36 SOCIAL SCIENTIST relations of production of a traditional society, in spite of, or at least within, the war. We are basing ourselves for describing this process on the self-criticism established by the Party in 1959. During the period 1945-1953, too much insistence had been put on the anti-imperialist struggle aad too little on the social relations of production. It meant that too much attention, according to the self-criticism of the Party, had been given to the collabaration of landlords and big proprietors. It was qualified as a deviation to the right. In the years 1953-1957, the land reform was initiated with, according to the same source, too much insistence on satisfying the immediate demands of the poor and landless peasants, without respecting enough a strategy of class alliance. The result of this has been the existence of injustice (it was estimated that 30 percent of the landlords who had been condemned were innocent) and at least 10,000 deaths. However, a pedagogical work had been initiated, through two sources: the popular tribunals, aiming at destroying the image of the landlord within a Confucianist culture and the work of the young cadre among the peasants, in order to raise the level of class consciousness in the rural areas and in particuler to help the peasants to put pressure to reduce farm rents.2 In 1957 a rectification campaign was initiated: 810,000 hectares of land were redistributed and 1,846,000 heads of cattle supplied to about eight million people, which meant about two million families. The land reform benefited 73 per cent of the rural population. It was thus clear that the first step of the land reform has been a parcellization of the land, but also that even that step had met with great difficulties in changing the mentality of the peasants. It was, if we compare with the proceeding situation, a change in the social relations of production. However, parcellization is hardly a socialist solution. It may be strange to think that coming from a traditional society where land was communal, the first step for a transition to socialism has been parcellization. We do not want to discuss this at length, but we may indicate two reasons. First, the typical Asiatic mode of production was quite eroded when the French established their colonial power and with this last political event, capitalist forms of production had been introduced and the desire for private property had been developed among the peasants as a means of security. The second reason is probably the fact that such social relations of production were the only ones adequate for a situation of weak development of productive forces. The peasants were using very primitive instruments of agriculture; there were practically no fertilizers and irrigation was insufficient. There was only one crop a year and a production of about one tonne of paddy per hectare. Steps Towards Cooperativization at Rural Commune Level For investigating the micro-dimension, we take the case of a