this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Ok, so exploitable land (a means of production) can be owned for the exclusive enjoyment of an individual in a socialist economy. Got it, thanks.
Yes, exploitable land can be owned by an individual in a socialist economy. If you're growing food for your family, then that's just one family the state doesn't have to feed. If you're growing food for your community, then that's several mouths the state doesn't have to feed. If you're hoarding or selling food (or in one very famous historical case, burning it out of spite), then you are monopolizing a resource that could be feeding people, and the state will intervene, whether by buying your land back from you, taking it from you, liquidating you as a class, or some other solution to be determined by the state in question - there is no one size fits all blueprint to socialism.
"Or some other other solution to be determined by the state in question"
Gulags, generally speaking
Yes, people who burn food during a famine should be rehabilitated, and prisons were the method (that doesn't work) that people thought was effective to that end at the time.
And what of people who steal food during a famine, like the bolsheviks?
People should steal food from hoarders to redistribute it to starving peasants actually.
If youre talking about grain quotas they stopped taking grain out of the region and started importing food when they realized there was a famine.
I agree, but the quota on kulak liquidation led to starving peasants being targeted.
After millions of people had already starved to death. A minor but necessary bump in the road toward industrialization, I'm sure.
It wasn't necessary. They could have foreseen the need for an independent commission to verify the numbers that local officials were reporting. They could have cracked down harder on sabotage of planting and harvesting and the mass slaughter of livestock by kulaks.
Industrialization was necessary. If they didn't push hard for industrialization we might all be speaking German right now. They cut it close to the wire and the mistakes that they made resulted in mass suffering. But there were no more famines with the exception of post ww2 after that famine, in an area that previously frequently had famines, because collectivization worked once the kinks were worked out.
Rapid industrialization at the cost of millions of lives was only a necessity because Stalin insisted on Socialism in One Country.
Had proletariat revolutions not failed elsewhere, especially Western Europe, there would be no need for such a haphazard and reckless transition.
Okay but how was the soviet union to create a global proletarian revolution? They had to work with what they had.
You could ask Trotsky but Stalin had him murdered 🤷
I've read Trot stuff and found their arguments unconvincing in this context. Global proletarian revolution is something we all have to exercise agency over, if youre in the soviet union you can't just rely on everyone else spontaneously uprising, you have to plan for that not happening. And it didn't happen, so...
You're right, it's so fucked up that Stalin stole all those poor Kulaks' grain and put it in a big swimming pool so that he and his cabinet could swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck.
Are there Kulaks in the room with you right now?
The soviets took enough grain from Ukrainian peasants to induce widespread hunger and death. But let's blame 1% of the peasantry who had already liquidated as a class.