There is general consensus that the majority people who were killed under communism in the 20th century (and the 21st in the case of North Korea) starved to death because of the failings of collective agriculture. Not that there weren’t millions killed by execution or by being sent to starve/freeze to death in camps, but the majority starved to death because the state could not produce enough food for them (Mao’s great famine in China being the most heinous example of this, which possibly killed more than all the other communist rulers of the 20th century combined)
Why was that? What made collective farms so goddamned awful at producing food? Not just less efficient than regular farms but so so much worse than they managed to kill a large percentage of the population from starvation. I mean combining small farms into big ones is a hallmark of capitalist agriculture, which for all its faults is very good at producing enough food for everyone. What is it about how the collectivization process works that makes it so bad at the one job fas have (I.e. producing food) ?
I think you mean the failings of governments to manage collective agriculture. These governments failed at almost everything else managed under their particular Communist rules.
In the US, one of the early experiments with collective farming was the Phalanx society. They started strong, but without a better incentive system to work hard, the slackers brought down the rest.
I see that playing out on the grand scale of China very easily. Morale can be fragile. It is hard to go out and work hard each day when others aren’t working as hard and all are rewarded equally.
Communist regimes often implemented agricultural policies based on ideological principles rather than practical agricultural science. The emphasis was on collectivization and state control, rather than efficiency or productivity. They eventually learned the hard way. Interestingly enough, in the Soviet Union one way they tried correcting this was by hiring “agricultural consultants” from the US, often black farmers looking for a new opportunity that didn’t involve moving north and working in a factory and trying to escape racism. They were lured by the promise of good pay and the communist ideology of all proletariat being equal regardless of race. The reality of course did not quite match the ideology. But they did correct a lot of the inefficiencies and just plain wrong agricultural practices that were in place.
There’s a lot is science to farming. Some of those collective farms were collectives of people with no experience farming. They literally didn’t know how to do it.
I think it wasn’t just a matter of collectivization, it was probably more a matter of it being under an authoritarian system. The people in charge had absolute authority, and were put in that place for political and ideological reasons, not because they had any particular skills at managing farms. So they made the rules, while not knowing what they were doing, and anyone who pointed that out was considered to be an enemy of the state for opposing the appointed bosses.
Execute a few farmers for “counter-revolutionary activities”, and the rest of the farmers stop trying to fix things. Fast forward a a generation, and a lot of traditional knowledge has been lost.
Part of the failure was due to the government using agricultural products to create funds for investment in other sectors, such as industry. To oversimplify greatly, Stalin wanted to build heavy industry as quickly as possibly, not least to build up the military. That required cash, which meant exporting grain. Quotas on grain were established, and taken first. If there was enough left over for the farmers, great. If not, too bad.
A similar process happened under capitalism, too. Russian peasants before the revolution also suffered famines when the tsar’s regime similarly taxed peasants to build industry. During the Irish potato famine, Ireland was a net exporter of food. Peasants raised grain that landlords took and sold, and ate potatoes. If the potato crop failed, too bad. This is not the only example.
Durer’s woodcut, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, portrays Famine as well-fed and holding scales. This is a reference to famine hitting the poor, not the wealthy.
So it wasn’t “collectivization” as such, but the decision to build up the economy in certain ways at the expense of agricultural workers. Russian peasants before the revolution often managed the resources collectively, divvying up land through discussions and debates to ensure a rough equality over time. Karl Marx noted that it might have been possible for Russia to move from its essentially feudal one to socialism without the need to go through capitalism, based on the collective nature of the peasant economy, based on the mir.
I don’t think that’s the case at all, the other aspects of the communist economies were obviously less efficient than the west. But their agriculture stands out as orders of magnitude worse. I mean Stalin’s Soviet Union managed to win an industrialized war with Germany, and then went on to hold their own (even pull ahead at times) in the cold war arms race with the US.
Whereas in all the communist states you see an inability to produce remotely enough food, in a way the west had not seen for centuries.
That definitely explains part of the issue with the Soviet Union in the 30s (as well as the use of famine as a weapon to quell a restive region in the Ukraine), but was that the case in all the other communist countries that saw huge famines?
