“Communes in Socialist Construction”– Monthly Review Double Issue, July-August 2025 (Part 2)
“Charting
a Communal-Ecological Path,” Brian Napoletano –
This is a partial polemic with Marxist Kohei Saito over the term ‘degrowth.’ ‘Degrowth’
is not a grounded political term, and can mean any number of things. “Don’t grow what?” you might ask. “Grow nothing?” you might also ask. As a
rhetorical arrow aimed at the capitalist concept of constant GDP ‘growth,’ no
matter what kind, it makes a person think.
But then come the questions. Some
useless production will have to be stopped, while lacks will have to be filled
- all based on human needs, not commercialized ‘wants.’
Napoletano contrasts ‘ecomodernism,’ degrowth and
ecosocialism, considering the first two to be antagonistic or ambiguous
regarding socialism. He calls
ecomodernism (which I suspect is capitalist ‘green’ tech attempts) a marketing
ploy - “neoclassical economics in a green
wrapping.” He also indicts “the ossification and closed systemization of
the dialectics of nature in Soviet Marxism under Joseph Stalin” for
ignoring Marx’s ecological insights.
Capital is neither ‘exclusively
destructive’ or ‘purely progressive’ to
nature or the working class according to Napoletano. But when ‘growth’ becomes an ideology, as it
has, the destruction of nature, animals, waste, obsolescence, militarism, stupid
work and the production of useless, unnecessary or dangerous junk runs out of
control. As he puts it: “…an increasing volume of waste is needed to
mitigate problems of overaccumulation and prevent the potential abundance made
possible by the unprecedented development of the productive forces … from
undermining the scarcity rationale.” Capital
grows but not use values corresponding to human needs.
Napoletano says ecosocialist degrowth should be called deaccumulation, a tricky academic substitution. Following Lefebvre, he does not believe there
is a dilemma between local, national and international economic planning. Yet this remained a stubborn problem in
actually existing socialized economies. He mentions Yugoslavia’s
‘self-management’ as a valuable example for Venezuela. Self-management as practiced in Yugoslavia also
helped that country ‘fly apart.’ Evidence
from the USSR and Poland indicate a pro-capitalist trajectory in isolated
production. He supports a global,
uninterrupted revolution to implement ‘autogestion’ (workers’ control of an
enterprise) in the face of these problems.
“Land,
Cooperation and Socialism,” interview with Joao Pedro Stedile – Stedile is a leader of
Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). Stedile discusses agro-industrial
cooperatives formed when rural landless take over unused or underutilized land and
run it cooperatively. The MST does not
limit land takeovers to just giving out individual plots. Families do farm them but cannot sell them,
as the state formally owns the property.
An ‘assentamento’ (settlement) like this is recognized by the
state. It also involves collective /
communal decision-making, collective production facilities for products, a
fight against inequality, agroecology and education. The MST found cooperative ag.
work does not always function, as different campesinos have various ways and times of doing
things. But the cooperative buys farm
machinery and commercializes ag. goods, i.e. processing milk and building cold
storage. Like cooperatives in many capitalist countries, they produce for the
market.
The MST oppose monocultures, GMO seeds, intensive
mechanization and use of chemical / gas-based fertilizers and pesticides.
Stedile says “…above all, the aim is
healthy food for the entire population.” They use reforestation, safeguard
biodiversity and protect the water around them.
Stedile makes the point that “a
paradigm centered on campesino forces is not enough.” The MST understands
that the majority of the working-class in Brazil and other countries are now in
and around cities. The MST is aware that
Lula’s Workers’ Party governs in league with a section of the Brazilian
bourgeoisie to block the far-right. They
work with urban forces and also have an international focus, having
‘brigades’ in other countries and have worked with Latin American groups to
defeat the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
“Popular
Power in Brazil,” Roberta Traspadini – This article is
representative of how academic collections stray from the topic. This is about how black, or in the Brazilian
term the Quilombolo, people ‘struggle for ‘self-determination’ and land. In Brazil today dark-skinned residents are
still 70% of the prison population. There is nothing concrete about communes,
cooperatives, collective farms or anything of the sort in this contribution.
 |
| MST farm invasion - Pitchforks! |
“Socioecological
Contraditions in the Development of Socialist Collective Farming: Drawing from
the USSR and Hungarian Histories,” Savatore Engel-DiMauro – Engel-DiMauro is a traditional
CP academic interested in the intersection of collective farming and various
kinds of soil and soil health. While
admitting a lack of data, he suggests that soil health in the USSR and Hungary
was better than capitalist countries until the use of chemical fertilizers and
mechanization in the 1960s became widespread.
His focus skips over communes and cooperatives to state farms / kolkhoz
run by plan and worked by agricultural proletarians. He brings an environmental slant to productionist
logic, which preserves production in the long run.
His detailed look at soil types in the USSR and the
Hungarian Plain, the effect of wind and water erosion, along with soil compaction,
the use of fallowing, cover crops, limited tillage, reforestation, shelter
belts, agroforestry, the weight of equipment and the use of chemicals is
probably unique on the left. He references biomes, soil groups and sub-groups,
chernozems and anthromes in his discussion. For instance by the 1980s 29% of Hungarian
land was degraded due to farming techniques, though not all of this was
collective farmland. EU loans to Hungary
were paid off through importing agro-chemicals. And there was the rub.
While scientific experts helped the collective farms in
both countries, he makes the factless statement that “The ecological implications of building socialism have never been lost
on Communist Party leaders.” After
you get done laughing, many examples could be cited, from the air pollution in
‘steel’ cities, the water decimation of the Aral Sea, the pollution of the
Danube to the oil damage in Baku or the Urals to contradict this misplaced
enthusiasm about ‘leaders.’
