All of this seems to sidestep the fact that each one of these Communist Collective Farms had a finite group of people that were known by everyone in the community. In fact the people on that farm most likely all lived in the same apartment overseen by a busy body grandma with some actual politburo authority. That small micro community certainly knew who the slackers were and dealt with them accordingly. And they still failed spectacularly.
But I agree with you that Society as a whole could be describe accurately as ‘faceless’…for whatever that matters to any farm any where.
I think that had to do with incorrect theories about how to farm being imposed on them from higher up; and/or with the group being made up of people who didn’t know how to farm. Again, the problem wasn’t the collectivization in itself. The problem was that the people who did know how to farm in those specific locations weren’t allowed to be the people who got listened to.
That’s been discussed a good bit in this thread already.
New Mexico, especially the northern part of the state where Spanish settlement is the oldest, has a complex set of water usage laws with the acequias. Well, the Western US does in general, but this is the same thing in small scale. How do you manage a finite resource in the desert, even at the elevations of places like Santa Fe and Las Vegas and Taos? With a community controlled and managed acequia system, which is now considered a legitimate political subdivision by the state. The farmers and families that still use them still have to work together to manage and maintain the systems.
I’m jumping in late to the thread and I’ll admit I haven’t read all hundred posts.
But I’ll offer the theory with Soviet collectives goes back to who ran the communist party. The Bolsheviks who controlled the communist movement in Russia originated in the cities and its base was the urban proletariat - factory workers. Russian rural peasants tended to lean towards the Social Democrats.
When the Bolsheviks took control of Russia and worked on reforming the economy, they went with what they knew. This worked okay with the industrial factory-based sector of the economy, where they had a pool of experience. But they encountered problems in the agricultural sector of the economy, where they tried to run farms like factories.
Farms and factories do not work on the same system. (On a personal note, I’ve worked in both.) In a factory, you can determine what the product is, figure out the process for manufacturing that product, break the manufacturing process down into a number of steps, set up an assembly line, assign workers to the various steps that need to be done, and check the products as they are finished. You essentially know what every worker was supposed to be doing and you can check the end product to see if it was done. If you discover, for example, that part #2056 is missing, you can go back to the individual who was supposed to be installing part #2056 and arrest him for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
This process doesn’t work on a farm. The operations of making a farm work have to be more flexible. You can’t work off a pre-determined list of what tasks needs to be done today. You have to take the changing conditions of the plants, the animals, the weather, etc into account in order to know what jobs are today’s priority, what jobs should wait a week because they’re not ready to be done yet, and what jobs can be put off until you have some spare time to do them. You can’t do everything on a pre-determined schedule.
Only if you’re measuring success by the metric of worker satisfaction. If you’re measuring success by the quantity of product output, shooting a few individual workers might be seen as an acceptable price to achieve the goal. We know which standard people like Lenin and Stalin chose.
This isn’t something we’ve covered in any of the human resources seminars and courses I’ve attended over the last few years. I’m going to bring it up to my vice president during our next one-on-one meeting and see what he things about implementing the Lenin/Stalin Method at our company. Thanks for the good idea.
Okay, I’d heard of Lysenko but knew little about him. Let’s just say he was the Ben Carson of botanists! “You can grow bananas in Siberia if you just acclimate them” - yeah, doesn’t work that way, then or now.
That’s kind of the point of the OP the communist industrial sector was brutal and inefficient but it worked despite all the pretending to work, as in, it just about produced enough manufactured goods and raw materials for a modern state (certainly more than the pre-revolutionary regimes)
The agricultural sector spectacularly failed to do even that. Agricultural output was less from the collectivized systems than from the pre-revolutionary regimes (which were pretty dysfunctional or wouldn’t have trigger the communist revolutions that ended them)
Pointing out that the communist governments prioritized feeding the urban industrial centers and exports over feeding the rural population, isn’t an explanation as the non-communist agricultural systems also had big (in fact much larger) urban centers to feed and exported far more than the communist countries.
The most active European nation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was Portugal, which used the forced labor of Africans in their Latin American colonies in present-day Brazil. Almost 3.9 million enslaved Africans were forced to embark on Portuguese ships. Present-day Brazil received around 3.2 of them, making it the country in the Americas where most enslaved people arrived during the period. British ships also carried upwards of 3 million Africans forcefully removed from the continent, mostly to the Caribbean, the United States and the Guyanas. French ships carried 1.3 million enslaved Africans.
The USA was 6th in the transatlantic slave trade.
