Watching Sunday-night TV in China, World War II-era dramas were running on at least three channels. But the world of D-Day seems a long way away. The war commemorated here on endless repeat is a guerilla war - low-tech, relying on cunning, vision and dogged resilience.
It did strike as peculiar to deem industrialization in the USSR as "forced," which almost forces the unspoken conclusion that only industrialization for profit can be free, presumably because only that is natural.
The Bloodlands thesis associated with Timothy Snyder seems to entail causally equating Stalin/Communist assaults on the peasantry with German assaults, which personally I find quite dubious.
The Irish thesis that famines are an act of God---as modified with the modern exception for man-made famines caused solely by Communism by dogma and/or policy---is not addressed in this excerpt. The Bengal famine is mentioned but has no cause here and the Henan famine in 1942 isn't cited.
I don't think there is any reason to suppose a socialist revolution in india in 1940's and your implicit blaming of stalin/ USSR. It was always the liberal/ conservative strain which was strong and liberals barely won due to partition
It is conventional to attribute all manner of evils to "Stalin" and the Communists even when the CP is very much smaller than other forces. It's like the universal consensus that Stalin gave Spain to Franco but the FAI and CNT had nothing to do with it. Or like everyone blaming this person or that for Lee losing at Gettysburg and ignoring Meade and the rest of the Union army.
Readers may be interested in “Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea” in Monthly Review March 2024.
Roughly 80 percent of North Korea’s territory is mountainous, and only about 14 percent of the country is arable land.
North Korean agriculture has been industrialized and petroleum/chemical-based for 60 years. The resulting soil acidification, degradation, and pollution has demonstrated the need for an ecological transition.
The author concludes: “However, ecological agriculture would be impossible without socialism. If a society plans to phase out fossil fuels and intense chemical applications, it implies we have to keep a considerable level of human physical labor in farming and other activities and a robust and populous countryside. This is against the overall trend in the history of capitalism.”
I have to read again more carefully but you seem to be implying that mechanizing agriculture (tractors tube well pumps etc) can increase food productivity per hectare. Mechanization does enable more capital control over agriculture but I don't know of any evidence that it enables more food from the same amount of land.
Isn't it something of a counterfactual to imagine agricultural machinery on the same amount of land? Machinery in practice I think expands the amount of land, increasing total production, which matters . More food with less labor functions in the economy more or less as a gain in productivity. As Seekonk suggested, the labor productivity, however distinct in concept, goes into total productivity.
Even more, artificial fertilizer is very much an industrial input, a form of mechanization. Ditto mechanized transport and storage of food (reportedly the greatest weakness of Soviet agriculture as I understand it.)
As to marketing the food, financial practices that lead to concentration of farmland is also capital control but not mechanization. I'm not sure which aspect would be more important in the long term 20th century demise of the family farm in the US, since US agriculture has long been into mechanization, eventually even cotton production.
This is an old discussion that goes back to the era when the complexity of farming and the skill involved to do it was studied and measured carefully. So-called peasant farming might have been dismissed but it was very productive given inputs available. That was my problem with the farm tractor aspect of Tooze's fossil fuel war area argument. But I'm thinking now maybe he is right--those tractors were like fuel-guzzling bombers burning cities in WWII.
I'm just a data person and Tooze brings in great data on current happenings but there is so little available on this kind of past history speculation.
If I remember correctly, many studies found that the use of material inputs by the family farm in the US was similarly efficient, productive. But the thing that mattered in the slow disappearance of the family farm was not such input productivity, but the profitability. But perhaps you meant labor productivity per person as well. I confess I wasn't under the impression that measure was very high for peasant farming.
In one instance, as I understand it a major focus of the Cultural Revolution communes (well after the radical phase in 66-67, the so-called ultraleft was progressively eliminated after, like getting rid of enrages, Hebertistes and Jacobins in the later phases of the French Revolution, I think) was local commune industries. They were part of the continued growth of the economy after the chaotic phase of the CR.
The impression the PRC was an economic disaster in the sense of genuine decrease of production appears to be purely propagandistic, the bad times the Dengists and his heirs saved China from. That growth rate was of course nothing so rapid as during the early twenty first century. Deng's magic cure took decades to take effect, raising questions in my mind about its true efficacy.
Later after the land was effectively redistributed by Deng to farmers. Not if I understand it correctly, the old peasant farms restored but a more concentrated, modern style farming, a process reliant on breaking up the previous concentrations of land and equipment, i.e., in those terms the CR laid the foundation. But apparently the local firms survived.
I gather Deng later boasted about their growth and especially how it was so helpful to training an industrial workforce for later, when the new farm system drove superfluous labor into the cities. (After smashing the so-called iron rice bowl, the hukou system turned them into a particularly cheap labor, it seems.) It seems very doubtful to me that the relatively few years after Deng's victory over Hua et al. were sufficient. But Deng still seems to have taken all the credit.
PS Sorry, can't proof at all. Left out that the local industries were devised to rely on the off-season workers on the farms. The idle time in peasant farmer in those periods can be viewed as unproductive.
“.. as recently as 1914 many of the peasant conscripts in the armies of Imperial Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Italy had little idea of the nation that they were called upon to fight for.”
Not knowing your nation also applied to farmers in World War II. In 1981 I visited a village in central Romania and met a local, Saxon farmer who told me: “Yes, I know that there are both Saxons and Swabians in Romania because after the war I was in a camp with Swabians”.
Fascinating and informative.
It did strike as peculiar to deem industrialization in the USSR as "forced," which almost forces the unspoken conclusion that only industrialization for profit can be free, presumably because only that is natural.
