American origins of the Soviet collective farm - anthropologist James Scott

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

American social anthropologist James Scott argues that Soviet collectivization in the 1930s had its roots in American agricultural industrialization. At the beginning of the twentieth century, farms with tens of thousands of hectares appeared in the United States, based on hired rather than farm labor. Looking at these farms, the Bolsheviks also wanted to set up "grain factories".

The first grain state farms in the USSR on hundreds of thousands of hectares in 1928-30 were made by the Americans. Agronomists from the USA Johnson and Ezekiel wrote: "Collectivization is on the order of the day in history and economics. From the political point of view, the small farmer or peasant is a brake on progress. The Russians were the first to clearly understand this and adapt to historical necessity."

James Scott is a living social anthropologist and professor at Yale University, where he has directed a special program of agricultural research since the early 1990s. He has been researching the relationship between agrarian practices and the type of state for a long time. Scott was one of the first to introduce the name of the specialty "economic anthropologist" into circulation. The Interpreter's blog in the article "Growing Grains Brought the State to Life" cited Scott's research that "Cereals are most conducive to concentration of production, tax collection, storage and rationing. The formation of states becomes possible only when a few domesticated grain crops ".

One of Scott's most famous books, "The Good Intentions of the State." For informational purposes, we present an excerpt from it, which tells how the Soviet collectivization of the 1930s was technologically American in origin.

American "state farm" in Montana

"A high level of enthusiasm for the application of industrial methods in agriculture in the United States was observed from about 1910 to the late 1930s. The main carriers of this enthusiasm were young professionals, agricultural engineers, who were influenced by various currents of their ancestral discipline, industrial engineering, more specifically influenced by the doctrine of Frederick Taylor, who preached the time-based study of movements, they redefined agriculture as "food and fiber factories."

Taylor's principles for the scientific evaluation of physical labor, which aim to reduce it to simple, repetitive operations that even an illiterate worker could quickly learn, could work reasonably well in a factory environment, but their application to the varied and changing demands of agriculture was questionable. Therefore, agricultural engineers turned to those aspects of economic activity that were easier to standardize. They tried to more efficiently arrange farm buildings, standardize machinery and tools, and mechanize the processing of staple crops.

The professional flair of agricultural engineers led them to try to copy, as far as possible, the features of a modern factory. This prompted them to insist on increasing the scale of the typical farm so that it could mass produce standard agricultural products, mechanize its operations, and thus, it was supposed, significantly reduce the cost per unit of output.

Modernist confidence in imposing scale, centralization of production, standardized mass production and mechanization determined everything in the leading industrial sector, and it was believed that the same principles would work just as well in agriculture. It took a lot of effort to test this belief in practice. Perhaps the most daring was Thomas Campbell's estate in Montana, begun in 1918. It was industrial in several ways. The shares of the farm were sold using the prospectuses of a joint-stock company describing the enterprise as an "industrial miracle", financier J. P. Morgan helped to raise $ 2 million from the population.

The Montana Agriculture Corporation was a giant wheat farm covering 95,000 acres (about 40,000 hectares - BT), most of which was rented from four local Indian tribes. Despite private investment, the venture would never have received land without help and subsidies from the Department of the Interior and the USDA.

By announcing that farming was about 90% engineering and only 10% farming itself, Campbell set about standardizing as many operations as possible. He grew wheat and flax, two hardy crops that only need a little maintenance between planting and harvest. In the first year, Campbell bought 33 tractors, 40 bundlers, 10 threshers, 4 harvesters, and 100 wagons, employing approximately 50 people for most of the year, and hiring 200 people during the harvest.

Americans are constructing Soviet collective farms

In 1930 Mordechai Ezekiel and Sherman Johnson in 1930 put forward the idea of a "national agriculture corporation" that would unite all farms. The corporation was to become united and centralized vertically and would be "capable of delivering agricultural raw materials to all individual farms in the country, setting production goals and rates, distributing machinery, labor and capital investments, and transporting farm products from one region to another for processing and use." … With a striking resemblance to the industrialized world, this organizational plan offered a kind of giant conveyor belt.

