Soviet Agricultural Efficiency

[RedCommieBear]

I was paging ahead in my civics book, and skipped to the chapter they dedicate to anti-socialism and anti-communism, and the book had the following (approximtely) to say about soviet agriculture:


Small, private plots Soviet farmers were allowed to work on their spare time, made up 2% of all farming land, but made up 30% of production.

Is there any truth behind this? And if so, then in what context?

[lvleph]

The analysis there is entirely too simple, even if the numbers are true. Those 2% of farmers could be on the most fertile land, and so just by the virtue of being on good land could have produced such results.

[Lamanov]

Transition from private plots to state farms was a big issue for Soviet bureaucracy at the time of the "Great Leap."

The numbers indicate that private, small plot exploitation was indeed more efficient then following 'Kolhoznik', but the problem was not in net production, but in state appropriation.

In 1926 Soviet village (mostly in private small plots) produced 77 million tons of grain. In 1932 Soviet village (mostly collectivized) produced 68 million tons, that is, with thousands of produced tractors, new agricultural tehnicians and all "efficiency" upgrades, it went down by 9 million. Millions of people died because of this forced policy. Peasantry lost the battle.

But it was a victory for the Soviet state, for the bureaucracy, because now, in 1932, it acquired for its lot staggering 22 million tons, two times more than it could back in 1928 (hardly 11 million).

Get it?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Even by bourgeois standards, the reactionary textbook material is too dualistic - private plots in the vicinity of kolkhozy.

I know I'm reviving my Kautsky thread, but:

1) The decision on collectivization was actually the middle ground of three proposals. (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=65638)

2) Consider that all-important economic force known as economies of scale (or, as Marx said, "socialization of production under capitalism"). As "bureaucratic" as I may have sounded in my thread above, there's economics, and then there's politics. This is the rationale behind my "bureaucratic" argument for revolutionary changes in agriculture after a proper socialist revolution (ie, "statification" / "sovkhozization"). The post-Stalin approach to this (as "noble" as Khrushchev himself was in coughing this up) was tempered by the excess bureaucracy and the abandonment of the "primitive accumulation of capital" policies pursued by the Stalin regime.

[RedCommieBear]

I don't like bumping old threads, but I did find some more on this statistic.


Originally posted by Wikipedia+--> (Wikipedia) Hedrick Smith, wrote in The Russians (1976) that according to Soviet statistics, one fourth of the value of agricultural production in 1973 was produced on the private plots peasants were allowed (2% of the whole arable land).[/b]

And some context...


Wikipedia
These claims of "inefficiency" have, however, been criticised by at least one Western economist. It has been asserted that statistics based on value rather than volume of production give one view of reality, as public-sector food was heavily subsidised and sold at much lower prices than private-sector produce. In addition, the 2–3% of arable land allotted as private plots does not include the large area allocated to the peasants as pasturage for their private livestock; combined with land used to produce grain for fodder, the pasturage and the private plots total almost 20% of all Soviet farmland.

It has also been claimed that private farming also turns out to be relatively inefficient, taking roughly 40% of all agricultural labour to produce only 26% of all output by value. Finally, such claims tend to discuss only a small number of consumer products and do not take into account the fact that the kolkhozy and sovkhozy produced mainly grain, cotton, flax, forage, seed, and other non-consumer goods with a relatively low value per unit area.

Economist Joseph E. Medley of the University of Southern Maine, US, while admitting to some inefficiency in Soviet agriculture, denounces the "myths" of failure propounded by Western critics. [2] He believes it to be ideological in nature and emphasises "[t]he possibility that socialized agriculture may be able to make valuable contributions to improving human welfare".

edit: rephrasing