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Collective farming
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"Drive to the Collective Farm!" – 1920s Yiddish-language poster featuring women kolkhoz workers
"Kolkhoz-woman with pumpkins", 1930 painting

Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise.[1] There are two broad types of communal farms: agricultural cooperatives, in which member-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective; and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries (including the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, China and Vietnam) there have been both state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy (cooperative-run farms) and sovkhozy (state-run farms).

Pre-20th century history

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Mexico

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Under the Aztec Empire, central Mexico was divided into small territories called calpulli, which were units of local administration concerned with farming as well as education and religion. A calpulli consisted of a number of large extended families with a presumed common ancestor, themselves each composed of a number of nuclear families. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it each day. When the Spanish conquered Mexico they replaced this with a system of estates granted by the Spanish crown to Spanish colonists, as well as the encomienda, a feudal-like right of overlordship colonists were given in particular villages, and the repartimiento or system of indigenous forced labor.

Following the Mexican Revolution, a new constitution in 1917 abolished any remnant of feudal-like rights hacienda owners had over common lands and offered the development of ejidos: communal farms formed on land purchased from the large estates by the Mexican government.

Iroquois and Huron of North America

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Latter-day Iroquois longhouse housing several hundred people

The Huron had an essentially communal system of land ownership. French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals. The Huron had "as much land as they need[ed]."[2] As a result, the Huron could give families their own land and still have a large amount of excess land owned communally. Any Huron was free to clear the land and farm on the basis of usufruct. They maintained possession of the land as long as they continued to actively cultivate and tend the fields. Once they abandoned the land, it reverted to communal ownership, and anyone could take it up for themselves.[3] While the Huron did seem to have lands designated for the individual, the significance of this possession may be of little relevance; the placement of corn storage vessels in the longhouses, which contained multiple families in one kinship group, suggests the occupants of a given longhouse held all production in common.[4]

The Iroquois had a similar communal system of land distribution. The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation. The land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers' Council gathered.[5] Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned and eventually punished by the Clan Mothers' Council by having the land redistributed to another clan.[6] Land property was really only the concern of the women, since it was the women's job to cultivate food and not the men's.[5] The Clan Mothers' Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans. Food from such lands, called kěndiǔ"gwǎ'ge' hodi'yěn'tho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings.[6]

Russian Empire

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The obshchina (Russian: общи́на, IPA: [ɐpˈɕːinə], literally: "commune") or mir (Russian: мир, literally: "society" (one of the meanings)) or Selskoye obshestvo (Russian: сельское общество ("Rural community", official term in the 19th and 20th century) were peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word о́бщий, obshchiy (common).

The vast majority of Russian peasants held their land in communal ownership within a mir community, which acted as a village government and a cooperative. Arable land was divided into sections based on soil quality and distance from the village. Each household had the right to claim one or more strips from each section depending on the number of adults in the household. The purpose of this allocation was not so much social (providing to each according to their needs) as it was practical (ensuring that each person pay their taxes). Strips were periodically reallocated on the basis of a census, to ensure equitable share of the land. This reallocation was enforced by the state, which had an interest in the households' ability to pay their taxes.

Collectivization under state socialism

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The Soviet Union introduced collective farming in its constituent republics between 1927 and 1933. The Baltic states and most of the Eastern Bloc (except Poland) adopted collective farming after World War II, with the accession of communist regimes to power. In Asia (People's Republic of China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam) the adoption of collective farming was also driven by communist government policies.

Soviet Union

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Soviet famine of 1932–33. Areas of most disastrous famine marked with black.

Leon Trotsky and the opposition bloc had originally advocated a programme of industrialization which also proposed agricultural cooperatives and the formation of collective farms on a voluntary basis.[7] According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Joseph Stalin appropriated the position of the left opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation.[8] Other scholars have argued the economic programme of Trotsky of voluntary collectivisation differed from the policy of forced collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928, due to the levels of brutality associated with the latter’s enforcement.[9][10][11]

As part of the first five-year plan, forced collectivization was introduced in the Soviet Union by Stalin in the late 1920s as a way, according to the policies of socialist leaders, to boost agricultural production through the organization of land and labor into large-scale collective farms (kolkhozy). At the same time, Stalin argued that collectivization would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the kulaks (farmland owners). In what became known as dekulakization, defiant kulaks were executed or mass deported to Siberia by the Soviet Communist Party in order to implement the plan.

The centuries-old system of farming was destroyed in Ukraine. In 1932–1933, an estimated 11 million people, 3–7 million in Ukraine alone, died from famine after Stalin forced the peasants into collectives. It was not until 1940 that agricultural production finally surpassed its pre-collectivization levels.[12][13]

Collectivization throughout the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was not aggressively pursued until the early 1960s because of the Soviet leadership's focus on a policy of Russification of Moldavians into the Russian way of life[citation needed]. Much of the collectivization in Moldova had undergone in Transnistria, in Chişinău, the present-day capital city of Moldova. Most of the directors who regulated and conducted the process of collectivization were placed by officials from Moscow.[citation needed]

The efficiency of collective farms in the USSR is debatable. A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by privately farmed plots despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms.[14] In 1935, the establishment of Personal Subsidiary Farms on collective land was allowed in the range of .25-1 hectare.[15] Private cattle ownership existed after 1935 but was severely restricted by decree in 1956.

Romania

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1962 stamp commemorating the "completion" of land collectivization

In Romania, land collectivization began in 1948 and continued for over more than a decade until its virtual eradication in 1962.[16] Force sometimes had to be used to enforce collective agricultural practices. Collective farming in Romania was an attempt to implement the USSR's communist blueprint. These attempts often fell short. By strictly adhering to this Soviet blueprint, the implementation of communism in Romania inevitably created dilemmas and contributions that led to violence. Kligman and Verdery state "The violence collectivization, emerges then, less, as an abhoration than as a product of sociocultural shaping and of deep problems with how the soviet blueprint came to be implemented... instead of a gradual and integrated process of moving from one form of society to another, Romanian society in the Soviet orbit was being completely rearticulated, a process in which violence was inevitable."[17]

On the other hand, as Kligman and Verdery explain, "Collectivization brought undeniable benefits to some rural inhabitants, especially those who had owned little or no land. It freed them from laboring on the fields of others, and it increased their control over wages, lending to their daily existence a stability previously unknown to them."[17]

Bulgaria

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Collective farms in the People's Republic of Bulgaria, introduced in 1945, were called Labour Cooperative Agricultural Farm (Bulgarian: Трудово кооперативно земеделско стопанство, romanizedTrudovo kooperativno zemedelsko stopanstvo).[18]

Hungary

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In Hungary, agricultural collectivization was attempted several times between 1948 and 1956, with disastrous results, until it was finally successful in the early 1960s under János Kádár. The first serious attempt at collectivization based on Stalinist agricultural policy was undertaken in July 1948. Both economic and direct police pressure were used to coerce peasants to join cooperatives, but large numbers opted instead to leave their villages. By the early 1950s, only one-quarter of peasants had agreed to join cooperatives.[19]

In the spring of 1955 the drive for collectivization was renewed, again using physical force to encourage membership, but this second wave also ended in dismal failure. After the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party opted for a more gradual collectivization drive. The main wave of collectivization occurred between 1959 and 1961, and at the end of this period more than 95% of agricultural land in Hungary had become the property of collective farms. In February 1961, the Central Committee declared that collectivization had been completed.[20]

Czechoslovakia

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In Czechoslovakia, centralized land reforms after World War I allowed for the distribution of most of the land to peasants and the poor, and created large groups of relatively well-to-do farmers (though village poor still existed). These groups showed no support for communist ideals. In 1945, immediately after World War II, new land reform started with the new socialist government. The first phase involved a confiscation of properties of Germans, Hungarians, and collaborators with the Nazi regime in accordance with the so-called Beneš decrees. The second phase, promulgated by so-called Ďuriš's laws (after the Communist Minister of Agriculture), in fact meant a complete revision of the pre-war land reform and tried to reduce maximal private property to 150 hectares (370 acres) of agricultural land and 250 hectares (620 acres) of any land.[21]

The third and final phase forbade possession of land above 50 hectares (120 acres) for one family. This phase was carried out in April 1948, two months after the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took power by force. Farms started to be collectivized, mostly under the threat of sanctions. The most obstinate farmers were persecuted and imprisoned. The most common form of collectivization was agricultural cooperative (Czech: Jednotné zemědělské družstvo, JZD; Slovak: Jednotné roľnícke družstvo, JRD). The collectivization was implemented in three stages (1949–1952, 1953–1956, 1956–1969) and officially ended with the 1960 implementation of the constitution establishing the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which made private ownership illegal.

Many early cooperatives collapsed and were recreated. Their productivity was low since they provided tiny salaries and no pensions, and they failed to create a sense of collective ownership; small-scale pilfering was common, and food became scarce. Seeing the massive outflow of people from agriculture into cities, the government started to massively subsidize the cooperatives in order to make the standard of living of farmers equal to that of city inhabitants; this was the long-term official policy of the government. Funds, machinery, and fertilizers were provided; young people from villages were forced to study agriculture; and students were regularly sent (involuntarily) to help in cooperatives.

