At 9.01 minutes into the discussion on china, this professor of economics (Richard Wolff) seems to be saying that the land distributed under the Lenin/Bolshevik regime was private property. Have I misunderstood collectivisation? Was anything about collectivisation of land every considered private? I always assumed that there was no private ownership under the socialist system in Russia or China.
I believe the land was considered private in the sense that you were responsible for it and nobody could take it away from you besides the government. So you didn’t own it as in you could sell it, but other people couldn’t treat it as their land. It’s ownership with all of the responsibilities and none of the benefits.
There was private property in pre-revolutionary Russia. You could pass land on hereditarily, and title to the land was held in the individual’s name. Individuals had the right to sell or mortgage the land.
Where it gets sketchy comes down to the fact that the state could confiscate your land under various conditions, mainly if you committed a crime of a certain type. Some people have contended that this means true ownership of land didn’t exist.
But if confiscation by the state under certain conditions means you don’t have private property, then the U.S. doesn’t have private property either, because even being accused of certain crimes can get your assets seized by the state without trial or conviction. That includes land, homes, etc.
Lenin’s regime initially turned agricultural land over to “the peasants”, even though they proclaimed the principle of the nationalisation of the land. After the post-revolutionary civil war, there was a period of economic relaxation from the stringencies of “war communism”, in order to encourage increased production, which meant some peasants got richer than others, and in effect individual private ownership/management of land (as long as state quotas for output were met). “Collectivisation” - meaning forcing all agricultural land into collective farms under state/party appointed managers - came later under Stalin.
Something similar seems to have happened in China, since the improvements in productivity due to improved irrigation, drainage and larger fields seem to have taken place after and separately from the initial communist revolution. I think that initially the same peasants tilled the same fields, paying taxes instead of rents.
Looks to me like all of the benefits except for the right to sell it; except that the government could take it. Which the USA or state government or in some cases municipal governments can do right now. You don’t have to have committed or even have been accused of a crime – go look up “eminent domain”.
Why do you think the only benefit one can get from owning land is the ability to sell it?
I went to a lecture once by a mining engineer who was talking about his trip to Russia after the end of communism. He mentioned that because all land belonged to the state under the Soviets, one serious problem they ran into was private companies trying to secure title to land - an important aspect of private enterprise development of resources. He said that the land title system was of low importance for 70 years, so land title management was stuck in the Tsarist era - some rural titles read something like “take 30 paces east from the big boulder at the fork in the road then turn south for 100 paces”
I presume the initial action of the Bolsheviks was to tell the peasants the plots they had been “renting” from their lord under the feudal system was now their own land. Collectivisation followed later. I recall too some discussion that many serfs had strongly opposed lat 1800’s efforts to “free the serfs” because they understood they were no longer bound to the land, but they were not guaranteed land either once “free”.
I’m curious what the imperial land distribution was like before the Chinese revolution. Were Chinese peasants also just working land owned by the local lord, or did they in fact technically own their own small plots going into the revolution, just pay taxes? Were they tied to the land and lord like European feudal serfs?
Once upon a time, when communism was still taken seriously, I was in Israel, and there was a village where, I’m not sure if the people could sell the land or not, but it was definitely not allowed to split up one’s plot. And there were tangible benefits from being a collective, like being able to market produce together and share equally in the (presumably better or at least more consistent) profits.
Lots of peasants owned farms. Before the revolution about 16% of peasants owned farms larger than 8 acres. They paid for them and everything. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, after which serfs could own property, start businesses, etc. Later reforms even provided lines of credit so peasants could buy the land they worked.
After the revolution, the peasant-owners with more than 8 acres were dubbed ‘Kulaks’ and persecuted as class enemies. Lenin ordered the murder of Kulaks who didn’t cough up their crops to the state:
Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.… Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [kilometers] around the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks.
Lenjn justified these atrocities by smearing the Kulaks as “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine.” Of course, Lenin was a monster.
Stalin then ramped up Lenin’s evil by collectivizing the land, leading to one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century when he intentionally starved the Ukraine by expropriating their agricultural products.
