I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Lysenkoism before, but after reading about it on Wikipedia I think it’s safe to say I’m an expert. The article mentions that Lysenko asserted that all science is class-oriented in nature got to me because of another article I had read in the last year or two. I wish I could remember the article, but the authord argued that modern science was both classist and sexist (maybe racist) because it originated with men of the leisure class. When I tried finding the original article, all I could find were more reasonable articles about how sexism has affected scientific endeavors.
Actually executing vaccine deniers would be almost as dangerous as executing vaccine supporters. It would be impossible to conduct reliable scientific research since no scientist would even come close to investigating safety issues due to the personal risk. You never would have gotten safe vaccines in the first place, because they wouldn’t have gotten through the process of safety and efficacy testing that requires a clear-headed, evidence-based analysis. You’d just get the first round of crap that was developed and might even be worse than placebo.
Yes, but people choose to live and work there, and they learn from their predecessors what to do and how to do it.
Not surprising since getting equipment to the Soviets was difficult and dangerous. But I just learned that the first production run of the Jeep pretty much all went to Great Britain and Russia under Lend Lease. The Army used an improved second run.
Farmers think collectively by instinct. Their enemies are the vagaries of weather, market and disease which they can do little to overcome but with neighbor cooperation they will survive and live on to perhaps help that family in return.
I think we can lay the fault of Communist Collectivization Schemes on the failures of a party making many revolutionary changes to create a brand new world and discovering biology could not possibly care less.
ETA: Also, not every nation has the badass Norman Borlaug a Nobel graduate from my Alma Mater!
I was also surprised that there was so little mention of Lysenko.
Here is a video discussing Lysenko, about 18 minutes long. For those who inevitably ask for a complete synopsis of every video posted on the SD: it is a video about Lysenko and Lysenkoism 
Thanks for bringing the link to Black American history. These sorts of facts are so often omitted from the history books.
That’s a good point. But did the other famines associated with collectivization have equivalent scientific figures?
I vaguely recall Pol Pot himself had some bonkers theories about how agriculture should work?
Good point. The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow gives abundant examples of just that, how local communities organized themselves cooperatively with all the features of early civilization* but without the apparatus of a state. It had all along been assumed that civilization is an emergent phenomenon from the primary state, but that turns out to be wrong. A state is not necessary to the workings of civilization; rather, a state is authoritarians’ way to take over the functions of existing local cooperative organizing on a large scale backed up with violent force, whether or not it really fulfills those functions. I suggest that the answer to the OP’s question may well be sought in The Dawn of Everything.
*the Ancient tech era, for Civ players
Well, they managed to export Lysenkoism to China to some extent. I’m not sure about Pol Pot, but he wanted some kind of agrarian utopia that was probably incompatible with modern farming techniques anyway.
At any rate, I’m not claiming that Lysenkoism was the only factor–I think large-scale collectivization would have doomed them on its own. You can beat people into submission for a while, but not forever. But Lysenkoism probably sped up the process.
I grew up on a Mennonite farm. There were Mennonites on collective farms in the area, but they were orthodox and about as alien to us as Hutterites were. All the Monnonites I knew had private farms and made their own choices.
HOWEVER… Farmers do tend to live in communities that help each other. When the farm across the road had the roof of its barn collapse, The nearby farmers pitched in to help fix it. We couldn’t afford a combine, but we had a tractor. People with combines would come and help pull in the crops, then we would do the same for them.
But this is where Dunbar’s number comes in. These communities work because free riders can’t survive in them. Everyone knows everyone else, and word of bad behavior travels fast. If a farmer tends to never show up to help anyone else, guess what happens when he needs help? Nothing.
Human behaviour is all about incentives. In small collectives, peer pressure and the threat of expulsion is all you need. The kid who behaves badly won’t be allowe to date any daughters, the family that behaves badly will be shunned or kicked out, etc. There are powerful incentives to keep you in line.
Once a group gets large enough for anonymity to be a protector of bad behavior, you need laws, police, bureaucracy, and all the rest. Counting on people to behave just because they are ‘good’ people is a fool’s game. People always respond to the incentive system set up around them.
