Forced collectivisation. [Archive]

daft punk

21st February 2012, 08:04

Lenin and Trotsky said tax the rich peasants and NEPmen etc. Subsidise co-operatives for the poor peasants. And build industry. When Lenin died Trotsky continued. Stalin did the opposite. He got Bukharin behind him and for a while, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Stalin let the rich get richer and did nothing to get poor peasants into cooperatives. The tax system favoured the rich. By 1928 only about 1% of peasants were in co-operatives. Trotsky warned that the rich would challenge for power if allowed to grow in wealth and number. Stalin kicked Trotsky and his followers out. Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had gone back to Trotsky, capitulated to Stalin - the terror had already begun.

Soon after, all Trotsky's predictions came true, there was a shortage of grain available for the government to buy. Also there was a shortage of industry generally, and Stalin had cocked up the Chinese revolution. Stalin started to requisition grain and this provoked kulak uprisings as Trotsky expected. Stalin then was forced to collectivise for all these different reasons, to squash the challenge for power from the rich, to give the appearance of doing the thing it was obvious he should have done earlier, to mask the failure of the Chinese revolution and his deepening and extending the NEP (just a year earlier he had even been talking about denationalising the land!)

He collectivised too late, too quickly, in a horrible way, for the wrong reasons.

The result was famines.

I have a thread in Learning called Platform of the Opposition which describes all this in advance in 1927.

Lenin 1923

"Cooperation must be politically so organized that it will not only generally and always enjoy certain privileges, but that these privileges should be of a purely material nature (a favorable bank rate, etc.). The cooperatives must be granted state loans that are greater, if only by a little, than the loans we grant to private enterprises, even to heavy industry, etc.
A social system emerges only if it has the financial backing of a definite class. There is no need to mention the hundreds of millions of rubles that the birth of “free” capitalism cost. At present we have to realize that the cooperatives system is a social system we must now give more than ordinary assistance, and we must actually give that assistance. But it must be it assistance in the real sense of the word, i.e., it will not be enough to interpret it to mean assistance for any kind of cooperative trade; by assistance we must mean aid to cooperative trade in which really large masses of the population actually take part. It is certainly a correct form of assistance to give a bonus to peasants who take part in cooperative trade; but the whole point is to verify the nature of this participation, to verify the awareness behind it, and to verify its quality. Strictly speaking, when a cooperator goes to a village and opens cooperative store, the people take no part in this whenever; but at the same time guided by their own interests they will hasten to try to take part in it."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm

No mention of forced collectivisation.

Lenin:

"the rich peasant not to be expropriated, but taxed equitably, heavily
middle peasants to be taxed lightly
poor peasants-not at all."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/sep/21.htm

Trotsky:

"The agricultural tax in the country is imposed, as a general rule, in an inverse progression: heavily upon the poor, more lightly upon the economically strong and upon the kulaks."

"The role of the indirect taxes in our budget is growing alarmingly at the expense of the direct. By that alone the tax-burden automatically shifts from the wealthier to the poorer levels."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm

Zulu

21st February 2012, 09:51

Lenin 1923

"Cooperation must be politically so organized that it will not only generally and always enjoy certain privileges, but that these privileges should be of a purely material nature (a favorable bank rate, etc.). The cooperatives must be granted state loans that are greater, if only by a little, than the loans we grant to private enterprises, even to heavy industry, etc.
A social system emerges only if it has the financial backing of a definite class. There is no need to mention the hundreds of millions of rubles that the birth of “free” capitalism cost. At present we have to realize that the cooperatives system is a social system we must now give more than ordinary assistance, and we must actually give that assistance. But it must be it assistance in the real sense of the word, i.e., it will not be enough to interpret it to mean assistance for any kind of cooperative trade; by assistance we must mean aid to cooperative trade in which really large masses of the population actually take part. It is certainly a correct form of assistance to give a bonus to peasants who take part in cooperative trade; but the whole point is to verify the nature of this participation, to verify the awareness behind it, and to verify its quality. Strictly speaking, when a cooperator goes to a village and opens cooperative store, the people take no part in this whenever; but at the same time guided by their own interests they will hasten to try to take part in it."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm

No mention of forced collectivisation.

That's because it was meant for the NEP period only. Stalin decided to "roll it up" altogether. You can argue that was a wrong decision, too early, or too late, but anyway, many say the Nazi invasion proved it to be a close call.

Lenin:

"the rich peasant not to be expropriated, but taxed equitably, heavily middle peasants to be taxed lightly poor peasants-not at all."

Collectivization pursued two main goals:

1. Planned production of grain, to feed the cities and for export - to obtain foreign currency, to by equipment and technologies in the West, to get on with industrialization.

2. Proletarize a number of peasants, so that they would go to the cities to man the future industry. Something that takes centuries, under "natural" capitalist conditions (enclosures in England, etc.). This was rarely spoken of, because it's as callous as it sounds, especially when the official ideology spoke about the alliance of the workers and peasants. Nonetheless, it had to be done.

Now, how could these two tasks be accomplished through taxation, if the peasants simply didn't want to produce more than they traditionally had, and had no use for money, since the industry was in shambles and there was little to buy even in the cities? The kulaks could serve as the primary suppliers of grain, but supporting them would create tensions of an entirely un-socialist nature, and progressive taxation would discourage them from expanding production.

And, of course, no peasant in his right mind would voluntarily change his bucolic life for the army discipline and fumes of the industrial labor. So yeah, the Bolsheviks went hard on the peasantry, but, according to Marxism, it happens to it anyway, so why not make something better to come out of it?

Tavarisch_Mike

21st February 2012, 10:06

Might be worth to remeber that the collectivisation did, evetually, end all famines and hunger chrises... until today. When they no longer exist.

l'EnfermÃ©

21st February 2012, 10:27

Why they pursued forced kolkhozization, who knows? Maybe they were too timid in property relations? Why mass death followed is more easily answered: because they didn't pursue accelerated sovkhozization.
Perhaps Bukharin is to be asked.

Omsk

21st February 2012, 10:29

The time for the collectivisation was right,so Stalin started the long process:

The Left Opposition, for example, held that the time had come for a decisive assault on the kulaks. It proposed that at least 150 million poods of grain be taken by force from the kulaks and prosperous middle peasants. In a resolution dated August 9, 1927, a plenary meeting of the Central Committee rejected this proposal as "absurd and demagogic, calculated to create additional difficulties in the development of the national economy."
The opposition's proposals were also unhesitatingly rejected at the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, when the grain crisis was in full effect. Stalin's report to the Congress carefully evaded the underlying difficulties, but he did speak plainly on the party's policy toward the kulaks:
"Those comrades are wrong who think that we can and should do away with the kulaks by administrative fiat, by the GPU: write the decree, seal it… That's an easy method, but it won't work. The kulak must be taken by economic measures, in accordance with Soviet legality. And Soviet legality is not an empty phrase. Of course, this does not rule out the application of some administrative measures against the kulaks. But administrative measures must not replace economic ones."
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 217

There are a lot of different accounts on the process:

The richer peasants hated collectivization. They were five percent of the total. But the poorest peasants liked it, and they were 30 percent of the total. Of the others, half -- the poorer half -- were rather for it. The other half were rather against it. But both sections did not care much, provided that collectivization benefited them.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 297

Yet always the communists had on their side half or more than half of the total peasant population and against them only a small minority, while the remainder just judged by the results.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 298

Finally, what about the other 90% of peasants who did not rebel? Some peasants did not reject collectivization and even supported it. In March 1929 peasants suggested at a meeting in Riazan okrug that the Soviet government should take all the land and have peasants work on it for wages, a conception not too distant from the future operation of kolkhozy. An OGPU report quoted one middle peasant in Shilovskii raion, Riazan okrug, in November 1929 to the effect that 'the grain procurements are hard, but necessary; we cannot live like we lived before, it is necessary to build factories and plants, and for that grain is necessary'. In January 1930, during the campaign, some peasants said, 'the time has come to abandon our individual farms. It's about time to quit those, [we] need to transfer to collectivization.' Another document from January reported several cases of peasants spontaneously forming kolkhozy and consolidating their fields, which was a basic part of collectivization. Bokarev's analysis summarized above suggests a reason why many peasants did not rebel against collectivization: the kolkhoz in certain ways, especially in its collectivism of land use and principles of egalitarian distribution, was not all that far from peasant traditions and values in corporate villages throughout the USSR. In any case, this example, and the evidence that the vast majority of peasants did not engage in protests against collectivization, clearly disproves Graziosi's assertion cited above that the villages were 'united' against collectivization.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 75.

I saw collectivization break like a storm on the Lower Volga in the autumn of 1929. It was a revolution that made deeper changes than did the revolution of 1917, of which it was the ripened fruit. Farmhands and poor peasants took the initiative, hoping to better themselves by government aid. Kulaks fought the movement bitterly by all means up to arson and murder. The middle peasantry, the real backbone of farming, had been split between the hope of becoming kulaks and the wish for machinery from the state. But now that the Five-Year Plan promised tractors, this great mass of peasants began moving by villages, townships, and counties, into the collective farms....
A few months earlier, people had argued calmly about collectives, discussing the grain in sown area, the chances of tractors.. But now the countryside was smitten as by a revival. One village organized as a unit then voted to combine with 20 villages to set up a cooperative market and grain mill.... Then Yelan united four big communes into 750,000 acres. Learning of this, peasants of Balanda shouted in meeting: "Go boldly! Unite our two townships into one farm of a million acres."...
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 35

To answer the short questions of : "who were the kulaks?"
Farming, especially, was in the hands of small owners, the strongest of whom were petty capitalists, called kulaks, who profited and grew by exploiting other peasants and cheating the state.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 13

It must be noted that the collectivisation was a success.

December 16, 1933--in the latter respect it is noteworthy that the proportion of wheat in this year's collections is half as large again as that of last year.
This result fully justifies the optimism expressd to me by local authorities during my September trip through the Ukraine and North Caucasus--optimism that contrasted so strikingly with the famine stories then current in Berlin, Riga, Vienna and other places, where elements hostile to the Soviet Union were making an 11th hour attempt to avert American recognition by picturing the Soviet Union as a land of ruin and despair.
Second, it is a triumph for Joseph Stalin's bold solution a year ago of the collective farm management problem--namely, the establishment of political sections in the tractor stations, a step that future historians cannot fail to regard as one of the major political moves in the Soviet Union's second decade.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 324

It was also needed,[just like the industrialisation] and this was proved by the industry and production efforts during the GPW.

Rooster

21st February 2012, 10:45

Collectivisation happened because the USSR was a capitalist enterprise. The peasantry was one of the dregs that was left over from the Tsarist period. "Collectivisation" should be called capital accumulation. The fact that there was even a peasantry should be proof enough that the USSR wasn't socialist. How low a level culturally do you have to be before you can't call it socialism?

And omsk, why is it that you copy and paste everything you post? Can't read books or come up with arguments yourself? http://revolutionaryspiritapl.blogspot.com/2011/06/collecitivisation.html

daft punk

21st February 2012, 19:22

That's because it was meant for the NEP period only. Stalin decided to "roll it up" altogether. You can argue that was a wrong decision, too early, or too late, but anyway, many say the Nazi invasion proved it to be a close call.

Too late, too fast, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, as I said earlier. I wouldnt mention the Nazis if I were you seeing as it was the terrible policies of the Stalinists that resulted in the Nazis in power.

Collectivization pursued two main goals:

To save Stalin from the kulaks, to mask the fact that Stalins policies had caused this mess. You do realise that Trotsky, who Stalin had kicked out, had been calling for collectivisation all along?

1. Planned production of grain, to feed the cities and for export - to obtain foreign currency, to by equipment and technologies in the West, to get on with industrialization.

2. Proletarize a number of peasants, so that they would go to the cities to man the future industry. Something that takes centuries, under "natural" capitalist conditions (enclosures in England, etc.). This was rarely spoken of, because it's as callous as it sounds, especially when the official ideology spoke about the alliance of the workers and peasants. Nonetheless, it had to be done.

Now, how could these two tasks be accomplished through taxation, if the peasants simply didn't want to produce more than they traditionally had, and had no use for money,

Rubbish, the kulaks were getting rich, that's the whole point.

since the industry was in shambles and there was little to buy even in the cities? The kulaks could serve as the primary suppliers of grain, but supporting them would create tensions of an entirely un-socialist nature,

No kidding. That's why Trotsky and Lenin both advised to keep them down by taxing them. And to push them to one side by developing voluntary collectives for the poor peasants.

and progressive taxation would discourage them from expanding production.

So Lenin was wrong was he?
The point was to encourage the poor peasants.

And, of course, no peasant in his right mind would voluntarily change his bucolic life for the army discipline and fumes of the industrial labor. So yeah, the Bolsheviks went hard on the peasantry, but, according to Marxism, it happens to it anyway, so why not make something better to come out of it?
Not the Bolsheviks any more. Stalin's regime. Lenin never said forced collectivisation.

Ismail

21st February 2012, 19:29

The fact that there was even a peasantry should be proof enough that the USSR wasn't socialist. How low a level culturally do you have to be before you can't call it socialism?Germany and France had peasants throughout the 1800's as well. I guess Marx and Engels were clearly pseudo-socialists in calling for socialist revolution in those countries. :rolleyes:

I don't get your usage of "culturally" either. What matters is the proletariat, which initiated the Great October Socialist Revolution and, led by its vanguard, assumed state power and began socialist construction.

The very point of collectivization was to integrate the individual peasant economies with the socialist economy. Even in Albania, where the ratio of peasants to proletarians was far more skewed in favor of the former, collectivization proceeded without hurdles (certainly less than in the USSR) and in fact by the 70's and 80's collectives were being developed into what were known as "higher forms," in which both elements of state and collective organization existed. There were also efforts throughout the early 80's to completely do away with private plots on the collective farms, but this was abandoned due to peasant resistance, since the peasantry, of course, always has individualistic inclinations.

daft punk

21st February 2012, 19:30

daft punk

21st February 2012, 19:35

The very point of collectivization was to integrate the individual peasant economies with the socialist economy. save Stalin's ass

Yeah, sound about right, the peasants were revolting

Ismail

21st February 2012, 19:36

Yeah, sound about right, the peasants were revoltingHar-de-har. I was speaking in general. Was collectivization in Albania to "save Hoxha's ass" as well?

daft punk

21st February 2012, 19:40

Fact is, had it not been for the Left Opposition's well known predictions and policies, donned by Stalin without a blush, capitalist restoration may well have been chosen instead.

What do you think about the fact that only a year earlier Uncle Joe had been discussing denationalisation of the land and slagging Trotsky for worrying about the kulaks revolting?

Tim Cornelis

21st February 2012, 19:56

The Soviet "bureaucrats" were revolutionaries called the "Bolsheviks".

The Bolsheviks did not even exist during Stalin's collectivization, which is, I presume, what we're talking about.

They regarded the objectives of social transformation as prevailing over the private interests of the peasants. So they decided to make collectivization happen fast, as it was necessary for the next step: the industrialization. The peasants resisted, didn't do as they were told.

That's why forced collectivisation is idiotic. If you force people to do and act contrary to their wishes, things will fail. You really expect peasants to work for free in the context of a commodity economy?

Some of them died.

Understatement of the century. Millions died. In both the famine under Lenin and under Stalin.

daft punk

21st February 2012, 20:11

The Bolsheviks did not even exist during Stalin's collectivization, which is, I presume, what we're talking about.

I dunno, a few of them didnt get shot until 1938-9.

Zulu

21st February 2012, 20:15

it was the terrible policies of the Stalinists that resulted in the Nazis in power.
Sure, and the British and French imperialists never had anything at all to do with it, or with the desire to trash the USSR in general...

To save Stalin from the kulaks...

Rubbish, the kulaks were getting rich, that's the whole point.

So what's the problem with that? He could support them and make them support him, seeing how in your dreams he was no fan of socialism anyway...

Or he could expropriate them, just like the old landlords. So your idea doesn't explain collectivization in the slightest.

It was really simple:

1st 5-year plan - Collectiviztion.
2nd 5-year plan - Industrialization.
3rd 5-year plan - Rearmament of the Red Army.

You couldn't have it in any other order.

So Lenin was wrong was he?

No, he wasn't. At the time.

Zulu

22nd February 2012, 04:39

The Bolsheviks did not even exist during Stalin's collectivization, which is, I presume, what we're talking about.

I'd understand if you said this about the post-1937 period (although I'd still would not agree with you). But for the early 1930s this statement is simply baseless.

That's why forced collectivisation is idiotic. If you force people to do and act contrary to their wishes, things will fail. You really expect peasants to work for free in the context of a commodity economy?

Collectivization didn't fail. Resistance did. And the peasants really had no noble cause to die for, except the sanctity of their private property, of course.

