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Comment by ldiracdelta | Hacker News Reader

Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

Stalin allowed for the household plot, because.... everyone was starving due to communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot During the Holodomor and in "the breadbasket" of Ukraine, people were arrested for not yielding _all_ of their produce to the state.

Now the effect of terrorizing people with scarcity of food may have caused them to try to grow more of their own food, but I'm not sure that's the best tactic.

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Europe and Russia has a history of peasants growing their own food. Subsequently farmland was divided into small lots. With lots of small farmers. This did not sit well with ideological goals of communism and also the soviets were in a military race with the west. Stalin wanted the state to be productively competitive with the high output large farms in America. So centrally controlled economy, and taking away land from the former peasants was one way he thought he would achieve that. But it failed in famine and the country side still to this day has many smaller farms. The land is just divided differently there. Locally grown organic food is how people still feed themselves through many parts of the world. But with globalization the price of food is low enough that local small farms can't compete on price. But still offer higher quality food in many regards. They're just squeezed out by mega farms. Also twice as many people in the world now, so need more food cheap to feed them. Globalization has made same things better and some things worse at the same time.

It makes it an interesting idea that poor people own more land in poor countries and are more self sufficient. The current form of capitalism in Canada and America is creating an underclass of people that are totally reliant on the state through debt schemes or direct welfare programs. Their labour has so little value, their salaries don't even cover rent and food. Inflation will make this more apparent than ever before.

The only part of your first post I object to is the attribution to communism. Literally, growing all the food and then sending it to the collection point of the commune. That didn't work at all and home plots were _allowed_ as a violation of pure communist idealogy. They existed before, they were opposed by communism, but then allowed to return because they actually work.

I don't disagree with that. I just wanted to advocate for something more like it here. Allowing more poor to be self reliant and sufficient through more equitable land ownership.

That's fair. Traditionally land jubilee's and debt jubilee's helped this happen. In ancient Israel of the Old Testament there was a complete unwinding of ALL debts every 6 years. Any that extended into the 7th year were... cancelled. Also, land wasn't sold, according to the law. It was apportioned by family and you could only _lease_ it for 50 years -- after that, it reverted to the family. Thus preventing land accumulation in a few hands.

I'm not sure the forced collectivization failed in the metrics that mattered to Stalin. The collectivization did really massively increase agricultural productivity enabling huge numbers of workers to be moved into factory work in the cities. Many people, including in the West, were in awe of the supposed communist productivity miracle.

Now, in retrospect we can say it was just the process of industrialization played out in a super-compressed timeline, and not due to the inherent economic superiority of communism. But it wasn't clear at the time, it was really an open question whether communism was a economically superior system. Which made the capitalist class really afraid, and caused various forms of communist repression in the West like McCarthyism.

As an aside, it wasn't like industrialization as a process was all roses in the West either. Enclosure of the commons drove masses of subsistence farmers into brutal factory work in the cities.

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