Agricultural collectivization

Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise. This type of collective is often an agricultural cooperative in which member-owners engage jointly in farming activities. The process by which farmland is aggregated (or forcefully donated) is called collectivization. In some countries (including the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, China, and Vietnam), there have been state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy (cooperative-run type) and sovkhozy (state-run type), often denoted in English as collective farms and state farms, respectively.

A small group of farming or herding families living together on a jointly-managed piece of land is surely one of the most common living arrangements in all of human history. This has co-existed with, and competed with, more individualistic forms of ownership (as well as state ownership), since the beginnings of agriculture. Private ownership came to predominate in much of the Western world, and is therefore better studied. The process by which Western Europe's communal land (and other property) became private is a fundamental question behind views of property: is it the legacy of historical injustices and crimes? Karl Marx believed that what he called primitive communism (joint ownership) was ended by exploitative means he called primitive accumulation. By contrast Libertarian thinkers say that by the homestead principle, whoever is first to work on the land is the rightful owner.

During the Aztec rule of central Mexico, the country was divided into small territories called calpulli, which were units of local administration concerned with farming as well as education and religion. A calpulli consisted of a number of large extended families with a presumed common ancestor, themselves each composed of a number of nuclear families. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it. When the Spanish conquered Mexico they replaced this with a system of haciendas or estates granted by the Spanish crown to Spanish colonists, as well as the encomienda, a feudal-like right of overlordship colonists were given in particular villages, and the repartimiento or system of indigenous forced labor.

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