Understatement of the century. Millions died. In both the famine under Lenin and under Stalin.
Millions died in famines under the Czars too. That happens quite regularly in non-industrialized countries even today. But after Stalin there were no famines in Russia. I wonder why.

blake 3:17

22nd February 2012, 04:48

Fact is, had it not been for the Left Opposition's well known predictions and policies, donned by Stalin without a blush, capitalist restoration may well have been chosen instead.

Would a `normal`development of capitalism in Russia been the worst thing?

Tim Cornelis

22nd February 2012, 15:44

I'd understand if you said this about the post-1937 period (although I'd still would not agree with you). But for the early 1930s this statement is simply baseless.

You're right. I thought Stalin had disintegrated the Bolsheviks in 1928 when he said "There are no more Mensheviks. Why should we call ourselves Bolsheviks? We are not the majority, but the whole party." but this happened only in 1952.

Collectivization didn't fail. Resistance did. And the peasants really had no noble cause to die for, except the sanctity of their private property, of course.

How do we measure success? You seem to equate "successful" with "victorious" and "failure" with "losing". Surely, something the causes the death of millions cannot possibly deemed successful?

My point is not that the peasants were right in fighting for private property, my point is that you cannot impose socialism on people or else it will fail. They must accept it of their own accord.

Millions died in famines under the Czars too. That happens quite regularly in non-industrialized countries even today.

Oh, well then it's okay I guess. I mean, who said that socialism would be better than feudalism and capitalism in terms of human well-being?

And I doubt it's true:

The fact that Lenin's famine was over 10 times as severe as the last major famine under the Czars shows how feeble the "bad weather" explanation was. The severity of this famine was confirmed by contemporary Soviet sources - see Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements.

But after Stalin there were no famines in Russia. I wonder why.

I don't know, are you suggesting that correlation implies causation?

Die Neue Zeit

22nd February 2012, 16:31

The mass deaths followed because the peasants decided that they didn't owe anything to the state, so the state confiscated what they thought would be just enough to feed themselves till the next crop.

Now, I do see how going for the "sovkhoz" pattern could create even more resistance (cattle slaughter, grain stashes, production plan sabotage), seeing how it would have been total "untimid" expropriation of the peasantry (as opposed to the "kolkhoz" pattern, which had the peasantry, at least for the time being, at least in theory, at least collectively, but remaining owners of their property), but I can't see how it could have been any better.

Going for the sovkhoz system would create less resistance. Why were famines greater in the Ukraine than in Central Asia?

The underlying land already belonged to the state, and the state could simply print money and "compensate" while exercising eminent domain. As evidenced in the years after Stalin's death, sovkhoz productivity per acre was always higher. Also, the business risk model for each type was different.

Zulu

23rd February 2012, 00:13

Going for the sovkhoz system would create less resistance. Why were famines greater in the Ukraine than in Central Asia?

The underlying land already belonged to the state, and the state could simply print money and "compensate" while exercising eminent domain. As evidenced in the years after Stalin's death, sovkhoz productivity per acre was always higher.

All land belonged to the state (was socialized per the Soviet Decree #2 on the day after the October Revolution). What belonged to the peasants in the "kolkhoz" system was grain, cattle and smaller tools. The "sovkhoz" system was more efficient even under Stalin, but he wouldn't go for the formal expropriation of the class "allied" with the workers' class, although in his latest work "The Economic Problems of Socialism in USSR" he suggested that the time was about to do that... Khrushchev did the exact opposite. Indeed, he expanded the "sovkhoz" system, but he gave away all the tractors, harvesters, silos, etc. into the collective property of the agricultural enterprises (literally so for the "kolkhoz" and in the form of full management and disposal rights for the "sovkhoz"), paving the first steps back to capitalism.

And the death toll during the famine in the Central Asia was lower than in Ukraine, simply because the resistance in Ukraine was higher, as the nationalist elements and kulaks agitated for it (basically the same bourgeois elements that have been trying lately to blow the Holodomor out of proportion).

How do we measure success? You seem to equate "successful" with "victorious" and "failure" with "losing". Surely, something the causes the death of millions cannot possibly deemed successful?
What causes the death of millions is capitalism. The Bolsheviks had a choice: sit tight and look at continued destitution of the majority of the population in the Soviet Union (and forget about doing their part for the world revolution...), or try and do something about it. You can either blame the deaths on them or on the reactionary elements. Or on both. But your final verdict as to which side has the main culpability only tells which side you are on yourself.

My point is not that the peasants were right in fighting for private property, my point is that you cannot impose socialism on people or else it will fail. They must accept it of their own accord.
Yes, and why do people accept anything "of their own accord"? Probably because they see the benefits of it. And sometimes "the benefits" means "solution to shortcomings of the former state of affairs". So, if "the former state of affairs" gets just a little bit more complicated, because, say, some crazy-ass revolutionaries have shot the Czar and carry out the policies which, unless complied with, make people die, that might have something to do with accepting socialism "of their own accord". In Marxism it's called "dialectics" and "class struggle".

Oh, well then it's okay I guess. I mean, who said that socialism would be better than feudalism and capitalism in terms of human well-being?

Do you realize that people have to build socialism to a certain degree at least, before they can reap its benefits? Socialism doesn't turn mud into bread by magic. It was not until the late 1930s that Stalin himself declared that basic socialism was built in the USSR (the statement that draws much controversy itself), so check your timing again. Socialism can't be all sunshine&bunnies till all the vestiges of the old formations (such as commodity production in agriculture, for instance) have been dealt with.

And I doubt it's true:

First of all, nobody ever tried to have a precise body count of the famines under the Czars. They simply didn't give a damn. The Bolsheviks did keep the statistic, although in secret. Then, no one denies that the collectivization, and the Civil War exacerbated the "natural" famine from the crop failures. By the way, the famine "under Lenin" was in part directly connected to the Czar's regime too, since the requisitions of grain to feed the troops first began in 1916 already, so you'd have to start your countdown to crisis there.

I don't know, are you suggesting that correlation implies causation?
Of course, correlation doesn't always mean causation, but in this case I do imply that there is a causation. Even if you consider the Soviet agriculture a complete mess (which it wasn't by a long shot), you can't deny that the strong industrial economy (which wouldn't be built without collectivization) provided the possibility to trade and buy grain on the foreign market. So yes, the end to regular (cyclical, in fact, as it were) starvation in Russia was thanks to collectivization, like it or not.

.

Marvin the Marxian

23rd February 2012, 03:08

Zulu

23rd February 2012, 04:00

I wonder whether the Russian mir/obshchina was already the most efficient form of collective agriculture for Russia

It was a vestige of the feudal past. The peasants abhorred it themselves and one of the motifs of the agitation against the collectivization was that "the Bolsheviks decided to reinstate the barshina!", which had been a form of labor service to the landlords that the peasants had had to carry out collectively in the Russian Empire.

Die Neue Zeit

23rd February 2012, 04:09

All land belonged to the state (was socialized per the Soviet Decree #2 on the day after the October Revolution). What belonged to the peasants in the "kolkhoz" system was grain, cattle and smaller tools.

Not just those, but the kolkhoz buildings belonged to the peasants as well.

The "sovkhoz" system was more efficient even under Stalin, but he wouldn't go for the formal expropriation of the class "allied" with the workers' class, although in his latest work "The Economic Problems of Socialism in USSR" he suggested that the time was about to do that... Khrushchev did the exact opposite. Indeed, he expanded the "sovkhoz" system, but he gave away all the tractors, harvesters, silos, etc. into the collective property of the agricultural enterprises (both "kolkhoz" and "sovkhoz"), paving the first steps back to capitalism.

Um, both regimes were inconsistent. The notion of printing money didn't enter the mind of Stalin or those around him. His last work was one of long-term suggestion, not something to do immediately. His successors had the guts to do what Stalin didn't.

Think about it: lots of land was devastated in WWII. Why, after that war, did kolkhozy still continue to exist atop the devastated land? There was the perfect opportunity right there for even outright expropriation, even without eminent domain (using printed money as "compensation"), because the peasants focused on reconstruction and wanting lost peace.

And the death toll during the famine in the Central Asia was lower than in Ukraine, simply because the resistance in Ukraine was higher, as the nationalist elements and kulaks agitated for it (basically the same bourgeois elements that have been trying lately to blow the Holodomor out of proportion).

The "kulak" agitation was minimal.

The main reason for peasant resistance was because the business risk was borne by those in the kolkhozy. Meeting risky and disproportionately high quotas was the norm in kolkhozy, whereas the business risk of the sovkhozy was borne by the state.

Zulu

23rd February 2012, 05:43

The main reason for peasant resistance was because the business risk was borne by those in the kolkhozy.
This doesn't make much sense. Slaughtering cattle because it would be too risky to keep it? Silly peasants....

Think about it: lots of land was devastated in WWII. Why, after that war, did kolkhozy still continue to exist atop the devastated land?
This makes more sense, I'll give you that, but it's irrelevant when talking about the initial collectivization. But in essence, there was an overall deficit of funds available for investment after the WW2, so they first went mostly into industry again, while the agriculture had to get by on its own.

The notion of printing money didn't enter the mind of Stalin or those around him.
Probably because it would cause inflation and would be unmasked capitalistic form of exploitation of the workers. Stalin was always advocating reduction of prices, and regarded the shortages it caused as the stimulus to expand production.

Marvin the Marxian

25th February 2012, 01:28

It was a vestige of the feudal past. The peasants abhorred it themselves and one of the motifs of the agitation against the collectivization was that "the Bolsheviks decided to reinstate the barshina!", which had been a form of labor service to the landlords that the peasants had had to carry out collectively in the Russian Empire.

My understanding is that the peasants in many villages of the Russian Empire had already decided to collectively own and manage the village lands before the Revolution of 1917. Such collective ownership and management is hardly the same thing as unpaid labor service to landlords.

On the other hand, the collectivism of the Russian village mir applied to land only. Crops and livestock products were considered the property of the individual households that raised them. So in that respect, Russian peasants still had a petty-bourgeois character.

Zulu

25th February 2012, 04:40

My understanding is that the peasants in many villages of the Russian Empire had already decided to collectively own and manage the village lands before the Revolution of 1917. Such collective ownership and management is hardly the same thing as unpaid labor service to landlords.

On the other hand, the collectivism of the Russian village mir applied to land only. Crops and livestock products were considered the property of the individual households that raised them. So in that respect, Russian peasants still had a petty-bourgeois character.
Most peasants lived in extreme poverty, because when they were released from serfdom in the mid-19th century, they had to pay off enormous sums for their lands (and the best lands still remained in the landlords' ownership). So, they naturally had to stick together, because they couldn't buy even the most necessary tools, and they were lucky if they had something as precious as a work horse, one per village. So it was more of a dire necessity than a deliberate decision of the peasants to work land collectively.

On the other hand a few peasants (mostly those who had been privileged even before the abolition of serfdom) became "kulaks", and began hiring poor peasants to work as "batraks", thus becoming sort of rural bourgeoisie.

Stolypin's reform contributed to growing of the middle "one-plot" peasants, who were the closest to the situation of a farmer, but there were very few of them too.

After the October 1917 all land was socialized (made state property), but the peasants didn't have to pay anything for working it. After the requisitions of the "War Communism" period during the Civil War, free trade of grain and other products was re-established under the NEP policy, and the social stratification of the countryside was pretty much the same as before the Revolution. Cooperation was encouraged by the state, but its gains were little, as the majority of peasants still lacked funds to buy mechanized equipment, even if they wanted to (which they didn't, because they had no idea what "investment" was). Even something as basic as crop rotation wasn't generally observed and the only source of growth was the intensifying exploitation of the poor peasants by the kulaks.

Imposter Marxist

25th February 2012, 06:36

Forced collectivisation was a plan from the State Capitalist fat cats to increase the exploitation of labor, at any cost to increase the profits from their labour

NorwegianCommunist

27th February 2012, 05:49

Whatever the reasons, it resulted in famine, in the Soviet Union and in China.

Famine in Soviet?
There where no such thing.

ComradeOm

2nd March 2012, 19:37

This doesn't make much sense. Slaughtering cattle because it would be too risky to keep it? Silly peasants....Surprisingly for JR it actually does make perfect sense. In the face of the risk of a) having no fodder available for feed or b) having your livestock 'collectivised' on entry to a kolkhozy ('business risks', if you will) then it is a perfectly rational response to slaughter the livestock and salt the meat. The latter can then be stored or sold, either increases the peasant's foodstocks in a time of famine

The alternatives of watching the livestock waste away due to starvation or be confiscated by the authorities (where it will probably waste away due to starvation) run entirely contrary to a peasant's economic interests

Probably because it would cause inflation and would be unmasked capitalistic form of exploitation of the workersExcept that the Stalinist government did print money as if there was no tomorrow. Between Oct 1926 and Oct 1931 alone, the amount of currency in circulation increased by around 230%. From 1291 to 4264 million roubles, to be exact. (Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil)

And yeah, that was one of the contributory factors to the collapse in real wages and nosedive in living standards that marked the Stalinist economy

What belonged to the peasants in the "kolkhoz" system was grain, cattle and smaller tools. The "sovkhoz" system was more efficient even under Stalin, but he wouldn't go for the formal expropriation of the class "allied" with the workers' class, although in his latest work "The Economic Problems of Socialism in USSR" he suggested that the time was about to do that... Khrushchev did the exact oppositeA few points here:

1) Livestock were initially collectivised. That policy was reversed when the scale of both the livestock catastrophe and peasant resistance to collectivisation became clear

2) Far from being concerned about his "allies", Stalin had openly spoken of the need to extract a 'tribute' from the peasantry. The purpose of the kolkhozy was to collect this at a minimum of cost. The problem with the sovkhozy was that the costs of collection (most obviously labour costs) were borne by the state. In contrast, kolkhozy were borne by the peasants themselves; if there was a fall in production then the state still took its quota and the peasants went hungry

And the death toll during the famine in the Central Asia was lower than in Ukraine, simply because the resistance in Ukraine was higher, as the nationalist elements and kulaks agitated for it (basically the same bourgeois elements that have been trying lately to blow the Holodomor out of proportion).I can't recall the exact figures (and for once can't be arsed to look it up) but the deathtoll in Central Asia was probably proportionally higher than in the Ukraine. The collectivisation process, and effect on livestock levels, there produced some truly horrific effects on what had been a largely nomadic society

And the kulak resistance is largely a myth. As is the existence of a kulak class (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1761699&postcount=18)

First of all, nobody ever tried to have a precise body count of the famines under the Czars. They simply didn't give a damnWhere do you think the early Soviet statisticians came from? Late Tsarist Russia had a very rich tradition when it came to statistics. Lenin and others were able to draw on this for their critiques of the Tsardom and notes on the developing capitalism in Russia. Similarly, the famine of 1891-92 was relavitly well documented for its time. There's also data available for heights of army recruits, etc, etc

So, all in all, we have a fairly good idea as to mortality trends for 19th C Russia. Certainly there's nothing like the disruptions of the early 1930s hiding there

Die Neue Zeit

2nd March 2012, 20:07

Surprisingly for JR it actually does make perfect sense. In the face of the risk of a) having no fodder available for feed or b) having your livestock 'collectivised' on entry to a kolkhozy ('business risks', if you will) then it is a perfectly rational response to slaughter the livestock and salt the meat. The latter can then be stored or sold, either increases the peasant's foodstocks in a time of famine

The alternatives of watching the livestock waste away due to starvation or be confiscated by the authorities (where it will probably waste away due to starvation) run entirely contrary to a peasant's economic interests

The "business risk" I had more in mind included problems like the weather. If the weather resulted in a bad harvest, any produce would have to be sold to the state first until a quota was met. Sovkhoz workers didn't have this "business risk."

Except that the Stalinist government did print money as if there was no tomorrow. Between Oct 1926 and Oct 1931 alone, the amount of currency in circulation increased by around 230%. From 1291 to 4264 million roubles, to be exact. (Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil)

And yeah, that was one of the contributory factors to the collapse in real wages and nosedive in living standards that marked the Stalinist economy

That money could have been used for exercising eminent domain towards sovkhozization, and the greater surplus produce could have averted the collapse in real wages and general living standards (all the while also being used for capital imports).

Stalin had openly spoken of the need to extract a 'tribute' from the peasantry. The purpose of the kolkhozy was to collect this at a minimum of cost. The problem with the sovkhozy was that the costs of collection (most obviously labour costs) were borne by the state. In contrast, kolkhozy were borne by the peasants themselves; if there was a fall in production then the state still took its quota and the peasants went hungry

The bigger picture, agricultural productivity, was obviously not considered.

