Private Property: For Some Romanians, A Mixed Blessing
A Conversation with Katherine Verdery
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Katherine Verdery Photo: Paul Jaronski |
In The Vanishing Hectare, you wrote about the ways collectively owned land reverted to being private property as socialism was being dismantled. How did that affect villagers?
I had never worked on property before this project. After 1989, I was visiting the village in which I had done earlier fieldwork and had previously written a book about; I started out simply talking to people about changes in their lives, and I noticed that everybody wanted to talk about getting their land back. It soon became clear that this was a fascinating topic. As the Eastern European governments approached the restitution process, their Western advisors told them that they needed to do away with all socialist property and restore private property rights, that people should be given title to their land again. But I argue in the book that it didn't do a whole lot of good for villagers to get land back if they were not in a position to make appropriate use of it. These people did not get credits for agricultural development, during conditions of tremendous inflation. What could they do? A tractor cost a fortune. Many of them were 65 years old and older, too old to make expensive purchases; they needed cheap long-term loans and short-term production loans to start working the land again, but this didn't happen. That's why the two parts of my book are called "Making Ownership" and then "Making Ownership Effective."
And it was on that second point, making ownership effective, that the transitional governments failed?
Absolutely. People had ideas on how to use their land, they were excited about having it, but as I continued going back each summer, more and more people said they had not actually calculated whether they were losing money but they were sure that they were. They were unable to continue cultivating because they could not get together the necessary production factors. There were some credits from the government, but they were totally inadequate, and most of what there was went to only the richest farmers, often the former agrarian elite.
Now you are working on a project on the initial collectivization of agriculture in Romania, in the 1950s. What are you finding?
I had started off with decollectivization, about how people got land back, and in the process I realized I didn't know how it had been collectivized in the first place. My colleague Gail Kligman at UCLA and I got a grant to do a project with Romanian scholars; we had a total of twenty people working, sixteen of them Romanian. We got an edited collection together, and now Gail and I are writing a synthesizing volume about collectivization. We spent last year working on the manuscript. My last book was about unmaking socialist property and making a regime of private property, and this second book is about unmaking a private property regime and creating a socialist property regime.
A lot of people believe there was no property in socialism, but this is completely wrong. The notion of socialist property was very central to communist systems. In the decollectivization book my first job was to explain how socialist property worked. The idea behind communist revolutions--and Marx said this in the Communist Manifesto--is that you have to get rid of private property. In Eastern European countries, getting rid of private land was central to the regime's agenda. The communist government needed to control the food supply, and collectivization was one way to do that. They formed two different kinds of agricultural enterprise: collective farms and state farms, and the property relations in those forms were quite different. The state property farm got a lot more investment of resources, and it was owned by the entire society and managed by the Party, supposedly on behalf of everyone. But the collective farms were jointly owned only by members of the particular collective.
And these different farms were treated differently when socialism fell and restitution was made, weren't they?
Yes. After 1989 in Romania, collective farm property was the only property they restored to private ownership, at first. So if your land had been taken for a state farm, you did not get it back, at least not right away. Eventually, political fallout changed this, but the legal distinction between the two forms was real and was reflected in the decollectivization process. State farms tended to have been formed on land confiscated from the class enemy--people who had been jailed, were large landowners, were considered enemies of the state, and so forth. Sometimes those were pretty good pieces of land, as they tended to come from larger land holdings of better quality. Once collective farms were formed as well, sometimes people running these various farms would trade pieces of land from the state farm to the collective farm and vice versa, so they could round out a perimeter of contiguous parcels. Thus, you might have given land to a collective, only to discover one day that it was now in the state farm. After 1989 this caused problems because only the land in collectives was given back.
To join a collective farm, you had to sign a piece of paper that you voluntarily donated your land, but for a state farm it was just taken. The idea of restitution in 1991 was that, if you had donated it, you could get it back--but if it had been taken, you couldn't get it back. The official argument was that the government wanted to be sure the state farms would provide the necessary food for the population while all the other farms were being broken up. But it was also political: one of the most powerful lobbies on the Romanian government was the state farm directors, who didn't want state farms undone because they'd lose their jobs. So, state farms remained intact a few years after the collectives were dismantled. Eventually state farms were also disbanded, and people could finally try to get their land back, but there were many con artists and scandals involving local officials taking advantage of aging widows and so forth. As a result, not everyone has gotten their land back even now.
In these areas you studied, land seems to be much more than just soil--it is economic, historical, emotional. It is a commodity, but also a psychological extension of personality and family. Did you find that to be true?
I did get a sense of the significance of land to people as something that connected them with their kin, for those with kin who'd owned the land. There were people whose families owned land and gave it to the collective and were getting it back. They would tell me that what motivated them to go to such trouble to get their land back was because it had belonged to their parents and grandparents. Then there were others farmers who had migrated into the village, hadn't had land, but felt they deserved it because they had worked on the collective farm and helped preserved the enterprise. Although they didn't fully understand Marx, they knew that their labor had contributed to keeping a good in use.
The thing that impressed me especially was when people talked about how cultivating land was a matter of exercising mastery; this was a term that came up a lot. To exercise mastery requires you to have all the things you need to put into the soil, but that's what they could not do: they could not buy the inputs. 'Making ownership effective' is enabling people to exercise this mastery, and when they lost that capacity because of government policy toward agriculture, they lost the most important meaning of having land. The idea that your sense of yourself is wrapped up in all this--if you can't exercise mastery over your holding, then you're not a fully qualified human being--is part of a much older conception. It's the kind of thing that western privatization programs never bothered to find out about, in their zeal to create property rights. But doing just that was not enough to make working private property for most of Romania's peasants. Gradually their land has been taken over by larger farmers, squeezing them out.
