But that process and poverty is somehow not considered part of the price of capitalism, while anything negative in the Soviet Union is taken as evidence of “the failure of collectivization.” This is of course not to suggest an equivalency between the horrors of active Stalinist collectivization but it is to suggest a historical analysis that starts and finishes with “collectivization bad” can be problematic.
My point is simply that whenever and wherever you find massive industrialization, you find terrible prices being paid. That Russia/USSR industrialized much later is a comment on timing, not the process and the pain. At a certain point, Mario Puzo’s rendering of Balzac comes into play for societies as well as individuals: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” At what point do we say, “well, let’s let bygones be bygones”? Beats me.
This may well be the size of group that we’re evolved to live in (along with routine trade and personnel exchange with other such groups.)
Whether we’ll evolve fast enough to succeed in living at anything remotely near the population sizes we’re now dealing with is an open question. I don’t expect we’ll live to see it answered (at least, unless it’s answered very resoundingly in the negative during our lifetimes.)
So far; and with a lot of damage.
And the more that capitalist companies become very large, as they will swallow each other up to the point of collapse if not controlled, the bigger the risks of damage that the system can’t deal with. Capitalism/private ownership can work – but it needs restrictions.
Yes, collectivization of the military worked for them to a degree. Just like every other country has done. But it’s not agriculture, it’s not production of goods and services to sell at market. Supporting a military industrial complex is always a drain on an economy.
The Soviets ‘defeated’ the German Army by literally throwing bodies and materiel into the grinder, essentially physically slowing the German advance until the winter and logistics broke the thrust of the invasion, and then plowed through the broken remains as the Germans beat a retreat. It does not stand as a brilliant strategic plan or tactics that are deeply studied in colleges of war today.
As other posters have variously noted, the agricultural failures of the 1920s were due to a combination of incompetence (people being assigned to work and run farms who had no experience), unrealistic expectations and inaccurate reports of yield, the application of the doctrinal pseudoscience of Lysinkoism, and intentional famine of the Holodomor and other famines in the 1920s intended to purge Ukrainian and other ethnic groups from the proximity of the Russian sphere of influence.
That Soviet political management was also monumentally incompetent was just a cherry on that shit sundae. Later lack of production capacity (forcing the Soviets to buy grain on the open market in the ‘Eighties despite controlling “The Breadbasket of Europe” in the Ukraine) was just entrenched bureaucracy and lack of modernization and innovation, as well as the vagaries of weather that have a larger impact given the shorter growing season at high latitudes.
Stranger
Actually, the big knock on the Russian military today is that it IS collectivized. Local autonomy is not granted to local commanders. Information about larger strategic objectives is not given to soldiers on the ground, so they cannot improvise well when things go bad, as they inevitably do.
The western militaries learned a lot of organizational lessons over the past 100 years, and as a result strategic decisions are made at the top, but tactical choices are pushed down as low as they can go, and all soldiers get told not just what they must do, but why and how it fits into the larger objective, so that if their instructions can’t be met on the battlefield they can improvise.
The rigid reliance on central decision making in the Russian military is why so many of their generals have been killed. Making decisions from HQ turned out to be a giant failure, so they had to go to the front where they became prime targets.
But that is exactly what I am saying. The poverty of the dust bowl (The absolute nadir of the US agricultural system) was the price of capitalism. There weren’t bodies piled up on the roads of Kansas (or England or France for that matter) people weren’t resorting to cannibalism. That is a far far lower price than was paid by the population of the USSR(or China, or North Korea, or Cambodia) when their government decided to collectivize their agriculture.
It’s not “problematic” it’s an obvious inference from the facts.
Part of the price of US capitalism includes slavery and the genocide of Indigenous people. I do not know how to balance the horrors; I am not sure sheer numbers is the best way.
As did the Russian empire. But that has absolutely zero, zip, and bugger all to do with the fact that collectivization in communist countries several centuries later led directly to massive deady famines that killed millions of people.