I can't recall the exact figures (and for once can't be arsed to look it up) but the deathtoll in Central Asia was probably proportionally higher than in the Ukraine. The collectivisation process, and effect on livestock levels, there produced some truly horrific effects on what had been a largely nomadic society

Well, I'd like some figures, please. I figure that there wasn't much resistance in Central Asia which would have prompted the authorities to do something to make the farmers go hungry (like taking the quota).

Anyway, what's your take on agricultural policy debates in the last years of the Great Patriotic War and the first few years after?

Omsk

2nd March 2012, 20:51

Hello,ComradeOm,it is a relief to see more and more users who take a serious approach to discussing,especially when it comes to the historical debates.

I think it is obvious that the Kulaks,not only went too far with the slaughter of the livestock,but they also supported the middle-peasants to do the same,with an equally devastating effect.-Some figures: Of the 34 million horses in the country in 1928, there remained only 15 million in 1932. A terse Bolshevik spoke of the liquidation of the horses as a class. Of the 70.5 million head of cattle, there only remained 40.7 million in 1932. Only 11.6 million pigs out of 26 million survived the collectivization period.
(Charles Bettelheim. L'Economie sovietique (Paris: editions Recueil Sirey, 1950), p. 87.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 79 [p. 66 on the NET] )

You made a notion that the Kulak resistance was a myth,i am not too sure about that,while you could say that the agit-prop in villages and towns acted out on the interests of the Soviet non-Kulak and 'lower rank village worker'part of the population,ie they might have overestimated the number of provocations and incident the Kulaks were involved with. A historian,which was proved wrong on some examples,and i wrote about that,but still,could have some insight into the problematics of the Kulak fighting back -(Short cite: ) [Footnote: In 1928 on the entire territory of the RSFSR 1123 terrorist acts by kulaks were recorded.]
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 232
I have also read such examples and notions in the works of Lion Feuchtwanger,Dimitri Volkogonov,and others.For an example,Isaac Deutscher wrote a line regarding the issue: The kulaks, and many "middle" and even poor peasants, were implacable in their hatred of the "commissars." Arson and killings of party agents and agitators were daily occurrences in the villages.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 69

The Kulaks as a class,or,rather,as simply rich land owners,were sometimes numereous in certain regions,but their number were exaggerated sometimes,the maximum of the number of i read,was some 10%,the lowest,2%.We should observe the collectivisation as something,at the first look in the eyes of the common Soviet agricultural worker,was something hostile,big and scary,something which did,and was destined to change their lives,and while it was met with ressistance,later,as years passed and it became obvious that the kolkhozy were the path ahead,numbers of people joined them increased greatly.In 1933 some 60%, by 1934 about 75%, and by 1940, 97% of peasants were either in collective farms,or state farms.

What also comes to my mind is that many people were accused by the local of being Kulaks,when in fact,they were not.

All in all,the collectivisation had a great impact on the USSR,and it was not just about the Kulaks,but also about the fight against illiteracy,and a whole new process of modernization,which was needed.(Along with the industralisation

ComradeOm

3rd March 2012, 00:52

I think it is obvious that the Kulaks,not only went too far with the slaughter of the livestock,but they also supported the middle-peasants to do the same,with an equally devastating effect.-Some figures: Of the 34 million horses in the country in 1928, there remained only 15 million in 1932. A terse Bolshevik spoke of the liquidation of the horses as a class. Of the 70.5 million head of cattle, there only remained 40.7 million in 1932. Only 11.6 million pigs out of 26 million survived the collectivization period.
(Charles Bettelheim. L'Economie sovietique (Paris: editions Recueil Sirey, 1950), p. 87.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 79 [p. 66 on the NET] )Nobody is denying that there was a catastrophic collapse in livestock levels during the collectivisation period (which brought the entire economy to the brink of collapse) but rather the assumption that this was primarily due to the activities of 'kulaks'. There were, as I noted above, very good economic reasons as to why a peasant would slaughter his livestock in time of famine

Unfortunately admitting that setbacks were the product of economic trends (spurred by their own policies) is not something that the Soviet government did very often. Much easier to blame kulaks or wreckers or whoever

I have also read such examples and notions in the works of Lion Feuchtwanger,Dimitri Volkogonov,and others.For an example,Isaac Deutscher wrote a line regarding the issue: The kulaks, and many "middle" and even poor peasants, were implacable in their hatred of the "commissars." Arson and killings of party agents and agitators were daily occurrences in the villages.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 69 Exactly: the peasant resistance to Stalinist policies was not found exclusively within a tiny upper caste but was widespread across the entire peasantry

The Kulaks as a class,or,rather,as simply rich land owners,were sometimes numereous in certain regions,but their number were exaggerated sometimes,the maximum of the number of i read,was some 10%,the lowest,2%.And a kulak is defined as...?

I call kulaks a myth because the term, to quote the Soviet historian Danilov, "has no class content". Certainly not from a Marxist perspective. By the 1930s the phrase was simply a slur, to be applied to those who opposed Moscow's policies. And not just peasants: witness the use of insults such as 'ideological peasants'. At this point the term ceases to have any sociological value whatsoever

So it's not surprising that the various numbers bandied about are largely guesswork. Were there (relatively) rich peasants? Yes. Did they comprise a distinct stratum of the peasantry or a caste/class in their own right? No. The reality is that the brunt of the collectivisation campaign fell against the serednyaki (who also happened to be the largest pre-collectivisation users of hired labour and machinery). Far from struggling against a small number of kulaks, the Soviet state was effectively at war with huge swathes of the peasantry... which the press characterised as 'kulak'

The picture that emerges is one in which class divisions within the commune are weak at best. The Black Repartition of 1917 had destroyed the kulaks, in the original sense of the term, and significantly eased class tensions in the villages. The NEP had of course introduced some more, but could certainly not return to a pre-1914 state in a mere half a decade. No, the twisting and reinvention of the term 'kulak' was necessary precisely because class antagonisms within the commune were not clearly defined. It masked the fact that resistance within the villages came not from some privileged class but from a broad spectrum of the peasantry - in particular the seredniaki, supposed allies of the Soviet state
(To quote an old post)

We should observe the collectivisation as something,at the first look in the eyes of the common Soviet agricultural worker,was something hostile,big and scary,something which did,and was destined to change their lives,and while it was met with ressistance,later,as years passed and it became obvious that the kolkhozy were the path ahead,numbers of people joined them increased greatly.In 1933 some 60%, by 1934 about 75%, and by 1940, 97% of peasants were either in collective farms,or state farms. It's called forced collectivisation for a reason. There is no question that the collectivisation campaign in 1929+ relied on intense state pressure - open coercion, tax incentives/penalties, expulsion of individual farmers to poorer land, the threat of being labelled a 'kulak', etc, etc - to move the peasantry into the collective farms. This cumulated in the formal abolition of the obshchina in 1930. Compare with Stalin's portrayal of all this as a voluntary mass movement

The most obvious example of all this is the enforced halt to the collectivisation programme in early 1930. After the publication of Dizzy, almost half of all collectivised peasants left the collective farms to return to individual holdings. It took a further renewal of the campaign to bring these back to the kolkhozy

All in all,the collectivisation had a great impact on the USSR,and it was not just about the Kulaks,but also about the fight against illiteracy,and a whole new process of modernization,which was needed.(Along with the industralisationYou will struggle to find a Soviet politician throughout the 1920s who did not agree that modernisation and industrialisation were essential. The question was how to achieve this without brining the country to the brink of economic meltdown

Well, I'd like some figures, please. I figure that there wasn't much resistance in Central Asia which would have prompted the authorities to do something to make the farmers go hungry (like taking the quota).IIRC Davies and Wheatcroft give a figure of 1.5 million famine deaths in Kazakhstan for the period 1930-33. The issue here was the collectivisation of livestock - a disaster everywhere but a complete catastrophe in a nomad society that relied heavily on livestock and had no real traditions of large-scale settled agriculture

Lev Bronsteinovich

3rd March 2012, 01:38

That's because it was meant for the NEP period only. Stalin decided to "roll it up" altogether. You can argue that was a wrong decision, too early, or too late, but anyway, many say the Nazi invasion proved it to be a close call.

Collectivization pursued two main goals:

1. Planned production of grain, to feed the cities and for export - to obtain foreign currency, to by equipment and technologies in the West, to get on with industrialization.

2. Proletarize a number of peasants, so that they would go to the cities to man the future industry. Something that takes centuries, under "natural" capitalist conditions (enclosures in England, etc.). This was rarely spoken of, because it's as callous as it sounds, especially when the official ideology spoke about the alliance of the workers and peasants. Nonetheless, it had to be done.

Now, how could these two tasks be accomplished through taxation, if the peasants simply didn't want to produce more than they traditionally had, and had no use for money, since the industry was in shambles and there was little to buy even in the cities? The kulaks could serve as the primary suppliers of grain, but supporting them would create tensions of an entirely un-socialist nature, and progressive taxation would discourage them from expanding production.

And, of course, no peasant in his right mind would voluntarily change his bucolic life for the army discipline and fumes of the industrial labor. So yeah, the Bolsheviks went hard on the peasantry, but, according to Marxism, it happens to it anyway, so why not make something better to come out of it?

The Left Opposition favored collectivization, but Stalin did it in a too rapid and poorly planned fashion. At one point there were collective farms, but no machinery to farm them with. Stalin was forced to act in a crisis, and in doing so had to discard Bukharin. He also co-opted some of the Left Oppositionists that were very pleased Stalin was at last abandoning his Rich Kulak policies.

I agree that, in general, peasants are not going to be terribly enthusiastic about collectivization. The LO had a plan to do it in a much more sane and organized fashion. Would there still have been some fighting and some deaths? I don't doubt it, but it was handled so poorly that it took Soviet Agriculture decades to recover fully.

Die Neue Zeit

3rd March 2012, 02:22

You will struggle to find a Soviet politician throughout the 1920s who did not agree that modernisation and industrialisation were essential. The question was how to achieve this without brining the country to the brink of economic meltdown

IIRC Davies and Wheatcroft give a figure of 1.5 million famine deaths in Kazakhstan for the period 1930-33. The issue here was the collectivisation of livestock - a disaster everywhere but a complete catastrophe in a nomad society that relied heavily on livestock and had no real traditions of large-scale settled agriculture

As implied in my post, the greater the business risk, the greater the expected return. That's manifested in the state absorption of business risk in the sovkhozy and in their significantly higher productivity.

Zulu

3rd March 2012, 05:13

The Left Opposition favored collectivization, but Stalin did it in a too rapid and poorly planned fashion. At one point there were collective farms, but no machinery to farm them with.

And this was why collectivization was impossible (or at least pointless) at the time the Left Opposition began favoring it. This was kind of a vicious circle: the USSR needed industry to mechanize the agriculture, and it needed collectivization to jump-start the industry.

Maybe Stalin would even delay quitting the NEP even further, but it was the aggravating situation in the world that forced him to initiate the "Radical Turn" of 1929. This was expressed in his speech where he said that the old Russia had been always beaten for its backwardness, and that the USSR was even in a more dire situation as the "besieged fortress of socialism", and had to make in 10 years that what had taken a century or more in the "classic" capitalist countries. The USSR did it, but it was no miracle. It was calculated sacrifice of the kulaks and, to a lesser extent, of the peasantry in general.

ComradeOm

3rd March 2012, 11:44

It was calculated sacrifice of the kulaks and, to a lesser extent, of the peasantry in general.One that came within an inch of collapsing the entire Soviet economy. There was a calculation going on here but it was comprised of delusional factors. Most obviously, the belief that Soviet industry could provide the mechanisation necessary to make collective agriculture feasible. It couldn't, of course, but this was not some accident or an unforeseeable twist of fate. The fantasy nature of Soviet industrialisation meant that the leadership was actively encouraging and using economic indicators that bore absolutely no relation to reality

To take a relevant example, the famous Stalingrad Tractor Factory was officially opened in June 1930 and planned to produce 2,000 tractors in the July-Sept period. Actually the completion was a sham (with only 75% of machinery in place by end of Sept) and a mere 43 tractors were produced in this period. None of which were of usable quality - all disintegrated (literally) after 70 hours of work/testing

So if the USSR was not in a position to collectivise in 1926 then it was no more ready for it in 1930. There were in fact some fortresses that Bolsheviks could not storm

But then it would be inaccurate to gloss over the nuances of collectivisation. The Left Opposition favoured collective farming but certainly did not envisage the programme of 1929+. There were different ways of collectivising, different approaches that would not lead to the deaths of millions. But the Stalinist economic programme, with its breakneck approach and blunt wastefulness, could only enact the most disastrous form of collectivisation

daft punk

3rd March 2012, 12:01

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2365149#post2365149)
"it was the terrible policies of the Stalinists that resulted in the Nazis in power. "
Sure, and the British and French imperialists never had anything at all to do with it, or with the desire to trash the USSR in general...

Not really sure what you are on about. The Nazis got into power via the help of capitalism and the terrible policies of the Stalinists. The Stalinists split the working class with their stupid 'social fascism'.

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2365149#post2365149)

"To save Stalin from the kulaks...

Rubbish, the kulaks were getting rich, that's the whole point. "
So what's the problem with that? He could support them and make them support him, seeing how in your dreams he was no fan of socialism anyway...

Lenin and Trotsky saw the rich as a threat and wanted to heavily tax them to stop them growing in number, in wealth, in power, in influence and so on, as that could lead to bourgeois restoration.

Stalin turned a blind eye because he based himself on the wealthy in his attacks on the left, the genuine socialist current, Trotsky and the Left Opposition, who tried to keep Leninism going.

Then in 1928 he realised his mistake.

Or he could expropriate them, just like the old landlords. So your idea doesn't explain collectivization in the slightest.

It was really simple:

1st 5-year plan - Collectiviztion.
2nd 5-year plan - Industrialization.
3rd 5-year plan - Rearmament of the Red Army.

You couldn't have it in any other order.

He started the first one too late, he did it too fast, he did it in the worng way, he did it for the wrong reasons. Industrialisation should have been done at the same time as collectivisation, and it should have begun in 1923, not 1928. Collectivisation should not have been forced, incentives should have been offered, as Lenin and Trotsky both stressed.

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2365149#post2365149)

"So Lenin was wrong was he? "

No, he wasn't. At the time.

So in 1922 Lenin was right to want to tax the kulaks heavily, but in 1924 that was a bad idea.

Why?

Tell me, have you any interest whatsoever in actually getting to the truth, or is your Stalin worship so strong that questioning it by yourself has never been an option?

daft punk

3rd March 2012, 12:05

Would a `normal`development of capitalism in Russia been the worst thing?

Yeah, the USSR was better than capitalism, just. And as I say it was the existence of the Left Opposition's policies, pushed for years, rejected by Stalin, and clearly proven right by events, which contributed to Stalin opting for forced collectivisation rather than allowing capitalist restoration.

daft punk

3rd March 2012, 12:10

I'm by no means an expert, but my understanding is that Lenin, Trotsky, etc. advocated collectivization of agriculture because they thought larger farms - equipped with modern machinery - could produce more food. Lacking such equipment, I wonder whether the Russian mir/obshchina was already the most efficient form of collective agriculture for Russia. Maybe that's why Lenin and Trotsky advocated collectivization by taxing the kulaks and subsidizing the poorer peasants.

Exactly. The idea was to subsidise coops for poor peasants, entice them in, and give them machinery to make them efficient. They would get a share of profit I think, but it would be collective and so a step towards socialism, plus efficient, eliminating hunger.

Uncle Joe did the exact opposite until he was forced to make a sharp U-turn. Then he did it in a terrible way.

Omsk

3rd March 2012, 16:34

Well,i see this thread has atracted a lot of attention,and i must say for now,it is going in a generally positive direction.(Just a note to daft-punk: don't just repeat your old lines,and write such simplified posts,and firstly: dont turn this into a Stalin debate,this thread has a clear subject.)

Nobody is denying that there was a catastrophic collapse in livestock levels during the collectivisation period (which brought the entire economy to the brink of collapse) but rather the assumption that this was primarily due to the activities of 'kulaks'. There were, as I noted above, very good economic reasons as to why a peasant would slaughter his livestock in time of famine

Economic reasons are in my opinion,in this case,secondary,and the profit they hoped they would gain is just a small brick in the wall,while the collectivisation process was something destined for the entire country,and absolutely needed,so a hastened reaction out of fear/opportunism is not something which was the right answer.However,it is logical,as the peasant class in the USSR was not completely devoted to socialism,and in some parts of the country,there were still many hostile elements.

