TWO MODELS FOR THE SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION OF AGRICULTURE: IMPLICATIONS FOR GENDER RELATIONS

The orthodox Marxist-Leninist strategy for agrarian transformation and rural development has put emphasis on superseding the role of the peasant household in the organisation of production and its replacement by large-scale collective control of the labour process and production planning. The recent policy move in Vietnam and China to subcontrac-ting production on collectively owned land to peasant households and officia1 encouragement of household mobilisation of material and labour resources for both agricultural and handicraft production after some twenty years of systematic promotion of large-scale collective agricul-ture with collective control of the labour force organised along non-kin lines, constitutes a major reversa1 of trends in socialist develop-ment thinking. What 1 wish to do in this paper is to examine the impli-cations for women of these two successive models of Third World socia-list development (the collective farm mode1 V. the household contrac-ting model). This question is put in the context of a more general dis