and increased managerial autonomy and workers' participation in the management of the workplace.
Tanzania
The move to a collective farming method in Tanzania was based on the Soviet model for rural development. In 1967, President Julius Nyerere issued "Socialism and Rural Development" which proposed the creation of Ujamaa Villages. Since the majority of the rural population was spread out, and agriculture was traditionally undertaken individually, the rural population had to be forced to move together, to farm communally. Following forced migration, incentive to participate in communal farming activities was encouraged by government recognition.
These incentives, in addition to encouraging a degree of participation, also lured those whose primary interests were not the common good to the Ujamaa villages. This, in addition to the Order of 1973 dictating that all people had to live in villages (Operation Vijiji)[50] eroded the sustainability of communal projects. In order for the communal farms to be successful, each member of the village would have to contribute to the best of their ability. Due to lack of sufficient foreign exchange, mechanization of the labour was impossible, therefore it was essential that every villager contributed to manual labour.
In the European Union, collective farming is fairly common and agricultural cooperatives hold a 40% market share among the 27 member states. In the Netherlands, cooperative agriculture holds a market share of approximately 70%, second only to Finland.[51] In France, cooperative agriculture represents 40% of the national food industry's production and nearly 90 Billion € in gross revenue, covering one out of three food brands in the country.[52][53]
There are also intentional communities which practice collective agriculture.[54][55] There is a growing number of community supported agriculture initiatives, some of which operate under consumer/worker governance, that could be considered collective farms.
India
In Indian villages a single field (normally a plot of three to five acres) may be farmed collectively by the villagers, who each offer labour as a devotional offering, possibly for one or two days per cropping season. The resulting crop belongs to no one individual, and is used as an offering. The labour input is the offering of the peasant in their role as priests. The wealth generated by the sale of the produce belongs to the Gods and hence is Apaurusheya or impersonal. Shrambhakti (labour contributed as devotional offering) is the key instrument for generation of internal resources. The benefits of the harvest are most often redistributed in the village for common good as well as individual need – not as loan or charity, but as divine grace (prasad). The recipient is under no obligation to repay it and no interest need be paid on such gifts.[citation needed]
Israel
Collective farming was also implemented in kibbutzim in Israel, which began in 1909 as a unique combination of Zionism and socialism – known as Labor Zionism. The concept has faced occasional criticism as economically inefficient and over-reliant on subsidized credit.[56]
A lesser-known type of collective farm in Israel is moshav shitufi (lit. collective settlement), where production and services are managed collectively, as in a kibbutz, but consumption decisions are left to individual households. In terms of cooperative organization, moshav shitufi is distinct from the much more common moshav (or moshav ovdim), essentially a village-level service cooperative, not a collective farm.
In 2006 there were 40 moshavim shitufi'im in Israel, compared with 267 kibbutzim.[57]
Collective farming in Israel differs from collectivism in communist states in that it is voluntary. However, including moshavim, various forms of collective farming have traditionally been and remain the primary agricultural model, as there are only a small number of completely private farms in Israel outside of the moshavim.
Mexico
In Mexico the Ejido system provided poor farmers with collective use rights to agricultural land.
Until recently Western Canada had a centralised wheat board where farmers were usually obligated to sell their wheat to the province which sold the product at a high collective price. Ontario currently has a milk board which obliges most milk producers to sell their milk to the province at a regulated quality and price.
A movement of voluntary collective farming started in 2008 in the Research Triangle under the name of crop mob. The idea spread throughout the United States and less than 10 years later this particular type of incidental, spontaneous, social-media driven collective farming was reported in over 70 places.[59]
In popular culture
In the 2021 Telugu filmSreekaram, the main protagonist encourages people for a community farming.
The 1929 Soviet film The General Line features Martha and a group of peasants organizing a kolkhoz. The film began production as a promotion of the TrotskyistLeft Opposition viewpoint on collectivization. After the rise of Joseph Stalin and expulsion of his rival Leon Trotsky, it was heavily re-edited into the pro-Stalinist film The Old and the New.
The 1930 Soviet Ukrainian film Earth features a peasant encouraging his village in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to embrace collectivization, which they do after he is killed by kulaks.