Unfortunately admitting that setbacks were the product of economic trends (spurred by their own policies) is not something that the Soviet government did very often. Much easier to blame kulaks or wreckers or whoever

But the Kulaks were still repsonsible for a lot of damage.

resistance to Stalinist policies was not found exclusively within a tiny upper caste but was widespread across the entire peasantry

Resistance is defined by a number of terms,and resistance can be carried out in many ways,for an example,there were peasants who accepted the collectivisation,and their numbers were huge,but you also had people who were affected by the negative effects of the kulaks making myth's about the collectivisation,and scaring 'poor peasents' .While there were drops in work activity,and this was something which was in the end,minimalized,the Kulaks were the ones who mainly used violent methods of opposing the collectivisation.

It is undeniable that there was opposition to the collectivisation,and the opposition was carried out by those who the collectivisation was aimed against,and trough more than 1000 terrorist attacks,or even more,by some sources,the Kulaks led that opposition,they were its backbone and supporting beam,and in the same time,its fist.

There have also been casses of people simply refusing to work in the new institutions, : First we need to address the meaning of resistance. Scholars often cite OGPU reports of peasants not going out to work, or of only a few kolkhozniki working.. These reports have to be understood in the context that in 1930, and for years afterwards, most collective farms had a labor surplus. An investigation in April 1930 found that kolkhozy in the North Caucasus would employ only 60% of their available labor, and those in the Urals only 50%;... and Ukraine even lower, from 25 to 31%.... This low labor use in 1930 does not appear to have reduced farm work done: for example, a nearly complete survey in mid-1930 in the Middle Volga found that sowings in kolkhozy increased more than six-fold over 1929, and included one-third of the region's sown area even though kolkhozy had only 22% of the region's households. Farms could increase crop areas despite low labor turnout because collectivization eliminated the traditional inter-stripping of allotments, the typical pattern of landholding in Soviet villages. This pattern constrained many peasants’ capabilities, particularly because the population growth in the 1920s resulted in smaller allotments. Once this basically medieval system was eliminated, many fewer peasants could cultivate all the village land. For years farms had more labor than they could employ, despite dekulakization and recruitment of peasants for industrial labor. A low turnout for work, therefore, may not have been a sign of resistance as much as a result of the real demands of work in the kolkhozy.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 79.

And a kulak is defined as...?

Someone,who aims to habitually take great advantage of the economic weakness of the people he is making the deals with,a Kulak is a rich peasant,refusing to change,and to give his countrymen a chance to advance,a kulak had certain privileges in the Tzardom,while in the new Soviet Union,he was recognised as a 'class' enemy.

To go into more detail,someone who,for an example,used hired labor,or owned a mill,or someone who rented agricultural equipment,and generally profited from the problems of the poorer peasantry.

You will struggle to find a Soviet politician throughout the 1920s who did not agree that modernisation and industrialisation were essential
The modernisation was upported,but the most debate was involved with the exact time of the implementation of the collectivisation and the actual start of the programme.For instance,Stalin had the position that in 1927,the time was simply not right; and the proposials of the Left Opposition were rejected two times,the first for the reason of it being simply (to paraphrase) : absurd and demagogic. To cite this properly: The Left Opposition, for example, held that the time had come for a decisive assault on the kulaks. It proposed that at least 150 million poods of grain be taken by force from the kulaks and prosperous middle peasants. In a resolution dated August 9, 1927, a plenary meeting of the Central Committee rejected this proposal as "absurd and demagogic, calculated to create additional difficulties in the development of the national economy." (Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 217 )

daft punk

3rd March 2012, 17:05

Omsk

3rd March 2012, 17:10

GoddessCleoLover

3rd March 2012, 17:11

Roy Medvedev is a reliable source and it is disappointing that the Left Opposition would have advocated grain seizures from the middle peasantry. Ironically, such "absurd" and "demagogic" practices occurred all too often in the early 1930s. Perhaps Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky and Uglanov were correct to oppose that "turn" ComradeOm raised some very interesting specific factors that convince me that the "great turn" policies were imprudent.

daft punk

3rd March 2012, 17:18

I cant argue against you?

You are one of the most arogant users i have ever seen and i wont even waste my words on you anymore,in every thread you post,you ruin it with your cultish approach to Bronstein and your endless walls of copy-paste Trotskyite lunacy.

I saw your pathetic one liners and i decided i will rather argue with someone who can actually support and express his views,ComradeOm.

well, if I'm annoying Stalinists I must be doing something right.

But despite your insults, you ducking and diving, you silly use of the name Bronstein, you pathetic slanders, slurs, lies and insults, if you wanna debate, debate. If not, just ignore me.

Lunacy. Is that word allowed?

Omsk

3rd March 2012, 17:24

well, if I'm annoying Stalinists I must be doing something right.

You are annoying everyone.

But despite your insults
Actually,you are insulting me most of the time.

you silly use of the name Bronstein

Your silly use of the the term: Stalinist.

you pathetic slanders, slurs, lies and insults

What?
Where have i insulted you? You on the other hand,usually called my sources: "shit" my posts "idiotic" .

, if you wanna debate, debate. If not, just ignore me.

For one,your posts in this thread were quite shallow and without content,with the usual : "Stalin = monster - ergo collectivisation was wrong"

I wrote posts here,and you didn't reply to them? A lack of knowledge maybe?

Lunacy. Is that word allowed?

Yes.
Unlike the sexist slurs you used.And i am thinking about reporting you for that.

I wont answer to your provocations anymore,and i am going to hope that you will stop interupting discussion with one-line posts and provocatuer rhetoric.If not i will report you.

daft punk

3rd March 2012, 17:36

You are annoying everyone.

Nope, only certain people. Politically challenged, I like to call them.
I see you are suddenly up for discussion now you have dragged it down to personal insults. When it was on topic it was all a deafening silence.

Actually,you are insulting me most of the time.

Untrue

Your silly use of the the term: Stalinist.

Yes very silly, nobody uses it. It only appears on marxists.org 6,000 times.

What?
Where have i insulted you? You on the other hand,usually called my sources: "shit" my posts "idiotic" .

"You are one of the most arogant users i have ever seen and i wont even waste my words on you anymore,in every thread you post,you ruin it with your cultish approach to Bronstein and your endless walls of copy-paste Trotskyite lunacy.

I saw your pathetic one liners and i decided i will rather argue with someone who can actually support and express his views,ComradeOm. "

Your sources are shit. There is never a link. You never read the context. You just have this massive pile of indexed quotes to slip into any topic. It's quote mining gone mad!

For one,your posts in this thread were quite shallow and without content,with the usual : "Stalin = monster - ergo collectivisation was wrong"

These are just lies. I never said that, you know it, so either address my posts with links and quotes honestly or get the fuck out.

I wrote posts here,and you didn't reply to them? A lack of knowledge maybe?

Yes.
Unlike the sexist slurs you used.And i am thinking about reporting you for that.
What sexist slur you bandwaggon jumper?

Fuck me, this is so fucking random.

Omsk

3rd March 2012, 17:42

Because i really dont want to go down to your level on this,and continue with this pointless argument,i will end this :

Untrue

Only in one post you said:

"bandwaggon jumper? "

"get the fuck out. "

"Your sources are shit. "

"Politically challenged "

Stop being so childish.

What sexist slur you bandwaggon jumper?

On the 1st March 2012, 18:38 you posted this:

All this *****ing, how to put people off. What the fuck is your problem?

And : Yesterday, 21:08 : you posted this childish lunacy:

He used it because he knew every snide **** like Stalin would. He said it was NOT to be used against him. Dont fucking twist his words.

Im surprised that the moderators didn't react.

Zulu

3rd March 2012, 18:08

Not really sure what you are on about. The Nazis got into power via the help of capitalism

Yeah, ever heard of the Munich accords, that gave Hitler green light to begin annexations? Of William Hearst, a US media mogul, who spread all the Goebbels' libel about the USSR (Holodomor & such) you Trotkyists are so happy to keep spreading?

and the terrible policies of the Stalinists. The Stalinists split the working class with their stupid 'social fascism'.
IIRC, it was Bukharin who invented the term. Wasn't he shot as a public enemy in the end?

Lenin and Trotsky
Let's make this one clear: Lenin was the main proponent of the NEP. Trotsky was against it from the get-go. See the difference here?

saw the rich as a threat and wanted to heavily tax them to stop them growing in number, in wealth, in power, in influence and so on, as that could lead to bourgeois restoration.

That's why Lenin insisted that all political power remained with the Party, and that the Party be united, all factionalism banned, and all the "casual elements" expelled during the regular purge campaigns.

Stalin turned a blind eye because he based himself on the wealthy in his attacks on the left, the genuine socialist current, Trotsky and the Left Opposition, who tried to keep Leninism going.

All Trotsky and the Left opposition were concerned with at the time was using their rhetoric to try and make a comeback into the positions of power they've lost due to inability of day-to-day routine work of building socialism in a country ravaged by 8 years of warfare, revolution and famine, and still not on good terms with the rest of the world.

Then in 1928 he realised his mistake.

It wasn't his mistake that he realized, for he hadn't made one. It was the diplomatic crisis of 1927 and the British Foreign Secretary Chamberlain's ultimatum, that made him conclude the USSR would be soon under threat of invasion by an imperialist power. So he had no choice but to "roll up" the NEP and commence forced collectivization and industrialization, even though the NEP hadn't yet created favorable conditions for that as it was supposed to (by Lenin).

He started the first one too late,

Nope, on the contrary: too soon, but he had no choice.

he did it too fast,

Yes, but he had no choice.

he did it in the worng way,

Yet, you Trotskyists say, he stole his plan from Trotsky, which means Trotsky was going to do it the wrong way.

he did it for the wrong reasons.

This is nothing but facepalmworthy.

Industrialisation should have been done at the same time as collectivisation,

That was impossible. There were no funds, and no manpower, until collectivization provided them.

and it should have begun in 1923, not 1928.

Hello! The country was still suffering from food shortages, industry was in shambles and the working class was like nonexistent in 1923!

Collectivisation should not have been forced, incentives should have been offered, as Lenin and Trotsky both stressed.
Incentives were provided and didn't work. The peasantry was too illiterate and too poor to observe even something as basic as crop rotation. That's why the kulaks were getting the upper hand during the NEP, it was kind of classic capitalist development of agriculture, but it was too slow.

So in 1922 Lenin was right to want to tax the kulaks heavily, but in 1924 that was a bad idea.
You completely missed my point. Lenin was right in 1921 when he ordered the partial backtracking to capitalism, called the NEP, assuming the capitalist countries would engage in profitable trade with Soviet Russia (and later the Soviet Union). However, by the end of the 1920s, as a new build-up of negative economic tendencies in the capitalist world began manifesting itself, which was reflected in the ideological stand-off between the USSR and Britain, Lenin's assertion that the NEP would provide conditions and prerequisites necessary for socialist construction lost its validity.

Tell me, have you any interest whatsoever in actually getting to the truth, or is your Stalin worship so strong that questioning it by yourself has never been an option?

I don't worship Stalin. I can even say he was a prick. See: STALIN WAS A PRICK. Oh, shi... I'm such a bad worshiper. Now I dare you to say (type) the same thing about Trotsky. Just to show us here, you're not a worshiper, not a fan-boy, but a person remotely capable of critical thinking.

.

ComradeOm

4th March 2012, 10:21

Omsk aside, the quality of this thread is dire. If you've got nothing to contribute then don't feel the need post one-liner after one-liner

Economic reasons are in my opinion,in this case,secondary,and the profit they hoped they would gain is just a small brick in the wall,while the collectivisation process was something destined for the entire country,and absolutely needed,so a hastened reaction out of fear/opportunism is not something which was the right answer.However,it is logical,as the peasant class in the USSR was not completely devoted to socialism,and in some parts of the country,there were still many hostile elements.Let me be stronger then: there was no kulak conspiracy. There was no coordinated campaign of anti-Soviet agitation to disrupt agriculture. Those impressively coherent cases that the OGPU/NKVD 'discovered' during the 1930s were fabrications. The collapse in grain production and livestock levels cannot be attributed to kulak activity

(On the contrary there are a host of very good reasons for these trends but they are the product of official Soviet agricultural policies, not some shadowy conspiracy)

What there was however was widespread peasant resistance to a massive agricultural reform that was entirely contrary to their interests and carried out in a coercive fashion. The idea that this was targeted at or only affected a small stratum of the peasantry is false. Collectivisation was an assault on the peasantry as a whole

But then we have to be careful about playing this up. It wasn't "terrorist attacks" that led to the collapse in grain production, the mass slaughter of livestock, the poor quality of sowing, delays in the sowing season, absence of seed, wagons full of rotting grain in railway sidings, etc, etc. These were fundamentally issues caused by state failings and there is no basis for ascribing them to 'kulaks'

To go into more detail,someone who,for an example,used hired labor,or owned a mill,or someone who rented agricultural equipment,and generally profited from the problems of the poorer peasantry.We'll ignore the last bit, because it's fuzzy in the extreme, but that's still a very broad definition. What if, for example, I told you that the largest users of hired labour in Soviet Russia (some two thirds of the total) was in fact the seredniaki? Are they now 'kulaks'?

(Davies, Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union. Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System, also has a lot of good stuff on this topic)

The reality is that class distinctions within the peasant milieu were no where near as sharply defined as the Soviet state liked to think. The categories and numbers that Stalin occasionally liked to roll out were fantasy. Insofar as stratum did exist, there was very little difference in any objective sense, and the use of hired labour is the big indicator, between the middle and top stratum. Alternatively, to quote Carr (Foundations of a Planned Economy 1): "The degree of solidarity between peasants of all categories, and of their mistrust of a party and government based primarily on the towns and insensitive to peasant concerns, was seriously underestimated."

The modernisation was upported,but the most debate was involved with the exact time of the implementation of the collectivisation and the actual start of the programme.For instance,Stalin had the position that in 1927,the time was simply not right; and the proposials of the Left Opposition were rejected two times,the first for the reason of it being simply (to paraphrase) : absurd and demagogic. To cite this properly: The Left Opposition, for example, held that the time had come for a decisive assault on the kulaks. It proposed that at least 150 million poods of grain be taken by force from the kulaks and prosperous middle peasants. In a resolution dated August 9, 1927, a plenary meeting of the Central Committee rejected this proposal as "absurd and demagogic, calculated to create additional difficulties in the development of the national economy." (Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 217 )Let's not read too much into what Stalin said and didn't say. He was, for example, rejecting the possibility of all-out collectivisation as late as summer 1929...

And you've provided another example. In 1927 Stalin rejects a proposal to seize hoarded grain from the peasantry. In 1928 Stalin personally oversees the implementation of, what he called, the 'Urals-Siberian method of grain collection' to - wait for it - seize hoarded grain and forcibly collect from the peasantry

(Bonus point: who at the XV Party Congress criticised those who sought to "make an end to the kulak by way of administrative means, by the GPU"? Yep, Stalin)

Which is one reason why I don't place much value on Stalin's pronouncements; the man changed his stated position three times before breakfast each day. You could easily construct an anti-collectivisation case from Stalin quotes alone

A Marxist Historian

6th March 2012, 08:05

And this was why collectivization was impossible (or at least pointless) at the time the Left Opposition began favoring it. This was kind of a vicious circle: the USSR needed industry to mechanize the agriculture, and it needed collectivization to jump-start the industry.

Maybe Stalin would even delay quitting the NEP even further, but it was the aggravating situation in the world that forced him to initiate the "Radical Turn" of 1929. This was expressed in his speech where he said that the old Russia had been always beaten for its backwardness, and that the USSR was even in a more dire situation as the "besieged fortress of socialism", and had to make in 10 years that what had taken a century or more in the "classic" capitalist countries. The USSR did it, but it was no miracle. It was calculated sacrifice of the kulaks and, to a lesser extent, of the peasantry in general.

The LO was in favor of experimental projects in collectivization where peasants were actually interested and thinking about it themselves. And the USSR was a big and very varied country, and there were such places.

To be gradually expanded as tractors became available, and not before.

There was one area in which collectivization actually worked well. That was in the Jewish agricultural collectives of the 1920s and 1930s, which were quite significant at one point in Belorussia and Ukraine and the Crimea. This was mostly because they had outside assistance from western Jews providing them with tractors.

Of course Hitler killed just about every last one of the Jewish farmers, who at their peak in the late '30s were about 10% of the Soviet Jewish population.

As for Stalin's hasty 100% flipflop turnabout in 1929, agriculture was not the only place it was disastrous. You had a huge industrial crisis too due to utterly unrealistic planning, and in 1932-33 the USSR nearly fell apart. Collapse was mostly averted only because Hitler's victory, which Stalin's crazy ultraleft German policies did so much to promote, made Soviet workers, and even Soviet oppositionists, want to draw ranks behind the Soviet state to avoid disaster.

-M.H.-

Zulu

6th March 2012, 10:55

in 1932-33 the USSR nearly fell apart.