Subsidies and constant pressure destroyed the remaining private farmers; only a handful of them remained after the 1960s. The lifestyle of villagers had eventually reached the level of cities, and village poverty was eliminated. Czechoslovakia was again able to produce enough food for its citizens. The price of this success was a huge waste of resources because the cooperatives had no incentive to improve efficiency. Every piece of land was cultivated regardless of the expense involved, and the soil became heavily polluted with chemicals. Also, the intensive use of heavy machinery damaged topsoil. Furthermore, the cooperatives were infamous for over-employment.

In the late 1970s, the economy of Czechoslovakia entered into stagnation, and the state-owned companies were unable to deal with advent of modern technologies. A few agricultural companies (where the rules were less strict than in state companies) used this situation to start providing high-tech products. For example, the only way to buy a PC-compatible computer in the late 1980s was to get it (for an extremely high price) from one agricultural company acting as a reseller.

After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989 subsidies to agriculture were halted with devastating effect. Most of the cooperatives had problems competing with technologically advanced foreign competition and were unable to obtain investment to improve their situation. Quite a large percentage of them collapsed. The others that remained were typically insufficiently funded, lacking competent management, without new machinery and living from day to day. Employment in the agricultural sector dropped significantly (from approximately 25% of the population to approximately 1%).

East Germany

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Collective farms in the German Democratic Republic were typically called Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG), and corresponded closely to the Soviet kolkhoz. East Germany also had a few state-owned farms which were equivalent to the Soviet sovkhoz, which were called the Volkseigenes Gut (VEG). The structure of farms in what was called East Elbia until German partition was dominated by latifundia, and thus the land reform which was justified on denazification grounds[22][23] and with the aim of destroying the Prussian Junker class – which had been hated by the left during the Weimar Republic and which was blamed for Prussian militarism and the authoritarian tendencies of the German Empire and later Nazi Germany – was initially popular with many small farmers and landless peasants. East German President Wilhelm Pieck coined the slogan Junkerland in Bauernhand! ("Junker land into farmer's hand!") to promote land reform, which was initially pledged to be more moderate than full-scale collectivization. Although the ruling Socialist Unity Party and the Soviet Military Administration in Germany promised to allow large landowners to keep their land, they were expelled as the LPG were introduced in 1953. After 1959 all farmers were required to surrender independently owned land and join the LPGs.[24] Similarly to the Soviet Union, ultimately most of the land was transferred into de jure or de facto state controlled entities with the former farmers becoming employees – now of the state instead of the erstwhile Junker class.[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][excessive citations]

Poland

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The Polish name of a collective farm was rolnicza spółdzielnia produkcyjna, 'agricultural production cooperative'. Collectivisation in Poland was stopped in 1956; later, nationalisation was supported.

Yugoslavia

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Collective farming was introduced as a League of Communists of Yugoslavia government policy throughout the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after World War II, by taking away land from wealthy pre-war owners and limiting possessions in private ownership first to 25, and later to 10 hectares. The large, state-owned farms were known as "Agricultural cooperatives" (zemljoradničke zadruge in Serbo-Croatian) and farmers working on them had to meet production quotas in order to satisfy the needs of the populace. This system was largely abolished in the 1950s. See: Law of 23 August 1945 with amendments until 1 December 1948.[32][better source needed]

China

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At the end of the Land Reform movement, individual families in China owned the land they farmed, paid taxes as households, and sold grain at prices set by the state.[33]: 109  Rural collectivization began soon after the CCP announced its 1953 "general line for the transition to socialism".[34] Over the next six years, collectivization took several incrementally progressing forms: mutual aid groups, primitive cooperatives, and people's communes.[34] As London School of Economics and Political Science Professor Lin Chun notes, researchers agree that communization proceeded on a largely voluntary basis that avoided both the violence and sabotage that occurred during the Soviet collectivization.[34] Like Professor Barry Naughton, she observes that China's collectivization proceeded smoothly in part because, unlike the Soviet experience, a network of state institutions already existed in the countryside.[34] Similarly, Professor Edward Friedman describes China's collectivization process as a "miracle of miracles".[35]

During 1954–1955, farmers in many areas began pooling their land, capital resources, and labor into beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (chuji nongye hezuoshe).[33]: 109  In the complex system of beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives, farmers received a share of the harvest based on a combination of how much labor and how much land they contributed to the cooperative.[33]: 109–110 

By June 1956, over 60% of rural households had been collectivized into higher-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (gaoji nongye hezuoshe), a structure that was similar to Soviet collective farmering via kolkhozy.[33]: 110  In these cooperatives, tens of households pooled land and draft animals.[33]: 110  Adult members of the cooperative were credited with work points based on how much labor they had provided at which tasks.[33]: 110  At the end of the year, the collective deducted taxes and fixed-price sales to the state, and the cooperative retained seed for the next year as well as some investment and welfare funds.[33]: 110  The collective then distributed to the households the remainder of the harvest and some of the money received from sales to the state.[33]: 110  The distribution was based partly on work points accrued by the adult members of a household, and partly at a standard rate by age and sex.[33]: 110  These cooperatives also lent small amounts of land back to households individually on which the households could grow crops to consume directly or sell at market.[33]: 110–111  Apart from the large-scale communization during the Great Leap Forward, higher-level agricultural producers' collective were generally the dominant form of rural collectivization in China.[33]: 111 

During The Great Leap Forward, the Mao Zedong-led Communist Party rapidly convert the Chinese economy to a socialist society through rapid industrialization and large scale collectivization.[36] Later, the country was hit by massive floods and droughts. This, combined with the usage of severely flawed policies of Lysenkoism and the Four Pests Campaign, caused "The Great Chinese Famine of 1959," where nearly 30 million people died of hunger. The party officially blamed floods and droughts for the famine; however, it was clear to the party members at the party meetings that famine was caused mostly by their own policies.[37] Recent studies also demonstrate that it was career incentives within the politburo system as well as political radicalism that led to the great famine.[38]

Collectivization of land via the commune system facilitated China's rapid industrialization through the state's control of food production and procurement.[39] This allowed the state to accelerate the process of capital accumulation, ultimately laying the successful foundation of physical and human capital for the economic growth of China's reform and opening up.[39] During the early and middle 1950s, collectivization was an important factor in the major change in Chinese agriculture during that period, the dramatic increase in irrigated land.[33]: 111  For example, collectivization was a factor that contributed to the introduction of double cropping in the south, a labor-intensive process which greatly increased agricultural yields.[33]: 116 

Both land reform movement and collectivization largely left in place the social systems in the ethnic minority group areas of Chinese Central Asia and Zomia.[33]: 118  These areas generally underwent collectivization in the form of agricultural producers' cooperatives during winter of 1957 through 1958, having skipped the small peasant landholder stage that had followed land reform elsewhere in China.[33]: 122  Central Tibet was under the joint administration of the People's Liberation Army and the Dalai Lama's theocracy until 1959, and consequently did not experience land reform or collectivization until 1960 in agricultural areas and 1966 in pastoral areas.[33]: 119 

After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping reformed the collective farming method. From this time, nearly all Chinese crops began to blossom, not just grain. The reform included the removal of land from rich land owners for use of agricultural land for peasants, but not ownership. This policy increased production and helped reverse the effects of The Great Leap Forward. The two main reasons why China succeeded was because 1) the government chose to make gradual changes, which kept the monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party and 2) because the reform process began from the bottom and later expanded to the top. Throughout the reform process, the Communist Party reacted positively to the bottom-up reform initiatives that emerged from the rural population. Deng Xiaoping described the reform process as "fording the river by feeling for the stones". This statement refers to the Chinese people who called for the reforms they wanted by "placing the stones at his feet" and he would then just approve the reforms the people wanted. The peasants started their own "household responsibility system" apart from the government. After Chinese trade was privately deemed successful, all Deng had to do was approve its legalization. This increased competition between farmers domestically and internationally, meaning the low wage working class began to be known worldwide, increasing the Chinese FDI.[40]

A 2017 study found that Chinese peasants slaughtered massive numbers of draft animals as a response to collectivization, as this would allow them to keep the meat and hide, and not transfer the draft animals to the collectives.[41] The study estimates that "the animal loss during the movement was 12 to 15 percent, or 7.4-9.5 million dead. Grain output dropped by 7 percent due to lower animal inputs and lower productivity."[41]

Mongolia

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North Korea

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In the late 1990s, the collective farming system collapsed under a strain of droughts. Estimates of deaths due to starvation ranged into the millions, although the government did not allow outside observers to survey the extent of the famine. Aggravating the severity of the famine, the government was accused of diverting international relief supplies to its armed forces. Agriculture in North Korea has suffered tremendously from natural disasters, a lack of fertile land, and government mismanagement, often causing the nation to rely on foreign aid as its primary source of food.

