Present and Future of Petty Production
However, once this principle is accepted, the forms of using this common good (the land of the village communities) can be quite diverse. In order to understand this, we must be able to distinguish petty production from small property.
Petty production—peasant and artisanal—dominated production in all past societies.
It has retained an important place in modern capitalism, now linked with small property—in agriculture, services and even certain segments of industry. Certainly in the dominant triad of the contemporary world (the United States, Europe and Japan) it is receding. An example of that is the disappearance of small businesses and their replacement by large commercial operations. Yet this is not to say that this change is ‘progress’, even in terms of efficiency, all the more so if the social, cultural and civilizational dimensions are taken into account. In fact, this is an example of the distortion produced by the domination of rent-seeking generalized monopolies. Hence, perhaps in a future socialism the place of petty production will be called upon to resume its importance.In contemporary China, in any case, petty production—which is not necessarily linked with small property—retains an important place in national production, not only in agriculture, but also in large segments of urban life.
China has experienced quite diverse and even contrasting forms of the use of land as a common good. We need to discuss, on the one hand, efficiency (volume of production from a hectare per worker/year) and, on the other, the dynamics of the transformations set in motion. These forms can strengthen tendencies towards capitalist development, which would end up calling into question the non-commodity status of the land, or can be part of development in a socialist direction. These questions can be answered only through a concrete examination of the forms at issue, as they were implemented in successive moments of Chinese development from 1950 to the present.
At the beginning, in the 1950s, the form adopted was petty family production combined with simpler forms of cooperation for managing irrigation, work requiring co-ordination, and the use of certain kinds of equipment.
And the insertion of such petty family production into a state economy that maintained a monopoly over purchases of produce destined for the market and the supply of credit and inputs, all on the basis of planned prices (decided by the center).The experience of the communes that followed the establishment of production cooperatives in the 1970s is full of lessons. It was not necessarily a question of passing from small production to large farms, even if the idea of the superiority of the latter inspired some of its supporters. The essentials of this initiative originated in the aspiration for decentralized socialist construction. The Communes not only had responsibility for managing the agricultural production of a large village or a collective of villages and hamlets (this organization itself was a mixture of forms of small family production and more ambitious specialized production), they also: provided a framework to attach industrial activities that employed peasants available in certain seasons; articulated productive economic activities with the management of social services (education, health, housing); and began the decentralization of the political administration of the society. Just as the Paris Commune had intended, the socialist state was to become, at least partially, a federation of socialist communes. Undoubtedly, in many respects, the Communes were in advance of their time and the dialectic between the decentralization of decision-making powers and the centralization assumed by the omnipresence of the Communist Party did not always operate smoothly. Yet the recorded results are far from having been disastrous, as the right would have us believe. A Commune in the Beijing region, which resisted the order to dissolve the system, continues to record excellent economic results linked with the persistence of high quality political debates, which disappeared elsewhere. Current (2012) projects of ‘‘rural reconstruction”, implemented by rural communities in several regions of China, appear to be inspired by the experience of the Communes.
The decision to dissolve the Communes made by Deng Xiaoping in 1980 strengthened small family production, which remained the dominant form during the three decades following this decision (1980-2012).
However, the range of users’ rights (for village Communes and family units) has expanded considerably. It has become possible for the holders of these land use rights to ‘rent’ that land out (but never ‘sell’ it), either to other small producers—thus facilitating emigration to the cities, particularly of educated young people who do not want to remain rural residents—or to firms organizing a much larger, modernized farm (never a latifundia, which does not exist in China, but nevertheless considerably larger than family farms). This form is the means used to encourage specialized production (such as good wine, for which China has called on the assistance of experts from Burgundy) or test new scientific methods (GMOs and others).To ‘approve’ or ‘reject’ the diversity of these systems a priori makes no sense, in my opinion. Once again, the concrete analysis of each of them, both in its design and the reality of its implementation, is imperative. The fact remains that the inventive diversity of forms of using commonly held land has led to phenomenal results. First of all, in terms of economic efficiency, although urban population has grown from 20 to 50 % of total population, China has succeeded in increasing agricultural production to keep pace with the gigantic needs of urbanization. This is a remarkable and exceptional result, unparalleled in the countries of the ‘capitalist’ South. It has preserved and strengthened its food sovereignty, even though it suffers from a major handicap: its agriculture feeds 22 % of the world’s population reasonably well while it has only 6 % of the world’s arable land. In addition, in terms of the way (and level) of life of rural populations, Chinese villages no longer have anything in common with what is still dominant elsewhere in the capitalist Third World. Comfortable and well-equipped permanent structures form a striking contrast, not only with the former China of hunger and extreme poverty, but also with the extreme forms of poverty that still dominate the countryside of India or Africa.
The principles and policies implemented (land held in common, support for petty production without small property) are responsible for these unequalled results.
They have made possible a relatively controlled rural to urban migration. Compare that with the capitalist road, in Brazil, for example. Private property in agricultural land has emptied the countryside of Brazil—today only 11 % of the country’s population. But at least 50 % of urban residents live in slums (the favelas) and survive only thanks to the ‘‘informal economy’’ (including organized crime). There is nothing similar in China, where the urban population is, as a whole, adequately employed and housed, even in comparison with many ‘‘developed countries’’, without even mentioning those where the GDP per capita is at the Chinese level!The population transfer from the extremely densely populated Chinese countryside (only Vietnam, Bangladesh and Egypt are similar) was essential. It improved conditions for rural petty production, making more land available. This transfer, although relatively controlled (once again, nothing is perfect in the history of humanity, neither in China nor elsewhere), is perhaps threatening to become too rapid. This is being discussed in China.
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