But before the horrors of collectivism showed up, peasants could and did buy land and control it. Under the Stolypin reforms from 1906 to 1914, peasants were given the absolute and unconditional right to own land, as the government of the time actually believed in Capitalism and thought land ownership would drive incentives for the owners to increase production for profit. Then the Bolsheviks came along and turned a transition to Capitalism (or at least State Capitalism) into a bloodbath and poverty.
That sounds like a kibbutz, which were relatively common in Israel.
There are agricultural cooperatives in the US still. One of the forms we get (on very rare occasions) as tax preparers is a 1099-PATR, which lists the amount of “patronage” dividends you received for being the patron of a farming collective. Since we’re in suburbia, just about the only way people get these is when they get their mortgage through a bank that is part of a collective. There’s one in particular that I remember, and I looked them up, and indeed, that mortgage provider is a collective. Just by getting a mortgage from them, you share in their profits. I don’t know how deep some of these cooperatives run, or if they’re just a different kind of credit union.
Actually, some very well-known brand names, like Ocean Spray, Land O’Lakes, Welch’s and Sun-Maid are, or were, cooperatives.
There are a whole lot of agricultural cooperatives. I’m currently president of one (volunteer unpaid position) – it’s a small town farmers’ market.
Whether there are any such in the USA that are set up like kibbutzes, I don’t know; but it’s certainly not the general course. Agricultural cooperatives in the USA function as a specific type of corporation; they can be any size, including very large multi-state businesses such as Agway and Land O’Lakes etc. and also tiny businesses such as our local market. Some farmers are members of multiple such cooperatives. Members may market and/or buy things together, or run a venue for doing so as separate businesses; but their farm operations are generally still individual private businesses, and their land ownership and for that matter living arrangements are whatever they would be if they weren’t members of the cooperative.
Think of a sort of LLC.
The closest thing to an Israeli kibbutz in the USA is a commune. The US has a long history of communes, and there are some of them in existence now. The setups of both ownership and living arrangements in communes vary widely – you pretty much have to know which individual commune you’re talking about.
I don’t know what were the members’ precise political leanings— perhaps I should have been more inquisitive— but the place I visited was a “normal” agricultural cooperative, not a kibbutz. In particular, there wasn’t the hard-core communal life for which kibbutzim are famous. People had their own homes and families to come back to in the evening.
Though on a separate occasion, I did get to attend a harvest festival at a kibbutz, which was fun.
Wikipedia tells us that most true Israeli kibbutzim have by now been dismantled, but did not list any concrete numbers or how big they figure as part of the total agricultural sector.
Kibbutzes and Colonies can function for several reasons: First, they are usually sized below Dunbar’s number, so everyone tends to know everyone else. That allows for regulation of activity through social pressure. Second, they tend to be culturally and religiously homogenous, meaning that the workers share the same goals and have the same morals and ethics - at least in public. They also tend to have cultural and/or religious traditions of hard work and sacrifice. Third, they tend to be voluntary, so people who are unfit for the life can leave it.
Once you get to larger and more compulsary collectives, you need bureaucracy to run them. And the larger the collective, the more disconnected the bureaucracy becomes from the actual work they are trying to regulate, leading to poor decisions. Coercion is required to keep workers working and to prevent the best people from leaving to seek better lives. You also lose all the information and innovation you get when people are free to be rational actors within the system. Centralized planning and control does not scale, and neither do collectives.
One of the reasons for the famines in Russia (during times of record harvest elsewhere) was that removing local farmers and replacing them with party functionaries destroyed the critical local knowledge and decades of practical experience on the land the former owners had. And decisions based on the facts on the ground were replaced by political decisions. Centalized plans failed to coordinate things like industrial products, tractors, etc. Agricultural output collapsed as a result. Stalin starved Ukraine because he needed the food for Russia where his political power base was, and Russia’s agricultural output collapsed due to the switch to collectivized agriculture.
And as usual, socialism was supposed to help the peasants, but in the end the peasants suffered greatly, and the people who were enriched were the powerful. As the old saying goes, under Capitalism the rich become powerful, but under Socialism the powerful become rich.