Vietnam

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The Democratic Republic of Vietnam implemented collective farming although de jure private ownership existed. Starting in 1958 collective farming was pushed such that by 1960, 85% of farmers and 70% of farmlands were collectivized including those seized by force.[42] Collectivization however was seen by the communist leadership as a half-measure when compared to full state ownership.[43]

Following the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, South Vietnam briefly came under the authority of a Provisional Revolutionary Government, a puppet state under military occupation by North Vietnam, before being officially reunified with the North under Communist rule as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on 2 July 1976. Upon taking control, the Vietnamese communists banned other political parties, arrested suspects believed to have collaborated with the United States and embarked on a mass campaign of collectivization of farms and factories. Private land ownership was "transformed" to subsume under State and collective ownership.[44] Reconstruction of the war-ravaged country was slow and serious humanitarian and economic problems confronted the communist regime.

In an historic shift in 1986, the Communist Party of Vietnam implemented free-market reforms known as Đổi Mới (Renovation). With the authority of the state remaining unchallenged, private enterprise, deregulation and foreign investment were encouraged. Land ownership nonetheless is the sole prerogative of the state. The economy of Vietnam has achieved rapid growth in agricultural and industrial production, construction and housing, exports and foreign investment. However, the power of the Communist Party of Vietnam over all organs of government remains firm, preventing full land ownership. Conflicts between the state and private farmers over land rights have grown with the potential to spark social and political instability.[45]

Despite the reforms however, over 50% of all farms in Vietnam remain collective cooperatives (over 15,000 farming cooperatives in Vietnam), and almost all farmers being members of some kind of cooperative.[46] The state also heavily encourages collective cooperative farming over private farming.[47]

Cuba

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In the initial years that followed the Cuban Revolution, government authorities experimented with agricultural and farming production cooperatives. Between 1977 and 1983, farmers began to collectivize into CPAsCooperativa de Producción Agropecuaria (Agricultural Production Cooperatives). Farmers were encouraged to sell their land to the state for the establishment of a cooperative farm, receiving payments for a period of 20 years while also sharing in the fruits of the CPA. Joining a CPA allowed individuals who were previously dispersed throughout the countryside to move to a centralized location with increased access to electricity, medical care, housing, and schools. Democratic practice tends to be limited to business decisions and is constrained by the centralized economic planning of the Cuban system.

Another type of agricultural production cooperative in Cuba is UBPCUnidad Básica de Producción Cooperativa (Basic Unit of Cooperative Production). The law authorizing the creation of UBPCs was passed on 20 September 1993. It has been used to transform many state farms into UBPCs, similar to the transformation of Russian sovkhozes (state farms) into kolkhozes (collective farms) since 1992. The law granted indefinite usufruct to the workers of the UBPC in line with its goal of linking the workers to the land. It established material incentives for increased production by tying workers' earnings to the overall production of the UBPC, and increased managerial autonomy and workers' participation in the management of the workplace.

Tanzania

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The Tanzanian socialist approach of ujamaa supported by President Julius Nyerere focused on collectivizing ownership of property and communal organization of agriculture in the Tanzanian countryside.[48]: 98  This re-organization of the countryside began on a voluntary and experimental basis.[48]: 98  From 1973 to 1975, these goals were pursued through the forced villagization process of Operation Vijiji.[48]: 98 

Laos

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Other collective farming

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Europe

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In the European Union, collective farming is fairly common and agricultural cooperatives hold a 40% market share among the 27 member states. In the Netherlands, cooperative agriculture holds a market share of approximately 70%, second only to Finland.[49] In France, cooperative agriculture represents 40% of the national food industry's production and nearly 90 Billion € in gross revenue, covering one out of three food brands in the country.[50][51]

There are also intentional communities which practice collective agriculture.[52][53] There is a growing number of community supported agriculture initiatives, some of which operate under consumer/worker governance, that could be considered collective farms.

India

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In Indian villages a single field (normally a plot of three to five acres) may be farmed collectively by the villagers, who each offer labour as a devotional offering, possibly for one or two days per cropping season. The resulting crop belongs to no one individual, and is used as an offering. The labour input is the offering of the peasant in their role as priests. The wealth generated by the sale of the produce belongs to the Gods and hence is Apaurusheya or impersonal. Shrambhakti (labour contributed as devotional offering) is the key instrument for generation of internal resources. The benefits of the harvest are most often redistributed in the village for common good as well as individual need – not as loan or charity, but as divine grace (prasad). The recipient is under no obligation to repay it and no interest need be paid on such gifts.[citation needed]

Israel

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Collective farming was also implemented in kibbutzim in Israel, which began in 1909 as a unique combination of Zionism and socialism – known as Labor Zionism. The concept has faced occasional criticism as economically inefficient and over-reliant on subsidized credit.[54]

A lesser-known type of collective farm in Israel is moshav shitufi (lit. collective settlement), where production and services are managed collectively, as in a kibbutz, but consumption decisions are left to individual households. In terms of cooperative organization, moshav shitufi is distinct from the much more common moshav (or moshav ovdim), essentially a village-level service cooperative, not a collective farm.

In 2006 there were 40 moshavim shitufi'im in Israel, compared with 267 kibbutzim.[55]

Collective farming in Israel differs from collectivism in communist states in that it is voluntary. However, including moshavim, various forms of collective farming have traditionally been and remain the primary agricultural model, as there are only a small number of completely private farms in Israel outside of the moshavim.

Mexico

[edit]

In Mexico the Ejido system provided poor farmers with collective use rights to agricultural land.

Canada and United States

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The Anabaptist Hutterites have farmed communally since the 16th century. Most of them now live on the Canadian Prairies and the northern Great Plains of the United States, as well as in Southern Ontario in Canada.[56]

Until recently Western Canada had a centralised wheat board where farmers were usually obligated to sell their wheat to the province which sold the product at a high collective price. Ontario currently has a milk board which obliges most milk producers to sell their milk to the province at a regulated quality and price.

A movement of voluntary collective farming started in 2008 in the Research Triangle under the name of crop mob. The idea spread throughout the United States and less than 10 years later this particular type of incidental, spontaneous, social-media driven collective farming was reported in over 70 places.[57]

[edit]

In the 2021 Telugu film Sreekaram, the main protagonist encourages people for a community farming.

The 1929 Soviet film The General Line features Martha and a group of peasants organizing a kolkhoz. The film began production as a promotion of the Trotskyist Left Opposition viewpoint on collectivization. After the rise of Joseph Stalin and expulsion of his rival Leon Trotsky, it was heavily re-edited into the pro-Stalinist film The Old and the New.

The 1930 Soviet Ukrainian film Earth features a peasant encouraging his village in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to embrace collectivization, which they do after he is killed by kulaks.

See also

[edit]
  • Camphill Movement – Special education
  • Dekulakization – Soviet repression of prosperous peasants (1929–1932)
  • Work unit – Danwei; a state institution of employment and political organization in China

References

[edit]
[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia
from Grokipedia
Collective farming is an agricultural arrangement in which individual peasants' land, , and tools are amalgamated into large-scale operations managed collectively or by the state, ostensibly to achieve greater , , and surplus extraction for broader economic goals such as industrialization. Originating from Marxist-Leninist ideology that viewed private farming as exploitative and inefficient, it was most prominently enforced through coercive state policies in 20th-century communist regimes, including the and , where it supplanted traditional smallholder systems with centralized planning and quotas. While proponents anticipated and heightened output, implementations frequently involved violent dispossession of prosperous farmers (labeled kulaks in the USSR), of private herds, and suppression of dissent, resulting in profound disruptions to food production. In the , Joseph Stalin's collectivization drive, launched in 1929, rapidly encompassed over 97 percent of households by 1940, but triggered immediate collapses in numbers and sown acreage due to resistance and mismanagement. plummeted, with grain procurement quotas escalating amid falling harvests, culminating in the 1932–1933 famine that killed 6–7 million in alone—attributable primarily to policy failures like collectivization rather than climatic shortfalls. Analyses indicate that the shift to collective farms reduced output through and weakened incentives, explaining at least 31 percent of in affected regions. Even after stabilization, permitted private household plots—comprising just a few percent of —accounted for a disproportionately large share of national produce, underscoring the systemic inefficiencies of the collective model. Analogous outcomes marked China's people's communes, established during the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961, where communal labor and exaggerated production targets supplanted individual initiative, leading to widespread crop failures, resource misallocation, and the Great Chinese Famine that starved approximately 30 million people. This disaster stemmed from institutional distortions inherent to collectivization, including distorted reporting and diversion of labor to non-agricultural projects, rather than exogenous shocks. Across these cases, empirical evidence consistently demonstrates that state-directed collective farming fostered lower yields and higher human costs compared to private alternatives, driven by principal-agent problems, lack of property rights, and bureaucratic overreach—factors that persisted despite ideological commitments to their superiority. While voluntary cooperatives in non-coercive contexts have occasionally thrived, forced collectivization's legacy remains one of economic underperformance and demographic devastation, challenging narratives that downplay policy causality in favor of environmental or conspiratorial explanations.

