2026/01/01 by Milán Pap
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Cooperative Studies and Economics #Eastern European Communism and Reforms #Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0960777326101908
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
This article examines the nature and limits of democracy in Hungarian agricultural producer cooperatives during the period of reform socialism, roughly 1967–82. Drawing on contemporary sociological studies, party documents, legal texts and ethnographic evidence, it argues that producer cooperative democracy represented a significant, if circumscribed, space for genuine collective decision-making within the constraints of one-party rule. The 1967 legislative package created what was arguably the most functional segment of socialist democracy. Yet this democratic space was structurally constrained by party oversight and progressively undermined by technocratic management. The article traces the ideological roots of cooperative democracy in both utopian socialist thought and the international cooperative movement, analyses the institutional framework established by key party reformers and agricultural policy architects and examines how cooperative democracy functioned in practice through survey data and ethnographic observation. It engages critically with both the scholarship on the coercive origins of collectivisation and interpretations that foreground technocratic expertise, arguing that neither fully captures the genuinely contested terrain that cooperative democracy occupied. It also explores the paradoxical relationship between cooperative democracy and the party’s goal of dissolving the peasantry as a distinct class: cooperative self-governance rested on collective property rights, yet the socialist project aimed to eliminate property-based identity entirely. The case of the Felcsút cooperative, documented in the 1972 film The Resolution , illustrates both the possibilities and limits of this arrangement.