Rural Income Policy and the Great Leap Forward

Abstract

A perusal of various source materials on the rural people's communes and on the great leap forward in agriculture yields at least four major policy objectives which require, in addition to other measures, income manipulation as a policy instrument. The rural communes were formed in the expectation that they would induce (1) increases of the rate of labor force participation of the peasant population, (2) increases of the relative share of public accumulation in net earnings from peasant activities, (3) improvements of the peasants' level of living and notably of material consumption, plus (4) improvements of distributive equity in inter-locational, inter-familial, and inter-occupational perspective. Once previous planning errors had been corrected, the simultaneous attainment of these four objectives was infeasible unless any one or any combination of three additional changes occurred. Either the rural capital stock had to increase and/or the peasants' technical know-how had to improve and/or their ideological outlook had to change. Labor force supply, accumulation share, consumption level: For the first three goals on which attention may be focussed at the beginning, this assertion can be demonstrated as true conveniently by means of conventional economic analysis of a simplified Marxist material transformation model which may be stated as follows: 1 Human energy (e) is consumed productively during the course of laboring (1) as well as studying (s), and it is reproduced consumptively with means of consumption (c). Both the productive consumption and the consumptive reproduction of human energy are affected by the states of technological awareness (T) and ideological awareness (I) which are improved (t = dT; i = d1) through studying. Laboring with a stock of means of production (P) which is consumed over time during the process of production, yields means of production (p = dP) as well as means of consumption.2 For any period of production, the stock of means of production plus the states of technological and ideological awareness are assumed as given (P, T, I), as are the depreciation charges against them (p, t, i).3 Planning