Conceptual Foundations

Definition and Core Principles

Collective farming is an agricultural organization in which multiple farmers consolidate their individual landholdings, livestock, tools, and other productive assets into a single joint enterprise, typically managed cooperatively or under state supervision to achieve and centralized control over production. This system emerged prominently in 20th-century socialist states, where it involved the expropriation or voluntary pooling of private farms to form collective units like Soviet kolkhozy (collective farms) or Chinese people's communes, with output directed toward state quotas rather than market sales. Unlike private farming, which relies on individual ownership and profit motives, collective farming subordinates personal initiative to group or national goals, often requiring members to contribute labor collectively while retaining limited personal plots for subsistence. At its core, the system rests on the principle of socialized ownership of land and major capital goods, eliminating rights in to prevent capitalist exploitation and enable planned . Labor is organized communally, with workdays (trudodni) or brigades tracking contributions to determine shares of harvest or income, theoretically incentivizing participation through prosperity rather than direct rewards. Production decisions, including selection and quotas, are centralized—either by farm committees or state authorities—to align with broader economic directives, such as industrialization via procurements in the starting in 1929. Distribution mechanisms emphasize equality or need-based allocation, with surpluses reinvested in the or surrendered to the state, though empirical outcomes often revealed misaligned incentives, as effort yielded diffuse benefits prone to free-riding without strong enforcement. These principles derive from Marxist-Leninist ideology, which posits that collective forms resolve class antagonisms in the countryside by uniting against (prosperous farmer) influence, fostering socialist transformation through scaled operations and . However, frequently deviated from voluntary , incorporating coercive elements to overcome resistance, as evidenced by the Soviet model's emphasis on rapid consolidation to extract resources for urban growth despite peasant opposition documented in declassified archives from . In theory, the structure promised higher productivity via shared expertise and inputs, but causal analyses highlight inherent dilution, where marginal personal gains from extra effort approach zero in large groups, contrasting with private farming's alignment of and output.

Theoretical Underpinnings and Incentive Structures

Collective farming's theoretical foundations originate in Marxist doctrine, which critiques capitalist agriculture as inherently exploitative due to private ownership of land and the extraction of surplus value from peasant labor. Karl Marx argued in Capital (1867) that the concentration of land in fewer hands under capitalism displaces smallholders, but under socialism, the abolition of private property would enable communal control over production, fostering cooperation and eliminating class antagonisms in the countryside. This view was extended by Vladimir Lenin, who in The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) analyzed the agrarian question, advocating for the proletariat to lead peasants toward collectivization as a step beyond individual farming toward socialist integration, though he initially emphasized state capitalism as transitional. Joseph Stalin later formalized this in Soviet policy, positing collective farms (kolkhozy) as mechanisms to socialize agriculture, pool resources, and achieve planned output aligned with industrial needs, rejecting market-driven incentives as bourgeois relics. Incentive structures under rely on centralized and rather than profit motives. Proponents, drawing from Marxist-Leninist principles, assumed that ideological commitment to would motivate labor, supplemented by state-set quotas and minimal private plots for personal consumption to sustain basic effort. However, economic analyses highlight inherent principal-agent problems, where farm managers (agents) face misaligned with distant state planners (principals), leading to asymmetries and shirking, as managers prioritize quotas over long-term without personal stakes. Workers within collectives encounter , exerting suboptimal effort due to egalitarian reward systems that distribute output regardless of contribution, akin to free-rider dynamics where personal gains from extra work are diluted across the group. Critiques from and economics underscore how collective systems exacerbate agency costs through weak monitoring and enforcement, as diffuse ownership undermines residual claimancy—the right to benefits from one's efforts—resulting in underinvestment in and . Without market price signals to allocate resources efficiently, theoretical models predict persistent shortages, as seen in game-theoretic representations of where Nash equilibria favor minimal over maximal output. Empirical extensions of these theories, such as in Chinese communes, confirm that overly egalitarian pay scales failed to elicit sufficient , contributing to lags relative to private farming benchmarks. These misalignments stem causally from the severance of property rights from effort, prioritizing collective goals over individual rationality, often leading to reliance on rather than voluntary alignment.

Historical Precedents Before Modern Collectivization

Pre-20th Century Communal Practices

Communal agricultural practices predating the often arose from customary land tenure systems emphasizing collective resource management and labor sharing among or village groups, rather than centralized state imposition or ideological collectivism. These arrangements typically involved periodic land redistribution, communal oversight of , or clan-based cultivation to mitigate risks from variable yields and ensure group subsistence, though individual household labor remained primary in many cases. Such systems were documented across , the , and other regions, with from historical records showing their to local ecologies and social structures. In medieval and , particularly , the exemplified partial communalism in arable farming. Villages divided unfenced fields into scattered strips allocated to households, but cultivation followed synchronized rotations—such as the three-field method leaving one-third annually—and communal regulations governed grazing on stubble and to prevent . This cooperative framework, persisting into the in some areas, reduced individual risk through shared practices but constrained innovation due to veto powers within assemblies; economic analyses indicate it supported from around 2 million in circa 1086 to 5.5 million by 1700, albeit with yields limited to 7-10 bushels per acre for . Emerging parliamentary enclosures, accelerating from the mid-18th century into the early 19th, demonstrated higher productivity by consolidating fragmented holdings, enabling crop experimentation, and incentivizing investments, with overall agricultural output rising as enclosed farms adopted improved rotations and reduced fallow land. Hypothetically, large-scale agricultural collectivization in the 1810 historical context would not have succeeded. Pre-industrial agriculture lacked mechanization, synthetic fertilizers, and scientific breeding methods essential for scaling collective operations efficiently, limitations that contributed to famines even in partially modernized 20th-century collectivizations. Incentive structures under collectivization discouraged individual effort and investment, fostering peasant resistance and output declines mirroring later empirical failures. Communal systems like Europe's open fields proved less productive than contemporaneous private enclosures, which boosted yields through specialization, secure property rights, and capital improvements—trends gaining traction around 1810. The Russian , or , represented a more explicit form of communal landholding among from at least the until the reforms of 1861. Village assemblies periodically repartitioned among households based on family size and labor capacity, while collectively managing meadows, forests, and taxes owed to landlords or the state; by the mid-19th century, over 80% of households operated under this system in . This structure fostered egalitarian redistribution but often perpetuated low productivity, as evidenced by grain yields averaging 5-7 chetveriks per desyatina (roughly 6-8 bushels per acre), attributed to fragmented holdings and resistance to individual enclosures. In the , the Inca Empire's system integrated communal farming within clans from century onward. Ayllus collectively held lands divided into portions for family use, state tribute (via labor ), and religious offerings, with members performing reciprocal labor exchanges for terracing, , and harvesting crops like potatoes and ; archaeological data from sites like reveal terraced fields supporting densities of up to 150 persons per square kilometer in highlands. Similarly, among the Haudenosaunee () Confederacy, established around 1142, matrilineal clans communally worked longhouse-adjacent fields cleared by men and cultivated by women using the "Three Sisters" of corn, beans, and squash, yielding sustainable outputs that sustained populations of 20,000-40,000 by the 17th century without plows or draft animals. These indigenous practices emphasized women's oversight of , with fields belonging to clans rather than individuals, enabling through diversified plots rotated every 10-20 years to preserve , as confirmed by paleoenvironmental studies showing stable pollen records from 1000 CE.

19th-Century Experiments and Influences

In the early , utopian socialists such as and proposed communal models that emphasized shared agricultural labor as a foundation for self-sufficient societies, influencing later collective farming ideologies despite their limited practical success. , a Welsh industrialist, advocated for villages where land and production would be collectively managed, arguing that environmental and social reforms could eliminate through joint farming efforts. Fourier envisioned phalansteries communities of 1,600–1,800 people organized into hierarchical "passions-based" work groups, with forming the economic core through diversified crops and to ensure year-round labor appeal and productivity. These theoretical frameworks highlighted potential efficiencies in communal but overlooked persistent human incentives for individual effort, as evidenced by subsequent experimental failures. Robert Owen's most prominent experiment, New in , launched in 1825 on 30,000 acres purchased for communal use, directly tested collective . The settlement divided operations into departments, including , where residents collectively farmed grains, vegetables, and to support the population, which peaked at around 1,000 participants from diverse backgrounds. However, the venture collapsed by 1828 due to internal divisions, inadequate work discipline, and free-rider problems, where many newcomers contributed minimally while consuming shared outputs, yielding minimal agricultural surplus and highlighting the misalignment between and personal motivation. Similar Owenite attempts in Britain, such as Harmony Hall (1839–1845) in , involved 200–300 members on 1,200 acres focused on market gardening and grain production but dissolved amid financial losses and disputes over labor shares. In the United States, transcendentalist and socialist-inspired communes further explored collective farming. , established in 1841 near on a 175-acre site, combined intellectual pursuits with shared agricultural labor, where members rotated tasks in dairy, crop cultivation, and to embody . The community attracted figures like but faltered by 1847 after a disastrous fire destroyed infrastructure, compounded by low productivity from voluntary but uneven labor commitment, resulting in chronic debt and abandonment. Étienne Cabet's Icarian movement, inspired by his 1840 novel Voyage en Icarie, established agricultural communes starting with a failed 1848 settlement, relocating to , and later , where by 1855 around 500 members managed mills, shops, and farmland producing staple crops through communal division of labor. These groups achieved temporary stability via strict rules and elected oversight but fragmented over leadership conflicts and subsistence-level yields, underscoring scalability issues in collective agriculture without coercive enforcement. Fourier's ideas, though rarely fully realized, indirectly shaped American Fourierist associations in the 1840s, such as the in (1843–1855), which operated 700 acres of orchards, vineyards, and fisheries under associative labor principles, generating profits through diversified output before dissolving due to a mill fire and member apathy. Collectively, these 19th-century ventures—numbering over 100 in the U.S. alone between 1800 and 1859—demonstrated short-term communal harmony but empirically validated critiques of inefficient incentive structures, as agricultural underperformance stemmed from diffused responsibility and lack of private stakes, informing both socialist aspirations and warnings against large-scale collectivization.

