The Failure of Agriculture in the Soviet Union

[Jason]

In the book "Marx - Key Ideas", it was explained that agriculture failed under Stalin because machinery and transport were inferior. Can anyone elaborate on this? In addition, the state price for surplus crops was too high for peasants. This problem lead to the starvation of millions.

Anyhow, the failure of farming under Communism is a major stumbling block for leftists who are trying to promote Marxism.

[Marxaveli]

Except the Soviet Union was never communist. Nor is "Marxism" a better or worse way, because it isn't a way at all - it is scientific system used for understanding human social organization and historical development, devoid of all ideology, value systems, morals, or idealism. It is however, the most objective and logical way of viewing history, because it doesn't rely on abstract ideas or "Great Man" theory nonsense.

[Jason]

Except the Soviet Union was never communist. Nor is "Marxism" a better or worse way, because it isn't a way at all - it is scientific system used for understanding human social organization and historical development, devoid of all ideology, value systems, morals, or idealism. It is however, the most objective and logical way of viewing history, because it doesn't rely on abstract ideas or "Great Man" theory nonsense.

Right, but ordinary people see the Soviet Union as the main example of Communism. Therefore, negative views of it tarnish the view of Karl Marx. For instance, somebody like Glenn Beck can just discuss the Soviet Union and millions of tea baggers will be even more convinced Communism is evil.

As for lefties, since the the Soviet experiment failed, they might be reluctant to support a new Communism.

Here's another question: "How could somebody make machinery and transport work, so that a Soviet style Communism (in the future) can feed people?" Is it possible?

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

Except the Soviet Union was never communist. Nor is "Marxism" a better or worse way, because it isn't a way at all - it is scientific system used for understanding human social organization and historical development, devoid of all ideology, value systems, morals, or idealism. It is however, the most objective and logical way of viewing history, because it doesn't rely on abstract ideas or "Great Man" theory nonsense.

I don't see how this is a useful response. He asked why agriculture failed in the Soviet Union, there is no need to bring this up.

[prolcon]

Except the Soviet Union was never communist. Nor is "Marxism" a better or worse way, because it isn't a way at all - it is scientific system used for understanding human social organization and historical development, devoid of all ideology, value systems, morals, or idealism. It is however, the most objective and logical way of viewing history, because it doesn't rely on abstract ideas or "Great Man" theory nonsense.

Oh boy! More of this! This kind of thing is always so helpful and productive!

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

It has been argued that the failure of Soviet agriculture is exaggerated in western academic circles, and that productivity of it was, all negative factors considered, relatively good, the major problem being the labour intensive work leading to a low producitivty per worker. As far as I remember modern Russian agricultural productivity has not fully reached the level prior to the fall within the same area.

[Jason]

Right I understand the Soviets were socialist and had not yet acheived Communism. I also know that Marxism is a method for studying economics.

However, I'm asking: "Why did the Soviet Union fail at farming?" and "What could a future Communist state do to prevent the same mistake?".


It has been argued that the failure of Soviet agriculture is exaggerated in western academic circles, and that productivity of it was, all negative factors considered, relatively good, the major problem being the labour intensive work leading to a low producitivty per worker. As far as I remember modern Russian agricultural productivity has not fully reached the level prior to the fall within the same area.


Anti-Soviet propoganda also has to be taken into account. The west denied the "farming success" of the Soviet Union much as it now denies the "medical success" of Cuba.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

I don't know much about farming, but I do have some stuff about why the soviet economy began to stagnate after Stalin, I can post some links on your wall if you'd like

[GoddessCleoLover]

Even the Soviets were well-aware of the shortcomings of Soviet agriculture. They had to import huge amounts of grain despite the fact that Ukraine was part of the Union. These are facts, not anti-Soviet propaganda. The only way that we can regain the confidence of the working class is to be intellectually honest.

[l'Enfermé]

http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?f=128&t=47201

[Jason]

http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?f=128&t=47201



The productivity of Soviet agricultural labor is lower than that of the US, primarily because in addition to a far less favorable climate and soil, the Soviet worker has far less capital stock with which to work. In 1977, for example, there were 1.3 tractors and 71 HP of tractor power for each worker on US farms. At the same time there were only .95 tractors and 7 HP of tractor power per worker on Soviet farms. In 1977 there were .73 trucks per worker on US farms, while there were only .056 per worker on Soviet farms. That same year there were 36.7 hectares of sown area per worker on US farms while there were only 8.68 per worker on Soviet farms. In addition, fertilizer utilization per worker on US farms in 1977 was about four times as great as on Soviet farms and energy use per farm worker in the US was a multiple of the Soviet's (NKhSSSR V 1979 and U.S. Statistical Abstract 1978). The US farm worker is more productive than his/her Soviet counterpart by a factor of 7 or 8 to 1 because the US farm worker employs vastly more resources. Considering the differences in climate, geography and, especially, capital stock between the US and the former Soviet Union, the difference in agricultural output per worker in the two countries clearly cannot be reduced to their different ownership and incentive systems.


