Agricultural commune

An agricultural commune is a commune based on agricultural labor.

Karl Marx

In his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, Karl Marx wrote that historically the "agricultural commune" is the most recent type of archaic forms of societies. Marx wrote that the following features distinguish the agricultural commune from more archaic forms of commune.^[1]

• Older communes was based on kinship
• In an agricultural commune the house and yard were private property
• In an agricultural commune the arable land was common, but was periodically divided among members to till and to own crops from it, while in archaic communes production was carried out communally and the yield was shared out.

Agricultural commune in the Soviet Union

The "agricultural commune" (Russian: Сельскохозяйственная коммуна, сельхозкоммуна) was a form of agricultural cooperation in early Soviet Union. In agricultural communes land and tools were communal property and the product was distributed per capita ("per mouth"). On the break of 1920-1930s they were transformed in kolkhozes.^[2]

References

1. Karl Marx, First Draft of Letter To Vera Zasulich Archived January 5, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
2. Article "Коммуна, сельскохозяйственная" "Large Encyclopedic Dictionary", Moscow, Soviet Encyclopedia (Russian)