That is rather bold statement. Care to reinforce it with something? If anything, with the opposition purged, the Party had secured ability to maintain control under any circumstances by that time, which was clearly demonstrated in those years, as well as during the Nazi invasion a decade later.

As for the rest, I can agree with much of what you say, but key several things are missing from your picture. First of all, the anti-semitic sentiments were always strong among the Ukrainian nationalists (who later quite gladly gave the Nazis their helping hand, to the point that the Nazis eventually grew wary of them for killing all the Jews instead of shipping them to Poland as slave labor force). During collectivization and the famine several cases were reported of the Ukrainians raiding the Jewish kolkhozes (that were complying with the state plan and had plenty of grain and cattle as a result - until the raids). The nationalists pointed to the Jews' enthusiasm for the collectivization as an evidence that the Bolsheviks were part of a larger Jewish-masonic conspiracy (which coincidentally was the cornerstone of the Nazi anti-Soviet propaganda, but had actually originated in the Tsarist Russia), while at the same time agitating to hide the grain and slaughter cattle, which was the primary source of plan failures in the Ukrainian kolkhozes, which resulted in forced requisitions of anything the authorities could find, which in turn resulted in the food shortages and starvation.

But the resistance, not only in the Ukraine, by the way, began from the very start of the 1st 5-year plan in 1927, when there had been no intention yet to force the collectivization. The policy of economic incentives and agitation simply wasn't working and the plans for grain collection were not met. During his tour of Siberia Stalin could witness in person that the peasants and local authorities were simply doing "business as usual" and not pursuing the goal of increasing the grain surplus. That led him to proclaim the "Great Turn" in 1929. It was that, or cancel the 5-year plan altogether.

.

Zulu

6th March 2012, 11:06

Let me be stronger then: there was no kulak conspiracy. There was no coordinated campaign of anti-Soviet agitation to disrupt agriculture. Those impressively coherent cases that the OGPU/NKVD 'discovered' during the 1930s were fabrications. The collapse in grain production and livestock levels cannot be attributed to kulak activity

Oh yes it can. The fact that the OGPU fabricated something and draw conclusions about an organized conspiracy doesn't cancel the fact that the primary cases of agitation against the collectivization (from which those presumably fabricated conclusions were drawn) were massive. Spontaneous or organized, it was the kulak resistance that exacerbated the consequences of the drought and some bureaucratic turmoil and made them really disastrous. Bureaucrats didn't order anybody to hide grain where it would rot and slaughter cattle.

Bottom line: it was a classic case of class struggle, with the poorer peasants being caught in the middle between the urban proletariat and the rural bourgeoisie.

commieathighnoon

10th March 2012, 04:53

^ When in doubt, you can always simply re-assert beliefs that are desired to be correct. ComradeOm denies a claim and at least provides general sources. Zulu simply asserts, "no I say it was kulaks."

I think the real issue between Stalinist conspiracy theorists and religious fanatics and reality-based revolutionaries, whatever else, is the inability for the former to accept the real material historical evidence does not support the view that working people had any substantive political power in the USSR under Stalin except perhaps in a purely mystical sense, and that the Stalinist economic policies were complete failures. Real productivity, real assets were destroyed with the historical Stalinoid rendezvous with "planning." The face value conclusion is unacceptable: un-falsifiable claims of boogeymen with ultimate responsibility, must therefore be fashioned.

ht tp://w ww.cpgb.org.uk/worker2/index.php?action=viewarticle&article_id=1001515

dodger

10th March 2012, 05:15

A very good study of the leading cadres of socialist construction:

The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (Paperback)

In this ground- breaking study, Lynne Viola - the first Western scholar to gain access to the Soviet state archives on collectivization - brilliantly excavates a lost chapter in the history of the Stalin revolution. This book affords an intimate look at the campaign of the `25,000ers', the industrial workers who were sent into the Soviet countryside to implement collectivization during the 1930s. Reviewed below by William Podmore.

In this fascinating book, Lynne Viola studies the work of the 25,000 workers who went to the Soviet countryside to assist collectivisation.
As she writes, "the 25,000ers were representative of a politically and numerically significant group of workers - politically active cadre workers. Their primary motives in volunteering to participate in the campaign were not based on coercion or material self-interest. The 25,000ers were workers who, on one level or another, identified with the state and party and supported the program of the First Five-Year Plan revolution."
She continues, "The 25,000ers' role in the proletarianization of the rural apparatus through purge and recruitments was an extension of the social and political policies of the cultural revolution of the First Five-Year Plan in the cities. Purge and recruitment of working-class forces in the urban government apparatus, industry and higher education had broad ramifications in the creation of a base of social support for the state in later years, as well as providing a response to the grievances and aspirations of workers who claimed that the role of the working class had been slighted during NEP."

ComradeOm

10th March 2012, 10:59

Oh yes it can. The fact that the OGPU fabricated something and draw conclusions about an organized conspiracy doesn't cancel the fact that the primary cases of agitation against the collectivization (from which those presumably fabricated conclusions were drawn) were massive. Spontaneous or organized, it was the kulak resistance that exacerbated the consequences of the drought and some bureaucratic turmoil and made them really disastrous. Bureaucrats didn't order anybody to hide grain where it would rot and slaughter cattleIf such cases I think it's always best to play a game called 'What is more likely?'

Is it likely that the abysmal quality of sowings (to take one example) in 1931-32 was the product of small bands of kulaks and kulak sympathisers, some two years after the main dekulakisation drive, covertly stealing into fields across the USSR and conducting 'wrecking' operations?

Or is it more likely that the collapse in quality was related to the pressures from the very top for increased sown areas? A drive that led to the abandonment of crop rotation in many regions and greatly reduced yields as vast areas of unsuitable land were sown simply to meet official targets

We could try the same exercise with the livestock collapse:

Is it likely that the primary cause of the plummeting levels of livestock in the USSR was covert bands of kulaks creeping through villages at night slaughtering their neighbours' livestock?

Or is it more likely that peasants began to kill their own livestock because they could not afford to feed them or because they, rightly, feared that they would be confiscated on entry to the new collective farms (and therefore valued their meat more). And is it really likely that kulaks were behind the shockingly high mortality rate of livestock that had been collectivised within the kolkhozy?

Bottom line: it was a classic case of class struggle, with the poorer peasants being caught in the middle between the urban proletariat and the rural bourgeoisie.You see, you talk of class struggle when your analysis is actually quite un-Marxist. If you answered yes to the first option in either of the two above questions then you are substituting the conspiratorial action of secret 'wreckers' for an actual material analysis of the economic and social conditions of collectivisation. You are ascribing to concious human conspirators what is much better explained by an analysis of the impact of Soviet agricultural and economic policy

But then that's the corner that you've backed yourself into by accepting a fictional categorisation of peasants. Far from being a "rural bourgeoisie", there is no acceptable Marxist definition of a kulak (post-1917 anyways). The term has no class content. I'm going to pause here and let you disprove that

Right. When you accept that 'kulak' was nothing more than a fuzzy slur thrown at opponents of Soviet power then the rest of Stalinist agricultural policy appears empty. Far from aligning itself with the poor and middle peasants against a small caste of kulaks, Soviet policy was arrayed against the peasantry as a whole. The destruction of the mir, the coercive corralling into new collective farms, imposition of grain quotas at unfavourable prices, etc, etc... these were not just the concern of a tiny and distinct case but rather impacted, typically unfavourably, most peasants. The destruction of individual farming and the imposition of Stalin's tribute affected the peasantry as a whole

Hence the use of terms such as little kulaks (kulachniki) and sub-kulaks (podkulachniki), as well as 'ideological kulaks' and 'kulak choirboys', to characterise resistance that was obviously not based on a narrow "rural bourgeoisie". There was class struggle here but it was not being waged against some rural elite

That is rather bold statement. Care to reinforce it with something? If anything, with the opposition purged, the Party had secured ability to maintain control under any circumstances by that time, which was clearly demonstrated in those years, as well as during the Nazi invasion a decade later.Again, Stalinists can only think politically. The danger of 1932-33 was both economic (ie, the degree to which critical shortages brought the entire economy to the brink of collapse) and, as a result, social. The danger came from the urban areas: for many Soviet workers, already pushed by years of collapsing living standards and increasing workloads, the 'starvation rations' introduced in 1932 were simply too much. Mass discontent in the cities was given form by a wave of strikes across the USSR (almost unheard of in a country where striking was illegal) and even a worker uprising in the Ivanovo region. Soviet power was probably never as much under threat, in both urban and rural areas, as these years

Or do you really think that a famine which claims millions would have no broader impact?

A very good study of the leading cadres of socialist construction:

The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (Paperback)I love this. Not the book, which I've not read, but the cloying need to display some credentials by noting a random book that I'm fairly sure that dodger has not read. Or if he has then I'd expect more than the synopsis and a review from the book's Amazon page :lol:

But then Stalinists do this a lot; bigging up random authors whose research supposedly supports their case. When I first saw references to Getty thrown around on RevLeft I thought that this guy must have proven the correctness of Stalin's actions or the like. Instead he's actually highly critical of the purges and Stalin, and only appears moderate in the context of Conquest. Getty's works in no way support the Stalinist case and it quickly became clear that most of those throwing his name around had never actually read him. I've had people sneeringly point me towards the very Getty papers that I was using to undermine their arguments!

Stalinists seem to struggle with the concept that someone can write a book that isn't virulently hostile on an aspect of Soviet history (say, the 25,000ers) without endorsing Stalinism. I've no doubt that Viola's work is a competent monograph on a particular component of the Soviet elite at the time. The 1990s saw a lot of that and, while of significant historical interest, it is pretty old hat. A lot of the focus that the Party or the cultural elite received was due to the accessibility of sources when the archives were first opened. Now the emphasis on research (such as Rossman and Murphy) tends to be on those ordinary citizens who weren't part of the Soviet elite and who perceived Soviet power very differently from those who were

daft punk

10th March 2012, 14:07

Yeah, ever heard of the Munich accords, that gave Hitler green light to begin annexations? Of William Hearst, a US media mogul, who spread all the Goebbels' libel about the USSR (Holodomor & such) you Trotkyists are so happy to keep spreading?

what are you on about?

IIRC, it was Bukharin who invented the term. Wasn't he shot as a public enemy in the end?
About 10 years later. What relevance is that to anything?

"At the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the end of capitalist stability and the beginning of the "Third Period" was proclaimed. The end of capitalism, accompanied with a working class revolution, was expected, and social democracy was identified as the main enemy of the Communists. This Comintern's theory had roots in Grigory Zinoviev (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Zinoviev)'s argument that international social democracy is a wing of fascism. This view was accepted by Joseph Stalin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin) who described fascism and social democracy as "twin brothers", arguing that fascism depends on the active support of the social democracy and that the social democracy depends on the active support of fascism. After it was declared at the Sixth Congress, the theory of social fascism became accepted by the world Communist movement.[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism#cite_note-0)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism#Overview
You bring up Bukharin being shot as if he was somehow being shot for the 'social fascism' thing, but the above shows this to be complete rubbish.

Let's make this one clear: Lenin was the main proponent of the NEP. Trotsky was against it from the get-go. See the difference here?

"But the New Economic Policy does not flow solely from the interrelations between the city and the village. This policy is a necessary stage in the growth of state-owned industry. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-2/20.htm

"Whoever does not understand this understands nothing about our epoch, and, in particular, does not understand what the NEP is. It is as if we were to say that, on the basis of proletarian ideology, ‘in forms that are lively and comprehensible to all,’ the entire people must be educated in the spirit of the socialist organisation of the economy. Easily said! But, in that case, what need we have for the New Economic Policy, with its decentralisation, its market, and so forth? This, it will be said, is a concession to the muzhik. That is just what it is. If we had not made this concession, the Soviet Republic would have been overthrown."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/military/ch39.htm

That's why Lenin insisted that all political power remained with the Party, and that the Party be united, all factionalism banned, and all the "casual elements" expelled during the regular purge campaigns.

Yes, and Stalin abused that to purge the left, to stablish his one man rule, based initially on the wealthy and the bureaucrats.

All Trotsky and the Left opposition were concerned with at the time was using their rhetoric to try and make a comeback into the positions of power they've lost due to inability of day-to-day routine work of building socialism in a country ravaged by 8 years of warfare, revolution and famine, and still not on good terms with the rest of the world.

pathetic

It wasn't his mistake that he realized, for he hadn't made one. It was the diplomatic crisis of 1927 and the British Foreign Secretary Chamberlain's ultimatum, that made him conclude the USSR would be soon under threat of invasion by an imperialist power. So he had no choice but to "roll up" the NEP and commence forced collectivization and industrialization, even though the NEP hadn't yet created favorable conditions for that as it was supposed to (by Lenin).

ridiculous.

Nope, on the contrary: too soon, but he had no choice.

ludicrous

Yes, but he had no choice.

If he had started earlier as the LO proposed, it would have been more gradual.
If he had taxed the rich and subsidised coops for the poor the whole scenario would have been completely different. The rich wouldnt have been bidding for power. The poor would have been more supportive of collectivisation. Industry would have progressed more via taxes on the rich. Agriculture would have been partly mechanised.

Yet, you Trotskyists say, he stole his plan from Trotsky, which means Trotsky was going to do it the wrong way.

It is obvious he was forced to collectivise and that was what the LO had been advising, but he made it forced, which was the wrong way to do it. It should have been voluntary, for the poor peasants anyway.

This is nothing but facepalmworthy.

Pathetic. You yourself just said he did it because of the fear of attack. This is wrong, but it is still the wrong reason. The right reason was advocated by Lenin in 1922, to subsidise coops for poor peasants, to entice them in voluntarily, as a step towards socialism. Why will you not address this crucial point? Stalin did the opposite of what Lenin wanted, and the LO stuck to Lenin's ideas.

This is a waste of time.

That was impossible. There were no funds, and no manpower, until collectivization provided them.

I have said a thousand times, Stalin should have taxed the wealthy, as Lenin and Trotsky advised, but he did the opposite.

Please address this point

Hello! The country was still suffering from food shortages, industry was in shambles and the working class was like nonexistent in 1923!

So you think Lenin was wrong then, for advocating industrialisation, paid for by taxing the kulaks? The kulaks got rich in the period 1924-8. Stalin did not tax them heavily as Lenin and Trotsky advised.

Incentives were provided and didn't work. The peasantry was too illiterate and too poor to observe even something as basic as crop rotation. That's why the kulaks were getting the upper hand during the NEP, it was kind of classic capitalist development of agriculture, but it was too slow.

No, Lenin's plan was not adopted. He advocated heavy taxes for the kulaks, zero taxes for the poor. Stalin did the opposite. You need to address this point. As for incentives, not nearly enough was done. Only about 1% of the peasants were collectivised in the 4 years from 1924-8. At that rate it would have taken 400 years to collectivise the peasants, a pathetic rate do you not agree?

You need to read this:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch03.htm

"The revision of Lenin on the peasant question being carried through by the Stalin-Bukharin group may be summed up in the following eight principal points:

Abandonment of the fundamental principle of Marxism, that only a powerful socialized industry can help the peasants transform agriculture along collectivist lines.
Underestimation of hired labour and the peasant poor as the social basis of the proletarian dictatorship in the country districts.
Basing our hopes in agriculture upon the so-called “economically strong” peasant, i.e., in reality on the kulak.
Ignoring or directly denying the petty-bourgeois character of peasant property and peasant economy – a departure from the Marxian position towards the theories of the Socialist Revolutionaries.
Underestimation of the capitalist elements in the present development of the countryside, and hushing up of the class differentiations that are taking place among the peasants.
The creation of soothing theories to the effect that “the kulak and kulak organizations will have no chance anyway, because the general framework of evolution in our country is predetermined by the structure of the proletarian dictatorship.” [3] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch03.htm#n3)
Belief in the “grafting into our system of kulak cooperative nuclei”. [4] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch03.htm#n4) “The problem may be expressed thus, that it is necessary to set free the economic possibilities of the well-oft peasant, the economic possibilities of the kulak.” [5] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch03.htm#n5)
The attempt to counterpoise Lenin’s “co-operative plan” to his plan of electrification. According to Lenin himself, only these two plans in combination can guarantee the transition to socialism."

"In the class struggle now going on in the country, the party must stand, not only in words but in deeds, at the head of the farm-hands, the poor peasants, and the basic mass of the middle peasants, and organize them against the exploiting aspirations of the kulak.
To strengthen and reinforce the class position of the agricultural proletariat-which is part of the working class – that series of measures is necessary which we indicated in the section on the condition of the industrial workers.
Agricultural credit must cease to be for the most part a privilege of the well-off circles of the village. We must put an end to the present situation, which permits the savings of the poor, insignificant enough already, to be spent, not for their intended purpose, in the service of the well-off and middle groups.