Engel-DiMauro cites Walter Rodney’s warning not to confuse
pre-colonial communalism with socialism.
As a traditional CPer, he thinks some of the old collective efforts
cited by Marx, Foster and others still contained inequalities and
contradictions. The Russian ‘mir’ was
patriarchal and enabled better tax collection for the Czar. The Haudenosaunee Confederation featured a
gendered division of labor and brutal hostility to other tribes. Liberian communal farming also is sex and age
centered. The East African ujamma system
under the Nyerere government refused to share anything outside their locale, resisting
redistribution of a surplus to the wider society. Cooperatives can exist within
capitalist society for years, such as in the U.S., but gradually erode due to political
power, profit, class and negative environmental effects.
“Making
Every Yard a Farm and Every Garage a Factory; The Theory and Practice of
Cooperation Jackson (CJ),” Kali Akuno – This seems to be a
neo-Maoist take, mentioning ‘peasants’ in Mississippi and an ostensible ‘black
belt’ in the South. There is even a touch of the ‘Great Leap Forward” in the
title. This version of CJ wants ‘people’s assemblies,’ an independent electoral
vehicle and ‘socializing the means of
production’ towards ecosocialism as part of … ‘revolutionary nationalism?’ Right
now CJ is a network of worker-owned cooperatives in and around Jackson,
Mississippi in housing, work, recycling, catering, farming and production. A ‘free market’ for mutual exchange also exists,
though it presently works more like a charity. Trucking, grocery and
coffee-house / library co-ops are planned.
One community assembly was organized, but was held during CoVid and
became a super-spreader event.
Choke Lumumba, their possible political figurehead as
mayor, lost the Democratic Party Primary in April 2025 after 8 years, 3-1. Instead of an independent political vehicle,
the majority of Cooperation Jackson, which seems to be a coalition, chose to
embed in the Dems, not run as independents.
Lumumba did not endorse all of the aspects of CJ and the municipality
did not provide direct aid or incorporate the solidarity aims of CJ.
The rest of the article is how Akuno’s group reacts to
these setbacks, principally by organizing “The People’s Network for Land and
Liberation” which seeks to “build
ecosocialism from below in real time.” Cooperatives have been organized by necessity
before by ‘associated producers’ and workers world-wide, but have never
resulted in socialism. There is no mention of the horrendous water situation in
Jackson, when the municipal water system failed repeatedly. The state starved
the city of funds to fix it and this probably led to Lumumba’s defeat.
 |
| People's Commune in China |
“Communal
Governance and Production in Rural China Today,” S. Tsui & L.K. Chi – No
issue of MR would be possible without
a nod to China, as MR is a large tent
of soft Maoists, Stalinoids, Xiists, Khrushchevites, Bukharinites, independent Marxists and
even an occasional Trotskyist, though they won’t admit it. This contribution
highlights the large rural People’s
Communes that existed for about 20 years in China, starting around 1958. This
also coincided with the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the Cultural Revolution. The Dengists ended them in favor of an
agrarian ‘Home Responsibility System’ (HRS) in 1978, and legally liquidated
them in 1983. Three small still-existing
commune and cooperatives are investigated in this article, one containing
12,000 people, one 4,500, one 3,500. One calls itself the only commune left.
The first People’s Communes where huge, covered almost all
rural land in China and were involved in small production too. They were collectively owned and worked, with
members paid by time credits. Later
small private plots for subsistence were allowed. Initially they were organized
from the top-down by the CCP. This
created obvious productivity problems, though productivity did rise. Problems
like extreme surplus extraction, lying about results, hunger and disasters were
apparent. The subsequent HRS involves
family-worked plots for home use and the market. Now more than a third of Chinese rural
property, 38%, has been ‘land contracted’ out to others for a fee, a process legalized
in 1988. The land is still technically
owned by the state, similar to Mexico, but in the U.S. we call it land leasing. They also report that land was ‘sold’ by one
commune to a near-by municipality for a real estate venture, so this indicates
a further level of privatization.
The three communes and cooperative are Zhoujiazhuang, Yakou
and Zhanqui. They either voted to follow
the old system by refusing to divide up the land, or, after seeing the
pollution and profiteering of the ‘new days,’ went back to more collective,
environmental and agro-ecologic methods. They all profitably lease much land to
private or public enterprises and run many production and educational
facilities along with growing crops. Some
are also involved in logistics, storage, ecommerce, handicrafts and
ecotourism. In one commune housing has
been erected where commune members live for free. It also provides health facilities, schools
and pension supplements for the elderly.
In 1978 the state withdrew support from health or education in rural
areas after the HRS was set up, so communities had to rely on themselves.
The authors make a point of explaining that the agricultural
sector was used by the CCP to extract ‘primitive accumulation’ in order to
build industrialism, similar to what happened in the USSR. This was done
through unequal exchange, ag. prices versus finished goods prices, free peasant
work on infrastructure projects and low wages. Over 60 years, one economist estimated that
peasants provided RMB 13.7 trillion ‘surplus value’ to the state and society.
In U.S. dollars that is around $1.92T.
While Xi’s CCP has recently made noises about ‘rural collectivity’ it
has not gone back to any widespread communal approach.
End of Part 2
Prior
blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to
investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Monthly Review,” “Saito,” “commune,” “Brazil,” “CCP,” “Brazil,”
“China.”
And I
bought it at May Day’s periodicals section!
This will be the last review for the foreseeable future. Red Frog / August 29, 2025
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