4 - Leftist Regimes and their peasantries: Ethiopia, China, Vietnam

Summary

I is better than we

Ethiopian peasant

We should let every family and every household think up its own method of doing things, and let them find more ways to raise production and . . Increase Income

Deng Xiaoping, 1981

The laws of the Emperor yield to the customs of the village

Vietnamese proverb

WHAT then of leftist regimes? In previous chapters allusions have been made to several instances where major attempts were made by leftist parties to alter the structure of power within their peasant societies so as to undermine the hold of the more well-to-do amongst them and create a more egalitarian society there, but where in actually doing so the difficulties proved immense. The attempt by President Nyerere in the late 1960s and early 1970S to introduce rural collectivisation in Tanzania failed totally, in part because the groundwork had not been effectively laid, but also because the power of the government to carry it through proved to be quite insufficient. In the mid 1960s the attempt by the Communist Party in Indonesia to enforce even a relatively modest series of land reforms set off such a major leading peasant backlash that once their opponents saw their chance the Communists and their followers were massacred in their hundreds of thousands. In 1929-32 rural collectivisation was carried through in the Soviet Union, but only at the cost of a massive use of force, many millions of dead, and the unending impoverishment of Soviet agriculture. Other attempts scarcely fared any better.

A number of other examples could be cited. Let a brief glance at Ethiopia serve. Its history went back deep into past millennia. In the days of Emperor Haile Selassie in the middle part of the twentieth century it remained an aristocratic landlord state, where on one estimation 2 per cent oflandlords owned 80 per cent of the available land, many peasants were entirely landless, and most tenants were simply sharecroppers. Upon the defeat of the Italian regime in 1941 there were large amounts of land available to the government for disposal.