The reason markets work is because they rely on this aspect of humans, rather than to deny it and pretend that everyone just wants the best for the collective. If the desire for personal advancement is a strong motivator, then a system of voluntary trade which requires people to do good for others to do good for themselves is a good way to go.
Or put another way, capitalism is not a system, it’s what you get when you don’t try to engineer a formal economic system. Small, voluntary collectives maintain that dynamic, as do the ones where everyone’s main goal is aligned (religious collectives). But for everyone else, we need a system that provides incentives to do the right thing, and for large groups, laws and police to stop antisocial behavior.
Pol Pot made no effort to conceal the fact that he was working and starving the “New People” to death.
“To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.”
New People (Khmer: អ្នកផ្ញើ neak phnoe or អ្នកថ្មី neak thmei or អ្នក១៧មេសា, neak dap pram pii mesa, lit. ‘April 17th people’) were civilian Cambodians who were controlled and exploited by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (officially then known as Democratic Kampuchea) from 1975 to 1979. Generally, anyone who was from an urban area was made a New Person and people from rural areas were made Old People (អ្នកចាស់ neak chas or អ្នកមូលដ្ឋាន neak moultanh).[1]
New People were not allowed any property and they were forced to work at least 10 hours a day, and often more. Their food rations were so small they led to starvation. Disease was rampant and in 1976 it was estimated that 80% of the Cambodian population had malaria.
I’m unsure then exactly what you would envision “actual communism” to be in the modern world. As pointed out upthread, communal work and division of the resulting bounty can’t really function beyond a Dunbar’s number of people. More than that and the Iron law of oligarchy - Wikipedia kicks in, with a formalized leadership taking over (Animal Farm anyone?) or even worse, a bureaucracy. There isn’t a single flaw of capitalism as you’ve defined it that isn’t ten times worse in a government-run command economy (whether based on Marxist principles or not).
For that matter, I’m not certain how you are defining the term “capitalism”. Your arguments seem to be based on capitalism meaning pure robber-baron monopolism, with wage slavery, company towns and Pinkerton men machine gunning strikers. That simply hasn’t been the case since the 1930s at latest.
The problem seems to be that the only known way for a people to defend themselves against a state’s invading army is to form an army themselves- which inevitably ends up being administered by a state. The most famous example is from the Biblical book of 1 Samuel, when the formerly decentralized independent Israelite tribes actually clamor for a king, a warlord to lead them to victory and conquest over the neighboring nations- even after Samuel explicitly warns them about the baggage that monarchies bring with them:
He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.
Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.
He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.
He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.
Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle [2] and donkeys he will take for his own use.
He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.
When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day."
No, Communism HAS been tried, many times. It’s just that it rapidly devolves into an authoritarian nightmare, because it has to.
Trying and failing is not hte same as not trying. Communism hasn’t been a SUCCESS anywhere, that’s true. Because it is anti-human, unscientific, and sucks very badly and results in the misery of millions every time it is tried.
This is interesting and I looked into it a bit. It appears that the cooperatives in the Netherlands are mostly for either the purchase of inputs (an animal feed cooperative) or the processing and marketing of outputs (the sugar beet processors), or financial services (credit unions for farmers). The actual planting and harvesting is done by individual farmers, afaict. Such arrangements are not unknown in the U.S.
They aren’t collective farms in the Soviet Union sense.
Oh, gods, Graeber and Wengrow. David Wengrow is at least a legitimate academic who did actual research and performed archeological excavations, but Dave Graeber was a radical leftist-cum-anarchist activist whose political and social views skewed his ‘scholarly’ research and comes out in full force in his monographs, the prose of which is heavy on the purple and light on verifiable facts. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is basically a post-Structuralist critique of the evidentially well-established history of early civilization using a highly selective cherry-picking of historical information and a thundering herd of tenuous assertions regarding pre-historical societies to produce a tailor-made narrative of the development of civilization that satisfies the political philosophy of collectivist anarchism, but it is neither well-founded nor regarded as a work of good scholarly integrity.