Can’t add much that’s not already been said. I do recall tales (true?) of bad middle and local management. Such as decreeing that wheat be grown in places too cold or wet or dry for any hope of success. That can only happen when non-farmers are at the top, and all info is flowed top-down with little to none flowed bottom-up.
Just now I’m reading the book Bullshit Jobs: a Theory by David Graeber. He holds that a lot of the ennui and social disaffectation of the current era stems from the vast number of what he calls “bullshit jobs”. Ones where the effort is pointless and the results largely illusory.
Bullshit jobs are not the same as “bad jobs”: ones doing difficult or mind-numbing work for little reward. In the West, many bullshit jobs pay quite well. Instead they are jobs lacking any sense that a) they should be done at all, and b) that the worker’s toil produces anything useful at all. A crushing depression and cynicism is the natural outcome of subjecting a normal human psyche to this situation. And anyone coming into these kinds of jobs with a preexisting tendency to depression or neuroticism is at great risk for even worse outcomes.
Tying this back to the OP …
If a peasant (or former town/city dweller) is assigned to work on a farm built where there’s no water, or to grow e.g. wheat where the climate ensures it will die with little yield, or there are insufficient or no tools or supplies and no ability to get them, all the work of the farm turns into a giant bullshit job with starvation as its sole reward.
Little wonder even the ones that might, as a matter of agriculture, have succeeded at least partially quickly turned to failure as a matter of human society and human nature.
I believe many kibbutzim did fail. However, the kibbutzim, and other types of agricultural co-ops, that were successful were the ones, as @puzzlegal explained, that has access to people who knew how to farm (including taking advantage of innovations), and indeed there were Israeli “agricultural consultants” to be found in many different countries, maybe still are.
I feel like collective living tends to work when it’s a sort of “protective” behavior that forms from the ground up to preserve or foster a way of life/belief system, like many of the kibbutzim did in the pre-Israel days.
But if it’s imposed from the top down, with forced land redistribution and forced reassignment of workers, it’s not going to work. That works against human nature.
I heard an interesting Planet Money episode about the effects of liberalization on collective farming in China. Allowing individual farmers to share in profits was immediately a big success.
When General Wrangle occupied the Crimea in 1920 he was about to appropriate food production. But the local agricultural soviet pointed out that they were in charge and, being freed of control by Moscow, they could manage food production very efficiently. Which they did. This is covered in detail in Wrangels’ book “Always With Honor”.
During the depression the government sponsored farming programs that funded qualified farmers to form cooperatives. A coop dairy farm in Missouri was so successful that local dairies eventually forced the government (probably state) to shut it down.
Sikorski Aircraft was founded as a commune.
It’s a matter of degree. Bosque Farms New Mexico was prepared by the federal government and then portioned out by lottery to qualified farmers. It still functions as a farming community.
Agriculture was the greatest portion of their economy so the failure would stand out. These countries were dictatorships and the dictators didn’t care if the people had enough to eat. They put their efforts into consolidating power and building up their militaries instead.
Murdering millions of landlords who know how to actually run a farm
Replacing them with people based on ideological or political alignment rather than actual farming knowledge
Displacing millions of farm workers to work in factories in the city
Using experimental farming techniques based on ideology rather than science (see “Four Pests” campaign where they killed all the sparrows resulting in an explosion of the locust population)
General chaos that results from forcibly restructuring an entire nations agricultural industry
I don’t think there is anything specific about structuring a farm around a collective that would make it unsuccessful. But it sort of presumes the members of the collective actually know how to farm and aren’t just a bunch of peasants being told to increase grain yields at gunpoint.
The Hutterites and the Israeli kibbutz movement are collectives, but have one absolutely vital difference ,compared to the communist collectives : they are purely voluntary.
When people actively choose to live a certain lifestyle and form their own commune, ( and live under a government which respects their choice), they work hard and succeed.
When people are forced into communes and treated as slaves, not so much.
(By the way: in Israel , the kibbutz system is now dead. It thrived for 3 generations, from 1920"s till about1980. But it eventually failed , due to changes in Israeli society and economy.)