The paragraph above seemed to blame the low productivity of Soviet agriculture on a harsh climate, geography and lack of capital stock. But couldn't the "capital stock" problem have been fixed?


Farm output often varies due to non-economic effects (e.g. yearly climate changes). Because it does one has to choose to invest in either excess storage and transportation capacity or to allow a shortage of such capacity. In the US problems of this kind are less critical than in the Soviet Union because, due to a more stable climate, crop output varies less. Nevertheless, during both the 1977 and the 1979 harvest seasons shortages of both storage and transportation facilities were acute in the US. Reports from all over the Midwest showed that grain was left in piles on the ground and, because many other farmers knew that the grain could not be either moved or stored, they did not bother to harvest (New York Times December 23, 1979: 14E).
Capitalist farming has its own unique kind of waste: market induced abandonment or destruction of output. Western European farmers dump their products along the roads and pour tons of milk into ditches, and US farmers destroy hogs, burn grain and potatoes, and leave their crops on the ground to rot because market prices are frequently too low. This happens even though there are hungry people in their countries. The conscious destruction of food in order to preserve profits (or to reduce money losses) and to retain ownership rights, points out that waste means something different in the two systems and that , consequently, comparisons must be carefully analyzed.


Whoa! Score one for the Soviets!!! Destruction of food in the US while people in Africa starve. Good point.



In a purely capitalist economy the implicit costs of the displacement of labor by the mechanization of agriculture are borne by the affected individuals. In (neoclassical) theory, individuals are assumed to have the capacity (and the opportunity) to deal with these costs because in theory they can always find work (full employment), borrow capital and get access to the latest technologies. In practice, however, whether in the Third World or in the U.S., mechanization of agriculture has usually entailed massive displacement of labor, significant urban migrations and creation of massive urban slums plagued by high levels of un- and under employment (Perelman 1977: 4-5).

In the U.S., in contrast to the Soviet Union, government subsidies have pumped capital into agriculture at a cost to agribusiness far below its true cost to society. Each U.S. agricultural worker, consequently, is now supported by about one third more capital than her/his industrial counterpart and by as much as fifty to seventy times (at actual exchange rates) as much as her/his Soviet counterpart. (US Statistical Abstract 1988, NKhSSSR 1989). Labor productivity and total output have soared, it is true, but so have the number of failed farms, the stocks of unsold agricultural commodities and the numbers of unemployed former agricultural workers. Replacement of labor by machinery forced an average of a million persons a year to flee rural areas. Because of lack of skills and insufficient demand for their labor, many of these migrants joined the ranks of America's already many millions of urban unemployed, poor and hungry. If U.S. agriculture appears to be free of so many of the problems which plague Soviet agriculture, it is to a large degree because these problems have been exported to the cities.6

The high social costs to displaced, unutilized and uncared for labor are explicitly recognized and added to the costs of agricultural investment in a socialized system. Consequently, under this sort of calculation it is conceivable that, given scarce investment funds, urban (or rural) industrial investments should be given priority over labor-saving agricultural investments until a sufficient demand for the labor which will be displaced from agriculture is created. A higher percentage of the labor force, especially older workers, would be retained in rural areas for a relatively longer period with socialized agricultural development. Thus evidence of a high percentage of the workforce retained in agriculture does not necessarily support Western critics' conclusion that socialist agriculture unduly hampers economic development. Instead, it suggests that in this respect the Soviet Union may have pursued a different (perhaps more humane) kind of economic development.


The US has sacrificed the jobs of millions of farmers. In addtion (but not part of the article), I'd like to add, these mega-farms destroy farming jobs in Latin America (via free trade) causing emigration to the US.


