Cooperation and Conflict: Cooperative and Collective Formation in China’s Countryside

In the 1960s, China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution resurrected international debate on problems of the transition to socialism. Stalin and his Soviet successors had constricted understanding of the transition to matters of formal ownership and productivity, relegating to an ever-receding future such issues as the mastery of working people over productive processes, the scope and form of institutions appropriate to the flourishing of socialist democracy, and the elimination of all forms of privilege and inequality.1