Forced Collectivization in Socialist Regimes

Soviet Union: Policies, Resistance, and Immediate Consequences

Forced collectivization of agriculture in the began in earnest during the winter of 1929–1930, as part of Joseph Stalin's First Five-Year Plan aimed at rapid industrialization through extraction of grain surpluses from the peasantry. Policies mandated the consolidation of individual peasant holdings into state-controlled kolkhozy (collective farms), where land, livestock, and tools were pooled under central directives, with output quotas enforced by party officials and OGPU security forces. In December 1929, Stalin explicitly called for the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," targeting wealthier peasants deemed resistant to socialization, with directives classifying households into categories for expropriation or deportation. By February 1930, official reports claimed over 50% of peasant households had been collectivized, though this pace prompted Stalin's March 1930 article "Dizziness from Success," which temporarily blamed local excesses and allowed some de-collectivization before renewed enforcement. Peasant resistance manifested in widespread acts of , including the mass slaughter of —approximately 50% of cattle and 40% of horses were killed between 1929 and 1933—to prevent confiscation and undermine collective viability. Kulaks and middling organized petitions, hid grain, and in some regions formed armed groups or destroyed farm infrastructure, prompting violent reprisals; campaigns deported around 2 million individuals, with direct executions numbering about 30,000, often summary shootings during raids. A third wave of deportations in 1930–1931 alone affected 1.244 million people (265,000 families), primarily to remote labor settlements in and the Urals, where mortality rates exceeded 20% due to exposure, starvation, and forced labor. These measures, justified by Soviet authorities as countering "class enemies," systematically dismantled private incentives, as peasants received minimal compensation and faced punitive grain requisitions far exceeding prior NEP-era levels. Immediate consequences included a sharp decline in agricultural output, with grain production falling 20–30% in 1930–1932 due to disrupted planting, loss of experienced farmers, and motivational collapse under quota pressures. The 1932–1933 famine, exacerbated by excessive procurements (e.g., Ukraine's quota raised to 7.7 million tons in 1932 despite shortfalls), resulted in 6–8 million deaths across the USSR, with ethnic Ukrainians suffering disproportionately—up to 92% of excess mortality attributable to targeted policies like blacklisting villages and sealing borders. In Ukraine alone, known as the Holodomor, deaths reached 3.9–4.5 million, driven not by harvest failure but by state seizure of food reserves and prohibition of private sales, leading to widespread cannibalism and depopulation of rural areas. Economically, while collectivization enabled short-term grain exports to fund industry (over 1.8 million tons shipped in 1932–1933), it entrenched chronic inefficiencies, with livestock herds halved and per capita food availability dropping below subsistence levels until the late 1930s.

Eastern European Variants: Implementation and Adaptations

Following , communist regimes in , established under Soviet influence between and 1948, initiated forced collectivization campaigns modeled on the Soviet system to consolidate agricultural production under state control. These efforts spanned from to , involving expropriation from private owners and mandatory enrollment of s into collective farms (kolkhozes) or state farms (sovkhozes), often accompanied by , , and suppression of resistance. By the early 1950s, collectivization accelerated amid Stalinist pressures, with targets set for 70-90% of under collectives in most countries, though actual implementation varied due to peasant opposition and local agricultural structures. In , collectivization commenced in 1949 and persisted until its official completion on March 31, 1962, despite widespread resistance that included , flight to urban areas, and armed confrontations; the process entailed the near-total of private holdings, merging them into over 19,000 collectives covering 96% of by the end. Authorities employed tactics such as penalties on private farms, forced requisitions, and incentives like machinery access to compel participation, resulting in documented and destruction by party cadres. Post-1962, adaptations included integrating collectives into centralized planning with five-year goals emphasizing , yet agricultural output stagnated relative to pre-communist levels due to disincentives for individual effort. Poland's variant diverged significantly, with full-scale collectivization largely abandoned by following peasant uprisings and the events, achieving only about 12% of farmland in collectives by the regime's end; instead, adaptations preserved a allowing private smallholdings, which maintained higher through retained property rights and market incentives. In , initial pushes in the early faced violent resistance, leading to partial reversals after the Revolution, but subsequent adaptations under János Kádár introduced "voluntary" collectives with work-point systems mimicking private remuneration to boost participation, though collectives still exhibited lower labor than surviving private plots. East Germany's from 1952 onward incorporated grassroots mobilization and Soviet-style planning, reaching 85% collectivization by 1960, with adaptations like specialized production cooperatives (LPG Types I-III) permitting graduated private elements to mitigate inefficiencies. Bulgaria pursued rapid collectivization from 1948, achieving over 80% coverage by 1958 through intense state pressure and popular mobilization campaigns, but faced adaptations in the form of flexible organizational forms to accommodate regional differences in farming practices. Across the region, empirical data indicate collectives suffered from over-employment and productivity losses—e.g., Hungarian private farms outperformed collectives in —attributable to weakened incentives under communal ownership, as private plots often yielded disproportionate output despite comprising minimal land. These outcomes underscored causal failures in incentive structures, prompting post-Stalinist reforms like decollectivization threats in and market-oriented tweaks elsewhere, though systemic inefficiencies persisted until the collapses.

Chinese Collectivization: Great Leap Forward and Aftermath

The , initiated by in 1958, accelerated China's collectivization by merging existing cooperatives into approximately 26,500 people's communes, each encompassing an average of 5,000 households and vast tracts of . These communes centralized control over , abolishing private land ownership and implementing communal production brigades and teams, with resources pooled for collective labor in farming, projects, and backyard furnaces. Cadres enforced exaggerated production quotas through mass mobilization campaigns, communal dining halls that discouraged individual effort by providing "free" meals, and diversion of rural labor from fields to industrial targets, aiming to surpass British output in 15 years. Agricultural output initially appeared to surge due to falsified reports incentivized by political pressures on local officials, but actual grain production fell sharply by 1959-1961 amid disrupted planting, poor harvests, and resource misallocation. The ensuing resulted in estimated at 16.5 to 45 million, with scholarly consensus around 30 million deaths from and related diseases, far exceeding official Chinese figures of 16.5 million. While drought contributed in some regions, primary causes were institutional: excessive state grain procurement (up to 30-40% of output) based on inflated , continued exports of millions of tons amid shortages, wasteful communal kitchens depleting reserves, and weakened work incentives under . By late 1960, reports prompted partial policy retreats; communal dining was largely abandoned by 1961, private plots and sideline production were reinstated, and quotas reduced, allowing output to recover to pre-Leap levels by 1962. Mao ceded day-to-day control to and , who decentralized some commune operations while retaining the structure nominally. The disaster eroded faith in radical collectivization, foreshadowing the 1978-1984 under Deng, which devolved land-use rights to families, boosted productivity through market incentives, and dismantled communes by 1984, contributing to sustained agricultural growth averaging 5-6% annually thereafter.

