this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A farm is means of production, therefore it would classify as public property. You cannot own production under communism, only products.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Therefore it could count as a means of production but in general in Communism personal farms of reasonable size and constant use are encouraged. Again, that's a misunderstanding of communism.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

That’s not a feature of communism, it’s a compromise based on the recognition that private ownership produces more efficient outcomes at scale. According to the collective farming wiki: A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by private farms despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms.

No one wants to recreate the Great Famine (The most deadly famine in human history - caused entirely by communism and specifically collectivized farms).

There’s also Holomodor in the USSR which lead to similarly deadly outcomes.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Fun fact for you: The famines were largely caused by Stalin appointing a guy to do agriculture policy who knew less than nothing about agriculture. He forced farmers to plant crops too densely because "communist crops will not compete for nutrients" causing the crops to just die. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko

Most dictators are absolute troglodytes and Stalin was no exception.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

One point in time does not constitute a robust conclusion. Consider any time before and how collectivism did yield considerable agriculture gains for the USSR. Like do we really think they fought WW2 with the same or less agricultural efficiency they had before their revolution?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This.

"A fledgling Nation failed after the most powerful nations on earth collectively conspired to hold it back and ideally topple it so every similar nation most also fail." And these people were paranoid for some reason, could you imagine?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Y'all just in here doing good work, absolutely wrecking these guys.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Oversimplified for brevity, but basically: You may not be able to OWN a farm in the sense that the land itself is collectivized (not even always true under socialism, depends on specific policies and also whether you consider the "farm" to be a different entity from the land it's sitting on, in that case you often own the farm itself, just look at home ownership rates in socialist countries), but you can USE and WORK ON the farm to generate products for yourself and society at large. I don't see it as that different practically from the perspective of the farmer, since they're still living on the land and taking advantage of its productivity.

I think that's certainly better than renting or mortgaging the land and having to deal with landlords and banks. Collectivization usually freed farmers from their obligation to their landlord or private bank and they just continued farming as normal. It's the landlords who had their "livelihood" taken away (i.e. land that they owned but someone else was living and working on), not the farmers doing the actual work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Perhaps you have a source on the collective farms of the Great Leap Forward years in Communist China, or a URL that points to the collective farms in the Ukraine and how it made the farmers better off?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These are bad links because they are from a biased source and not properly cited.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There are no unbiased sources. Zero. Because that's not how politics or the world works.

Also, I fail to see how they're badly cited. It's literally a giant list of links to books, historical records, news articles, and write-ups by other socialists that are also cited.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The sources range wildly, some are just images and links to podcasts or articles. For example the “How many people did the Great Leap Forward kill” link just goes to a Reddit comment on r/communism where the OP just says “it’s fine… there were famines all the time in China!”.