The growth of land-renting must be offset by a more rapid development of collective farming. It is necessary systematically and from year to year to subsidize largely the efforts of the poor peasants to organize in collectives."

"The task of socialist construction in the country is to reform agriculture on the basis of large-scale, mechanized, collective agriculture. For the bulk of the peasants the simplest road to this end is co-operation, as Lenin described it in his work On Co-operation."

and so on.

Please address these points.

You completely missed my point. Lenin was right in 1921 when he ordered the partial backtracking to capitalism, called the NEP, assuming the capitalist countries would engage in profitable trade with Soviet Russia (and later the Soviet Union). However, by the end of the 1920s, as a new build-up of negative economic tendencies in the capitalist world began manifesting itself, which was reflected in the ideological stand-off between the USSR and Britain, Lenin's assertion that the NEP would provide conditions and prerequisites necessary for socialist construction lost its validity.

This is hopeless. Lenin reluctantly organised the NEP in 1921. He called it a retreat. In 1922 he called for an end to the retreat. Not a sudden end to the NEP, but an end to the retreat. Can you not get it into your head that from 1924-8 Stalin did the exact opposite? I am fed up of repeating myself. If you cant be bothered to read a bit from the above link and understand it there is simply not point in debating with you.

Stalin did the opposite of what Lenin and Trotsky advised, he deepened the NEP, allowed the class differentiation to grow, as Trotsky details in the above link. Trotsky was right, and in 1928-9 he was proved right.

I don't worship Stalin. I can even say he was a prick. See: STALIN WAS A PRICK. Oh, shi... I'm such a bad worshiper. Now I dare you to say (type) the same thing about Trotsky. Just to show us here, you're not a worshiper, not a fan-boy, but a person remotely capable of critical thinking.

.

How old are you? 12?

Zulu

11th March 2012, 07:48

A drive that led to the abandonment of crop rotation in many regions and greatly reduced yields as vast areas of unsuitable land were sown simply to meet official targets
What? Crop rotation was introduced for the first time in many areas with collectivization. Until that peasants usually simply had no other thing to seed than what grew there the previous year, and many had no idea of what the crop rotation was at all.

You see, the collectivization itself was not so much a move for social justice, but for first and foremost it was a move for a more rational organization of agricultural production, which was unattainable in the former conditions. Greater social justice was supposed to result from it as a consequence, and not only as a direct result but more importantly as a result of the subsequent industrialization.

Or is it more likely that peasants began to kill their own livestock because they could not afford to feed them or because they, rightly, feared that they would be confiscated on entry to the new collective farms (and therefore valued their meat more). And is it really likely that kulaks were behind the shockingly high mortality rate of livestock that had been collectivised within the kolkhozy?
The whole idea behind the collective farms was that the cattle and other property was not being expropriated from the peasants. Yet the kulaks naturally thought it was, since they were effectively losing control of their property, as they now had to participate in its management on equal terms with their former batraks and share the profits likewise. So they were going around spreading those "rightful fears" among the broader masses of the "one-plot" peasants, the "serednyaki". But frankly, fear is the fault of the frightened.

Subsequently those fears materialized during the "dekulakisation" and forced collectivization, as the most openly resisting peasants were evicted, losing their property to the remaining communities.

You see, you talk of class struggle when your analysis is actually quite un-Marxist. If you answered yes to the first option in either of the two above questions then you are substituting the conspiratorial action of secret 'wreckers' for an actual material analysis of the economic and social conditions of collectivisation. You are ascribing to concious human conspirators what is much better explained by an analysis of the impact of Soviet agricultural and economic policy

On the contrary, I am pretty much denying the conspiracy here, and saying the resistance was spontaneous, massive and originated with the entire class of the rural bourgeoisie called the kulaks. Even after the "dekulakisation", the former kulaks kept spreading their dissent, and it was not sufficiently suppressed until the Great Terror of 1937. Like I said, class struggle.

But then that's the corner that you've backed yourself into by accepting a fictional categorisation of peasants. Far from being a "rural bourgeoisie", there is no acceptable Marxist definition of a kulak (post-1917 anyways). The term has no class content. I'm going to pause here and let you disprove that

I'm surprised you don't snatch at the opportunity to claim the term "rural bourgeoisie" an oxymoron, seeing how "bourgeoisie" originally meant "townsfolk". And the term "kulak", although not coming from the scientific vocabulary, but from the Russian folk tongue, does have class content: private exploiter of hired labor and/or means of production. I doubt you'd accept a "stalinist" definition, but here's what one Vladimir Lenin had to say about the kulaks:

"The kulak hates the Soviet government like poison...

There is no doubt about it. The kulaks are rabid foes of the Soviet government. Either the kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolts of the predatory kulak minority of the people against the working people’s government. There can be no middle course. Peace is out of the question: even if they have quarrelled, the kulak can easily come to terms with the landowner, the tsar and the priest, but with the working class never...

The kulaks are the most brutal, callous and savage exploiters, who in the history of other countries have time and again restored the power of the landowners, tsars, priests and capitalists. The kulaks are more numerous than the landowners and capitalists...

These bloodsuckers have grown rich on the want suffered by the people in the war; they have raked in thousands and hundreds of thousands of rubles by pushing up the price of grain and other products. These spiders have grown fat at the expense of the peasants ruined by the war, at the expense of the starving workers. These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved. These vampires have been gathering the landed estates into their hands; they continue to enslave the poor peasants..."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/x01.htm

Hence the use of terms such as little kulaks (kulachniki) and sub-kulaks (podkulachniki), as well as 'ideological kulaks' and 'kulak choirboys', to characterise resistance that was obviously not based on a narrow "rural bourgeoisie". There was class struggle here but it was not being waged against some rural elite
Of course, just like I said, the kulaks agitated the broader and poorer masses of peasants. In their agitation they as often resorted to nationalist and anti-semitic rhetoric as to the private property instincts of the illiterate peasant masses. Hence the "podkulachniki" and the "choirboys". They were unfortunate victims of irrational agitation that ran counter to their objective interests, yet that does not make them any less of the enemies of socialism along with the genuine kulaks. In Nazi Germany many workers supported Hitler too, you know.

Again, Stalinists can only think politically. The danger of 1932-33 was both economic (ie, the degree to which critical shortages brought the entire economy to the brink of collapse) and, as a result, social. The danger came from the urban areas: for many Soviet workers, already pushed by years of collapsing living standards and increasing workloads, the 'starvation rations' introduced in 1932 were simply too much. Mass discontent in the cities was given form by a wave of strikes across the USSR (almost unheard of in a country where striking was illegal) and even a worker uprising in the Ivanovo region. Soviet power was probably never as much under threat, in both urban and rural areas, as these years
This is simply a mix of unsubstantiated anti-socialist slander from William Hearst's tabloids and Robert Conquest's psi-ops stuff together with the complete disregard for the ongoing class struggle where it is somewhat less unsubstantiated. Sure, the living standards of the workers were still far from optimal, yet they definitely improved, compared to the pre-revolutionary times. The crisis of 1932 was, of course, quite severe, and the workers couldn't but feel it too, when people were really dying of starvation in the country, but that's still far from "the USSR was falling apart".

Could the economy collapse completely? Well, maybe it could. But you Stalin's detractors seem to forget just one little thing: in reality it didn't. In effect, what you guys say is this: Stalin should have anticipated the peasants' reluctance for collectivization, so he should have given up on building socialism in the Soviet Union. In a broader sense it means that counter-revolution should not be fought against, just because fighting it gets people killed.

.

Zulu

11th March 2012, 07:50

How old are you? 12?
Don't dodge the test. Type "TROTSKY WAS A PRICK".

If you can't do it, then you're a lousy worshiper yourself, and deal with it. And don't bother replying then, as I'm not interested in your preaching of Trotsky the Saint Martyr.

ComradeOm

11th March 2012, 11:38

What? Crop rotation was introduced for the first time in many areas with collectivization. Until that peasants usually simply had no other thing to seed than what grew there the previous year, and many had no idea of what the crop rotation was at allWell, no. Crop rotation was increasingly introduced during the 1920s (the zemleustroistvo campaign) and by 1928 over 90% of communes were, on paper at least, practising crop rotation (Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy). In many of those kolkhozy and sovkhozy , plus those that had been formed during the collectivisation drive, this practice of crop rotation was abandoned in the pursuit of ever larger sown areas (Davies, Years of Hunger). Oh those perfidious kulaks!

The whole idea behind the collective farms was that the cattle and other property was not being expropriated from the peasantsAnd that's exactly what happened. As I said earlier, initial policy was to seize livestock from the peasantry on entry to the kolkhoz. Which was a disaster and was reversed as part of the mini-reforms of 1932

On the contrary, I am pretty much denying the conspiracy here, and saying the resistance was spontaneous, massive and originated with the entire class of the rural bourgeoisie called the kulaks. Even after the "dekulakisation", the former kulaks kept spreading their dissent, and it was not sufficiently suppressed until the Great Terror of 1937. Like I said, class struggleNo, there is class struggle and there is the malign influence of shadowy wreckers. Where peasant resistance manifested itself it was in a refusal to hand over quotas, a reluctance to join collective farms, withdrawal from the market, occasional violence, etc,etc. The idea that the livestock crash was the product of bands of kulaks going around "slaughtering cattle" or that grain was deliberately being left to rot (in a time of famine) is fantasy

And the term "kulak", although not coming from the scientific vocabulary, but from the Russian folk tongue, does have class content: private exploiter of hired labor and/or means of production. I doubt you'd accept a "stalinist" definition, but here's what one Vladimir Lenin had to say about the kulaks:Actually, Lenin doesn't provide an explanation there either. Unless we're going to call "brutal, callous and savage exploiters" a Marxist definition. Which we're not

And I have no problem calling Lenin wrong on this one. In fact, I don't really need to. The abandonment of the Committees of the Village Poor policy in 1918, and ultimately the rapprochement of the NEP, is evidence that Lenin's analysis was wrong (in that he failed to grasp the magnitude of the changes that 1917 wrought on the peasantry). Kulak, post-revolution, became nothing but a slur

Really, if the kulaks were a prominent and as distinct as is suggested then you should have no trouble demonstrating this. And yet the largest group of "private exploiters of hired labour" and mechanised equipment were not those classified as kulaks but rather the serednyaki (Davies, Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union[/i]. Yet the definition used by the Soviet state, as I've previously noted, was hopelessly vague, estimates as to their numbers were plucked out of the air and even today, some several decades later, there is no firm definition that matches the reality. Face it: the term has no class content

Of course, just like I said, the kulaks agitated the broader and poorer masses of peasants. In their agitation they as often resorted to nationalist and anti-semitic rhetoric as to the private property instincts of the illiterate peasant masses. Hence the "podkulachniki" and the "choirboys". They were unfortunate victims of irrational agitation that ran counter to their objective interests, yet that does not make them any less of the enemies of socialism along with the genuine kulaks. In Nazi Germany many workers supported Hitler too, you know.I'm going to ignore the Hitler comparison (because it is stupid) but I will run with your logic. Here we have this small caste of rich peasants that are desperately exploiting the remainder of the peasantry and are hated for such. Conversely you have the Soviet government with its benign programme of collectivisation that will greatly improve the peasants' lives for the benefit of the whole country. Both those premises are bullshit but let's ignore that for now

Yet in this fantasy scenario, wicked kulaks and socialist state, the peasantry still overwhelmingly chose the former. Kulak agitation was apparently so powerful that they could make up for their minuscule numbers by recruiting vast numbers of ordinary peasants (the supposed natural allies of the Soviet state). Apparently their lies and slander were more powerful than the state's educational efforts, programme of forced collectivisation and mass deportation of the kulaks themselves. At which point do you start to suspect that the bonds of the peasant milieu were far stronger than supposed class divisions in it?

This is simply a mix of unsubstantiated anti-socialist slander from William Hearst's tabloids and Robert Conquest's psi-ops stuff together with the complete disregard for the ongoing class struggle where it is somewhat less unsubstantiatedI've got to wonder whether you guys go to some Stalinist school or something. I mean, who reads a Hearst tabloid these days? How many people on the street have even heard of him? Yet his name will live forever in regurgitated Stalinist insults

But you're new here so I'll give you a break. My sources are not Conquest and they're not early 20th C tabloids. Nor do I rely on quotes from MIA. In fact I referenced two historians from the revisionist (ie, anti-Conquest) school in my comments on this in my above post

Sure, the living standards of the workers were still far from optimal, yet they definitely improved, compared to the pre-revolutionary timesWhy are you comparing them to the Tsarist times? The Soviet Union did not go from 1916 to 1929. There's more than a decade missing there. Why would you skip over that? Oh wait...

... could it be because that intervening decade and a bit, despite the chaos of the Civil War, actually saw great improvements to the condition of the Soviet working class? Improvements of such a scale that the introduction of the Stalinist economy actually caused a collapse in living standards? Thus rendering any assertion that "living standards of the workers definitely improves"?

Let's cut the coy questions, the answer to all the above is: yes. When compared to the NEP, and indeed the Khrushchev era, Soviet living standards were dismal during the Stalin years. I'm not going to roll out the stats on real wages because the real topic at hand is 1932, and I can so easily ramble on this subject, but let me know if you want them and we'll do that. It is however, in the context of 'starvation rations', worth showing the decline in calorie consumption over this period of time

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v142/GreaterDCU/Misc/Calories.jpg

From Wheatcroft, The First 35 Years of Soviet Living Standards. Unfortunately the key period is missing, due to the temporary abolition of the statistical agency that collected the data, but you can use your imagination.

Could the economy collapse completely? Well, maybe it could. But you Stalin's detractors seem to forget just one little thing: in reality it didn't. In effect, what you guys say is this: Stalin should have anticipated the peasants' reluctance for collectivization, so he should have given up on building socialism in the Soviet Union. In a broader sense it means that counter-revolution should not be fought against, just because fighting it gets people killedOr, and this is a radical suggestion, he could have done something differently. Stalinist fallacy #147 is that there is no alternative. It's either Stalinism or the restoration of capitalism and who knows what else. Sure, a few million people died in the process but omelettes and whatnot

The reality of course is that there were myriad alternatives to the reckless and anti-worker Stalinist economic reforms. Unfortunately they were all deliberately silenced and in the absence of criticism the Stalinist elite drove the USSR to the brink of the abyss. That they simply hung there tottering before pulling back is no excuse for breakneck driving

Zulu

12th March 2012, 11:06

Well, no. Crop rotation was increasingly introduced during the 1920s (the zemleustroistvo campaign) and by 1928 over 90% of communes were, on paper at least, practising crop rotation (Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy). In many of those kolkhozy and sovkhozy , plus those that had been formed during the collectivisation drive, this practice of crop rotation was abandoned in the pursuit of ever larger sown areas (Davies, Years of Hunger). Oh those perfidious kulaks!

You seem to mean the traditional 2-field and 3-field rotation that had been practiced since the Middle Ages (but still not everywhere and not all the time in Russia). I mean the modern multi-culture science-based techniques. They were practically unheard of until the collectivization. Their introduction was faced with the additional problem of the uneven climatic and soil layout of the different parts of the Soviet Union, so a systemic approach was needed to implement them, which required an effective state leverage over the agriculture. Granted, in the turmoil of the 1st 5-year plan those techniques were still not introduced, but without the collectivization it would have remained impossible to begin introducing them even later in the 1930s.

And that's exactly what happened. As I said earlier, initial policy was to seize livestock from the peasantry on entry to the kolkhoz. Which was a disaster and was reversed as part of the mini-reforms of 1932

The peasants didn't have to give up their property completely, they only had to share it with the rest of the local peasant community. Do you understand the difference between "give up" and "share"? Well, the kulaks certainly didn't, or pretended they didn't, and were going around calling it "seizure".

No, there is class struggle and there is the malign influence of shadowy wreckers. Where peasant resistance manifested itself it was in a refusal to hand over quotas, a reluctance to join collective farms, withdrawal from the market, occasional violence, etc,etc. The idea that the livestock crash was the product of bands of kulaks going around "slaughtering cattle" or that grain was deliberately being left to rot (in a time of famine) is fantasy

The "shadowy wreckers" were not the main problem by far, although there were some "normal" criminal activity, of course. The main problem was that the kulaks were going around and spreading their anti-collectivization and anti-Soviet agitation, hostility and fear-mongering OPENLY and EN MASSE. All the party activists and OGPU operatives had to do was to ask peasants who had advised them to slaughter the cattle.

Actually, Lenin doesn't provide an explanation there either. Unless we're going to call "brutal, callous and savage exploiters" a Marxist definition. Which we're not
Yet it's clear he is acceptive of the term and even finds it applicable to other countries.