Dekulakization– Political repression of prosperous peasants (kulaks) in the USSR (1929–1932)
Work unit– Danwei; a state institution of employment and political organization in China
Related Research Articles
The people's commune was the highest of three administrative levels in rural areas of the People's Republic of China during the period from 1958 to 1983, until they were replaced by townships. Communes, the largest collective units, were divided in turn into production brigades and production teams. The people's commune collectivized living and working practices. Many individual homes were abolished in favour of communal residences, with many houses taken apart and demolished. Regardless of age or relationship, many men and women lived separately, and often, multiple families were placed in the same communal homes. One's land, tools, resources were pooled together, with working hours and farming practices completely dictated by the CCP.
The Soviet Union introduced forced collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food would be needed to keep up with urban demand.
Agriculture in the Soviet Union was mostly collectivized, with some limited cultivation of private plots. It is often viewed as one of the more inefficient sectors of the economy of the Soviet Union. A number of food taxes were introduced in the early Soviet period despite the Decree on Land that immediately followed the October Revolution. The forced collectivization and class war against "kulaks" under Stalinism greatly disrupted farm output in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the Soviet famine of 1932–33. A system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes, respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly productive and fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness. Under the administrations of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, many reforms were enacted as attempts to defray the inefficiencies of the Stalinist agricultural system. However, Marxist–Leninist ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of market mechanism to coexist alongside central planning, so the private plot fraction of Soviet agriculture, which was its most productive, remained confined to a limited role. Throughout its later decades the Soviet Union never stopped using substantial portions of the precious metals mined each year in Siberia to pay for grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an economic indicator showing that the country's agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been. The real numbers, however, were treated as state secrets at the time, so accurate analysis of the sector's performance was limited outside the USSR and nearly impossible to assemble within its borders. However, Soviet citizens as consumers were familiar with the fact that foods, especially meats, were often noticeably scarce, to the point that not lack of money so much as lack of things to buy with it was the limiting factor in their standard of living.
A UBPC, or Basic Unit of Cooperative Production, are a type of agricultural cooperative that exists in Cuba.
A CPA, or Agricultural Production Cooperative, is a type of agricultural cooperative that exists in Cuba.
In the Hungarian People's Republic, agricultural collectivization was attempted a number of times in the late 1940s, until it was finally successfully implemented in the early 1960s. By consolidating individual landowning farmers into agricultural co-operatives, the Communist government hoped to increase production and efficiency, and put agriculture under the control of the state.
Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of supposed kulaks and their families. Redistribution of farmland started in 1917 and lasted until 1933, but was most active in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929, portraying kulaks as class enemies of the Soviet Union.
For millennia, agriculture has played an important role in the Chinese economy and society. By the time the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, virtually all arable land was under cultivation; irrigation and drainage systems constructed centuries earlier and intensive farming practices already produced relatively high yields. But little prime virgin land was available to support population growth and economic development. However, after a decline in production as a result of the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), agricultural reforms implemented in the 1980s increased yields and promised even greater future production from existing cultivated land.
The causes of the Holodomor, which was a famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932 and 1933 that resulted in the death of around 3–5 million people, are the subject of scholarly and political debate, particularly surrounding the Holodomor genocide question. Soviet historians Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty believe the famine was the unintended consequence of problems arising from Soviet agricultural collectivization which was designed to accelerate the program of industrialization in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Other academics conclude policies were intentionally designed to cause the famine. Some scholars and political leaders claim that the famine may be classified as a genocide under the definition of genocide that entered international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The Polish People's Republic pursued a policy of agricultural collectivization throughout the Stalinist regime period, from 1948 until the liberalization during Gomułka's thaw of 1956. However, Poland was the unique country in the Eastern Bloc where large-scale collectivization failed to take root. A legacy of collectivization in Poland was the network of inefficient State Agricultural Farms (PGRs), many of which can still be seen in the countryside of modern Poland, especially in its northern and western provinces.
Prior to World War II, agriculture in Bulgaria was the leading sector in the Bulgarian economy. In 1939, agriculture contributed 65 percent of Net material product (NMP), and four out of every five Bulgarians were employed in agriculture. The importance and organization of Bulgarian agriculture changed drastically after the war, however. By 1958, the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) had collectivized a high percentage of Bulgarian farms; in the next three decades, the state used various forms of organization to improve productivity, but none succeeded. Meanwhile, private plots remained productive and often alleviated agricultural shortages during the Todor Zhivkov era.
