Write a report to Joseph Stalin explaining your reasons for not supporting collective farming and reasons why you will not give your land to the Russian Government.
Answers
Collective farming and communal farming are various types of "agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise".[1] There are two broad types of communal farms: Agricultural cooperatives, in which member-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective, and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries (including the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, China and Vietnam), there have been both state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy (cooperative-run farms) and sovkhozy (state-run farms).
A small group of farming or herding families living together on a jointly managed piece of land is one of the most common living arrangements in all of human history as this has co-existed and competed with more individualistic forms of ownership as well as state ownership since the beginnings of agriculture. Private ownership came to predominate in much of the Western world and is therefore better studied. The process by which Western Europe's communal land and other property became private is a fundamental question behind views of property: namely is it the legacy of historical injustices and crimes? Karl Marx believed that what he called primitive communism (joint ownership) was ended by exploitative means he called primitive accumulation. By contrast, capitalist thinkers say that by the homestead principle whoever is first to work on the land is the rightful owner.
During the Aztec rule of central Mexico, the country was divided into small territories called calpulli, which were units of local administration concerned with farming as well as education and religion. A calpulli consisted of a number of large extended families with a presumed common ancestor, themselves each composed of a number of nuclear families. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it. When the Spanish conquered Mexico they replaced this with a system of haciendas or estates granted by the Spanish crown to Spanish colonists, as well as the encomienda, a feudal-like right of overlordship colonists were given in particular villages, and the repartimiento or system of indigenous forced labor.
Following the Mexican Revolution, a new constitution in 1917 abolished any remnant of feudal-like rights hacienda owners had over common lands and offered the development of ejidos: communal farms formed on land purchased from the large estates by the Mexican government.
In the late 1970s, the economy of Czechoslovakia entered into stagnation, and the state-owned companies were unable to deal with advent of modern technologies. A few agricultural companies (where the rules were less strict than in state companies) used this situation to start providing high-tech products. For example, the only way to buy a PC-compatible computer in the late 1980s was to get it (for an extremely high price) from one agricultural company acting as a reseller.
After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989 subsidies to agriculture were halted with devastating effect. Most of the cooperatives had problems competing with technologically advanced foreign competition and were unable to obtain investment to improve their situation. Quite a large percentage of them collapsed. The others that remained were typically insufficiently funded, lacking competent management, without new machinery and living from day to day. Employment in the agricultural sector dropped significantly (from approximately 25% of the population to approximately 1%).
East Germany
Collective farms in the German Democratic Republic were typically called Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG), and corresponded closely to the Soviet kolkhoz. East Germany also had a few state-owned farms which were equivalent to the Soviet sovkhoz, which were called the Volkseigenes Gut (VEG).
Poland
Main article: Collectivization in the Polish People's Republic
The Polish name of a collective farm was Rolnicza spółdzielnia produkcyjna. Collectivisation in Poland was stopped in 1956, later nationalisation was supported.
Yugoslavia
Main article: Collectivization in Yugoslavia
Collective farming was introduced as government policy throughout Yugoslavia after World War II, by taking away land from wealthy pre-war owners and limiting possessions in private ownership first to 25, and later to 10 hectares. The large, state-owned farms were known as "Agricultural cooperatives" ("Zemljoradničke zadruge" in Serbo-Croatian) and farmers working on them had to meet production quotas in order to satisfy the needs of the populace. This system was largely abolished in the 1950s. See: Law of 23 August 1945 with amendments until 1 December 1948.[15]