18 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
prevailed before Liberation,, in particular the traditional system of peasant mutual-aid teams, and see whether or not—and if so, how—collectivization has brought greater efficiency in the employment of field labour.
For many centuries the Chinese peasant did practise a highly efficient and intensive agriculture on his small plots of land. But the perennial dilemma which he faced was that, though he had time to spare during the regular growing seasons and after the harvests, the very intensity of the methods he used meant that he found himself desperately short-handed when the few annual weeks of harvesting, resowing and transplanting suddenly sprang upon him. Such busy seasons presented the peasant with bottlenecks to increased production, since he could only safely plant and nurture what he could expect to have the time to reap.
Traditional Mutual-aid Teams
The peasants of China long ago came to realize they would be able to expand their production if each of them were able to acquire free labour during his busy season in exchange for the labour time he had to spare during his own slack seasons. The traditional mutual-aid teams developed from this notion. A peasant cooperated with his relatives and neighbours in an exchange of labour, each farmer adjusting his own agrarian calendar so thai his dates for sowing and reaping did not coincide with his neighbour's, making it possible for peasant mutual-aid teams of a half a dozen or so households to work their members' fields in succession. By way of massed labour power, each of the member-households was able to cope with its own individual peak season in a fraction of the usual time and in exchange each farmer was able to spread his own busy-season labour efforts over a longer period of time. In a highly developed agriculture like China's such mutual aid held the added advantage that, through a quicker harvest and resowing, the peasant was sometimes afforded sufficient time to squeeze an extra crop into his agricultural cycle.1
Because such mutual-aid agriculture does provide a peasant with an eminently sensible solution to his annual cycle of labour superabundance and scarcity, in different variants it has independently been adopted in other traditional economies of intensive agriculture, such as India's*
However, this traditional system of organization in China was only able to take advantage of the pooled labour of perhaps half a dozen or more households. When more than a few households were involved, conflicts of interest might arise too readily over whose household should receive the most favourable timing for sowing or harvesting and whose should suffer most from an unseasonable scheduling. It was difficult too to rework properly the irrigation systems to accord with the new planting schedules, since the fields of some members were bound to suffer in the process. Though the traditional mutual-aid teams permitted the