This article describes the development of agriculture in East Germany, both the Soviet occupation zone of Germany as well as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) between the years 1945 and 1990.
The Great Turn or Great Break was the radical change in the economic policy of the USSR from 1928 to 1929, primarily consisting of the process by which the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 was abandoned in favor of the acceleration of collectivization and industrialization and also a cultural revolution. The term came from the title of Joseph Stalin's article "Year of the Great Turn" published on November 7, 1929, the 12th anniversary of the October Revolution. David R. Marples argues that the era of the Great Break lasted until 1934.
Kulak, also kurkul or golchomag, was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned over 3 ha of land towards the end of the Russian Empire. In the early Soviet Union, particularly in Soviet Russia and Azerbaijan, kulak referred to property ownership among peasants who were considered hesitant allies of the Bolshevik Revolution. In Ukraine during 1930–1931, there also existed a term of podkulachnik ; these were considered "sub-kulaks".
A kolkhoz was a form of collective farm in the Soviet Union. Kolkhozes existed along with state farms or sovkhoz. These were the two components of the socialized farm sector that began to emerge in Soviet agriculture after the October Revolution of 1917, as an antithesis both to the feudal structure of impoverished serfdom and aristocratic landlords and to individual or family farming.
Agrarian socialism is a political ideology that promotes social ownership of agrarian and agricultural production as opposed to private ownership. Agrarian socialism involves equally distributing agricultural land among collectivized peasant villages. Many agrarian socialist movements have tended to be rural, locally focused, and traditional. Governments and political parties seeking agrarian socialist policies have existed throughout the world, in regions including Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America, Africa and Australia.
The economy of the Soviet Union was based on state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, and industrial manufacturing. An administrative-command system managed a distinctive form of central planning. The Soviet economy was second only to the United States and was characterized by state control of investment, prices, a dependence on natural resources, lack of consumer goods, little foreign trade, public ownership of industrial assets, macroeconomic stability, low unemployment and high job security.
Land reform in Vietnam began in the political turmoil following World War II in which a civil war pitted the communist Viet Minh against the French colonists and their supporters. At that time a large percentage of agricultural land was owned by large landowners and the majority of the rural population of Vietnam owned only small plots of land or was landless. The early success of the land reform program of the Viet Minh, gave the communists a strong base of support among the 80 percent of the Vietnamese people who lived in rural areas. The support of the communists by a large number of rural dwellers was an important factor in determining the outcome of the Vietnam War.
Villagization was a land reform and resettlement program in Ethiopia implemented by the Derg in 1985 that aimed to systematize and regulate village life and rural agriculture. Villagization typically involved the relocation of rural communities or nomadic groups to planned villages with communal farmland.
Gigant is a sovkhoz located in the rural locality of Gigant in Salsky District of Rostov Oblast, Russia. The Gigant was the first grain sovkhoz.
References
↑ Definition of collective farm in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993.
↑ Axtell, James, ed. (1981). The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes. New York: Oxford University Press. pp.110–111.
↑ A. Sarris and D. Gavrilescu, "Restructuring of farms and agricultural systems in Romania", in: J. Swinnen, A. Buckwell, and E. Mathijs, eds., Agricultural Privatisation, Land Reform and Farm Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe, Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, 1997.
1 2 Kligman, G., & Verdery, K. (2011). Peasants under siege: the collectivization of Romanian agriculture, 1949–1962. Princeton University Press.
↑ Sue Williams "China: A Century of Revolution. Part 2", 1994
↑ Kung, James Kai-Sing, and Shuo Chen. "The tragedy of the nomenklatura: Career incentives and political radicalism during China's Great Leap famine". American Political Science Review 105, no. 1 (2011): 27-45.
McHenry, Dean E. Jr. (December 1977)"Peasant Participation in Communal Farming: The Tanzanian Experience" in African Studies Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Peasants in Africa, pp.43–63.
Stites, Sara Henry (1905). Economics of the Iroquois. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: The New Era Printing Company.
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