Village Community

Also known as “rural commune”, “land commune” or “village”. It refers to the form of social organization in the transition from the primitive public property in the means of production to private property, in which the inhabitants were united based on location.

In the early 1850s, Marx put forth that the old village community was the basis of peculiar social phenomena in India. “Since the remotest times, a social system of particular features—the so-called village system, which gave to each of these small unions their independent organization and distinct life.” Marx held that the outstanding characteristics of the village system were its intrinsic closure, relative independence and exclusiveness. “Alongside this, the entire Empire which, apart from a few large cities, is an agglomeration of villages, each with its own distinct organization and each forming its own small world.” The Asiatic mode of production was based on agriculture and domestic handicrafts, and such a form of production also fostered the formation of the self-governments of small regional populations, i.e., the village system. The village system gave to each of these small areas an isolated organization in itself and distinct life. “The village isolation produced the absence of roads in India, and the absence of roads perpetuated the village isolation. On this plan a community existed with a given scale of low conveniences, almost without intercourse with other villages, without the desires and efforts indispensable to social advance.” The inner closure of the village system in the “Oriental society” led to a deep estrangement of man and forged a fatuous mentality among the members of society. “We must not forget the barbarian egoism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature.”

The chief feature of the village system was the dualism of the property in the means of production. On the one hand, the land was owned in common, arable land was at the disposal of the village community and distributed to families for use, and the pastures, forests, water sources, waste ground, etc., were used in common by the members of the village community. On the other hand, houses, homesteads, farm tools, draft animals, etc. belonged to the private ownership of individual families.

The village system was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it got rid of the shackles of the traditional consanguineal ties of the kin, and furthered the development of the individual economy to a certain extent; on the other hand, the development of the individual economy inevitably brought about property inequality. Although the arable land was periodically redistributed by the village community according to the changes in the number of member in each family, it was often postponed or even stopped, and gradually evolved into the hereditary possession by each family. The economic disparity of families in the village community gradually increased. Moreover, the upper-class families of traditional tribes used their power to appropriate the communal land of the village community, exploited the labor of other members, which accelerated class divisions and eventually led to the dissolution of the village community. However, after entering class society, the village system remained in place in some areas for a long time. In Russia, for example, the rural commune was the main place of production and life of the peasants, the body of self-government of Russian peasants, and was deemed by the Russians as the “special Russian spirit”. The village system has nurtured the Russian cultural traditions of collectivism, egalitarianism (levelling) and absolutism, and took deep roots in the life and ideological and cultural sphere of Russian peasants. Because of this, it did not wither away with the entry into the class society as it did in other countries, on the contrary, it was used for a long time under the feudal serfdom of the Tsarist rule to apportion taxes for squeezing the peasants. From a single body of peasant self-government, the village community evolved into a social system which, together with serfdom and absolutism, constituted an important factor which influenced the development of Russian society before the October Revolution.

See Rural Commune on p. 116.