Ideally, the model implies parallel rights: of the state as sole landowner, on the one hand, and of the usufructuary (the peasant family), on the other. The state guarantees equal distribution of village lands among all families. It prohibits any use other than family cultivation, such as renting out the land. It guarantees that the product of the investments made by the usufructuary returns to him, in the short term, through his ownership of all of the farm’s production (freely marketable, although the state guarantees it by its purchases at a minimum price) and, in the long term, through the inheritance of the usufruct by the children who remain on the farm (the emigrant, when leaving the village, loses the right of access to the land, which returns to the basket of land for redistribution). Since this is certainly about rich soils, but also small (even tiny) farms, the system is viable only as long as vertical investment (a well-organized green revolution—not the one pushed by agribusiness—without large-scale motorization) proves to be as effective in allowing an increase in production per rural farmer as horizontal investment, that is, expansion of the farm supported by intensification of motorization.
Has this “ideal” model ever been implemented? It was probably close to being implemented in China during the Deng Xiaoping era. It remains the case that, while it could produce a strong degree of equality within a village, it had never been able to avoid inequalities among communities, which were a function of soil quality, population densities, and proximity to urban markets. No system of redistribution, even via cooperatives and state marketing monopolies during the Soviet phase, was up to the challenge.
What is certainly more serious is that the system itself is subject to internal and external pressures that erode its social scope and significance. Access to credit, under satisfactory conditions for the provision of inputs, is subject to all kinds of bargaining and interventions, both legal and illegal: “equal” access to the land is not synonymous with “equal” access to better conditions of production. The popularization of “market” ideology encourages this erosion. The system tolerates (even legitimates once again) the leasing of land (tenant farming) and the use of wage labor. The rhetoric of the right—encouraged from the outside—repeats that it will be necessary to give to the peasants “ownership” of the land and to open the “market in agricultural land.” It is more than obvious that the rich peasants (even agribusiness) who aspire to increase their property, lie behind such views.
This management system that regulates peasant access to the land has up till now been undertaken by the state and its ruling party. It is clearly possible to envision a system managed by actually elected village councils. That is probably necessary because there is not really any other way to mobilize the majority opinion and reduce the intrigues of a minority who might profit from a more pronounced capitalist development. The “dictatorship of the party” has been proven to be prone to sink into careerism, opportunism, even corruption. There are social struggles underway in the rural areas of China and Vietnam. They are just as prominent elsewhere in the world. But they are mainly defensive, that is, they are committed to defending the heritage of the revolution—the equal right for everyone to the land. Such defense is necessary insofar as this heritage is more threatened than it appears, in spite of repeated affirmations to the contrary by the two governments that “state ownership of land will never be abolished in favor of private property”! But this defense today requires recognition of the right to engage in such practices through organizing those who are concerned—that is, the peasants.
Forms of organizing agricultural production and land tenure systems are too diverse throughout Asia and Africa to construct a single path for the “peasant alternative” that can work for everyone. Hence, agrarian reform should be understood as a redistribution of private property when it is considered to be too unequally distributed. This is not a matter of a “reform of the land tenure system,” since this system is still managed by the principle of ownership. Nevertheless, this reform is necessary both to satisfy the perfectly legitimate demand of the poor and landless peasants, and to reduce the political and social power of large landowners. But where it has been implemented, in Asia and Africa after the liberation from imperialist and colonial domination, it was accomplished by hegemonic non-revolutionary social forces, meaning that these reforms were not managed by the majority of poor and dominated classes, except in China and Vietnam. In the latter, there was not any “agrarian reform” in the strict sense of the term, but, as I have said, a suppression of private property in land, an affirmation of state property, and an implementation of the principle of “equal” access to land use for all peasants. Elsewhere, true reforms dispossessed only the large landowners to the ultimate benefit of middle and even (in the longer term) rich peasants, while neglecting the interests of the poor and landless. That was the case in Egypt and other Arab countries. The reform underway in Zimbabwe could very well end up with similar results. Reform is still part of the required agenda in India, Southeast Asia, South Africa, and Kenya.
Even where agrarian reform is an immediate and imperative requirement, it would still be an ambiguous progress because of its longer-term significance. It reinforces attachment to “small property” that becomes an obstacle to challenging a land tenure system based on private property. The history of Russia illustrates this. Changes begun after the abolition of serfdom (1861) and stimulated by the 1905 Revolution, followed by Stolypin’s policies, had already produced a demand for property that the 1917 Revolution recognized through a radical agrarian reform. As is well known, the new small landowners were unenthusiastic about giving up their rights in favor of the unfortunate cooperatives organized in the 1930s. Another path to development based on peasant family farming, organized around generalized small property, perhaps might have been possible. It was not attempted.
But what about regions (other than China and Vietnam) where the land tenure system is not (yet) based on private property? Here we are talking about inter-tropical Africa. This is an old debate. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, in his correspondence with the Russian Narodniks (Vera Zasulich, among others), Marx dared to assert that the absence of private property can be an asset for the socialist revolution, allowing the leap to a system for managing access to the land other than the one governed by private property. But he did not specify what form(s) this new system should take, with the qualifier “collective,” as true as it is, being inadequate. Twenty years later, Lenin concluded that this possibility no longer existed, eliminated by the penetration of capitalism and the accompanying spirit of private property. Is this judgment correct or not? I will not express an opinion on this question, for which my knowledge of Russia is insufficient. Still it is the case that Lenin was not inclined to give critical importance to this question, having accepted Kautsky’s view expressed in The Agrarian Question. Kautsky generalized the scope of the modern European capitalist model and concluded that the peasantry was destined to disappear due to capitalist expansion itself. In other words, capitalism would be able to “resolve the agrarian question.” This is true for the capitalist countries of the triad (15 percent of the world population), but it is false for the rest of the world (85 percent of the population). History demonstrates not only that capitalism has not settled this question for the 85 percent of the world’s population, but even that in continuing its worldwide expansion, it will not be able to settle it (except by genocide—a “beautiful” solution!). It was thus up to Mao Zedong