Co-operatives in Socialist Construction

Abstract

As we stated earlier, many of the countries that have accomplished a socialist evolution in this century have been backward, i.e. industrially and economically untransformed. The majority of the population depend on agriculture or small-scale industry carried out in small and scattered production units. here, then, small-scale production predominates and the cultural level of the population is low. production is mainly for subsistence and due, in particular, to the vagaries of the weather, the life of the population is precarius. Owing to their place in social production, peasants and other small commodity producers have a dual role in society and therefore a double outlook vis-a-vis society. On the one hand the bulk of the peasantry and other small-scale producers are toilers. They work on small plots or in artisan shops. This "toiling" engenders in them a tendency to support all those who work and labour, and hence to support those programmes and policies that articulate and advance the interests of the working masses. On the other hand, they are private owners. They own the instruments they use to work and sometimes the plots of land on which they cultivate the crops. This role engenders in their minds a tendency to cling to private property and thus a tendency to support those programmes that articulate and advance the interests of private property. We know that under the present rule of finance capital this tendency to support private property or to cling to his small plot of land or artisan shop is a delusion. The objectified power of finance capital to concentrate and centralise production finally impoverishes these people so that their dear land or workshop is slowly but all the more surely taken away from them and thereby turning them into semi-proletarian hands. This is because: "...As capitalist production develops it has a disintegrating, resolvent effect on all older modes of production wherever it takes root capitalist production destroys all forms of commodity production which are based either on the self-employment of the producers, or merely on the sale of the excess as commodities...'33 (Emphasis added). In such circumstances therefore the peasant increasingly becomes "a toiler who differs from the modern proletariat in that he still possesses his instruments of labour.34 It is in this respect that "what separates the peasant from the proletariat is, therefore, no longer his real interest, but his delusive prejudice. This separation of the peasant from the proletariat, although based on "delusive Prejudice" must be handled with care by the proletarian party and state. With the exception of the rich peasants, their property should not be expropriated as this would be inimical to the worker peasant alliance