Collectivization of Agriculture

Lenin’s thoughts on transforming small-scale peasant economy into collectively owned agricultural economy and on the socialist transformation of agriculture in the form of collective farms.

After the October Revolution, Lenin put forward the idea of transforming small-scale peasant economy to cooperative economy. He argued that the small-scale peasant economy of Russia was a semi natural economy based on manual labor, whose productivity was very low, even under the dictatorship of the proletariat and the land nationalization, the small-scale peasant economy would have no future. It was an inevitable trend of historical development of small-scale peasant economy being transformed into the large-scale and machined socialist agricultural production. In the early days of the new Soviet regime, Russia experimented different forms of collective farms in rural areas (including agricultural communes, agricultural labor combinations and co-farming societies), the Party even hastily tried to lead the peasants to establish the system of “communist production and distribution” in the form of agricultural communes, so as to directly transform the small-scale peasant economy to communism.

After the implementation of the new economic policy, with the working class mastering the lifeline of the national economy, the socialist economic elements were greatly developed and consolidated. Lenin advocated the implementation of the cooperative farming system, leading individual farmers to organize themselves in cooperatives which would be the most proper way to lead the peasants into the path of socialism. Lenin put forward a whole set of policies for the cooperative movement and socialist transformation of agriculture in his late work “On Cooperation” (1923), which included several levels—from lower to higher levels－of cooperative organizations according to their development. In his work “On Cooperation” he evaluated organizing millions of peasants in cooperatives—which he classified cooperative economy as a form of state capitalism-- would be the most favorable form of state capitalism for the long term interest of the Party and the working class in building socialism

By adopting various forms which are suitable to various stages of their development, and making decisions on the basis of farmers’ consciousness and willingness, “attracting millions of farmers to their own side”, the state gives strong financial support to cooperatives, and provides agricultural production technology to farmers through supply and marketing cooperatives. In order to promote agricultural mechanization, we should gradually transit from small-scale peasant economy to large-scale socialist agriculture under the condition of certain material and technical basis, and the improvement of farmers’ consciousness and cultural level.