Общото – чуждо. Нагласи на поведение в предсоциалистическите земеделски производителни кооперации
The Common – Someone Else’s. Attitudes and Behaviorin the Pre-Socialist Agricultural Production Cooperatives

Summary/Abstract: The study focuses on the concepts of collective farming and the actual attitudes and behavior of members of collective farms working there. Part one offers a brief history of the emergence and development of some of the 50 collective farms set up on a voluntary principle in the 1930s and the early 1940s. Part two discusses the concepts of collective farming relevant at that time, with a special emphasis on the ideas of “cooperative consciousness”, “cooperative spirit”, solidarity and labor ethics and discipline. Part three deals with the actual behavior of cooperators in their everyday work. The following attitudes, strategies and practices are identified and analyzed: low trust within the cooperative; individualism, particularism, encapsulation in small groups; inherent skepticism regarding the success of a common future undertaking; absent or insufficient willingness and readiness for common action; more time, energy and effort invested in private than in cooperative farming, i.e., to the detriment of the latter; perception of the common/cooperative as “someone else’s” or as “one’s own” (in the sense that it can be used to satisfy one’s own private needs) – negligence toward cooperative inventory and produce, on the one hand, and appropriation of cooperative products and resources, on the other; violation or evasion of formal rules. The conclusion highlights the existence of the same strategies and practices in a new political age and in a new economic form: the collective farms (TKZS) of socialism. Hence, these attitudes, strategies and practices can be considered “typically socialist” only insofar as they have to do with the specificity of the socialist system. However, they did not originate in the socialist age, nor were they a product or effect of it.

• Details
• Contents