Soviet Agricultural Reform Under Brezhnev

[seventeethdecember2016]

I've read that Brezhnev's government allowed some privatization of collective farms. It also said that these farms made up 3% of the collectives, yet they produced 40% of what was yielded in the Soviet Union. Is this authentic? Is this also an issue with collectives?

[Die Neue Zeit]

The agricultural reforms under Brezhnev were threefold:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/cccp-ag-brezhnev.htm

1) Minimum wages, pensions, and other benefits introduced for producers in the kolkhozy (1965)
2) Sovkhozy becoming self-financed entities (1967)
3) More incentives for producing in private plots (less regulation but especially more state support re. using state materials for private plot production)

[eric922]

The agricultural reforms under Brezhnev were threefold:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/cccp-ag-brezhnev.htm

1) Minimum wages, pensions, and other benefits introduced for producers in the kolkhozy (1965)
2) Sovkhozy becoming self-financed entities (1967)
3) More incentives for producing in private plots (less regulation but especially more state support re. using state materials for private plot production)
The 3rd one seems to be the most important. With use of state materials for private plot growth, it isn't too surprising that they did well.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ The whole propaganda and productivity problem could have been avoided if the Stalin regime pursued full-scale sovkhoz-ization.

[Comrade Jandar]

This is some esoteric shit.

[seventeethdecember2016]

^^^ The whole propaganda and productivity problem could have been avoided if the Stalin regime pursued full-scale sovkhoz-ization.
Stalin actually suggested that in Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Stalin actually suggested that in Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.

No he didn't. He suggested just getting rid of the private plots and have the collective farms trade in kind. That is consistent with his inconsistency on the subject, from the late 1920s debate to the opportunity not seized right after WWII for public sector wage relations in agriculture (sovkhoz-ization):

http://www.revleft.com/vb/defense-trotsky-s-t156790/index.html?p=2157302


Stalin and co. didn't need to send in the NKVD and say, "These farms are now state property, dear peasants!" Historically the First Five-Year Plan was characterized by, among other things, high inflation (related to the artificial depression of real wages that I have a major beef with). The regime could simply have used eminent domain [for the sovkhoz-ization drive] and given printed money to the peasants as "compensation" for their farm property.

Work could then have begun on reconsolidating former landlord estates into sovkhozy, and on consolidating other non-sovkhoz estates into sovkhozy. Red directors could then be installed to oversee both the explicit atmosphere of labour discipline and rising labour productivity (possibly enough to minimize or eliminate the artificial depression of real wages of the urban workers, the non-farm rural workers, and the new farm workers) way before the time of the model Gorodets state farm... and construction materials plant!

[People learn new things everyday, by the way, in regards to the industrial combination in that last statement.]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/kolkhoz-and-sovkhoz-t171068/index.html?p=2435846


Leaving aside our mutual opposition to piecework, didn't Stalin and co. introduce "socialist piecework" garbage in the countryside as well as in the factories? That shifts business risk back onto the immediate producer.

For all the barbarity, sovkhozy plus "socialist piecework" would have been a far better alternative to the kolkhozy bumblings.

[seventeethdecember2016]

Today there are two basic forms of socialist production in our country: state, or publicly-owned production, and collective-farm production, which cannot be said to be publicly owned. In the state enterprises, the means of production and the product of production are national property. In the collective farm, although the means of production (land, machines) do belong to the state, the product of production is the property of the different collective farms, since the labour, as well as the seed, is their own, while the land, which has been turned over to the collective farms in perpetual tenure, is used by them virtually as their own property, in spite of the fact that they cannot sell, buy, lease or mortgage it.
The effect of this is that the state disposes only of the product of the state enterprises, while the product of the collective farms, being their property, is disposed of only by them. But the collective farms are unwilling to alienate their products except in the form of commodities, in exchange for which they desire to receive the commodities they need. At present the collective farms will not recognize any other economic relation with the town except the commodity relation - exchange through purchase and sale. Because of this, commodity production and trade are as much a necessity with us today as they were, say, thirty years ago, when Lenin spoke of the necessity of developing trade to the utmost.
Of course, when instead of the two basic production sectors, the state sector and the collective-farm sector, there will be only one all-embracing production sector, with the right to dispose of all the consumer goods produced in the country, commodity circulation, with its "money economy," will disappear, as being an unnecessary element in the national economy. But so long as this is not the case, so long as the two basic production sectors remain, commodity production and commodity circulation must remain in force, as a necessary and very useful element in our system of national economy. How the formation of a single and united sector will come about, whether simply by the swallowing up of the collective-farm sector by the state sector - which is hardly likely (because that would be looked upon as the expropriation of the collective farms) - or by the setting up of a single national economic body (comprising representatives of state industry and of the collective farms), with the right at first to keep account of all consumer product in the country, and eventually also to distribute it, by way, say, of products-exchange - is a special question which requires separate discussion.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch03.htm

[Die Neue Zeit]

Yeah, Stalin wrote "the swallowing up of the collective-farm sector by the state sector - which is hardly likely." That isn't exactly an endorsement of full-blown sovkhoz-ization, is it?

[seventeethdecember2016]

Perhaps not, but he did call for the unification of the state and collective sectors.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Well, that principle resembles that of the first two reforms I listed re. the Brezhnev era, doesn't it?

[ComradeOm]

Perhaps not, but he did call for the unification of the state and collective sectors.But not, notably, the "swallowing up of the collective-farm sector by the state sector". Nothing in that quote suggests that Stalin was proposing "full-scale sovkhoz-ization". Indeed, he deliberately places a question mark over whether that was possible or desirable