Why is cooperativization an intrinsic pursuit of farmers?
There is a saying that cooperativization cannot be achieved without mechanization, which is utter nonsense. The more fragile and imperfect family farming is, the more urgent the need for the cause of cooperativization becomes; this problem and this need have “existed since ancient times.” In the policy debates among ancient Chinese intellectuals, both Confucians and Legalists once envisioned “repairing” the imperfections of family farming, but neither succeeded. The key to success lies in establishing a “low-cost, high-execution-capacity” organization in rural society; without such an organization, nothing can be accomplished.
Cooperativization is an intrinsic and urgent pursuit of farmers
In early 2011, together with several scholars from the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, I made a trip to Wugong Village in Raoyang County. This village was an advanced cooperative model led by the famous labor hero Geng Changsuo of the Mao era. It established a “land partnership group” (equivalent to an elementary cooperative) as early as 1943, and by 1952 had established a large cooperative based on public ownership of land with the entire village as a unit. Because the practice of Wugong Village was far ahead of policy design in terms of timing, the village twice encountered “cooperative-cutting work teams” dispatched by the Hebei Provincial Party Committee, but both times the villagers stubbornly “pushed them back.”
During the period of land distribution to households, Du Runsheng and others promoted for a time the idea that “only mechanization can bring cooperativization,” and this propaganda contained a formulaic imagination of “the level of productive forces absolutely determining the relations of production.” According to this imagination, before agricultural mechanization is achieved, cooperativization is an impossibility, belonging only to a future of a higher level of productive forces not yet attained.
However, from the perspective of past history and the reality of agricultural production, cooperativization as an institutional arrangement transcending the family production unit has always been urgently needed. The urgency of this need is closely related to the imperfection of the family as a production unit. In other words, the more imperfect the family is as a production unit, the more urgent the demand for cooperativization. From the experiences of the impoverished villagers of Wugong Village, whenever natural disasters struck, families were often torn apart and people died; whenever unexpected losses occurred, even basic simple reproduction could not be maintained. The first batch of members of the land partnership group privately established by farmers in 1943 included middle peasant Li Yutian, who after withdrawing from the group encountered a difficult year and ended up selling his land and his wife to get through the crisis; Geng Changsuo's elder brother, unable to survive, was once sent away to the Northeast. Such predicaments were the intrinsic motivation for some villagers of Wugong Village to seek the cooperative path.
Feudal dynasties also tried to reform family management, but lacked execution capacity
Not only the poorest farmers hoped to overcome the fragility of family farming; the upper strata of ancient China had the same strong need. There is an old saying: if the foundation is not solid, the earth will shake and the mountains will tremble. Over the long history of thousands of years of agricultural society, the family served as the most basic production unit, and due to its inherent fragility and imperfection, it could not effectively guarantee the stable conduct of farmers' production and livelihood. As a result, the survival situation of farmers (and the ruling class that depended on farmers for its existence) was extremely unstable, and under special circumstances this often led to very serious political turmoil and social costs. After the collapse of the primitive agricultural commune, the imperfection of agriculture's basic production system became a structural institutional predicament. In every dynasty, ambitious emperors and capable ministers repeatedly attempted to “patch” this imperfect agricultural production system.
Various ideas for “patching the basic agricultural economic system” eventually converged into two policy positions. When summarizing the policy debates of ancient scholars, Lü Simian gave a concise summary: the Confucian policy position was to restore the “well-field system,” the Legalist position was to “regulate capital,” and Wang Mang put both positions into practice, only to fail in both cases. Thereafter, scholars felt disheartened. On the one hand, they felt that the basic system was indeed imperfect; on the other hand, they saw how difficult it was to “patch” the system, and thus fell into intellectual “passivity,” which in turn gave rise to Wei-Jin Neo-Taoism. (See Chapter 5, “Property,” in Lü's General History of China.)
The well-field system was an institution formed after the collapse of the primitive communist commune. Under this system, the family had already become a cultivation unit, but the grassroots community still had considerable ability to intervene in the redistribution of means of production, with “land exchanged and residence changed once every three years.” At this time, although farmers no longer had cooperation within the production process, there was still “land insurance” outside the production process. With this guarantee, the number of “landless vagrants” could be reduced to an acceptable low level, thereby safeguarding political stability at the macro level. The functional role of the well-field system was to safeguard the state's political stability by ensuring that farmers had land to cultivate. This system was similar to the brigade and production team in the early period of land distribution to households, when these two levels still had the ability to periodically redistribute cultivated land according to population, thereby fulfilling the function of “means-of-production insurance” for the agricultural population.
The Legalist position of regulating capital actually hoped to intervene in farmers' market transactions to prevent farmers from going bankrupt due to various “transaction behaviors.” Li Kui once conceived of a system similar to the later “ever-normal granary,” attempting to provide “price protection” for agricultural products and prevent “cheap grain hurting farmers”; Wang Anshi's “green sprout law” was also a representative design, hoping that the government would provide low-interest loans to farmers during difficult times, so as to prevent farmers, when their bargaining position was at its lowest, from being plundered by stronger counterparties. The core of Legalist thought was to attempt deep government intervention in the circulation links outside the production process, preventing the rich from depriving the poor by relying on their superior market position, thereby reducing the intensity of social conflict.
