Rural Commune

Also known as “peasant commune”, “kin community”, “territorial commune”, “village commune”, abbreviated as “village”, in Russian “община”. In a wider sense, it is a general term for different types of communes such as agricultural communes, nomadic communes and hunting communes; in a narrower sense, it refers to agricultural communes. It was a social organization formed during the dissolution of the primitive society and characterized by locality and the dualism of the property in the means of production.

The study of the rural commune began in the mid-19th century. First, the Prussian official and writer A.F. Haxthausen discovered the communal property in land in Russia, followed by the German historian G.L.R. Maurer who investigated the Germanic Mark commune. Marx and Engels, using the view and method of historical materialism, carefully studied the formation of the rural commune and made a theoretical summation of the nature of the rural commune and its historical evolution.

The dualism of the property in the means of production determined the inevitability of the transition of the rural commune from primitive society to class society. “The agricultural rural commune therefore emerged in Germania from a more archaic type; it was the product of spontaneous development rather than being imported ready-made from Asia. It may also be found in Asia—in the East Indies—always as the final term or last period of the archaic formation.” Marx pointed out in his Reply to V.I. Zasulich (First Draft): “The ‘agricultural commune’ everywhere presents itself as the most recent type of the archaic formation of societies; and the period of the agricultural commune appears in the historical course of Western Europe, both ancient and modern, as a period of transition from communal to private property, from the primary to the secondary formation.” Certain elements of class society, of mutually antagonistic class groups, gradually formed at the stage of rural commune. Rural communes were not bound by blood ties, but were composed of members of different clans on a territorial basis. There was both family private property and communal property within the commune, and some antagonistic class groups gradually formed.

Engels pointed out that the stages of development experienced by the rural commune were universal throughout the world. In his 1875 article On Social Relations in Russia, he said: “In reality, communal property in the land is an institution found among all Indo-Germanic peoples at a low level of development, from India to Ireland, and even among the Malays, who are developing under Indian influence, for instance, on Java. As late as 1608, in the newly conquered North of Ireland, the legally established communal property in the land served the English as a pretext for declaring the land to be ownerless and, as such, escheated to the Crown. In India, a whole series of forms of communal property has been in existence down to the present time. In Germany it was general; the communal lands still to be found here and there are a relic of it; and often still distinct traces of it, temporary divisions of the communal lands, etc., are also to be found, especially in the mountains… In Western Europe, including Poland and Little Russia, at a certain stage in social development, this communal ownership became a fetter, a brake on agricultural production, and was increasingly eliminated. In Great Russia (that is, Russia proper), on the other hand, it persists until today.” In Africa, America and Oceania, when the European colonialists invaded, many indigenous nations were still at the stage of development of rural commune. In China, during the Spring and the Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the Han people of the Central Plains also retained the social organization of rural commune; some ethnic minorities in the border areas were still at the stage of rural commune or retained their residual forms until the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The dualism of property in the means of production in the rural commune became the decisive factor in the dissolution of the commune at the later stage of the rural commune. The development of individual labor and the private ownership of its products aroused the community members’ enthusiasm for production and their desire to eventually take possession of the land. The land which had been periodically adjusted and distributed evolved from the initial extension of the adjustment period into individual adjustments when necessary, and eventually became private property that could be rented or bought and sold by the community members. The penetration of the commodity-money economy into the commune divided the economically and socially equal community members into the poor and the rich. The poor and bankrupt were reduced to debt slaves because of their indebtedness and, together with the war captives, formed the original class of oppressed slaves, thus providing a source of slaves for the development of patriarchal slavery. Due to the different historical processes, in some countries and regions, the traditional form of rural commune had been preserved for a long time. However, it was no longer a transitional social formation from primitive society to class society, but had already degenerated into a form of communal organization dependent on slavery or feudal serfdom. In such communes, although a periodic redistribution of arable land was implemented according to tradition, property in land was usurped by slave-owners or feudal lords, and the members cultivated the “plots” of the commune in return for various tributes or labor. Subsequent developments have led to the gradual withering-away, from content to form, of the rural commune.

See Village Community on p. 114.