The Failure of Agricultural Plans

The entire history of Soviet agriculture is replete with failures of agricultural plans. From this information Western critics draw the conclusion that economic systems based on social ownership and planning are unworkable in both theory and practice (Hedlund 1984; Nove 1986; Theen 1988; Marrese 1990). Soviet plans for agriculture have failed more frequently than they have succeeded over the course of the past fifty years of socialized agriculture. Failure, however, is a relative term which tells us nothing of the magnitude of the goals set, nor of the results achieved. For example, the meat target set in the 1982-1990 Soviet Food Program was an average annual output of 20.25 million tons. Although production in 1990 reached 20 million tons (RSEEA 1991a:8), the Food Program target was not met. Therefore, the plan failed. However, to focus only on the failure to reach the meat target overlooks the important facts that in 1990 meat output was up some 30% over that in 1981 (20 million vs. 15.2 million tons) and that 1990's per capita meat consumption (67 kg)(RSEEA 1991a:8) was up some 18% over that of 1981.

In other words, significant progress towards meeting the goal of increasing meat production and consumption was achieved within the socialist agricultural system even though the plan "failed". This underlines a more general point about socialist agriculture. Its failures to achieve ambitious goals do not prove that it is a failed system; they instead emphasize the high expectations for continued improvement associated with it.


Soviet agriculture failed to meet goals, but made a lot of progress. It also had to be considered that under the "humane" soviet agriculture that's the best that can be done. As an analogy, we could torture animals to get lower food costs, but we choose not to.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Right, but ordinary people see the Soviet Union as the main example of Communism. Therefore, negative views of it tarnish the view of Karl Marx. For instance, somebody like Glenn Beck can just discuss the Soviet Union and millions of tea baggers will be even more convinced Communism is evil.

As for lefties, since the the Soviet experiment failed, they might be reluctant to support a new Communism.

Here's another question: "How could somebody make machinery and transport work, so that a Soviet style Communism (in the future) can feed people?" Is it possible?
The question is a good one -- what were the issues with Soviet agriculture? I don't know enough about it to add much. As for Beck and the teabaggers, screw them. They will be won over during or after the revolution. Not the folks to worry about winning to a revolutionary perspective -- first they have to accept the Enlightenment.

[Jason]

The question is a good one -- what were the issues with Soviet agriculture? I don't know enough about it to add much. As for Beck and the teabaggers, screw them. They will be won over during or after the revolution. Not the folks to worry about winning to a revolutionary perspective -- first they have to accept the Enlightenment.

What do you mean "accept the enlightenment"?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

You know, that the Earth and all of its creatures were not created in 6 days a few thousand years ago. And that things like magic don't exist. Empirical science is preferred over myth and mysticism. That kind of stuff. The Enlightenment was a movement of 17th and 18th century thinkers that valued such things. Put another way, those bozos will first have to accept the French Revolution before they can be expected to consider workers revolution.

[Marxaveli]

The irony of it is that the French Revolution is what allowed their beloved capitalist system to become what it is. The bourgeois decry revolution, especially socialist revolution, but they seem to have forgotten where they came from.

Personally, I don't think we should be trying to pander to Tea Party fascists anyway - they are beyond reach.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

The irony of it is that the French Revolution is what allowed their beloved capitalist system to become what it is. The bourgeois decry revolution, especially socialist revolution, but they seem to have forgotten where they came from.

Personally, I don't think we should be trying to pander to Tea Party fascists anyway - they are beyond reach.
Exactly. I think it is a measure of how decadent 21st Century US society has become. Anti-science, anti-reason anti-human.

[Jason]

I'm wondering if there are any objections from the left or right to the article posted. Any reason to think the article might contain misinformation or be biased?

[Baseball]

The paragraph above seemed to blame the low productivity of Soviet agriculture on a harsh climate, geography and lack of capital stock. But couldn't the "capital stock" problem have been fixed?



Whoa! Score one for the Soviets!!! Destruction of food in the US while people in Africa starve. Good point.



The US has sacrificed the jobs of millions of farmers. In addtion (but not part of the article), I'd like to add, these mega-farms destroy farming jobs in Latin America (via free trade) causing emigration to the US.



Soviet agriculture failed to meet goals, but made a lot of progress. It also had to be considered that under the "humane" soviet agriculture that's the best that can be done. As an analogy, we could torture animals to get lower food costs, but we choose not to.

the Soviet Union was unable to feed itself, despite the Ukraine being part of it. it is difficult to see why this is a a more "humane" way of doing things.

[hetz]

the Soviet Union was unable to feed itself, despite the Ukraine being part of it.
Soviet Union didn't start importing grains ( and that didn't mean it "couldn't feed itself" ) until the 50s, what did the people eat before then?

[Baseball]

Soviet Union didn't start importing grains ( and that didn't mean it "couldn't feed itself" ) until the 50s, what did the people eat before then?


nothing. they starved in famines.

