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Originally Posted by Lucem Ferre
But how?
You're not explaining how collectivizing in it's self caused a lack of resources, just what they did with the resources once they collected them.
Resources don't just magically disappear when you gather them together. If distributed properly at most it thins it out across the population. So it wouldn't be collectivization in it's self but what they did when they gathered all of their resources. Like selling the resources to build industry.
Or am I missing something?
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Obviously, as we've already touched on, state collectivization - taking by force from agricultural owners - causes resentment, distrust, and antipathy. Like a factory worker today, the laborer on the collectivized farm is just as, if not more alienated from the fruits of their labor. This undoubtedly results in a lack of incentive to be more productive than necessary. When people are forced to work and aren't often allowed control of their surpluses, they look to avoid that work at every turn.
Central planning does not do an effective job at reacting to local conditions. Those in power did not understand to the extent that they needed to properly plan for the plots of the land that they used in collectivized farming, unlike the local farmers that previously owned those plots of lands. They had a prototypical set up that they used that was cookie-cutter pasted across the country without regards or changes to best capitalize on local conditions. Most of the time, party members made decisions on the collectivized farms, even if they weren't the best qualified ones to make those decisions.
Another problem with big collectivized farms is that they were almost all met with diseconomy of scale issues (whereas the Soviet party members believed it would be an economy of scale). What this meant in practice is that these big collective farms produced less food per worker than the smaller farms did. The problems caused by the large collectivized farms were greater than the benefits that the party higher ups imagined there would be. Obviously, that's not an economically effective model in the long run.
Not to mention, if I recall correctly, many of the people in charge of these collectivized farming operations were no strangers to fudging numbers to "meet" production quotas - lest they wished to be punished.
In short, my position is that locally owned private farms would have produced more resources in the timeframe than collectivized farms did - it's just that the yields wouldn't have been in control of the state - which would've made it harder for them to use as exports to fund rapid industrialization - which was the whole point anyway.
EDIT:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lucem Ferre
Resources don't just magically disappear when you gather them together. If distributed properly at most it thins it out across the population. So it wouldn't be collectivization in it's self but what they did when they gathered all of their resources.
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Just to be clear, the policies of collectivization did not just entail letting the farmers do as they had been doing and the government lackeys coming by every month to pick up their share of the yield, it involved the amalgamation of what was indivdually owned and run property and land into state owned and run property and land. The government did not run it effectively.