ABSTRACT
At the center of the 1970 and 1980 eruptions of strike activity culminating in independent worker and peasant movements and the formation of Solidarnosc in Poland was widespread resentment over the acute shortage and skyrocketing prices of food. The Polish case exemplifies in concentrated form aspects of the long-term systemic crisis of agrarian development that socialist states have confronted and most continue to confront. The Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, and Poland, all substantial food exporters prior to revolution, became food importers. Following collectivization and the crushing of the household economy and the market, the Soviet Union and China became two of the world’s largest grain importers. In recent years, moreover, collective agriculture has come under severe scrutiny as reformers embarked on a search for viable agrarian institutions, incentive practices, and marketing relationships. The Soviet Union has been among the most resistant to market-oriented reforms and enlargement of the scope of the household economy. Nevertheless, since the 1960s, the Soviet kolkhoz (collective farm) has declined in importance, particularly vis-a-vis the expanding sovkhoz (state farm) and a slightly growing private sector (Kerblay 1983: 77,78, 83-88). Yugoslavia and Poland years ago acknowledged the failure of collectivization and restored private agriculture to a position of dominance, albeit within a system of restrictive marketing and purchase practices. China, which until the late 1970s was widely regarded as the most successful practitioner of collective agriculture, in the 1980s carried out the most far-reaching reform of collective and communal agriculture since the formation of the communes in 1958.
