Collectivised Farming in USSR

[Rakshas]

The process of 'Collectivised Farming' was one of the aspects of the first 'Five Year Plan' started by Stalin in 1928. The western critics have always argued that collectivised form of agriculture is inefficient, leads to wastefulness of resources, low productivity and lack personal motivation, as opposed to privately held farms, where the incentive is much higher for the producer to toil in the fields and sell his ouput at an optimum price in the market. Though the process of collectivisation started off with initial resistance from the Kulaks, the Stalin regime succeeded in collectivising privately held farms into state owned collectives. Still, for most of the time, it is said that agricultural output was way lower than it was in, during Czarist times. Could collectivised farming in USSR be called a 'moderate success', if not a failure. What are your views on farming collectives and is there a link someone can provide which shows us the statistical comparison of agricultural output in USSR (under collectivised farming) and pre-Revolution czarist Russia?

Thanks.

[coda]

I am all for collectivized farming. i think everybody should have a little farm plot to till.


I can't comment on the Stalinist intiative... I don't know much about it... But with the current farming techniques---such as crop rotation, collectivized farming should be able to produce vast amounts of food that are resistant to privitized farming.

[redstar2000]

If present trends in American agriculture continue, there will probably be no individually-owned "family farms" left in the U.S. by the middle of this century. Every farm will be a "factory farm"...and can be, in principle, taken over by the people who work there just like any other workplace.

Thus, Stalin's "example" is really not very relevant to our era.

Moved to the History Forum.

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[Andy Bowden]

Hmm, it did defintely reduce the levels of famine in the USSR. But long term, industrial farming is unsustainable. It affects the soil salinity and removes nutrients, so we need to find a sustainable method of agriculture.

[Cult of Reason]

Is crop rotation utilised in factory farming?

[EusebioScrib]

Could collectivised farming in USSR be called a 'moderate success', if not a failure.

Most certainly not. It was a COMPLETE success. It helped consolidate the new vanguard class's power.

[Janus]

Is crop rotation utilised in factory farming?
Factory farming is based on monoculture growing or a focus on a single crop. The practice of traditional crop rotation has given way to simply using artificial fertilizers in order to replenish soil fertility. This is one of the major criticisms of monoculture in that the practices may not be sustainable and these problems have become apparent.

[JKP]

Collectivisation is not the proper term since those farms were never under the vontrol of the people, but rather the state. In other words, it was nationlized. and thus has nothing to do with communism.

To see an example of true collectivisation, look to the communes established by anarchist revoluton in Spain, in which production in all sectors greatly increased with far higher efficiency compared to its capitalist predecessors.

[Wiesty]

theres nothing wrong with collectivization, but there was with stalins "forced" collectivization

[Intelligitimate]

I think everyone should read Stalin's Dizzy With Success (http://marx.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm). You'll find his line should be agreeable to just about any Leftist.

[black magick hustla]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12 2006, 04:01 AM
I think everyone should read Stalin's Dizzy With Success (http://marx.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm). You'll find his line should be agreeable to just about any Leftist.
stalin had the writing skills of a highschool kid


also hello there gentleman-i-banned-some-time-ago-for-pissing-me-off

[Intelligitimate]

Originally posted by Marmot+May 12 2006, 04:08 AM--> (Marmot @ May 12 2006, 04:08 AM)
[email protected] 12 2006, 04:01 AM
I think everyone should read Stalin's Dizzy With Success (http://marx.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm). You'll find his line should be agreeable to just about any Leftist.
stalin has the writing skills of a highschool kid [/b]
The irony of this statement should be immediately obvious to anyone. What kind of dumbass talks shit about someone else's writing skills, when there isn't a single punctuation mark or capitalized letter in what they write?


also hello there gentleman-i-banned-some-time-ago-for-pissing-me-of

I have no idea what you're talking about. The fact you write like English isn't even your second language doesn't help.

[Cult of Reason]

Would there be any problems with using crop rotation on factory farms, once the profit motive is removed?

[Janus]

Would there be any problems with using crop rotation on factory farms, once the profit motive is removed?
NO, but then it wouldn't really be a factory farm anymore. The problem is that current agriculture is very dependent on fertilizers due to years of use and totally reverting back to crop rotation may not work out.

[black magick hustla]

The irony of this statement should be immediately obvious to anyone. What kind of dumbass talks shit about someone else's writing skills, when there isn't a single punctuation mark or capitalized letter in what they write?

i am pretty competent at writing; i just tend to not capitalize or to add punctuation because it is obviously a faster way to type.

also, that doesn't changes the fact that stalin had the writing skills of a high school kid.


