From the fields to the table...
OHH, peasants...
Posted on 11/16/2013 7:32:13 AM PST by ProgressingAmerica
In a speech to the Russian people on February 9th, 1946, Joseph Stalin explained the following:
Secondly, by the policy of collectivizing agriculture.To put an end to our backwardness in agriculture and to provide the country with the largest possible amount of market grain, cotton, and so forth, it was necessary to pass from small peasant farming to large-scale farming, for only large-scale farming can employ modern machinery, utilize all the achievements of agricultural science and provide the largest possible quantity of market produce. But there are two kinds of large-scale farming -- capitalist and collective. The Communist Party could not take the capitalist path of developing agriculture not only on grounds of principle, but also because that path presupposes an exceedingly long process of development and requires the preliminary ruination of the peasants and their transformation into agricultural labourers. The Communist Party therefore took the path of collectivizing agriculture, the path of organizing large farms by uniting the peasant farms into collective farm's. The collective method proved to be an exceedingly progressive method not only because it did not call for the ruination of the peasants, but also, and particularly, because it enabled us in the course of several years to cover the entire country with large collective farms capable of employing modern machinery, of utilizing all the achievements of agricultural science and of providing the country with the largest possible quantity of market produce.
There is no doubt that without the policy of collectivization we would not have been able to put an end to the age-long backwardness of our agriculture in so short a time.
It cannot be said that the Party's policy met with no resistance. Not only backward people, who always shrink from everything new, but even many prominent members of the Party persistently tried to pull our Party back, and by every possible means tried to drag it onto the "ordinary" capitalist path of development. All the anti-Party machinations of the trotskyites and of the Rights, all their "activities" in sabotaging the measures of our Government, pursued the one object of frustrating the Party's policy and of hindering industrialization and collectivization. But the Party yielded neither to the threats of some nor to the howling of others and confidently marched forward in spite of everything. It is to the Party's credit that it did not adjust itself to the backward, that it was not afraid to swim against the stream, and that all the time it held on to its position of the leading force. There can be no doubt that if the Communist Party had not displayed this staunchness and perseverance it would have been unable to uphold the policy of industrializing the country and of collectivizing agriculture.
Everything they do, no matter how many lives it destroys or people it kills, gets labeled as "progress", "forward", or "new ideas". Despite the fact that all of these collective methods are as old as human history. The The Pilgrims gave collectivization a shot. It failed miserably. Other "progressive" ideas such as wealth redistribution are also very old ideas, having been implemented by tyrants for as long as time can remember. The death of truth is an important stage on the road to serfdom.
Ping.........
There is no doubt that without the policy of collectivization we would not have been able to put an end to the age-long backwardness of our agriculture in so short a time.
Yes, and then the Russian people began to starve.... How did these people manage to bastardize the term “progressive”?
Looks like capitalism is only the lesser of two evils, but I suppose a lot of choices in lfe are that way; including the current private insurance vs. Obamacare, single payer.
Ask the Ukrainians how collective farming under Soviet rule worked out for them...
I think our vaunted public education system may have played a role in that.
http://holodomorct.org/history.html
Holodomor: approximate pronunciation: ‘huh-luh-duh-more’
The term Holodomor refers specifically to the brutal artificial famine imposed by Stalin’s regime on Soviet Ukraine and primarily ethnically Ukrainian areas in the Northern Caucasus in 1932-33.
—
Stalin’s Progressive Experiment killed millions.
Death by Starvation.
The power of self-delusion. The "large collective farms" were created by ruining the peasants. See "kulak."
So by 1970 they were importing grain from us.
By 2020 Americans will be the health tourists as we cope with a system that fails us. Same story.
Collectivism ensures the minimum results because no one is rewarded for hard work;indeed working harder than anyone else in a collective is foolish for you expend extra energy with no personal gain.
Stalin said anything in order to prove the dialectic - lies or truth were interchangeable.
I agree, but the family farmer can work awfully hard and not be able to compete with the corporate farm. It seems to me the slave labor/ cotton plantation economic juggernaut of the era just before the Civil War was the same dynamic. The sodbuster couldn’t compete in the geographic areas where cotton was the cash crop.
It’s got to do with the economy of scale. A small-scale family farmer producing a non-niche crop cannot compete with a gigantic, mechanised corporate operation, with all the political power and influence wielded by the latter.
Look up Regulatory Capture.
Likewise corner drugstores, Mom and pop grocery stores, etc. There certainly is a cost to creative destruction.
From the fields to the table...
OHH, peasants...
Until we moved into "town" I never was inside a store that exclusively sold food.
I was in a clothing/general/company store in a mining town but WWII was going on and we rarely left the farm.
We did eat peasant errr, pheasant, but if we had seen and could have shot a peasant, we would have eaten them.
As it happens, I was lurking at the Daily Kos the other day to see what the socialists are up to. Lo and behold, they were discussing what they called the Stalin Method: grab one person in ten, at random, and torture him into confessing to something. The other nine will pee their pants in their eagerness to get in line and obey, because that is what it’s all about: obedience.
>>>As it happens, I was lurking at the Daily Kos the other day to see what the socialists are up to. Lo and behold, they were discussing what they called the Stalin Method: grab one person in ten, at random, and torture him into confessing to something. The other nine will pee their pants in their eagerness to get in line and obey, because that is what it’s all about: obedience.<<<
In fact so-called Stalin’s method wasn’t used by Soviets until 1934 or so and peaked at 1937.
I wonder why no one interested in what happened in Soviet Union in a period of 1918-1934?
People really need to know because parallels between earlier Soviet and modern American society are striking.
I think if the GOP won’t put it’s head out of own butt and US conservatives won’t consolidate there is a fat chance for Obama to be American Lenin replaced with some kind of Stalin soon.
Good point. That is sixteen years where something must have been going on, but I don’t know anyone who knows anything about that era. Was that when the great scientist fraud Lysenko was butchering Soviet biology and ruining their harvest yields?
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