Other State-Driven or Regional Implementations

Asian Cases Beyond China: Vietnam, North Korea, and Mongolia

In , agricultural collectivization commenced in the North following land reforms completed by 1956, with the formation of lower-stage cooperatives in 1958 and higher-stage ones accelerating from 1960 amid emulation of Soviet and Chinese models. By the early 1970s, approximately 85% of northern farm households were organized into collectives, emphasizing state procurement quotas and centralized to boost output for efforts and industrialization. However, the system engendered inefficiencies, including weak work incentives and mismanagement, resulting in stagnant yields; production per capita in the North hovered around 200-250 kg annually in the 1970s, insufficient for self-sufficiency. After unification in 1975, collectivization was imposed on the , covering over 90% of farmland by , but encountered peasant resistance through output concealment and black markets, exacerbating food shortages that affected millions. De facto dismantling began with pilot household contracts in 1981, culminating in the 1988 Land Law that allocated long-term use rights to families, spurring productivity gains of 30-50% in yields within a as private incentives replaced collective apathy. North Korea's agricultural sector remains predominantly organized under cooperative farms, comprising about 90% of cultivated land and managed through the state's Public Distribution System since the 1950s, when collectivization was enforced post-Korean War to align with self-reliance ideology. Farms operate on work-point systems tied to state plans, with grains requisitioned at fixed low prices, but chronic underinvestment in inputs led to dependency on imports; by the , food production covered only 60-70% of needs, precipitating the 1994-1998 that killed an estimated 240,000 to 3.5 million due to floods, rigidity, and collapsed collectives unable to adapt. Partial reforms emerged in the via "private plots" and the 2012 June 28 Measures, allowing sub-team contracting and market sales of surpluses, which boosted non-state output to 30-40% of total by 2020, though official collectives persist amid ongoing shortages averaging 1 million tons of grain deficit yearly. Recent 2023 amendments to the Farms Act emphasize intensified labor and technology but retain centralized control, yielding limited gains as farms prioritize quotas over efficiency. In , Soviet-influenced collectivization targeted the nomadic pastoral economy starting in , with initial state farms for crops established by and cooperatives (negdels) mandated from 1955, achieving full coverage by 1959-1960 to facilitate and central . By 1989, over 250 negdels managed 80% of the 25 million-head inventory through assigned brigades and seasonal migrations, supplemented by 50 state farms producing grains on irrigated plots covering 1-2% of , yielding annual outputs of 500,000-700,000 tons of by the late 1980s. This shift disrupted traditional , causing initial losses from resistance and mismanagement—herds dropped 20-30% in the 1930s-1940s—but stabilized under subsidies, enabling modest industrialization at the cost of environmental strain from fixed routes. Post-1990 privatized s, distributing animals to households and dissolving negdels by 1992, which restored flexibility but exposed vulnerabilities to dzuds (harsh winters), as decentralized herders lacked the buffers of storage and mobility coordination.

African and Latin American Attempts: Tanzania and Cuba

In Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere's policy, formalized in the 1967 , promoted through voluntary communal villages emphasizing collective farming and self-reliance, but evolved into coercive villagization by the mid-1970s. Operation Vijiji, launched in 1974, forcibly relocated over 5 million rural residents—approximately 70% of the population—into planned settlements between 1973 and 1976, disrupting traditional dispersed farming practices and imposing communal labor without adequate infrastructure or incentives. This centralization aimed to boost agricultural output through shared resources, yet resulted in immediate declines as farmers abandoned fields during relocations and resisted mandatory collective work due to weakened personal incentives and poor yields from unfamiliar group plots. Agricultural production stagnated or fell post-villagization; World Bank analysis noted sluggish growth in output after the mid-1960s, coinciding with Ujamaa's intensification, while food and export crop declines—such as and cash crops—persisted into the 1980s, exacerbating shortages despite attributions to droughts. Empirical studies link these outcomes to villagization's disruption of ecological balances, soil degradation from concentrated settlement, and lack of market signals, with long-term effects including reduced household consumption and agricultural persistence in affected areas. By the early 1980s, policy abandonment under reflected Ujamaa's failure to achieve gains, as communal structures fostered shirking and underinvestment compared to private smallholdings. In Cuba, the 1959 revolution initiated agrarian reform via the First Agrarian Reform Law on May 17, 1959, which expropriated latifundia over 402 hectares, redistributed parcels to about 31,425 peasants (up to 28 hectares each), and formed initial cooperatives like 622 sugarcane units and 263 People's Farms by 1961. The 1963 Second Agrarian Reform Law radicalized this process, capping private holdings at 67 hectares and placing 70% of arable land under state farms through further nationalizations, including 4.4 million hectares from U.S. owners, shifting toward centralized planning over private incentives. From 1975, Agricultural Production Cooperatives (CPAs) institutionalized collectivization, growing to 1,378 units covering 1 million hectares by 1985, where members shared profits but adhered to state quotas, while Credit and Service Cooperatives (CCSs) supported individual plots under collective oversight. These reforms yielded short-term land access gains but precipitated productivity shortfalls; output stabilized until 1961 before food shortages prompted in 1962, as fixed quotas and low eroded expansion , leading to chronic inefficiencies in state-dominated farms reliant on Soviet subsidies. productivity in collective units, for instance, halved from 211.6 tons per member in 1993–94 to 113.1 tons in 2002–03, reflecting broader declines in yields and output amid centralized mismanagement and lack of rights. By the , Cuba's depended heavily on imports for basics despite vast state lands, with collectivization's voids—evident in and low labor effort—contributing to post-Soviet vulnerabilities, though initial growth masked underlying causal failures in aligning effort with rewards.

Voluntary and Market-Oriented Collectives

Israeli Kibbutzim: Formation, Successes, and Evolutions

The kibbutzim emerged as voluntary communal settlements in the early , rooted in Labor Zionist that combined Jewish national revival with socialist principles of collective labor and ownership. The first kibbutz, , was established in 1910 near the by a small group of pioneers who rejected and wage labor in favor of shared resources and equal work distribution to reclaim and cultivate underutilized land in Ottoman Palestine. This model expanded during the British Mandate era, with dozens more founded by the 1930s, often on land purchased by the ; by Israel's independence in 1948, around 100 kibbutzim existed, comprising about 7% of the Jewish population and playing a pivotal role in frontier defense and agricultural expansion amid Arab hostility and sparse infrastructure. Kibbutzim achieved notable successes in and , leveraging communal organization and ideological motivation to transform arid regions into productive farmland through innovations like cooperative labor brigades and early adoption of technologies such as precursors. In 2010, kibbutz accounted for 40% of Israel's total output, valued at over $1.7 billion, despite occupying only 4% of cultivated land, demonstrating high per-unit efficiency driven by investment in machinery and training. Beyond farming, many diversified into industry and high-tech by the late 20th century, with examples like Sdot Yam producing global brands such as quartz surfaces and Kibbutz Shamir Optical developing precision lenses, contributing to Israel's export economy and underscoring the adaptability of motivated voluntary . Socially, kibbutzim fostered in labor and education, with women comprising half the workforce from inception, and provided elite military units like the , which were instrumental in the 1948 War of Independence. These outcomes stemmed from high member commitment and state land allocations, though empirical data indicate that such productivity relied on external subsidies and pioneer zeal rather than inherent superiority over private farming. From the 1980s onward, kibbutzim underwent profound evolutions amid Israel's economic liberalization, hyperinflation, and mounting debts totaling billions by the mid-1980s, prompting a shift from pure communalism to hybrid models with private incentives. Facing demographic decline as younger members emigrated for urban opportunities and free-rider problems eroded morale, over 200 of Israel's 273 kibbutzim privatized by the early 2000s, introducing differential salaries, personal budgets, and home ownership while retaining some shared services; only about 60 remained fully collective by 2014. This transition, accelerated by the 1985 stabilization plan and global market pressures, boosted financial recovery—kibbutz industries now generate significant GDP contributions through tech firms—but halved membership to around 2% of Israel's population by the 2010s, reflecting the causal limits of enforced equality in sustaining long-term voluntary adherence. Today, surviving ideological kibbutzim emphasize sustainability and education, while privatized ones operate as affluent suburban communities, illustrating how initial successes gave way to market-oriented reforms to avert collapse.

Western and Non-Socialist Cooperatives: Examples from Europe, India, and North America

In contrast to state-mandated collectivization, Western and non-socialist agricultural cooperatives operate as voluntary associations of private landowners who retain control over their farms and production decisions, pooling resources primarily for , , and efficiencies within competitive markets. These entities distribute refunds based on individual members' transactions, aligning incentives with personal economic gain rather than centralized , which fosters adaptability and innovation absent in coercive systems. Europe
The Danish agricultural cooperative model, pioneered in the , demonstrates effective voluntary organization in and sectors. Starting with local butter factories in around 1882, farmers formed producer-owned societies to standardize , reduce costs through shared cooling and , and access export markets, transforming into a leading exporter of and by the early 1900s. By emphasizing member control and democratic governance, these cooperatives achieved higher efficiencies than individual smallholdings, with Denmark's dairy output per cow exceeding many an peers by the due to collective investments in breeding and feed. Similar structures persist in modern entities like , a merger of Danish and Swedish cooperatives formed in 2000, which processes milk from over 12,000 farms and generates annual revenues exceeding €13 billion through market-driven competition.
India
India's Amul cooperative, formally established as the Kaira District Co-operative Producers' Union in , exemplifies grassroots organization among small-scale dairy farmers facing exploitative middlemen. Under the leadership of Tribhuvandas Patel and with veterinary support from , it adopted a three-tier structure—village societies for collection, district unions for processing, and a for —that empowered over 3 million members by linking them directly to consumers via branded products like and cheese. This model contributed to India's , boosting national production from 17 million metric tons in 1950-51 to approximately 210 million metric tons by 2022-23, with 's cooperatives accounting for a disproportionate share through efficient procurement and low-cost distribution. Unlike state farms, Amul's success stems from retained individual animal ownership and performance-based payments, enabling scalability without land pooling and yielding sustained profitability, with the Cooperative reporting turnover of over ₹80,000 (about $10 billion USD) in recent years.
North America
In the United States and , farm cooperatives like , organized in 1921 through the consolidation of 320 creameries, provide members with integrated services including feed supply, genetics, and global marketing, serving over 1,700 producers and generating $18 billion in annual revenue as of 2023. This structure allows independent farmers to capture greater value from processing and branding, such as the butter label, while competing against corporate through in and R&D. Similarly, Ocean Spray Cranberries, founded in 1930 by 14 growers, evolved into a cooperative owned by about 700 family farms across , handling over 1 billion pounds of cranberries annually and deriving 60% of U.S. production through member-controlled harvesting and juice manufacturing. These organizations thrive by enforcing contracts that reward high-quality output and exit options for underperformers, contrasting with rigid socialist allocations and yielding consistent returns, with Ocean Spray distributing over $100 million in refunds to growers in peak years.