Slavery was abolished in the US in 1865, and the “Indian Wars” lasted until 1924, while the “legacy” of racism continues, so not “several centuries later.” My point was, and I think we agree, “collectivization” was one form of making the transition to an industrial economy and other paths were pretty awful too. So the original question about “why collective farms were so bad at farming” is more complicated than “collectivization.”
This isn’t just “the Russian military today”; this goes back to the Soviet era, and it is because the Russian and Soviet armies do not really have a core of professional non-commissioned officers (NCO). As a result, company grade officers end up being squad-level leaders and filling technical roles requiring special training and experience, and field grade officers never really get the experience to make independent tactical decisions or learn leadership at even the company or battalion level.
And to be clear, this isn’t just an issue with the Russian military; the United States can definitely have the same problem when a high ranking company or general grade officer will not give autonomy to more junior officers to make individual decisions, but it is not as culturally entrenched or uniformly applied.
As tempting as it may be to apply this to capitalism it isn’t really true, at least insofar as the “genocide of Indigenous people”. This was due to a combination of political expansionist objectives and a racialist nationalism policy to marginalize Native Americans by eliminating their cultures.
There are certainly particular situations where there were financial motivations for crimes perpetrated against natives, e.g. the Osage Indian murders recently brought to broader public attention by the novel and film Killers of the Flower Moon (and the even longer history of scamming and stealing from tribal members where were forcibly resettled in Oklahoma and elsewhere when it was discovered that the reservations or purchased land were sitting on petroleum and mineral resources) but I don’t think that can really be tied to capitalism alone; the Soviets did essentially the same thing to the many indigenous ethnic groups when they sought resources. I think this is more generally just a consequence of industrialization and trampling the rights and well-being of non-represented peoples when they possess or have rights to resources that the ruling authority wants or needs.
The Atlantic slave trade was certainly originally driven by a design to maximize profits, first by trying to enslave native groups and then importing Africans captured or sold to traders to work in sugar fields and mines, and the conventional rationale for why slavery endured in the American South was a consequence of the cotton gin making the cheap labor of slavery advantageous, this is really a just-so story; the reality is that the cost of owning slaves was not really much less than paying cheap wages for farm workers in a depressed labor market and the notion of slave-owning as a status indicator became deeply entrenched in Southern culture.
Frankly, the Soviet Union never had anything but the trappings of what Marx and Engels would have recognized as “communism”, and the monopolies and corruption of both late 19th Century and modern American “capitalism” would have Adam Smith in violently apoplectic with rage. The collective farms of the Marxist-Leninist Stalin-era Soviet Union failed because of functional incompetence, bad management, and deliberate malfeasance. The Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine were even bigger humanitarian catastrophes conducted under a system that was substantially closer to a system approximating actual communism.
Stranger
You’re comparing two vastly different topics related only by the single word ‘military’. Military industry is by necessity top-down, and if one wants to try forcing the word ‘collectivized’ into a context that it doesn’t really apply to, the military industry of every nation that has fought a war since the industrial revolution has been ‘collectivized’. FDR, Churchill, Hitler and Stalin all had command economies in the military sector during the Second World War; none of them told the economic sector to just do their thing and let the invisible hand of the free market provide for the military.
You are also both grossly oversimplifying the divide between the tactical, strategic and operational in the military and the reasons for the Russian failures in the war in Ukraine. As with economies, everyone decides strategic objectives from the top down. How things are run on an operational and tactical level, and the evolution of Auftragstaktik or very loosely ‘mission-oriented tactics’ originating in Prussia in the 19th century has to do with how much operational freedom low level officers are both given and expected to exercise in carrying out their orders. Russia’s problems in Ukraine are the results of a great many more things than simply reliance on the Soviet style of tactical control and logistical management. It’s important to note that though the Soviet Union relied on traditional top-down tactical and logistical control during WWII while Germany relied upon the Auftragstaktik inherited from its Prussian tradition and further developed both during interwar eras and WWI, it was Germany that lost WWII, not the Soviet Union.
If the Russian military wasn’t such an incompetent, corrupt, hollowed out core of what it inherited from the Soviet Union that spent decades decaying under a kleptocracy that had managed to delude both itself and the rest of the world about its actual military capabilities, we’d be having a very different discussion.
Indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world, as well as to some extent those in North America, are still struggling with this – not only with the legacy, but also with ongoing new damage.
Because the companies are headquartered in North America or Europe no longer means that those are the places most impacted by their activities.
That’s a fair point. But it’s also true that people often want to look at the success of a technique for those in one situation, and to ignore the damage that it did and/or does for those in other situations – as well as the similarities of that technique to other supposedly different techniques causing similar problems.
Yup. Actual communism, on a large scale, hasn’t actually ever been tried. It’s always been taken over effectively immediately by authoritarian elitist governments.
I suspect actual communism won’t work on a large scale; but saying it can’t work because of Stalin and Mao doesn’t really work either, at least unless the problem is that it won’t work because it’ll essentially always be taken over by authoritarian elitist governments, once population levels rise to anywhere near 20th century levels. But that isn’t usually the charge laid against it.
You are still conflating ‘collective farm’ with ‘authoritarian society’, and honestly at this point I’m not sure what you actually want to debate.
Collective farms, in and of themselves, suffer the same problems as any other system where people are asked to work primarily for the benefit of others: we just prefer not to. Or at least our willingness to work for others decreases as our social ties become more distant. This is by the way nothing to do with communism or agricultural science. It’s just the inescapable reality that people work harder for their own families than for someone else’s families.
By the way you can readily find examples of this in American colonies. The outcome here wasn’t bodies burned in open pits, it was just a few lean winters until some people decided they were tired of carrying free riders, and consequently some delicate bodies discovered strength they never knew they had.
The reason that was different from the mass deaths in the 20th century was, again, little to do with farming skills or failures of altriuism. In these cases collectivization happened at suddenly, forcefully, at gunpoint (or tankpoint), at industrial scale backed by a heavily industrialized and militarized security apparatus. Calling the 20th century starvations “famine” misunderstands what they were… they were civil wars, partially over food, using food as a weapon.
At this point I get that your actual goal here is to make the case “collectivism so bad” and I’m not going to contest that, but I do feel it’s important to be historically correct about how it actually went wrong. “Collective farmers were bad at farming” doesn’t even scratch the surface of an adequate explanation here. If you think this was all about collective farming, you have to explain the rest of Soviet history when there was continuous collective farming without the mass famines of the 1930’s.
It’s not for the benefit of others, as the people are part of the collective so it is for their own benefit if you want to look at it that way, including getting more money for their labor than they would independently.
In the Netherlands, 70% of agriculture is cooperative, and I doubt it’s because 70% of Dutch farmers are suckers.
I used a bad piece of phrasing up there, so that’s my fault. People want to work harder for themselves than others. Inescapably true, but that’s not a universal characterization of all collective effort.
Obviously Dutch farmers are not suckers, this proves my broader point that collective farms aren’t inherently bad or inefficient. One thing that tends to make them work well is when people participate voluntarily, rather than being forced to work on land stolen from them being held at gunpoint by people who’d just as soon see them dead. That approach has little to recommend it, and a rather poor track record.
Man, 76 posts and only two mentions of Lysenkoism so far.
Aside from all the economic and game theory reasons for the failures under collectivization, it is impossible to run a successful farm when you have politicized science itself. And specifically, imprisoned or executed anyone that had an actual grasp of biology. You might be able to run a successful collective farm if you threaten or abuse people enough. But not if you have outlawed the very techniques required for it.
Sounds remarkably like a certain recent pandemic response in many countries.
While there might be some similarities, it’s somewhat inevitable that the laws passed as a response to a pandemic would be politicized. But making it outright illegal–punishable by execution–to behave otherwise is another thing entirely. I.e., whether there is a vaccine mandate or not is a political question, especially as it depends on how you weight various economic and social factors. But declaring vaccine supporters as enemies of the state and executing them is rather different, and I’m not sure they belong on the same spectrum.
The danger with the pandemic was with vaccine deniers, and the vaccine deniers executed themselves.