Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

The concentration of land is actually much more seriousthan is apparent from the above data. As revealed in theJuly 19, 1963 issue of Borba, the organ of the Tito clique, inone district alone there were “thousands of peasant householdswith far more than the legal maximum of 10 hectares of land”.In Bijeljina Commune, “it was found that five hundred peasanthouseholds owned estates of 10 to 30 hectares”. These are notisolated cases.Polarization in the rural areas also manifests itself in thegreat inequalities in the ownership of draught animals andfarm implements. Of the 308,000 peasant households in theprovince of Vojvodina, which is a leading grain-producingarea, 55 per cent have no draught animals. Peasant householdswith less than 2 hectares of land each, which constitute 40.7per cent of all peasant households, have only 4.4 per cent ofall the ploughs in this region, or an average of one ploughto 20 households. On the other hand, the rich peasants ownmore than 1,300 tractors and a great deal of other farm machineryas well as large numbers of ploughs and animal-drawncarts. 1Polarization likewise manifests itself in the growth of suchforms of capitalist exploitation as the hiring of labour.The February 7, 1958 issue of Komunist revealed that 52per cent of the peasant households in Serbia owning morethan 8 hectares of land hired labourers in 1956.In 1962 Slavko Komar said that the heads of some peasanthouseholds had in recent years “become powerful” and that“their income is derived not from their own labour but fromunlawful trade, from the processing of both their own productsand those of others, from illicit distilling of spirits, fromthe possession of more than the prescribed maximum of 10hectares of farmland, which is obtained by purchasing, or moreoften by leasing land, fictitious partition of land among familymembers, seizure or concealment of public land, from the1The Yugoslav journal Index, No. 2, 1962.150