And I have no problem calling Lenin wrong on this one. In fact, I don't really need to. The abandonment of the Committees of the Village Poor policy in 1918, and ultimately the rapprochement of the NEP, is evidence that Lenin's analysis was wrong (in that he failed to grasp the magnitude of the changes that 1917 wrought on the peasantry). Kulak, post-revolution, became nothing but a slur
The NEP wasn't a rapprochement. It was a temporary retreat and respite, Lenin reiterated that on many occasions. Naturally, as the kulak affluence and exploitative habits rebounded during the years of free trade, Lenin's attitude towards them had to be re-applied.

Really, if the kulaks were a prominent and as distinct as is suggested then you should have no trouble demonstrating this. And yet the largest group of "private exploiters of hired labour" and mechanised equipment were not those classified as kulaks but rather the serednyaki (Davies, Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union[/i]. Yet the definition used by the Soviet state, as I've previously noted, was hopelessly vague, estimates as to their numbers were plucked out of the air and even today, some several decades later, there is no firm definition that matches the reality. Face it: the term has no class content
Slur or whatever, the application of it to the "serednyaki" only denotes their relative economic position among the rest of the peasantry. If anything, the "serednyaki" and the "one-plot" peasants were always considered a vacillating element by the Bolsheviks. It's true that Lenin, describing them as "not exploitative of the labor of others in any way", urged to seek their support for the Soviets, but it couldn't be tolerated if they sided with Denikin in the Civil War or with the kulaks during the collectivization. However, in 1932 over 1/5 of the total sown land was still worked by the "one-plot" peasants, which means that they were practically untouched at that point by the collectivization.

Yet in this fantasy scenario, wicked kulaks and socialist state, the peasantry still overwhelmingly chose the former. Kulak agitation was apparently so powerful that they could make up for their minuscule numbers by recruiting vast numbers of ordinary peasants (the supposed natural allies of the Soviet state). Apparently their lies and slander were more powerful than the state's educational efforts, programme of forced collectivisation and mass deportation of the kulaks themselves. At which point do you start to suspect that the bonds of the peasant milieu were far stronger than supposed class divisions in it?
Yeah, this "milieu" word is spot on. Although the kulaks didn't have to "recruit" anybody, because starting another open civil war was not on their agenda (at least not immediately). They agitated for what may be called "passive resistance": don't enter the kolkhozes, don't comply with the plan, hide your grain so they couldn't take it from you, slaughter your cattle so you could at least sell the meat, don't listen to those Jews with satanic stars on their caps, hold out, fellow Christians, for just a few years and it will be over for them, and we shall live in a fairy tale finally!

I've got to wonder whether you guys go to some Stalinist school or something. I mean, who reads a Hearst tabloid these days? How many people on the street have even heard of him? Yet his name will live forever in regurgitated Stalinist insults.

First of all, I'm not a Stalinist, and although Hearst's name has been dimming into the abyss of history, his slander persists, which requires to identify its original source every time it's being brought up again. Because the fact that "people in the street" never heard of him makes it look as if his hired muckrakers' fantasies were some kind of a universal axiomatic truth, which is quite the opposite of what they really are. Conquest at least has lived to be faced with the facts and had to retract the most notorious of his slanderous assertions - not that the bourgeois politicians give a damn as they find it more useful to stick to his old bullcrap.

But you're new here so I'll give you a break. My sources are not Conquest and they're not early 20th C tabloids. Nor do I rely on quotes from MIA. In fact I referenced two historians from the revisionist (ie, anti-Conquest) school in my comments on this in my above post
Yeah, I noticed. And it's funny how bringing up the actual papers from the "KGB archives" is now called "revisionist" because they do not corroborate the "Stalin killed 100 million people singlehandedly" views. And while it is commendable that Davies and Wheatcroft choose to stick to basic scientific decency, it's clear that they are still quite presumptuous when it comes to commenting on those documents and statistic.

And I must specifically admit ignorance of the "worker uprising in the Ivanovo region". Everybody heard of how the workers in Novocherkassk rebelled against supposedly benign Khrushchev in 1962, so one would guess a workers' revolt against evil Stalin would be a common knowledge if that had any substance...

Why are you comparing them to the Tsarist times? The Soviet Union did not go from 1916 to 1929. There's more than a decade missing there. Why would you skip over that? Oh wait...

... could it be because that intervening decade and a bit, despite the chaos of the Civil War, actually saw great improvements to the condition of the Soviet working class? Improvements of such a scale that the introduction of the Stalinist economy actually caused a collapse in living standards? Thus rendering any assertion that "living standards of the workers definitely improves"?

Let's cut the coy questions, the answer to all the above is: yes. When compared to the NEP, and indeed the Khrushchev era, Soviet living standards were dismal during the Stalin years. I'm not going to roll out the stats on real wages because the real topic at hand is 1932, and I can so easily ramble on this subject, but let me know if you want them and we'll do that. It is however, in the context of 'starvation rations', worth showing the decline in calorie consumption over this period of time

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v142/GreaterDCU/Misc/Calories.jpg

From Wheatcroft, The First 35 Years of Soviet Living Standards. Unfortunately the key period is missing, due to the temporary abolition of the statistical agency that collected the data, but you can use your imagination.

I imagine it was an abrupt collapse at the end of the missing period. You see, poor storage conditions in the hiding places got that grain infected with fungi and other diseases, so the crops were poorer the next year... The effects of the "passive resistance" began stacking up during the 1927/28 collection campaign already, prompting the forced collectivization and then administrative bureaucratic turmoil, and then even more resistance... You see this whole Holodomor thing should really be used as a case study in some mass psychology courses as an example of how fear-mongering makes the fears materialize. Then the droughts hit in 1931 and 1932, and it all came to a crash.

And the diagram shows a positive dynamic in the calorie consumption after the crash, similar to (and proportionately greater than) that of the NEP years. Obviously it didn't return to the pre-collectivization levels in the 1930s, but here comes out the true objective of the collectivization. It was not to improve life in the USSR right away and by itself. It was to use the export of grain and urban migration of the peasants for the purposes of industrialization, without which advanced socialism was unattainable by definition. And yes, btw, since the workers ate more than the peasants and the urbanization rate began to rapidly rise during the post-famine years, the actual average calorie consumption in the USSR was rising even faster than it appears from this diagram).

And anyway I was comparing the entire post-revolutionary period to the Tsarist times. And you can't judge on the quality of life just by the calorie consumption (or real wage for that matter), since we're talking socialist construction here. You have to account also for the access to the "public consumption". And even as the calorie consumption diminished, the workers were constantly gaining access to better healthcare, better education (esp. for their children), better housing, better leisure (entertainment, mass sports, etc). All that was growing rapidly in the late 30s, even though the average calorie consumption grew slowly and labor discipline and plan grew stricter.

And let's not forget that on the global level the capitalist economy and standards of living weren't seeing especially good times in the 1930s either.

Or, and this is a radical suggestion, he could have done something differently. Stalinist fallacy #147 is that there is no alternative. It's either Stalinism or the restoration of capitalism and who knows what else. Sure, a few million people died in the process but omelettes and whatnot

And you anti-stalinists adhere to the rules ## 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 19, 30 and several others of the 40-rule Guide to anti-communism (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/07/28/40-helpful-tips-for-anti-communists/), only you target Stalin specifically where the openly bourgeois propagandists would target communism in general. Collectivization, famine - it's all Stalin's fault. Purges, executions, Gulag - Stalin's fault. Yes, Stalin was a powerful dictator, but he was neither omniscient, nor omnipotent and always had to rely on other people to do stuff. He made his mistakes, but not every mistake in the Soviet Union was his.

But notice how even your Wheatcroft blames some Rykov, Tomsky and Bukharin for the deterioration of Soviet statistics and planning failures during the 1st 5-year plan (here (http://www.melgrosh.unimelb.edu.au/documents/Sov_nutrition_mortality_famine.pdf), pp. 8-9). John Littlepage, who was an American contractor in the USSR, recalled in his book "In search of the Soviet Gold" how he personally witnessed another "Old Bolshevik" Pyatakov commit acts that could range anywhere between gross incompetence, criminal negligence and deliberate sabotage when purchasing industrial equipment in Germany (for that hard collected grain paid for in human lives in effect). Yet later, after all those types were executed as public enemies they somehow became "innocent victims" of Stalin's paranoia.

The reality of course is that there were myriad alternatives to the reckless and anti-worker Stalinist economic reforms. Unfortunately they were all deliberately silenced and in the absence of criticism the Stalinist elite drove the USSR to the brink of the abyss. That they simply hung there tottering before pulling back is no excuse for breakneck driving

The reality, which neither Wheatcroft, nor you seem to understand, that what was happening in the USSR throughout 1929-53 was a continuous socialist revolutionary struggle. Making people fully happy there and then was impossible, until the "second side" of the problem the "socialism in one country" could be resolved. Namely, the capitalist encirclement. Khrushchev gave up on that struggle. He said: enough with the revolution, let's be making people happy. Well, that didn't work out either for the world revolution or the USSR.

.

andyx1205

15th March 2012, 22:02

forced collectivization is everything against what Marx wanted.

A Marxist Historian

16th March 2012, 02:18

If such cases I think it's always best to play a game called 'What is more likely?'

Is it likely that the abysmal quality of sowings (to take one example) in 1931-32 was the product of small bands of kulaks and kulak sympathisers, some two years after the main dekulakisation drive, covertly stealing into fields across the USSR and conducting 'wrecking' operations?

Or is it more likely that the collapse in quality was related to the pressures from the very top for increased sown areas? A drive that led to the abandonment of crop rotation in many regions and greatly reduced yields as vast areas of unsuitable land were sown simply to meet official targets

We could try the same exercise with the livestock collapse:

Is it likely that the primary cause of the plummeting levels of livestock in the USSR was covert bands of kulaks creeping through villages at night slaughtering their neighbours' livestock?

Or is it more likely that peasants began to kill their own livestock because they could not afford to feed them or because they, rightly, feared that they would be confiscated on entry to the new collective farms (and therefore valued their meat more). And is it really likely that kulaks were behind the shockingly high mortality rate of livestock that had been collectivised within the kolkhozy?

You see, you talk of class struggle when your analysis is actually quite un-Marxist. If you answered yes to the first option in either of the two above questions then you are substituting the conspiratorial action of secret 'wreckers' for an actual material analysis of the economic and social conditions of collectivisation. You are ascribing to concious human conspirators what is much better explained by an analysis of the impact of Soviet agricultural and economic policy

But then that's the corner that you've backed yourself into by accepting a fictional categorisation of peasants. Far from being a "rural bourgeoisie", there is no acceptable Marxist definition of a kulak (post-1917 anyways). The term has no class content. I'm going to pause here and let you disprove that

Right. When you accept that 'kulak' was nothing more than a fuzzy slur thrown at opponents of Soviet power then the rest of Stalinist agricultural policy appears empty. Far from aligning itself with the poor and middle peasants against a small caste of kulaks, Soviet policy was arrayed against the peasantry as a whole. The destruction of the mir, the coercive corralling into new collective farms, imposition of grain quotas at unfavourable prices, etc, etc... these were not just the concern of a tiny and distinct case but rather impacted, typically unfavourably, most peasants. The destruction of individual farming and the imposition of Stalin's tribute affected the peasantry as a whole

Hence the use of terms such as little kulaks (kulachniki) and sub-kulaks (podkulachniki), as well as 'ideological kulaks' and 'kulak choirboys', to characterise resistance that was obviously not based on a narrow "rural bourgeoisie". There was class struggle here but it was not being waged against some rural elite

Again, Stalinists can only think politically. The danger of 1932-33 was both economic (ie, the degree to which critical shortages brought the entire economy to the brink of collapse) and, as a result, social. The danger came from the urban areas: for many Soviet workers, already pushed by years of collapsing living standards and increasing workloads, the 'starvation rations' introduced in 1932 were simply too much. Mass discontent in the cities was given form by a wave of strikes across the USSR (almost unheard of in a country where striking was illegal) and even a worker uprising in the Ivanovo region. Soviet power was probably never as much under threat, in both urban and rural areas, as these years

Or do you really think that a famine which claims millions would have no broader impact?

I love this. Not the book, which I've not read, but the cloying need to display some credentials by noting a random book that I'm fairly sure that dodger has not read. Or if he has then I'd expect more than the synopsis and a review from the book's Amazon page :lol:

But then Stalinists do this a lot; bigging up random authors whose research supposedly supports their case. When I first saw references to Getty thrown around on RevLeft I thought that this guy must have proven the correctness of Stalin's actions or the like. Instead he's actually highly critical of the purges and Stalin, and only appears moderate in the context of Conquest. Getty's works in no way support the Stalinist case and it quickly became clear that most of those throwing his name around had never actually read him. I've had people sneeringly point me towards the very Getty papers that I was using to undermine their arguments!

Stalinists seem to struggle with the concept that someone can write a book that isn't virulently hostile on an aspect of Soviet history (say, the 25,000ers) without endorsing Stalinism. I've no doubt that Viola's work is a competent monograph on a particular component of the Soviet elite at the time. The 1990s saw a lot of that and, while of significant historical interest, it is pretty old hat. A lot of the focus that the Party or the cultural elite received was due to the accessibility of sources when the archives were first opened. Now the emphasis on research (such as Rossman and Murphy) tends to be on those ordinary citizens who weren't part of the Soviet elite and who perceived Soviet power very differently from those who were

Much of the above posting is correct. And for a Stalin advocate to quote Lynne Viola is rather hilarious. Because in her next book, she did a total flip flop. "Peasant Rebels Under Stalin," which I have read (only glanced through her earlier book) is one long panegyric to the marvelous popular revolt against collectivization by, allegedly, the entire Russian peasantry.

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryWorld/RussiaFormerSovietUnion/?view=usa&ci=9780195131048

I mention the book advisedly, as it is the best, albeit unintentional, refutation of Comrade Om's notion that there was no such thing as a kulak. Many of the fascinating original documents she uncovered of the peasant rebellions against collectivization are, obviously, kulak documents.

(Actually, come to think of it, maybe not unintentional. Maybe she thought this was the only safe way to slip in her original conceptions by the back door, and still get tenure...)

Far from representing a differentiated classless revolt, these documents drip with class hatred of the thieving poor peasantry, who, according to the peasant rebels, supported collectivization so that they could steal the fruits of the honest toil of peasants like themselves! (And also hatred of Jews, factory workers and other communists, naturally.)

Whether and to what degree the Soviet peasantry should be seen as differentiated into clear economic classes, kulak, serednyak and bednyak, or not, was a major subject of theoretical dispute and argument between the left, Trotskyist wing of the Soviet CP and the right, Bukharinist wing. With Trotskyists arguing that this was the case, and Bukharinists disagreeing. And the argument was ended by the Stalinists, with first the Bukharinists and then the Trotskyists ending up dead.

The truth of the matter is that this is kind of like the argument over whether a glass is half empty or half full. Class differentiation was a rapidly developing process, which the CPUSSR at the height of NEP encouraging this, with Bukharin's famous line "peasants, enrich yourself."

Moshe Lewin is the great source of the argument, which Comrade Om echoes, that Bukharin was right and Trotsky and the other leftists wrong. He is a good enough historian, if you read his work, to acknowledge that there are arguments on both sides.

And supporting the Bukharin side of the argument was natural on his part, as an explicit admirer of Bukharin and Bukharin's latter-day exemplar, Mikhail Gorbachev.

His epigones, like Comrade Om and Lynne Viola (one of Lewin's students) in her second post Soviet collapse incarnation, oversimplify.

By the way, the 25,000'ers were in no way part of the Soviet elite. They were rank and file factory workers, who, like most workers in the USSR, supported collectivization and, rightly or wrongly, blamed greedy rich peasants not the Soviet bureaucracy for the rising food prices and food shortages. And volunteered to go out into the countryside to fight the kulak menace and enforce collectivization.

Though when collectivization created outright famine, many of them became seriously disaffected, which has a lot to do with the working class rebellions in 1932 that Rossman etc. describe--and of course the explosion of internal dissent in the party in 1932, which went all the way up to the very top, with Stalin's wife committing suicide and the Left Opposition re-emerging.

Which all came to an abrupt end when Hitler seized power, creating a powerful defensive reaction with the Soviet working class and even many oppositionists wanting to rally 'round the party, Stalin or no Stalin.

-M.H.-

Zulu

16th March 2012, 14:57

And the argument was ended by the Stalinists, with first the Bukharinists and then the Trotskyists ending up dead.

They ended up dead together and much later. After the collectivization disputes they were only purged (and the Trotskyists and leftists were first, obviously). But many of them were even readmitted later into the party. And they only used that to resume their opposition and anti-Stalin agitation.

