Not really. Never really defended what the USSR did to Ukraine. In fact I said it was bigoted.

Even then, it's not hard to understand why anybody wouldn't want to give up private ownership in the first place when all they've known revolves around that idea.

I don't really get it. How much of the manifesto did Lenin write? Because the manifesto very clearly states that capitalism is important when it comes to industrializing a country to the point where socialism is viable.

After China failed by making the same exact mistake even they said "we shouldn't have skipped capitalism" because they're Marxist. Lenin literally helped write the goddamn book they got that from. Is Lenin stupid or something?


Edit: There is literally only 3 things that The Communist Manifesto makes clear. 1) Capitalism is **** and we need a new revolution to save us from the oppression of capitalism. 2) But we actually needed capitalism to save us from feudalism and introduce industry to provide us with an abundance to make utopia viable. 3) Our revolution has to come from the proletariat because bourgeois socialism is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

The USSR helped save the US from starvation? When? Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying here?

Other way around lol.

So because Russia has had famines before that weren't caused by collectivization and they required international assistance, that's good reason to believe that collectivization doesn't cause a lack of resources?

I'm still not getting where you're going with that.

They didn't have the supply to feed their people so they had to beg the US to give them some food.

If they had the food to feed people why wouldn't they? How would collectivizing, in it's self, prevent them from having enough food to feed people?

NOW I understand that it's because they exported food, but that's not collectivization in it's self causing the famine it's what they did with it.

It sounds like you're conflating the reasons why they didn't have enough food in the 1921 famine with the reasons why they didn't have enough food in the 1931 famine. These were different situations with different causes.

In a perfect utopia where farmers simply willingly gave up their owership of property to the government, that would only solve one problem (successful kulak peasants burning their fields and slaughtering their livestock in revolt) - another problem is that of distribution. With the USSR being a centrally planned economy, that is one of the cruxes of the issues.

With the five year plan, the government came up with projections and figures based on current agricultural productivity that were optimistic, to put it generously. They indeed expected their policies of collectivization would increase agricultural productivity and result in a surplus, which would be used to pay for industrialization while maintaining the crop yields the people have had in recent times. Instead, the policy was a failure and resulted in much less agricultural productivity. The Soviet Union still used much of what they had to pay for industrialization, at the expense of human lives. So contrary to your point there, even if they hadn't decided to export the yields they got, the extremely diminished agricultural productivity (caused in large part by collectivization) would've still resulted in famine.

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?

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:

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.

bruh the manifesto was written in 1848 by marx and engels... Give your head a shake