The Agrarian Question
Mao described the nature of the revolution carried out in China by its Communist Party as an anti-imperialist/anti-feudal revolution looking toward socialism. Mao never assumed that, after having dealt with imperialism and feudalism, the Chinese people had ‘constructed’ a socialist society.
He always characterized this construction as the first phase of the long path to socialism.I must emphasize the quite specific nature of the response given to the agrarian question by the Chinese Revolution. The distributed (agricultural) land was not privatized; it remained the property of the nation represented by village communes and only the use was given to rural families. That had not been the case in Russia where Lenin, faced with the fait accompli of the peasant insurrection in 1917, recognized the private property of the beneficiaries of the land distribution.
Why was the implementation of the principle that agricultural land is not a commodity possible in China (and Vietnam)? It is constantly repeated that peasants around the world long for property and that alone. If such had been the case in China, the decision to nationalize the land would have led to an endless peasant war, as was the case when Stalin began forced collectivization in the Soviet Union.
The attitude of the peasants of China and Vietnam (and nowhere else) cannot be explained by a supposed ‘tradition’ in which they are unaware of property. It is the product of an intelligent and exceptional political line implemented by the Communist Parties of these two countries.
The Second International took for granted the inevitable aspiration of peasants for property, real enough in nineteenth century Europe. Over the long European transition from feudalism to capitalism (1,500-1,800), the earlier institutionalized feudal forms of access to the land through rights shared among King, Lords and peasant serfs had gradually been dissolved and replaced by modern bourgeois private property, which treats the land as a commodity—a good that the owner can freely dispose of (buy and sell).
The socialists of the Second International accepted this fait accompli of the ‘‘bourgeois revolution’’, even if they deplored it.They also thought that small peasant property had no future, which belonged to large mechanized agricultural enterprise modeled on industry. They thought that capitalist development by itself would lead to such a concentration of property and to the most effective forms of its exploitation (see Kautsky’s writings on this subject). History proved them wrong. Peasant agriculture gave way to capitalist family agriculture in a double sense; one that produces for the market (farm consumption having become insignificant) and one that makes use of modern equipment, industrial inputs and bank credit. What is more, this capitalist family agriculture has turned out to be quite efficient in comparison with large farms, in terms of volume of production per hectare per worker/year. This observation does not exclude the fact that the modern capitalist farmer is exploited by generalized monopoly capital, which controls the upstream supply of inputs and credit and the downstream marketing of the products. These farmers have been transformed into subcontractors for dominant capital.
Thus (wrongly) persuaded that large enterprise is always more efficient than small in every area—industry, services and agriculture—the radical socialists of the Second International assumed that the abolition of landed property (nationalization of the land) would allow the creation of large socialist farms (analogous to the future Soviet sovkhozes and kolkhozes). However, they were unable to put such measures to the test since revolution was not on the agenda in their countries (the imperialist centers).
The Bolsheviks accepted these theses until 1917. They contemplated the nationalization of the large estates of the Russian aristocracy, while leaving property in communal lands to the peasants. However, they were subsequently caught unawares by the peasant insurrection, which seized the large estates.
Mao drew the lessons from this history and developed a completely different line of political action.
Beginning in the 1930s in southern China, during the long civil war of liberation, Mao based the increasing presence of the communist party on a solid alliance with the poor and landless peasants (the majority), maintained friendly relations with the middle peasants and isolated the rich peasants at all stages of the war, without necessarily antagonizing them. The success of this line prepared the large majority of rural inhabitants to consider and accept a solution to their problems that did not require private property in plots of land acquired through distribution. I think that Mao’s ideas, and their successful implementation, have their historical roots in the nineteenth century Taiping Revolution. Mao thus succeeded in realizing what the Bolshevik Party failed to do: to establish a solid alliance with the large rural majority. In Russia, the fait accompli of summer 1917 eliminated later opportunities for an alliance with the poor and middle peasants against the rich ones (the kulaks) because the former were anxious to defend their acquired private property and, consequently, preferred to follow the kulaks rather than the Bolsheviks.This ‘‘Chinese specificity”—whose consequences are of major importance— absolutely prevents us from characterizing contemporary China (even in 2012) as ‘capitalist’ because the capitalist road is based on the transformation of land into a commodity.
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