[Myrdin]

I fear that mister Stalin's policy of rapid and forced collectivizations had a hand in the 'failure' of agriculture in the USSR. The NEP rebuilt Soviet agriculture by giving farmland to the peasants, Stalin destroyed it be taking it from them yet again. I say, this not as a supporter of the near-capitalist NEP, but as an opponent of the pace at which some of Stalin's policies proceeded.

[Jason]

http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

Apparently, the famine was some Nazi lie to justify future German conquest.




The conquest of the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union would necessitate war against the Soviet Union, and this war had to be prepared well in advance. To this end the Nazi propaganda ministry, headed by Goebbels, began a campaign around a supposed genocide committed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, a dreadful period of catastrophic famine deliberately provoked by Stalin in order to force the peasantry to accept socialist policy. The purpose of the Nazi campaign was to prepare world public opinion for the 'liberation' of the Ukraine by German troops. Despite huge efforts and in spite of the fact that some of the German propaganda texts were published in the English press, the Nazi campaign around the supposed 'genocide' in the Ukraine was not very successful at the world level. It was clear that Hitler and Goebbels needed help in spreading their libellous rumours about the Soviet Union. That help they found in the USA.

William Hearst - Friend of Hitler

William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the 'father' of the so-called 'yellow press', i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.
This was also the start of the Hearst newspaper empire, an empire which strongly influenced the lives and thinking of North Americans. After his father died, William Hearst sold all the mining industry shares he inherited and began to invest capital in the world of journalism. His first purchase was the New York Morning Journal, a traditional newspaper which Hearst completely transformed into a sensationalist rag. He bought his stories at any price, and when there were no atrocities or crimes to report, it behoved his journalists and photographers to 'arrange' matters. It is this which in fact characterises the 'yellow press': lies and 'arranged' atrocities served up as truth.

These lies of Hearst's made him a millionaire and a very important personage in the newspaper world. In 1935 he was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at $200 million. After his purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst went on to buy and establish daily and weekly newspapers throughout the US. In the 1940s, William Hearst owned 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news services, one business providing news items for films, the Cosmopolitan film company, and a lot of others. In 1948 he bought one of the US's first TV stations, BWAL-TV in Baltimore. Hearst's newspapers sold 13 million copies a day and had close to 40 million readers. Almost a third of the adult population of the US were reading Hearst newspapers every day. Furthermore, many millions of people throughout the world received information from the Hearst press via his news services, films and a series of newspapers that were translated and published in large quantities all over the world. The figures quoted above demonstrate how the Hearst empire was able to influence American politics, and indeed world politics, over very many years - on issues which included opposition to the US entering the Second World War on the side of the Soviet Union and support for the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.

William Hearst's outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst's newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler's right-hand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.

After his visit to Hitler, Hearst's sensationalist newspapers were filled with 'revelations' about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union - murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany's political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand. We should not forget that these articles were read each day by 40 million people in the US and millions of others worldwide!

[GoddessCleoLover]

Conspiracy theories come in many different forms. David Irving denies the Holocaust and has a conspiracy theory as a rationale. This excerpt contains a conspiracy theory and a blanket denial, but doesn't address the fact that Ukrainians of all political persuasions agree that the famine did, in fact, occur. If there was no famine, then why did Stalin author and publish "Dizzy with Success". "Dizzy with Success" of course does not admit the existence of a famine, Stalin would never have published such as admission for obvious political reasons. Nonetheless, one can readily infer from "Dizzy with Success" that serious problems had developed in Soviet agricultural policy.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

The famine was, of course, Gramsci guy, let us not forget, not limited to Ukraine, but affected the Volga delta in the RSFSR too. Any famine is of course not a pleasant thing in any shape or form, and undoubtedly there was less than good decisions taken and a great deal of incompetence and improprieties, but the exaggerated death tolls (I think the more soundly based estimates of 1-3 million are bad enough) and insinuations of some sort of intentional ethnic cleansing are obviously the stuff born from anti-communist lackeys. The reality of the situation that actually happened was bad enough, no doubt, but proponents of these ideas often proclaim this to be the brainchild of Stalin's personal pathologies, which is just ridiculous great-man type nonsense.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Takayuki is absolutely correct that the famine reached beyond Ukraine and deeply affected Russia for example. Stalin's policies caused the famine and his response exacerbated it, and I ascribe this to Stalin personally because he called the shots. The famine was not Stalin's brainchild, to the contrary I believe he was taken completely by surprise by the resistance to collectivization that precipitated the famine. I also believe, however, that Stalin instituted repressive policies that exacerbated the famine in order to maintain his grip on power.