Economic Analysis and Empirical Outcomes

Productivity Comparisons: Data from Collectives vs. Private Farms

In the , private household plots, which constituted about 3% of sown land, generated 25-30% of total agricultural output during the and 1980s, yielding levels 8 to 15 times higher per than farms for comparable crops. This disparity was particularly evident in and , where private plots produced over 50% of gross output despite their minimal land share, underscoring the efficiency losses from management structures lacking individual incentives. yields further illustrate the post-collectivization decline; average per-hectare output in hovered around pre-1913 levels of 7-8 centners despite efforts, only recovering modestly to 10 centners by the 1950s amid chronic shortages. In , commune-based collectivization during the (1958-1962) resulted in sharp productivity drops, with grain output per capita falling 15-20% from 1957 peaks due to disrupted incentives and labor misallocation. The subsequent , implemented from 1978 onward, reversed this by assigning individual land contracts, boosting grain production by approximately 33% between 1978 and 1984 through enhanced farmer effort and specialization. Private plots under communes, limited to 5-7% of , similarly outperformed collective fields in vegetable and sideline production, contributing disproportionately to rural incomes and highlighting the role of personal stakes in output. Post-communist privatizations in and the former Soviet republics provide additional evidence of productivity gains from shifting to private farming; in and , farm-level efficiency rose 20-30% in the decade following land decollectivization, driven by market-oriented despite initial output dips from transition shocks. Voluntary collectives, such as Israeli kibbutzim, deviated from this pattern, achieving higher productivity growth rates than private moshavim farms through scale and ideological commitment, producing up to 40% of national agricultural output from a small population base in the mid-20th century. However, even kibbutzim experienced long-term declines in agricultural shares as members opted for differential rewards, leading to partial by the 1990s.
Region/PeriodCollective/Private Land ShareOutput ShareProductivity Multiple (Private vs. Collective)
USSR (1970s-1980s)Private: ~3% sown landPrivate: 25-30% total ag output8-15x per
China Communes (pre-1978)Private plots: 5-7% arableDisproportionate in sidelines>2x in key crops
Post-Soviet (1990s-2000s)Shift to private post-privatizationOutput recovery 20-30% gains via markets
These comparisons reveal a consistent empirical pattern: forced collectivization correlated with lower per-unit due to weakened property rights and monitoring challenges, while private or incentive-aligned systems yielded superior results, as corroborated by output metrics across regimes.

Causal Explanations: Property Rights, Incentives, and Efficiency Losses

In collective farming systems, the absence of secure rights fundamentally undermines agricultural efficiency by severing the link between individual effort and personal reward. Under private ownership, farmers invest in land improvements, such as and , because they anticipate capturing the future benefits, as formalized in economic models linking tenure to incentives. In contrast, communal or state-controlled land in collectives diffuses responsibility, where no single actor bears the full costs of neglect or overuse, leading to underinvestment in long-term productivity enhancements like or . This dynamic, observed across Soviet kolkhozy and Chinese communes, resulted in degraded and stalled technological adoption, as farmers prioritized short-term survival over sustainable practices. Incentive misalignments exacerbate these issues through free-riding and . Collective output is typically distributed equally or via administrative quotas, regardless of individual contributions, reducing the marginal return to extra labor and encouraging shirking, as predicted by principal-agent theory in team production settings. from the illustrates this: private household plots, comprising less than 4% of sown area, generated approximately 51% of total agricultural output by 1970, including 60% of potatoes and over 40% of meat and , due to direct retention of proceeds motivating intensive cultivation. Collective fields, by comparison, yielded far lower per-hectare results, often 8-15 times less efficient, as workers lacked personal stakes and faced quotas that penalized overall farm performance without rewarding diligence. The manifests in , where shared access to land, , and tools incentivizes overuse by individuals seeking immediate gains at expense. In Soviet collectivization, this contributed to massive slaughters— herds fell by 50% from 1928 to 1933—as peasants anticipated and anticipated no personal benefit from maintenance, amplifying efficiency losses through depleted capital stocks. Political oversight further distorted allocations, with farm managers prioritizing ideological quotas over economic rationality, resulting in mismatched inputs and persistent shortages that compounded erosion. These mechanisms collectively explain the chronic underperformance of state-driven collectives relative to private alternatives, independent of scale or technology access.

Human, Social, and Political Costs

Famines, Repressions, and Demographic Impacts

Forced from to involved the repression of kulaks, defined as wealthier peasants resisting communal farms. Approximately 1.8 million individuals were deported to remote regions like and , with mortality rates during transit and settlement reaching 15-20 percent due to , , and exposure. Executions of kulaks and their families numbered around 240,000 to 500,000, as part of a campaign to eliminate perceived class enemies through show trials, confiscations, and forced labor. These measures disrupted agricultural production, as resistance included slaughtering —reducing horse numbers from 34 million in to 17 million by —and hiding , exacerbating shortages. The resulting famine of 1932-1933, known as the Holodomor in Ukraine, caused 3.5 to 5 million deaths in that republic alone, with total Soviet excess mortality from the crisis estimated at 6 to 8 million. Policies such as grain requisitions exceeding harvests, blacklisting of non-compliant villages, and export of food abroad despite domestic starvation directly contributed to these losses, as documented by historians analyzing Soviet archives. Demographic analyses indicate a population deficit of about 7 million in the USSR from 1926 to 1939 attributable to collectivization-era famines, repressions, and reduced birth rates, with Ukraine experiencing a 20-25 percent decline in rural population. In , the Great Leap Forward's communal farming experiments from 1958 to 1962 triggered the deadliest in history, with excess deaths ranging from 36 million to 45 million. , drawing on provincial archives, attributes at least 45 million premature deaths to , , and , noting that exaggerated production reports led to excessive procurements leaving peasants without sustenance. Yang Jisheng estimates 36 million fatalities, emphasizing policy-induced incentives where local cadres prioritized ideology over output, resulting in communal kitchens wasting food and backyard furnaces diverting labor from farming. Demographically, provinces like and saw mortality rates exceed 18 percent, with long-term effects including suppressed fertility and a skewed age structure persisting into the 1970s. Repressions in these systems extended beyond direct killings, fostering states that suppressed through purges of agricultural officials and peasants alike. In , while early collectivization in the 1950s avoided mass , the command economy's rigid collectives contributed to the 1990s Arduous March , claiming 2 to 3 million lives amid policy failures and isolation. Overall, these episodes highlight how centralized control over farming eroded local and incentives, leading to cascading demographic collapses through elevated mortality and stalled .

Resistance Movements and Long-Term Societal Effects

In the , resistance to forced collectivization manifested in widespread acts of , including the mass slaughter of —reducing the national herd by approximately 50% between 1929 and 1933—and the destruction of farm equipment and seed grain to thwart state procurement quotas. Women-led riots, known as bab'i bunty, erupted in rural areas, particularly in response to grain confiscations, with documented uprisings in regions like the Western Oblast where peasants organized to resist campaigns targeting prosperous farmers labeled as kulaks. These kulaks, estimated at around 5% of households but blamed for output shortfalls, faced systematic repression including arrests, deportations to , and executions, with over 1.8 million individuals affected by 1931, yet their elimination deprived collectives of skilled labor and deepened agricultural inefficiencies. Similar patterns emerged in China during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), where peasants employed covert resistance such as hiding grain, exaggerating production figures to avoid requisitions, and maintaining traditional lineage-based mutual aid networks to shield resources from communal pools. In areas with strong clan structures, these self-protective measures correlated with higher survival rates amid procurement excesses that diverted resources to industry, contributing to grain output declines of up to 30% in affected provinces. Resistance was less overt than in the USSR due to Maoist mobilization tactics but included localized revolts against commune labor demands, often suppressed through cadre enforcement and ideological campaigns. Long-term societal effects of these resistance efforts and repressive countermeasures included profound demographic losses—estimated at 5–7 million excess deaths in the from 1930–1933 famines partly triggered by and policy fallout—and enduring rural depopulation, with survivors exhibiting heightened of centralized that persisted into post-Stalin reforms. In the USSR, collectivization's disruption of traditional farming knowledge and incentives led to chronic productivity lags, influencing suboptimal agrarian policies through the and complicating post-1991 by entrenched state farm bureaucracies. China's Great Leap (1959–1961), linked to similar dynamics, caused 15–45 million deaths and left intergenerational scars, with exposed regions showing reduced , lower , and altered fertility patterns decades later, as experiences correlated with diminished trust in collective institutions and spurred the 1978 household responsibility reforms. These episodes eroded social cohesion, fostering black markets and informal economies as coping mechanisms, while politically entrenching surveillance states; in both cases, resistance highlighted the causal role of property rights erosion in incentivizing non-cooperation, yielding legacies of inefficiency and skepticism toward state-directed agriculture observable in slower rural modernization compared to non-collectivized peers.