The Bloodlands thesis associated with Timothy Snyder seems to entail causally equating Stalin/Communist assaults on the peasantry with German assaults, which personally I find quite dubious.
The Irish thesis that famines are an act of God---as modified with the modern exception for man-made famines caused solely by Communism by dogma and/or policy---is not addressed in this excerpt. The Bengal famine is mentioned but has no cause here and the Henan famine in 1942 isn't cited.
I don't think there is any reason to suppose a socialist revolution in india in 1940's and your implicit blaming of stalin/ USSR. It was always the liberal/ conservative strain which was strong and liberals barely won due to partition
It is conventional to attribute all manner of evils to "Stalin" and the Communists even when the CP is very much smaller than other forces. It's like the universal consensus that Stalin gave Spain to Franco but the FAI and CNT had nothing to do with it. Or like everyone blaming this person or that for Lee losing at Gettysburg and ignoring Meade and the rest of the Union army.
Readers may be interested in “Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea” in Monthly Review March 2024.
Roughly 80 percent of North Korea’s territory is mountainous, and only about 14 percent of the country is arable land.
North Korean agriculture has been industrialized and petroleum/chemical-based for 60 years. The resulting soil acidification, degradation, and pollution has demonstrated the need for an ecological transition.
The author concludes: “However, ecological agriculture would be impossible without socialism. If a society plans to phase out fossil fuels and intense chemical applications, it implies we have to keep a considerable level of human physical labor in farming and other activities and a robust and populous countryside. This is against the overall trend in the history of capitalism.”
https://monthlyreview.org/2024/03/01/industrial-agriculture-lessons-from-north-korea/
I have to read again more carefully but you seem to be implying that mechanizing agriculture (tractors tube well pumps etc) can increase food productivity per hectare. Mechanization does enable more capital control over agriculture but I don't know of any evidence that it enables more food from the same amount of land.
Maybe the increase in output produced by labor-saving devices could be measured per worker rather than per unit of land area?
Isn't it something of a counterfactual to imagine agricultural machinery on the same amount of land? Machinery in practice I think expands the amount of land, increasing total production, which matters . More food with less labor functions in the economy more or less as a gain in productivity. As Seekonk suggested, the labor productivity, however distinct in concept, goes into total productivity.
Even more, artificial fertilizer is very much an industrial input, a form of mechanization. Ditto mechanized transport and storage of food (reportedly the greatest weakness of Soviet agriculture as I understand it.)
As to marketing the food, financial practices that lead to concentration of farmland is also capital control but not mechanization. I'm not sure which aspect would be more important in the long term 20th century demise of the family farm in the US, since US agriculture has long been into mechanization, eventually even cotton production.
This is an old discussion that goes back to the era when the complexity of farming and the skill involved to do it was studied and measured carefully. So-called peasant farming might have been dismissed but it was very productive given inputs available. That was my problem with the farm tractor aspect of Tooze's fossil fuel war area argument. But I'm thinking now maybe he is right--those tractors were like fuel-guzzling bombers burning cities in WWII.
I'm just a data person and Tooze brings in great data on current happenings but there is so little available on this kind of past history speculation.
If I remember correctly, many studies found that the use of material inputs by the family farm in the US was similarly efficient, productive. But the thing that mattered in the slow disappearance of the family farm was not such input productivity, but the profitability. But perhaps you meant labor productivity per person as well. I confess I wasn't under the impression that measure was very high for peasant farming.
In one instance, as I understand it a major focus of the Cultural Revolution communes (well after the radical phase in 66-67, the so-called ultraleft was progressively eliminated after, like getting rid of enrages, Hebertistes and Jacobins in the later phases of the French Revolution, I think) was local commune industries. They were part of the continued growth of the economy after the chaotic phase of the CR.
The impression the PRC was an economic disaster in the sense of genuine decrease of production appears to be purely propagandistic, the bad times the Dengists and his heirs saved China from. That growth rate was of course nothing so rapid as during the early twenty first century. Deng's magic cure took decades to take effect, raising questions in my mind about its true efficacy.
Later after the land was effectively redistributed by Deng to farmers. Not if I understand it correctly, the old peasant farms restored but a more concentrated, modern style farming, a process reliant on breaking up the previous concentrations of land and equipment, i.e., in those terms the CR laid the foundation. But apparently the local firms survived.
I gather Deng later boasted about their growth and especially how it was so helpful to training an industrial workforce for later, when the new farm system drove superfluous labor into the cities. (After smashing the so-called iron rice bowl, the hukou system turned them into a particularly cheap labor, it seems.) It seems very doubtful to me that the relatively few years after Deng's victory over Hua et al. were sufficient. But Deng still seems to have taken all the credit.
PS Sorry, can't proof at all. Left out that the local industries were devised to rely on the off-season workers on the farms. The idle time in peasant farmer in those periods can be viewed as unproductive.
Brilliant article.
“.. as recently as 1914 many of the peasant conscripts in the armies of Imperial Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Italy had little idea of the nation that they were called upon to fight for.”
Not knowing your nation also applied to farmers in World War II. In 1981 I visited a village in central Romania and met a local, Saxon farmer who told me: “Yes, I know that there are both Saxons and Swabians in Romania because after the war I was in a camp with Swabians”.
Communist countries were lot more independent unlike western Europe,japan,s korea during cold war (they are continuing now also)
Tito & Mao should have stayed with USSR. Sadly they didn't.it wasn't a good thing either as evil bloc won cold war