Wolff: “The first thing Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky did was to distribute land to the peasants”.
Leaving aside that Stalin wasn’t even the picture then, the first thing Lenin actually did was to abolish all private ownership of land.
(1) Private ownership of land shall be abolished forever; land shall not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated.
Stalin established forced collectivization of agriculture soon after he gained autocratic power.
I think Wolff is talking crap.
Please do not confuse socialism with communism. Socialism had its focus on improving the position of workers, by organising in the form of unions, calling strikes, etc. In Europe this led to a great improvement in the position of the workers and legislature around working hours, vacation, sick leave, all the things that are pretty common in a social democracy.
Communism OTOH is about collectivisation and abolishment of private property, and the goal was a classless society, that should have followed the dicatorship of the proletariat. Alas, this never came to be.
A kibbutz is socialist in principle but resembles communism in practice, because in its original form there was no private property, leadership was rotating between all members, children were raised collectively and everyone could be mandated to take up any task. A side effect I noticed when I was a volunteer in a Kibbutz 25+ years ago, was that no one took responsibility for maintenance of public space. In the end the system of autarky was’t tenable and many kibbutzim hired outside workers and were subsidized by the government.
By decree in 1918, the Soviets abolished private ownership of land, made farming the sole basis of landholding, and declared collectivization a major objective of policy. Marketing of agricultural products became a state monopoly. In 1929 Stalin embarked on a full course of collectivization, and by 1938 collective farms occupied 85.6 percent of the land and state farms 9.1 percent. Credit facilities and tractor stations supplemented collectivization, while agricultural production was integrated in the national plan for industrialization and development.
The difference isn’t as stark as you make it out to be. Both systems claim to help the workers by taking from the rich. Both impose limits on private property. Many communists call themselves socialists, and many socialists are all about state control of the means of production. Nationalization of infrastructure happens all the time under spcialism - not as much today as in the past, as we’ve learned from the experience of nationalization that it generally works out poorly.
Even Soviet Communism wasn’t all communist. The Soviets tolerated huge black markets, because they helped distribute goods that the central planners couldn’t manage. Stalin even backed off on collectivization after its horrible results - for a while.
Stalin tried to solve the collapse of industrial production by simply shooting the least productive workers in factories as a lesson to the others. That increased output, but lowered quality and collapsed the flow of information as everyone became a ‘yes man’.
After Stalin, reforms were made to reward good workers instead of shootjng the bad ones. That required giving them better apartments, access to better stores, ‘factory owned’ cars for their personal use, ‘factory owned’ Dachas in resort areas for the personal use of factory managers, etc. Thus they began reinstituting a class system to make everything work.
Near the end of the Soviet Union there were plenty of very wealthy people - it was just accounted for differently. You need hierqrchies of rewards to motivate people.
The real split between collectivist politics and capitalism is that collectivists believe in strong national or international governments that will regulate the people and centrally plan economies rather than allowing them to evolve through the choices of free people.
Socialism, Communism and Fascism have much more in common with each other than they do with free market capitalism. The only real difference between Fascism and Communism is that the Fascists were okay with private ownership of industry so long as they could ultimately control that industry by diktat. The communists just decided to take it all and kill the owners who objected. Either way, you get state control of the means of production and state media and social control of the commanding heights of society.
The U.S. is trending more towards Fascism than Socialism, but absent a maniac like Hitler they tend to look similar. FDR was a hig fan of Mussolini - he made the trains run on time. Both Fascism and Socialism rose out of the turn-of-the-century Progressive movement which advocated for change through state action rather than allowing organic evolution based on the choices of the people.
You have to work the land as instructed by your local government and turn over most if not all of the product grown to the local government. I believe that if you meet your quota you could keep and sell some of the excess food you grew, but Chinese farmers, especially in today’s modern Chinese economy, are about as poor as you can imagine. You take care of the land, work the land, you can’t sell the land-only grow food for the government, and then give most if not all of it for the government to redistribute. “It’s ownership with all of the responsibilities and none of the benefits”.