Ideological Debates and Assessments

Defenses from Socialist Perspectives

Socialist theorists, from Marxist-Leninist principles, defend collective farming as essential for transitioning from capitalist fragmentation to socialist integration, arguing that private holdings inevitably produce class differentiation, with prosperous kulaks exploiting poorer farmers and hindering proletarian unity. This view, articulated in Leninist doctrine, posits that small-scale individual farming cannot achieve the required for modern mechanization and , whereas collectives enable centralized planning, shared resources like tractors and systems, and rational allocation of labor to maximize output for societal needs rather than market . Proponents claim that collectivization empowered landless and poor peasants by granting them access to communal land and tools previously monopolized by wealthier owners, fostering equality and reducing in early phases of implementation in the and . In the USSR, official socialist narratives highlighted post-1930s achievements, such as the deployment of over 200,000 tractors by 1935, which allegedly boosted on collective farms (kolkhozy) compared to fragmented private plots, facilitating surplus extraction to support urban industrialization and averting capitalist crises of . From a Maoist perspective, as applied in China's people's communes during the , collective farming mobilized mass labor for large-scale projects like terracing and flood control, purportedly increasing grain yields from 113 million tons in to 142 million tons by through effort and state-directed , though subsequent disruptions were attributed externally rather than to the model itself. Advocates in and other states similarly argued that collectives integrated into national planning, enabling subsidies, credit access, and technical aid unavailable to isolated smallholders, thereby stabilizing food supplies and contributing to overall socialist development despite initial resistances. These defenses emphasize ideological imperatives over short-term disruptions, asserting that collective forms eliminate profit-driven inefficiencies and align production with human needs, as theorized by Engels and extended by , who viewed forced consolidation as a dialectical necessity to overcome for proletarian victory. Empirical assertions of long-term gains, such as sustained output in stabilized collectives, are presented as vindication, with critiques dismissed as bourgeois ignoring the transformative role in building .

Critiques from Economic and Libertarian Viewpoints

Economic theorists, particularly those in the Austrian school, argue that collective farming inherently suffers from misaligned incentives, as individual efforts are not directly rewarded with proportional gains, leading to free-rider problems where participants shirk responsibilities knowing others will bear the burden. This dynamic, akin to the , manifests in overuse or neglect of shared resources, as seen in Soviet kolkhozes where peasants slaughtered livestock to avoid surrendering them to collectives, resulting in a 50% drop in stocks between 1929 and 1933. Empirical evidence from China underscores this: during the commune period (1958-1978), egalitarian reward systems stifled productivity, but the shift to the in 1978-1984, devolving to families, boosted grain output by approximately 30% and overall agricultural value by 50%, demonstrating how private incentives restore efficiency. Libertarian critiques emphasize that collectivization constitutes a coercive expropriation of , violating individuals' to the fruits of their labor and homesteaded land, which undermines both moral justice and economic . Without secure property titles, farmers lack the motivation to invest in long-term improvements, as gains can be diluted by collective claims, echoing ' argument that abolishes the price signals necessary for rational . In practice, Soviet collectives delivered persistently low yields—grain production per hectare lagged 20-30% behind private farming benchmarks elsewhere—partly because central planners could not harness dispersed, of local , weather, and techniques, as described in his analysis of how markets aggregate such information via prices, a mechanism absent in top-down directives. From a perspective, collective systems invite and bureaucratic inefficiencies, where state officials prioritize quotas over output quality, fostering and waste, as evidenced by chronic underfulfillment in USSR procurements despite forced labor . Libertarians further contend that such arrangements erode voluntary cooperation, replacing it with state-enforced uniformity that stifles innovation; post-Soviet privatizations in , for instance, saw agricultural output rebound by 20-40% in countries like after restoring private tenure, affirming that property rights are causal prerequisites for sustained rather than mere correlates. These viewpoints hold that empirical failures of collectives are not aberrations but predictable outcomes of severing from control, irrespective of ideological intent.

Legacy and Contemporary Context

Post-Communist Transitions and

In the wake of the Soviet Union's dissolution in December 1991 and the fall of communist governments across starting in 1989, collective farms—known as kolkhozy and sovkhozy in the former USSR—faced dismantling through reforms intended to reestablish private land ownership and market incentives. These transitions varied by country: Central and Eastern European states like , , and prioritized restitution of land to pre-collectivization owners or heirs, often via legislative acts in the early , which redistributed up to 80-90% of in some cases but resulted in severe fragmentation, with average farm sizes dropping below 5 hectares in by 2000. In contrast, and other former Soviet republics adopted a share-based model under the 1990 Law on and subsequent decrees, granting collective members tradable shares in land and assets; by 1995, over 90% of agricultural land had been nominally privatized, yet many enterprises reorganized as joint-stock companies rather than fully dissolving, preserving large-scale operations controlled by former managers. Initial outcomes were marked by sharp disruptions, as the abrupt shift from state planning to markets eroded supply chains, subsidies, and labor discipline, causing agricultural output to contract by 35-50% across the region between 1990 and 1995; in , grain production fell from 116 million tons in 1990 to 51 million tons in 1998, exacerbated by , input shortages, and rural credit collapse. Privatization's efficiency gains emerged unevenly: in European successor states like and , the coexistence of family farms and corporates facilitated labor exodus from (reducing by 40-60%) and capital inflows, yielding productivity recoveries by the early , with rising 1-2% annually in viable private operations. However, in , persistent corporate dominance—controlling 80% of farmland by 2000—hindered , as insider privatization favored entrenched elites over smallholders, leading to underutilized land and abandonment rates exceeding 10% in marginal areas. Empirical analyses indicate that privatized firms outperformed state remnants in efficiency, with foreign-invested or domestically privatized entities showing 20-30% higher output per worker, underscoring the role of secure property rights in incentivizing . Long-term privatization effects highlighted institutional weaknesses, including incomplete land markets due to restrictions on sales until 2001 in and fragmented holdings impeding in , where up to 7.6 million hectares of farmland were abandoned between 2001 and 2012 amid low profitability. Despite these challenges, the shift dismantled collective rigidities, enabling output stabilization and modest growth; 's agricultural GDP share declined from 16% in 1990 to under 6% by 2000 as resources reallocated to higher-value sectors, mirroring patterns, while private household plots—comprising just 4% of land—produced 50% of and potatoes by the late , demonstrating superior per-hectare yields from individualized incentives. In , top-down dissolution of collectives in the early accelerated smallholder emergence but fueled without supportive credit or extension services. Overall, these transitions validated causal links between private ownership and , though suboptimal implementation—marred by and weak enforcement—limited full realization of gains compared to theoretical benchmarks.

Modern Relevance: Surviving Models and Policy Lessons

In contemporary settings, voluntary or semi-voluntary collective farming models persist in limited forms, often diverging from historical state-imposed systems through adaptations that incorporate private incentives. Israeli kibbutzim, originally established as egalitarian communes in the early , represent one enduring example; by 2025, approximately 270 kibbutzim remain operational, though most have transitioned since the economic to differential wage structures, private allocations, and individual to sustain viability amid declining membership and external pressures. This evolution highlights how pure communal ownership eroded productivity without performance-based rewards, prompting reforms that blend collective ideals with market elements. In , agricultural cooperatives—numbering over 5,700 and covering about 80% of farmland—continue under state oversight, producing the majority of domestic food, including , , and staples; however, chronic inefficiencies, exacerbated by U.S. sanctions and internal mismanagement, have led to persistent shortages, with reforms since 2008 allowing limited private leasing to boost output. China's rural sector, once dominated by Mao-era communes, underwent decollectivization via the starting in 1978, assigning land-use rights to families and yielding a 50% surge in grain output within five years, alongside annual growth of 3.9% from 1979 to 1994—contrasting sharply with 1.1% under collectivization. Remnants of collective structures exist in some villages for or , but core production relies on individualized plots, demonstrating that voluntary coordination succeeds where forced pooling fails due to aligned personal stakes. and maintain rigid state collectives, but data indicate yields per lag 20-50% behind privatized peers, underscoring the rarity of sustainable pure models without hybrid reforms. Policy lessons from collective farming emphasize the causal primacy of secure private property rights and incentive alignment in driving agricultural efficiency, as evidenced by post-communist privatizations. In Eastern Europe after 1991, land restitution to individuals increased output by 15-30% within a decade by resolving free-rider dilemmas inherent in shared ownership, where workers shirk without personal gain. China's decollectivization similarly validated that tying rewards to effort—via family contracts—averts moral hazard and spurs investment, lessons echoed in early American communal experiments like the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony, where shifting to private plots in 1623 ended near-starvation by harnessing self-interest. Forced collectivization, by contrast, systematically undermined productivity through tenure insecurity and quota burdens, contributing to famines and stagnation; modern policies should thus prioritize titling individual or household rights to foster innovation and resilience, avoiding ideological impositions that ignore human motivational realities.

References

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