Yes the Hutterite farms are managed collectively, and they work pretty well. Unlike the Soviet Union’s collectives, the Hutterite farms aren’t enormous. I think the average is around 10 - 20 families, which makes management easier. The main difference, though, is that the Hutterites really believe in the ideals of collectivism (ultimately based on their interpretation of Christianity), whereas the Communist farms were peasants forced to work together at gunpoint.
I think we’d need a concrete example that illustrates “collective farms bad at being farms”.
The USSR was not a “collective farm.” It was a centrally planned economy that involved many different industries. It’s true that Ukranians died by the millions in the 1930’s. But that’s not because any party involved was bad at farming. Stalin made a deliberate choice to divert Ukranian grain production away from domestic food production because his goals were:
- Purchase massive amounts of American automotive and factory equipment
- Starve the Kulaks to death.
So the Soviet collective farms worked beautifully for their intended purpose, as long as you understand what that purpose is.
Infamously, the Chinese Great Leap Forward promoted crackpot agricultural methods that utterly failed, resulting in famine.
In the Soviet Union, Lysenko has to be called out for singlehandedly ruining much of Soviet agriculture.
And finally slaves have little incentive to work hard or well, and the workers in many communist countries were basically slaves of the state.
But it wasn’t something that happened in non-communist dictatorships. And it wasn’t just the case that the communist leadership didn’t care about the people (though they didn’t) it was a conscious ideological decision, once they had consolidated power to collectivize agriculture, that led to mass famine in pretty much all the communist countries.
That is not universally true. The communist system continued to function in the Crimea even when occupied by the White Army. The soviets were peoples’ committees run from the bottom up. Moscow was out of the picture. Tsarist Russia was an Elitist paradise. Nobody had to hold a gun to the peasants heads to reform the system.
There were a number of utopian movements with various groups setting up their own collectives in 70s. Here in the Arkansas Ozarks, where land was relatively inexpensive, we even had a few lesbian collectives pop up. (Landowners here deliberately advertised to such groups.) Most of them failed after a few short years. In The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South, Brock Thompson argues many of them failed because the residents had unrealistic expectations about how difficult the work would be, did not have the skills necessary to build their communities, and were ideologically opposed to receiving help or advice from those outside their group.
Yes. But what is your point? The same philosophy failed everywhere else it was applied. These countries had no other major industries at the level of their need to produce food so the failure there stands out. It’s their same failure to produce cars, televisions, and toilet paper. Those failures didn’t have the same impact as an inability to feed people.
Not true at all. There is zero evidence the collective farms were a deliberate means to kill off the Kulags (rather than the “kulags” being a convenient label to blame things on when collectivization when wrong). Collectivization was a decision taken for ideological reasons, because the rulers thought it would improve their countries economy. While its true taking food away from rural regions to feed industrial workers and for export certainly exacerbated the problem, that is what modern agricultural systems are meant to do, and had successfully done in the West for centuries. You produce enough to feed the people working on the farms, but that is only a tiny proportion of what you produce, in any functioning modern agricultural system there should be plenty left over to feed the urban population and for export.
The fact that its still being debated among historians whether the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the restive Ukrainians or just the collective agricultural system working as expected, says all you need to know about how catastrophic that system was.
Plus the famines of the soviet union in the 1930s were just one many examples of famine caused by collectivization in communist countries and certainly not the worst.
Back in the '80s when I worked in agriculture, one of my clients took an agricultural tour of the USSR. When I asked him his most vivid memory, he talked about the wheat harvest on a giant collective. There were rows of combines working together, and then at once, they all stopped and their drivers climbed out and went home, even though it was still daylight, and when crops are ready to harvest you have a limited time to do it.
The point is, you can’t run a farm like a factory.
My point is the communist governments did produce iron, steel, guns, tanks, nuclear power plants, ICBMs, etc. Not as efficiently as the west but also not at the amounts you’d expect a 17th century economy produce. Agriculture was (and is) especially fucked up in communist regimes, far more than the rest of the economy.
The first part of that sentence is true, since the ideology was whatever the dictator said it was. The second part is not so simple, I doubt we can establish that any of them meant it at all when it was given as the reason. Collectivization was a method of subjugating the populace, most of whom were farmers. They didn’t want any benefit from the process that would allow the consolidation of power outside the control of the dictator. Taking power by mass murder and starvation resulting from the lack of production was just a win-win in their eyes.
Let’s not forget that agriculture failed in the US and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s when world grain prices crashed. Many farmers had negative incomes for years and many abandoned farming: a lot of the “hoboes” riding the rails were former farmers. And they didn’t even count as “unemployed.” The droughts and dust bowls didn’t help, but those too owed much to the market farm economy.
This is different from famine and state policy, obvs. The point remains, however: capitalist farming was not, and is not, an unalloyed success.
And, despite the discussion of apples and oranges in another thread, comparing the Societ Union and the US in any period is not evaluating equivalent levels of economic development.
Though earlier on, the bolsheviks did not enforce collectivization. They basically kept the village systems in place (which were communal systems, at a small scale even in tsarist days) without the hated landlords.
Collectivization happened later once Stalin had consolidated power. Ironically after taking a moderate line during those internal struggles and using the radicalism of his opponents in the bolshevik party who wanted to enforce collectivization as a rhetorical weapon against them (before using actual non-rhetorical weapons against them to settle the issue)
There is really no evidence for this. With hindsight we know that these communist dictators had consolidated power enough that no amount of famine and suffering would cause them to be overthrown but that was not clear at the time. The history of revolutions up to that point (which all the communist leaders were extremely well versed in) had shown that maintaining a reliable food supply was the most important way to keep in power. The idea that causing a massive famine would help a dictator stay in power was (and is) ridiculous. All the evidence shows that they were sold on the idea, and thought collectivization would improve food production (and help them stay in power that way).
Though that kind of makes the point. This was considered the nadir for agricultural production in the modern US. But at no point was the US close to not being able to feed its people
Agreed. But that spoke to uneven development, geography, and state policy under tsars and commissars to industrialize on the backs of peasant farmers, rather than enslaved peoples and Indigenous peoples a few generations earlier. And neither tsars nor commissars believed they had theluxury of slower-paced industrialization, given the invasions and defeats handed to them by European and Asian countries. I’m not defending anyone, but am suggesting industrialization has always come at a price and those who pay it do not benefit from it. So singling out “collectivization” is a little more complicated than it sometimes seems.
However they did overcome the famines (that also plagued the Tsar) and industrialized a huge nation, raised literacy from 16% to 99%, designed and produced the tanks and airplanes that defeated WW2 Germany, became the first in space and first to land a module on Venus. But, they lagged us in consumer products.
This was accomplished by a controlled economy. Not sure to what extent that is a collective.
To be fair, this is not an issue unique to communism. The discrepancy between pay and effort and the morale issues it creates is a problem with capitalism as well.
Yet that is exactly what happened.
The other side of your argument claims that the collectivization of agriculture was a unique kind of failure. Can you point out any time that forced collectivization of any industry was successful? It won’t be anything that demonstrates your point because the concept as practiced was inherently flawed.
Again, you are incorrect that this was a failure of collective farming. By all accounts the agricultural output of the USSR in the 1930s was adequate to feed the population, except the Communist Party chose to redirect that output elsewhere (specifically to trade for Studebakers and tractor farms), rather than feeding the Soviet people.
As far as whether Stalin intended to kill off the Kulaks, I guess you could argue that he confiscated their entire agricultural product, leaving them nothing to eat, and then they coincidentally died. But that suffers a certain lack of explanatory power.