Amal

16th March 2012, 18:38

Zulu

16th March 2012, 23:24

I just want to understand one thing. Whether "collectivization" in itself doomed to be failed due to scientific reasons or not. So far, what I have understood is that the basic reason behind collectivization to make big plots of land and use of modern machinery for industrialization of agriculture and increase in productivity. Isn't something "Evil" inherently. And who were opposing that? peasants i.e. petty-bourgeoisie. In proper sense, the Russian peasantry is so backward at that time that I have doubt to apply any modern terminology to them. The kolkhozs's and sovkhoz's existed even after 1931 and what was the output of them at that time. Did they had less productivity than small plot of lands farmed by small, individual farmers with much less sophisticated tools?
I hope that I will get a proper answer to that instead of slandering and Stalin bashing.

Collectivization is doomed to be resisted by those collectivized, proportionately to the amount of property being collecitvized.

Initially the kolkhoz's and sovkoz's had slightly smaller productivity per acre than the "one-plot" peasants (which could be only the result of them remaining mostly in more fertile areas though), but after they gained access to the machinery, they gained, of course, bigger productivity and most of the remaining "one-plot" farms were gradually also collectivized (in the course of the 2nd and the 3rd 5-year plans).

There were things peripheral to collectivization that affected the productivity negatively (Lysenkoism and its effects on agriculture, Khrushchev's campaign to introduce maize everywhere).

And again, to fully understand the historical meaning of collectivization in the USSR you have to keep in mind that it was closely tied with the tasks of industrialization in two main ways: (1) the state needed foreign currency, and the export of grain was one of the main sources of it, and (2) it also needed urban migration of a portion of peasants to man the rapidly growing industry.

A Marxist Historian

17th March 2012, 04:06

I just want to understand one thing. Whether "collectivization" in itself doomed to be failed due to scientific reasons or not. So far, what I have understood is that the basic reason behind collectivization to make big plots of land and use of modern machinery for industrialization of agriculture and increase in productivity. Isn't something "Evil" inherently. And who were opposing that? peasants i.e. petty-bourgeoisie. In proper sense, the Russian peasantry is so backward at that time that I have doubt to apply any modern terminology to them. The kolkhozs's and sovkhoz's existed even after 1931 and what was the output of them at that time. Did they had less productivity than small plot of lands farmed by small, individual farmers with much less sophisticated tools?
I hope that I will get a proper answer to that instead of slandering and Stalin bashing.

A simple question with a simple answer.

Yes of course, large scale farming with tractors is much more efficient than small scale farming with horse-drawn wooden ploughs. And Soviet peasants, by the way, understood that perfectly, whether poor, middle or kulaks.

Unfortunately, Stalin's bright idea was to collectivize first, and then provide tractors later! The first Soviet tractors came off the fresh-built assembly lines only a year or so *after* "complete collectivization had been proclaimed! And for the first year or so after that, they were crap, falling apart almost as soon as they hit the fields.

Once decent tractors were widely available, by the late '30s, peasants began to accept collectivization, and after Khrushchev knocked the previously pretty exploitative tax levels on the collectives down to something reasonable, they became pro collectivization, and objected when Yeltsin and Putin decollectivized the countryside.

-M.H.-

Zulu

17th March 2012, 04:55

Stalin's bright idea

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about:

to fully understand the historical meaning of collectivization in the USSR you have to keep in mind that it was closely tied with the tasks of industrialization in two main ways: (1) the state needed foreign currency, and the export of grain was one of the main sources of it, and (2) it also needed urban migration of a portion of peasants to man the rapidly growing industry.

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

17th March 2012, 07:48

Why did the Soviet bureaucrats initiate collectivisation, which resulted in mass death? Why didn't they create incentives for peasants to collectivise instead of using force? Did the material conditions force it?

Well we know that the peasantry is a weak spot in the marxist tradition (and i guess theory...) and we also know that the Bolsheviks were very authoritarian and did not like incalculable deviations. Obviously (at least for marxists) the peasantry is not such a revolutionary class as the proletariat, especially workers of industry. But, i believe anarchist revolution in Spain did do a good job of building a revolutionary front of the peasantry, collectivising was done not by the gun but by enthusiasm for self-determination. Of course it could have been done differently in the USSR but all in all the material conditions in such a backward country did pose a high threat for sectarian and counterrevolutionary threats (that the Bolsheviks did maneuver the difficult road of industrialisation, skillfully); THIS is why i always argue for the Left to be ONE United Front, working together in what we know best. Marxists with the proletariat, anarchists with the peasantry, Leninists with the politics. Why can we not do this?

Amal

17th March 2012, 15:00

A simple question with a simple answer.

Yes of course, large scale farming with tractors is much more efficient than small scale farming with horse-drawn wooden ploughs. And Soviet peasants, by the way, understood that perfectly, whether poor, middle or kulaks.

Unfortunately, Stalin's bright idea was to collectivize first, and then provide tractors later! The first Soviet tractors came off the fresh-built assembly lines only a year or so *after* "complete collectivization had been proclaimed! And for the first year or so after that, they were crap, falling apart almost as soon as they hit the fields.

Once decent tractors were widely available, by the late '30s, peasants began to accept collectivization, and after Khrushchev knocked the previously pretty exploitative tax levels on the collectives down to something reasonable, they became pro collectivization, and objected when Yeltsin and Putin decollectivized the countryside.

-M.H.-
Well, in that case I want to say that he followed Lenin's ideas in this regard. Lenin advocated accumulation of land and as per him "it will take just 3 horses and instruments to plough the same plot of land together while it will take 10 horses if it was divided into small plots". So, as per him, even with old "horse-drawn wooden ploughs", the productivity of the process would be three times if the plot is accumulated.
And as per you, peasants wouldn't object collectivization if they have modern machinery available. But the real experience of my own country, India, just tells the opposite. Here you can find small plot of lands still being by modern machinery like tractor, power tillers. I have personally talked with peasants on a regular conversation and put the idea of a "collective farm" before him and asked him "whether it's possible or not". He shook his head strongly in disagreement and asked me whether I am ready to share my personal property with others and even asked me whether I am ready to share my wife with others for "better productivity". Though that's my personal experience, but still large collective farming even in cooperative method isn't accepted here. In short, my own life experience contradicts your theory. Can you show some light?

Amal

17th March 2012, 15:31

Well we know that the peasantry is a weak spot in the marxist tradition (and i guess theory...) and we also know that the Bolsheviks were very authoritarian and did not like incalculable deviations. Obviously (at least for marxists) the peasantry is not such a revolutionary class as the proletariat, especially workers of industry. But, i believe anarchist revolution in Spain did do a good job of building a revolutionary front of the peasantry, collectivising was done not by the gun but by enthusiasm for self-determination. Of course it could have been done differently in the USSR but all in all the material conditions in such a backward country did pose a high threat for sectarian and counterrevolutionary threats (that the Bolsheviks did maneuver the difficult road of industrialisation, skillfully); THIS is why i always argue for the Left to be ONE United Front, working together in what we know best. Marxists with the proletariat, anarchists with the peasantry, Leninists with the politics. Why can we not do this?
So far, the issue of peasants has been well discussed in Marxism and what you are doing is just "questioning for questionings sake". After all, I strongly believe that peasants and workers are two totally different classes and there are matters of dispute between those classes. Peasantry is standing on "personal property" i.e. private ownership of land as means of production here and while till today, the main motto of workers are to socialize all means of production. And after revolution, this can't be just an ideological issue, but matter of productivity and progress as the private ownership of land is clearly a barrier in the way of production. In short, how can you nationalize land and means of agriculture for better production and productivity without going against the peasantry.
Once I have debated with some anarchists regarding "whether anarchy is the ideology of workers or petty-bourgeoisie i.e. peasants". Now, as you have clearly mentioned that you (and probably other anarchists like you) oppose the "classical Marxist view towards peasantry", then kindly explain how you can hold the class interest of peasantry and workers together in the question of nationalization of land and agriculture.
I am also requesting you to not just posting threads in sites, but instead go to various places of the world where peasantry is the majority of population and how some good example of "enthusiasm for self-determination" and prove that collectivization can be done peasantry themselves by self-determination. So far, I am thinking, if the model invented in Spain is so good, why it isn't followed in the rest of the world. After all, it can be practiced even today as this is based on "self-determination".

daft punk

18th March 2012, 18:57

So far, the issue of peasants has been well discussed in Marxism and what you are doing is just "questioning for questionings sake". After all, I strongly believe that peasants and workers are two totally different classes and there are matters of dispute between those classes. Peasantry is standing on "personal property" i.e. private ownership of land as means of production here and while till today, the main motto of workers are to socialize all means of production. And after revolution, this can't be just an ideological issue, but matter of productivity and progress as the private ownership of land is clearly a barrier in the way of production. In short, how can you nationalize land and means of agriculture for better production and productivity without going against the peasantry.
Once I have debated with some anarchists regarding "whether anarchy is the ideology of workers or petty-bourgeoisie i.e. peasants". Now, as you have clearly mentioned that you (and probably other anarchists like you) oppose the "classical Marxist view towards peasantry", then kindly explain how you can hold the class interest of peasantry and workers together in the question of nationalization of land and agriculture.
I am also requesting you to not just posting threads in sites, but instead go to various places of the world where peasantry is the majority of population and how some good example of "enthusiasm for self-determination" and prove that collectivization can be done peasantry themselves by self-determination. So far, I am thinking, if the model invented in Spain is so good, why it isn't followed in the rest of the world. After all, it can be practiced even today as this is based on "self-determination".

See my thread on Platform of the Opposition, and my early posts in this thread. Basically Lenin and Trotsky wanted to subsidise cooperatives for the poor peasants, but Stalin wanted to look after the wealthy ones instead.

A Marxist Historian

18th March 2012, 21:49

Well, in that case I want to say that he followed Lenin's ideas in this regard. Lenin advocated accumulation of land and as per him "it will take just 3 horses and instruments to plough the same plot of land together while it will take 10 horses if it was divided into small plots". So, as per him, even with old "horse-drawn wooden ploughs", the productivity of the process would be three times if the plot is accumulated.
And as per you, peasants wouldn't object collectivization if they have modern machinery available. But the real experience of my own country, India, just tells the opposite. Here you can find small plot of lands still being by modern machinery like tractor, power tillers. I have personally talked with peasants on a regular conversation and put the idea of a "collective farm" before him and asked him "whether it's possible or not". He shook his head strongly in disagreement and asked me whether I am ready to share my personal property with others and even asked me whether I am ready to share my wife with others for "better productivity". Though that's my personal experience, but still large collective farming even in cooperative method isn't accepted here. In short, my own life experience contradicts your theory. Can you show some light?

Could land be more efficiently farmed on a large scale even with horses and ploughs? Poissibly, but overcoming peasant skepticism becomes much more difficult. Indeed, some agricultural experts claim that small-scale farming can be more efficient, which seems very plausible at low technological levels.

As for Lenin, he firmly opposed pushing for collectivization in his lifetime, he was of course the originator of the NEP. What is more, he wrote quite aggressively against any notions of compulsory collectivization, which ultraleftists were pushing even during his lifetime.

As to why peasants in India oppose collectivization, even with machinery, firstly in India you have plenty of machinery already, it is not a question of the horse and plough on the one hand and government-sponsored agricultural progress on the other.

And secondly, as Marx and others discuss, you had the tradition of the "mir" in Russia, with land actually not owned by individual peasants but by the village community, so agricultural collectivism fit peasant traditions better in Russia than they do in modern India.

Indeed the nationalization of the land in the Soviet Union was the result of agricultural revolution. From 1917 until quite recently, there was no private ownership of land. Which is not at all the same thing as collectivization, as nationalisation of the land actually facilitates capitalist agriculture just as much as collective, by removing the landlord and rent from the equation, so that the agribusinessman or kulak does not have to share his profits with a third party.

-M.H.-

Amal

19th March 2012, 02:02

Could land be more efficiently farmed on a large scale even with horses and ploughs? Poissibly, but overcoming peasant skepticism becomes much more difficult. Indeed, some agricultural experts claim that small-scale farming can be more efficient, which seems very plausible at low technological levels.
Most of them I know talk this about environmental point of view, not from productivity. Whatsoever, that too is debatable as they said that environment friendly agriculture is NOT possible with in industrial scale agricultural production and I am NOT ready to agree with that. Whatsoever, that's a different matter. But it least it can be said that it is NOT true regarding productivity of labor by any means.

As for Lenin, he firmly opposed pushing for collectivization in his lifetime, he was of course the originator of the NEP. What is more, he wrote quite aggressively against any notions of compulsory collectivization, which ultraleftists were pushing even during his lifetime.
Any source?

As to why peasants in India oppose collectivization, even with machinery, firstly in India you have plenty of machinery already, it is not a question of the horse and plough on the one hand and government-sponsored agricultural progress on the other.
Then at least you will agree that government sponsored agricultural process i.e. has played a great role here.

And secondly, as Marx and others discuss, you had the tradition of the "mir" in Russia, with land actually not owned by individual peasants but by the village community, so agricultural collectivism fit peasant traditions better in Russia than they do in modern India.
"Mir" like traditions aren't unique to Russia only and even today, it can be seen in aboriginal peoples i.e. adivasi areas. And use of tractor and other modern machinery has been started in the 60's in India when such kind of tradition is more widespread in India. Then why such program wasn't successful here. It's not a fact that such kind of attempts has not been taken here, but that was very weak and with little or no government support.

Indeed the nationalization of the land in the Soviet Union was the result of agricultural revolution. From 1917 until quite recently, there was no private ownership of land. Which is not at all the same thing as collectivization, as nationalisation of the land actually facilitates capitalist agriculture just as much as collective, by removing the landlord and rent from the equation, so that the agribusinessman or kulak does not have to share his profits with a third party.

-M.H.-
If so, why peasants resisted collectivization still if the nationalization facilitates growth of capitalism and it can be guessed that means introduction of good modern machinery to agriculture. Otherwise, growth of capitalism is a totally vague term and useless.

A Marxist Historian

19th March 2012, 21:18

Most of them I know talk this about environmental point of view, not from productivity. Whatsoever, that too is debatable as they said that environment friendly agriculture is NOT possible with in industrial scale agricultural production and I am NOT ready to agree with that. Whatsoever, that's a different matter. But it least it can be said that it is NOT true regarding productivity of labor by any means.

I am not a great agricultural expert, but I do know that in America at least, there are a number of agronomists who claim that small scale "truck farming" can be more efficient than big farms. I'm a bit skeptical about this myself, given that it is the big farms in the Central Valley of California that are the "OPEC of food," and dominate American and indeed world agriculture, not Wisconsin dairy farms. But I do know such claims are made.

Any source?

Just look at any of Lenin's writings from the last couple years of his life, all posted on MIA and easily available. That collectivization, not just in agriculture but in the cities too, could only be voluntary and gradual was one of the main themes of his writings in 1921 and 1922 and 1923, it runs through many of them like a red thread.

Just for one example, his famous article "On Cooperation," which explains his concept of how, under workers rule, capitalist peasant farming could be gradually transformed into socialist collectivism through a slow, voluntary process.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm

Then at least you will agree that government sponsored agricultural process i.e. has played a great role here.

"Mir" like traditions aren't unique to Russia only and even today, it can be seen in aboriginal peoples i.e. adivasi areas. And use of tractor and other modern machinery has been started in the 60's in India when such kind of tradition is more widespread in India. Then why such program wasn't successful here. It's not a fact that such kind of attempts has not been taken here, but that was very weak and with little or no government support.

How could it be anything else, with a bourgeois regime in India?

In China, where you had a peasant revolution not a workers revolution, collectivization was actually quite popular, and peasants have fiercely opposed the partial decollectivization of agriculture for the benefit of greedy businessmen and bureaucrats by the Chinese Bukharins.

But in a country like India, where the Indian bourgeoisie has always been in command (with or without Stalinist government ministers as in West Bengal), it would be surprising if peasant sentiment for collectivization would be very strong, as peasants are by their class nature would-be capitalist farmers. The pettiest of the petty bourgeoisie.

If so, why peasants resisted collectivization still if the nationalization facilitates growth of capitalism and it can be guessed that means introduction of good modern machinery to agriculture. Otherwise, growth of capitalism is a totally vague term and useless.

Nationalizing the land facilitates economic growth in the countryside by removing the landlord from the equation. But it abolishes rent not profit, and can be the basis for either capitalist or socialist development.

The peasants resisted collectivization because of the ineptitude, hastiness and blunders of Stalin and his followers. Given that Russian peasants had participated in a vast popular revolution, and were not nearly as committed to private property as farmers elsewhere, if proper agricultural machinery and proper political leadership were available, they would likely have welcomed a slow, gradual, sensible course of collectivization, regulated by the material possibilities, especially the availability of tractors.

Like the one Lenin advocated in the article I provided a link to, shortly before he died.

-M.H.-