Nor were the Americas the only place slavery existed-
Slavery was a widespread phenomenon in Europe during the Atlantic slave trade of the 1500s to the 1800s, particularly around port cities and in their hinterlands. The slaves held around the Mediterranean and more widely around Europe included both “Atlantic” slaves and slaves of other geographical origins, primarily the Ottoman Empire, Indian Ocean colonies, and sub-Saharan Africa. Others came from the Black Sea and Eastern Europe. Sub-Saharan Africans arrived in Europe via the Barbary Regency ports and Egypt.
and Asia https://www.iias.asia/the-newsletter/article/human-trafficking-asia-1900-preliminary-census The same can be said about human trafficking in Asia. While research over the last half century has established that some 12,521,000 men, women, and children were exported from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas between 1500 and 1866, 4 it is becoming increasingly apparent that transnational/pan-regional slave trading elsewhere in the globe was also massive. The trans-Saharan and western Indian Ocean trades exported an estimated 10.9-11.6 million Africans toward the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia between 650 and 1900. 5 Perhaps one million enslaved Europeans from as far north as Britain, Ireland, and Iceland reached North Africa’s Barbary Coast between 1500 and 1800, while 800,000-900,000 or more North Africans landed in Italy, Portugal, and Spain between 1450 and 1800. 6 Europeans also trafficked large numbers of slaves beyond the Atlantic. British, Danish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders exported a minimum of 450,000-565,000 Africans, Indians, and Southeast Asians to European establishments within the Indian Ocean basin between 1500 and 1850, while the Manila galleons carried tens of thousands of Asian slaves to Central and South America during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 7
Missing from this picture is a comprehensive sense of the volume of human trafficking in Asia.
But some of the worst could be held criminally responsible for example criminally negligent manslaughter. trump, Fox news and conservative news radions may have been responsible for anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of American covid deaths.
Which is- actual communism.
Exactly.
And various small communes often had a single charismatic leader… and the communs often fell apart after his death.
So this is basically saying chattel enslavement of millions and the mass death of millions by enforced collectivization are basically good things, as they were an unfortunate but ultimately worthwhile steps in the transition to a modern industrial society. Which is BS. They were nothing of the sort, they were standalone atrocities that were the result of decisions of the ruling class at the time.l
The other problem wirth the claim is that other countries in the world that weren’t Communist industrialized faster and better, and without killing millions of people.
China’s economy stagnated under Communism. Then they liberated and allowed markets to work, and China’s industrial capacity exploded along with their standard of living. Now authoritarianism is being imposed again, and the results aren’t looking good.
When Chavez took over Venezuela, the national income was about $9500. Since then, Latin America’s standard of living has gone up, dramatically. For example, the average income in its neighbor Guyana is about $70,000. In Venezuela? It’s still around $9500. It’s the only country in the region which has not seen an improvement in the income of the people over the past 20 years.
Of course, Maduro’s answer to that is to simply take Guyana, which he is planning to do. Pure imperialistic conquest of a weaker country to take their natural resources. Comunist countries often become threats to their neighbors as their leaders seek to placate the people after the results of their awful policies rile thenm up.
Except I’m not claiming communist industry was a success relative to non-communist contemporary nations. Only that it was a success relative to communist agriculture.
Communist industry was brutal and inefficient (especially relative to contemporary non-communist countries which were less brutal and more efficient) but far far more effective than communist collectivized agriculture.
Thinking that the USA is alone in its racism and Xenophobia is deluded. Brexit was fueled by Xenophobia. All over Europe Right wing populists are riding a wave of bigotry and xenophobia.
No. In fact I supported Obama, donated to his campaign, and I support Harris as Bidens successor.
I did say that if the GOP did manage to nominate a woman, particularly a woman of color, that it would be likely that many diehard bigots would stay home and not vote for her. That’s not the USA, that is the MAGA branch of the GOP.
Only when measured by numerical output; the quality of the products was shit. It was literally the shoddiest crap the workers could get away with, with the minimum investment of time and effort. It was “Cut Every Corner” from The Simpsons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy50nUYyTKM
When told to increase production or be branded a “counter-revolutionary saboteur”, they would literally ship the products of the reject bins.
Not always. Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the attempt to have everyone produce steel to industrialize China was a disaster, leading to mass famine and useless industrial products as the steel was of such low quality.
On the other hand, Stalin’s industrialization of the Soviet Union during the 1930s was an outstanding success in turning what was a backwards agrarian economy into an industrial powerhouse as long as the cost in bodies was considered to be an acceptable cost, which to Stalin it certainly was. As I said upthread, the USSR outproduced the US in military hardware every single year of the Cold War, and just prior to the outbreak of WWII the USSR not only had more tanks (at ~20,000) than any other nation, but they also had more tanks than every other nation in the world combined.
In WWI Tsarist Russia was sending its riflemen into battle without enough rifles to go around for everyone because its economy was such as basket case, particularly the industrial sector. In WWII the USSR outproduced everyone in every category of land combat equipment, from small arms to artillery. Before anyone cites the absurd scene in Enemy at the Gates of Soviet riflemen being sent forward with one gun per two men, it’s utter Hollywood nonsense. Enemy at the Gates is a work of fiction, not a documentary. Vasily Zaitsev never fought a sniper duel with the head of the German sniper school at Stalingrad. Erwin König is a fictional character. Contrary to his portrayal in the movie, Vasily Zaitsev was an ardent communist. His autobiography, Notes of a Sniper makes that abundently clear.