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A form of farm organization associated with socialist countries in which the state retains ownership of land but leases it on a permanent basis to the members of the collective as an institutional unit. In theory each collective is self-governing, but in practice production quotas are invariably determined by the state as part of central planning. However, the collective is responsible for paying its employees and financing inputs (e.g. fertilizers or new machinery). Both former Soviet (kolkhoz) and Chinese (commune) forms of rural collectivism are being replaced by private forms of farm organization, in China since 1978, and in the former Soviet bloc countries and in Vietnam since the late 1980s. (See also kibbutz.)Â (GES)
Suggested Reading Pallot, J. 1997: Continuity and change in the post-Soviet countryside. In M. Bradshaw, ed., Geography and transition in the Post-Soviet Republics. London: Wiley, 109-28. Smith, G.E. 1989: Planned development in the socialist world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 82-97. Watts, M. 1998: Recombinant capitalism: state, de-collectivisation and the agrarian question in Vietnam. In A. Pickles and A. Smith, eds, Theorising transition. The political economy of post-communist transformation. London: Routledge, 450-505. |
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