Raise the Hammer

Again, watch the straw man. What I am proposing is not Stalinism -far from. I know liberals are used to using the word "community" as a euphemism for "state". But communal ownership of land is very different from state ownership.

If you want to know what anarchist collectivization of land looks like, you have to read about Spain in the revolution/civil war of 1936. I would suggest "The Anarchist Collectives" edited by Sam Dolgoff. It's mostly primary documents.

In Spain, the collectivization was coordinated through the massive anarchist union, the CNT, and was by all accounts a voluntary, grassroots, cooperative affair. Farm workers who wanted to follow a more "individualistic" life were free to move outside the collective and homestead. But most of the them wanted radical-democratic collectivization as an alternative to peonage - not surprising given the ancient communal traditions of the pueblo. Union delegates of the time claimed that agricultural productivity increased, and there is no reason to disbelieve them, since rank-and-file workers were free to challenge the numbers in assembly. Organized anarchism merely gave the ancient communal impulse a modern twist.

Pre-1917 Russian farm workers also had indigenous communal institution - the Mir, or peasant commune - which pre-dates serfdom and the Tsarist autocracy. The Mir functioned very much along communistic lines - it literally allocated land "to each according to need." Remember these local institutions had nothing to do with ideological soc'ialism. They go back into the mists of time, and are just as "natural" a way for humans to organized as private property, if not more so.

In 1917, when the working classes of St. Petersburg and Moscow revolted against the tsarist regime, their rural peasant counterparts also revolted. They kicked out (or killed) the aristocratic Boyar landowners who were oppressing them. With the Boyars gone and the Russian state essentially collapsed, it was the autonomous Mir councils - not private enterprise - that largely coordinated agricultural life from 1917 until Stalin's collectivization in the 30's.

So when you compare Russian agricultural productivity before and after Stalin's 5-year plans, you are essentially comparing an autonomous form of collectivization with a forced one. The poor productivity of the latter could have been caused by any number of factors. If I was researching the problem in depth, the first thing I would hypothesize is that decision making was taken away from the people who actually worked the land and given to technocratic "experts".

This would match well with Self Determination Theory, which I touched on in a previous post. This is hard, empirical, academic stuff. They found that people were intrinsically motivated to work once their needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence are met. Being forced at gunpoint to work for a bureaucratic state wouldn't exactly do much for your desire to work hard.

And you're assuming that there were no pecuniary incentives on Stalinist farms. I don't know the agricultural collectives that well. But I did research the factory system of the 5-year plans, so I know there were significant wage differentials according to what job one did.

People need to be more careful about how they use historical examples. It can really get over simplistic.