I have no idea what you're talking about. The fact you write like English isn't even your second language doesn't help.

i was joking. i just remember you coming to IRC and acting like a stalinist nutjob.

ps: english is my second language buddy.

[CCCPneubauten]

Oh guys, take the fight to a PM, it doesn't have much to do with collective farms. But as much as I hate the Stalin nutjob I gotta say "stop it" to both sides.

[bezdomni]

stalin had the writing skills of a high school kid.
It's true.

And Stalin's forced collectivization was temporarily "sucessful" from a purely economic point of view...but in the long run it failed, and lead to a famine that killed a lot of people.

[chimx]

One should remember that the Russian peasantries experience with private land ownership is extremely limited. The communal mir was the norm up until the Stolypin reforms of 1906, and even then, that did not completely undermine the mir system. Many peasants were extremely reactionary to any attempts to break up there communal land structure.

Not that Stalin's crimes should be ignored. One of the real problems behind the forced collectivization of the 1930s was that it punished farmers who often times were the hardest workers and most skilled--trying to reap the benefits of the NEP.

It wasn’t until 1987, under the leadership of Gorbachev, that the Soviet Union began to institute serious reform in the agricultural sector in the form of contractual land-leasing systems. Contract brigades became officially legalized by the Soviet government for the purpose of increasing agricultural output. The model that Gorbachev created consisted of brigades of ten to thirty workers who would get land leased to them by the state or collective farm. What's particularly interesting for Russia, not many peasants were willing to leave the security of the collective farm, which had been used for nearly half a century. Instead, the peasant population relied more heavily on their own small private gardening plots as a source for greater income. Many did not want to risk the necessary investments required to establish privately owned farms.

In 1990, state and collective farms represented three quarters of the agricultural output of in the Soviet Union. Of these communes, 45% were state farms, and 55% collective farms. The rural private sector produced the other 25% of the gross value of agricultural output and mainly consisted of peasants personal gardening plots.

Of course this was still Gorbachev's Russia. Though he was critical of collectivization, ultimately he was opposed to land ownership by anybody other than the government. It was under this atmosphere that President Yeltsin had to deal with the agrarian problem in Russia. Although Yeltsin called for the privatization of land just days after his appointment to presidency in the later years of 1991, minimal amount of attention was initially given to the agricultural sector. This 1991 decree required that all state and collective forms reorganize as joint-stock companies, cooperatives, individual private farms, or to remain in their collective structure. Joint-stock companies were organizations divided up by work groups or brigades and were generally defined by the shares that members were distributed to company participants. Production output was usually assigned by annual contracts throughout the company. Cooperatives took a variety of different forms, but can generally be described as a less hierarchical framework than that of its collective counterpart, giving greater rural direction to the workers rather than management, which mainly acts as a provider of resources and services. The state and collective farms remain similar in manner to the Soviet era collectives, with management providing a great deal more influence with the collective’s decision-making process. The most significant change though is that the farm members elect the collective management.

Despite the attempts at reforms by Yelsin, by 1995 much of rural Russia still worked within a collective framework. While nearly 35% of rural Russia had reorganized into various farming cooperatives, roughly only 5% of the rural population had established private farms.

I find this fact fascinating--that there is a strong hesitancy to adopt western agricultural practices in Russia despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ultimately one can see two reasons for this phenomenon. First, when contrasting the situation to China who quite successfully decollectivized, the communist bureaucracy of Russia never had a "Cultural Revolution" to emphasize decentralization and debureaucratization. Thus, much of the bureaucratic apparatus remains intact in the Russian country side. This can be seen in the fact that the party members acting as managers of state and collective farms, in conjunction with local party government officials worked to prevent privatization by impeding access to credit, machinery, seeds, pesticides, and by ruling that new private farmers could not hire labor. These “Red landlords” that tried to maintain power over the Russian countryside were relatively effective at stopping any sort of federal reforms that would detract from their regional authority.

Second, by the late 90s and early 21st century, Russia's agricultural output as a percentrge of its GDP was catching up to China rapidly. The collective framework inside of Russia was thriving, causing many to question the necessity of privatized farming techniques. If we remember that over the hundreds of years Russia has been farming, less than 40 have been in the context of privatization, it becomes difficult to look at collective farming as anything but a cultural tradition within Russia which holds far greater significance than the Stalinist repression of the 1930s.

[Hiero]

Collectivisation is not the proper term since those farms were never under the vontrol of the people, but rather the state. In other words, it was nationlized. and thus has nothing to do with communism.

They were not nationalised. The industry was nationalised, the argiculture was collectivised.