Both Confucian and Legalist policy positions pointed very accurately to the fundamental aspect of “the fragility of the family as a production system,” but neither position succeeded in practice, not because their visions were “impractical,” but because they encountered insurmountable difficulties in “execution capacity.” The Confucian well-field system position required a strong redistributive structure within the community, while the Legalist position, to be successfully implemented, required the establishment of effective state organs in rural society. In the course of historical evolution, the originally strong communes in rural society (which fit Confucian needs well) weakened along with “the world being for the family” (the householdization of the cultivation unit), and by the time coercive state power emerged (the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods), they gradually fell into disintegration. Confucians always harbored hostility toward the strengthening of the state apparatus, but Confucian scholars also failed to build new community power institutions. Therefore, the well-field system remained a “critical imagination”——used only to contrast with the imperfections of the actual system. Meanwhile, the extension of political power down to the countryside was rapidly constrained by high costs, and the principle that imperial power does not extend to the county became the norm. According to Liang Shuming, many things in history were “forced into being” by their opposites. So-called “resting with the people” and “non-intervention” were essentially inability to intervene; “imperial power not extending to the county” was merely a “passively mutually accommodating arrangement,” not the result of “Huang-Lao learning” or some other intellectual position. In other words, community power, once collapsed, was never rebuilt, and the high cost of the administrative system made it impossible for political power to obtain the necessary execution capacity in the countryside.
History has never lacked “good ideas”; what it has long lacked is “good means,” which is why an imperfect production system——“the small-peasant economy”——was allowed to live on for ten thousand years. Many people knew it was not good to use, but everyone was helpless against it. In this sense, for agriculture to be “socialist” (pursuing a new institution that transcends the limitations of the family as a production or living unit), the problem is not “economic need” (that has always existed), but political (or administrative) feasibility——how to regenerate sufficient “execution capacity” in rural society.
The key to the success or failure of cooperativization lies not in whether there are ideas, but in whether they can be executed
Looking at the practice of Wugong Village and comparing it with historical experience, one discovers a very interesting phenomenon: Geng Changsuo and Geng Xiufeng happen to be representative figures. Both saw the serious limitations of the family as a production unit and survival unit, and both hoped to change this reality. Geng Xiufeng himself was an active advocate and thinker, but it happened that he personally lacked the conditions to generate “execution capacity” in rural society.
When the people of Wugong Village recall Geng Xiufeng today, they still affirm that he was a good person, also had good ideas, and moreover was very public-spirited, but he simply lacked “leadership ability” or “appeal.” He once volunteered to serve as production team leader of Team One, but could not “make it work”; after a few days he could not continue. After returning to the village on sick leave from the provincial supply and marketing cooperative, the task he long performed was pushing a small cart around the village to repair roads for everyone. After land was distributed to households, he even wrote three letters to leaders including Deng Xiaoping to express his “different political views,” which led comrades from the provincial public security department to visit him. He refused to soften and even very forcefully stretched out both hands for them to “put on the cuffs.” Geng Xiufeng not only had a profound understanding of cooperativization and firm convictions, but also had public spirit and a spirit of service, and was one of the rare “educated people” in a countryside teeming with illiterates. By all accounts, he was a very suitable candidate for cadre, but in the end he could not be competent as team leader. This reveals from another angle that “execution capacity” in rural society is not so easy to solve.
Conversely, Geng Changsuo was uneducated, and due to poverty could not become an ideal initiator of the cause of cooperativization. The poor, as initiators, always had to face the question of “whether they want to take advantage of others,” and thus were placed in an inferior position. At the very beginning of the land partnership group, he was not invited to participate; only in the second year, when the partnership encountered difficulties and was on the verge of disbanding, did people think of inviting him to join. Also because of poverty, he had to engage in side occupations and go out to do short-term labor. Because he had too little land to maintain survival, he had to open up “side occupation channels” and became an expert rope-maker, and had also been a leader of “short-term laborers.” Precisely because he had once been “poor,” he had a deep obsession with cooperation changing the plight of the poor. Before the state introduced the “five guarantees” policy, Geng Changsuo had already begun designing a security system for villagers lacking labor capacity, and brought this idea to the venue of the 1956 “Eighth National Congress” to describe it.
As a poor man, he had a deep memory of the suffering and damage to dignity brought by impoverished status. Confucius said, “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.” Geng Changsuo always emphasized the concept of building the collective economy into a reliance for everyone, and could not let villagers be left with nowhere to turn. To this end, he waged unyielding struggles against all forces contrary to this spirit. This was the firm cognitive foundation for Geng Changsuo's view of collective distribution and market behavior. He firmly opposed the provincial party committee's vision of “100 percent distribution according to labor,” never used opportunities to seek exorbitant profits in the market, and to a certain extent also opposed the method of over-relying on chemical fertilizers to increase production, always pursuing that method of increasing production through labor-intensive input. We visited a descendant of a landlord, who also spoke highly of Geng Changsuo's contributions, saying that the entire village benefited from him. Clearly, this landlord descendant explained the achievements of cooperativization by linking them to Geng Changsuo personally. However, if one starts merely from the understanding that the cost of farmer organization generally cannot be solved, this evaluation is also reasonable.
Geng Changsuo's understanding was too plain and ordinary, too commonsensical, lacking “theoretical height.” Zhang Qi recalled that the old man was not tall and lacked the physical conditions to become a labor model and rural leader. Why did he succeed? The old man chuckled and said that from his rope-making career he had drawn an irrefutable understanding: several strands of hemp only have strength when “twisted together” into one rope, and people must be organized to transcend the limitations of family production. Yet farmers being unable to “twist together” has become the normal state of history, and it is still like this today.