As for addressing the question of the o.p., the apparatus of a state is not required for agriculture, and there are plenty of examples of voluntary collectivism and cooperatives in agriculture (some presented here) that were functional without any significant degree of regulation or government oversight, so the hypothesis that collectivism per se is not compatible with even large scale agriculture does not hold water. The failures mentioned by the o.p. are examples of autocratic regimes run by leaders who don’t understand that their lofty philosophical notions and aspirations of productivity don’t translate into effective policy without technical competence and honest feedback on the viability of stated goals, or worse, just don’t care about the well-being of their populace and take measures that actively (and sometimes quite intentionally) result in failure.
Stranger
An interesting book that gets near this topic is The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond.
IMO he has his limitations as an author and a scholar, so this isn’t meant as a paean to him or to his views. Neither is what he has to say 100% bunk.
But one of this book’s large points is that until very recently historically speaking (his titular “Yesterday”), say 5000 years, substantially everyone lived in small communities. They neither traveled (unless they were nomads, but then they traveled as a group), nor met strangers. You lived and died wholly within your group.
Meeting a stranger on a path through the bush was literally a life or death experience for you and possibly your whole tribe. The other person’s too. And you both knew it. Kinda like we imagine the first contact between an Earth interstellar ship and a ship from another planet might be. Oh SHIT, whadda we do now??!?1?
The thread-relevant point being that the kinds of societies and motivations that arise 100% naturally in sub-Dunbar low-mixing environments differ greatly from what arises naturally in larger, or vastly larger, highly mixed environments.
And he goes on to offer some speculations about how a human mind evolved for that bygone world struggles to operate in this present one. And how we might adjust this man-made world, and the education in it, to work better versus the mental substrate we’re stuck with for at least the next few hundred generations until it changes enough to matter.
Since studying complexity theory I have come around to the “small is beautiful” mindset. Big government is not good, but big business is only better in the sense that it can ultimately fail and be replaced, and that it doesn’t have thr right to use guns to compel you. In terms of efficiency and good devision-making, bigness is bad.
It’s not just humans that evolved in small groups. Nature does this always when it comes to cooperative social species. Notice how wolves do not evolve into megapacks? Or that ants maintain individual anthills and go to war wirh other ants that establish anthills too close? Orcas separate into autonomous pods. And so it goes.
Complex systems survive and thrive through experimentation and exploration. Sometimes that goes horribly wrong. Randomness is involved. And so complex systems evolve to be highly fault tolerant and redundant. Then they can explore maximally without risk to the species. If one anthill dies of disease, the other ants in the world are fine. In a global ant colony, one disease could end the species.
Global government, Communism, and other ideologies that require combining humans into massive collectives with central control fly in the face of this reality. The first time a global government makes a policy error, the whole planet pays the price. When Communist leaders get the factors of production wrong there is no negative feedback mechanism to correct the error, as the people at the bottom who actually know what’s going on have no say in the matter and no incentive to speak up and risk angering the powers that be. The Communists wouldn’t even be able to learn on the Capitalists to establish prices and supply and demand, since we’d all be Communists.
So global government is bad, but Isolationism is equally bad. Social species nedd to cooperate, and trade benefits everyone. But that doesn’t mean open borders.
In computing terms, borders and international regulations are the interfaces between countries. We shouldn’t be isolationist or globalist, but a collection of independent countries cooperating with other countries through defined interfaces that protect our internal structures, morals and practices while allowing as much outside interaction as possible through those interfaces. We need immigration and lots of it, but it needs to be controlled. Borders must be defended.
Part of the craziness we are seeing today is, IMO, the result of the complete globalization of information. We have broken down all the informational borders that prevented the internal dialog of people in one group from being observed in detail by all. Countries are no longer black box modules with interfaces that hide their differences or their incompatibilities. Bad ideas move across country barriers easily. People across the globe can influence each other. And people aren’t much liking it. It’s generating a lot of hate as we find out what other people really think.
Farming in small villages was the historical roots of Japan. It was very much the same thing, where people had to work together for the common good, but each family had its own land.
I don’t know that much about this, but apparently wet rice farming takes considerable community involvement such as for building and maintaining canals and terraces.