The state never owned the farms, or their product. They only owned the machines, which were giving to the collectives for free. The State would buy the grain from the collectives at set prices that were negiotated by the state and the collectives.

The state was going to nationalise the farms after decades of growth.

You can find this in Stalin Problems of Socialism in the USSR.

[EusebioScrib]

They were not nationalised. The industry was nationalised, the argiculture was collectivised.

o_O what's the difference? :lol:


They only owned the machines,

Ah, so the state owned the means of production... <_<


You can find this in Stalin Problems of Socialism in the USSR.


Yes, Stalin wrote the 1936 const. as well... :rolleyes:

[TheSpoon]

Collectivized farming evidently helped the U.S.S.R, but I&#39;m reading a pretty good book on Afghanistan on how it severely hurt the Afghan economy, probably due to the lack of unity and the tribal divides in the country would be my guess.

[Rakshas]

First of all, thanks to all you comrades for butting in your views on "Collectivised Farming". Though it can be said that after 1960&#39;s the results of collectivised farming were begining to come out, with USSR&#39;s agricultural output sometimes exceeding more than than average output of the world combined. Hungary, for example, has been the most shining example of collectivised farming. After having read through various resources, one can conclude that though &#39;Collectivised Farming&#39; was NOT A FAILURE, it can be fairly termed as moderate success. When we compare the situations in USSR with rest of the world, we need to be in cognizance of the fact that very little land in Russia and other republics in erstwhile Soviet Union were fit for agriculture, plus burdened with erratic rainfall and harshness of the general climate. No matter what you try to implement, generating increased agricultral output is always difficult on those circumstances. Western bourgeiosie has always criticised the collectives as they negate the so-called human nature of taking ownership and rewards with incentives. USSR tried everything from co-ercion to rewards and incentives, still they were not able to boost their agricultural production due to reasons well beyond their control. Even then, what has been termed as failure by western economists is all to relative. Western economists, in their hurry to discredit farming collectives, explained that failures to achieve the set targets was an evidence. However, they do not tell you straight that if you could achieve as much 85% of the set target, that cannot be described as a failure. Had it the output been less than 40%, it would have some basis to call collectivised farming a failure, but I think achieveing more than 80% of the target set in, is a fairly moderate success. The failure of collectivised farming can be attributed to climatic conditions, conditions of soil, the labor and of course one cannot discount the co-ercion tactics employed by Soviet Bureaucracy to make people tile the land.

[Hiero]

o_O what&#39;s the difference?

Collectivised is grouping private individuals together to own and run a farm. Nationalised is the state owning and runing the farm.


Ah, so the state owned the means of production...

No. They owned the machines. The machines are only a part of the means of production. The peasants owned the land, which is the larger part of the means of production.


Yes, Stalin wrote the 1936 const. as well...

What?

[EusebioScrib]

Collectivised is grouping private individuals together to own and run a farm. Nationalised is the state owning and runing the farm.

No the difference between the agricultural "industry" and agriculture :lol:


No. They owned the machines. The machines are only a part of the means of production. The peasants owned the land, which is the larger part of the means of production.

Oh, so I guess the peasants could just be like "Yo state, get the fuck outta ma crib or I&#39;ma fuck you up."

As a matter of fact the state DID own the land, regardless of what was written (which it probably wasn&#39;t written), they owned it defacto.

But for the sake of arguement, lets say they peasants DID own the land. What would it matter? The state could manipulate the peasants and say "well if you don&#39;t do this, we&#39;ll just take our machines back and you&#39;re done foo."


What?

Exactly ;)

[Hiero]

No the difference between the agricultural "industry" and agriculture

I didn&#39;t use the term agricultural industry. Maybe you are thinking of industrialised agriculture. The difference between industrialised agriculture and non or semi industrailised is that the former can be nationalised, like what Redstar said about american farms. The latter needs to be collectivised till it reaches a higher level.


Oh, so I guess the peasants could just be like "Yo state, get the fuck outta ma crib or I&#39;ma fuck you up."

As a matter of fact the state DID own the land, regardless of what was written (which it probably wasn&#39;t written), they owned it defacto.

But for the sake of arguement, lets say they peasants DID own the land. What would it matter? The state could manipulate the peasants and say "well if you don&#39;t do this, we&#39;ll just take our machines back and you&#39;re done foo."


The peasants got a say in prices and quotas. The main fact is that they sold their produce means they had owndership of the produce, and the means of production. They didn&#39;t own the land in the sense of capitalism, they weren&#39;t capitalists, so they didn&#39;t have that much freedom. Which is what you are leaning to.


Exactly

Are you going to continue to be a childish jerk or just get to they point?