Johnson and Ezekiel wrote: “Collectivization is on the order of the day in history and economics. Politically, the small farmer or peasant is a brake on progress. sheds. The Russians were the first to clearly understand this and adapted to the historical necessity."

Behind these admiring references to Russia was definitely less political ideology than shared belief in high modernism. This belief was reinforced by something else at the behest of the high-modern exchange program. Many Russian agronomists and engineers came to the United States, which they considered the Mecca of industrial agriculture. Their educational journey through American agriculture almost always included a visit to Campbell's Montana Agriculture Corporation and M. L. Wilson, who headed the Department of Agricultural Economics at Montana State University in 1928 and later became a high-ranking official in the Department of Agriculture under Henry Wallace. The Russians were so impressed with Campbell's farm that they promised to give him 1 million acres (400,000 hectares - BT) if he came to the Soviet Union and demonstrated his farming methods.

The movement in the opposite direction was no less lively. The Soviet Union hired American technicians and engineers to assist in the development of various branches of Soviet industrial production, including the manufacture of tractors and other agricultural machinery. By 1927, the Soviet Union had purchased 27,000 American tractors. Many of the American visitors, like Ezekiel, admired the Soviet state farms, which by 1930 gave the impression that large-scale collectivization of agriculture was possible. The Americans were impressed not only by the sheer size of the state farms, but also by the fact that technicians - agronomists, economists, engineers, statisticians - seemed to be developing Russian production along rational and egalitarian lines. The collapse of the Western market economy in 1930 strengthened the attractiveness of the Soviet experiment. The guests, who traveled to different directions in Russia, returned to their country, believing that they saw the future.

As historians Deborah Fitzgerald and Lewis Fire argue, the appeal that collectivization had for American agricultural modernists had little to do with the Marxist faith or the appeal of Soviet life itself. “This was because the Soviet idea of growing wheat on an industrial scale and in an industrial way was akin to American suggestions about which direction American agriculture should take,” they wrote. Soviet collectivization provided these American observers with a huge demonstration project free from the political inconvenience of American institutions.

That is, the Americans viewed the gigantic Soviet farms as huge experimental stations with which the Americans could test most of their radical ideas for increasing agricultural production and, in particular, wheat production. Many aspects of the case that they wanted to know more about simply could not be tried in America, partly because it would be too expensive, partly because they did not have a suitable large farmland at their disposal, and partly because many farmers and households would be concerned about the rationale behind this experimentation. The hope was that the Soviet experiment would mean roughly the same to American industrial agronomy as the Tennessee Valley resource management project meant to American regional planning: a proving ground and a possible model for choice.

Although Campbell did not accept the Soviet proposal to create an extensive demonstration farm, others did. M. L. Wilson, Harold Weir (who had extensive experience in the Soviet Union), and Guy Regin were asked to plan a huge mechanized wheat farm on approximately 500,000 acres (200,000 ha - BT) of virgin land. Wilson wrote to a friend that it would be the largest mechanized wheat farm in the world. They mapped out the layout of the farm, the use of labor, the need for machines, the crop rotation, and a tightly regulated work schedule for a Chicago hotel room in two weeks in 1928.

The giant state farm they founded near Rostov-on-Don, a thousand miles south of Moscow, contained 375,000 acres (150,000 ha - BT) of land to be sown with wheat.

Collectivization as "high modernism"

If the movement towards total collectivization was directly inspired by the party's desire to seize the land and the agricultural crops sown on it once and for all, then this intention was passed through the lenses of high modernism. While the Bolsheviks might disagree on how to achieve this, they did feel confident that they knew exactly what agriculture should look like as a result, their understanding was as visible as it was scientific.

Modern agriculture must be large-scale, the bigger the better, it must be highly mechanized and managed according to scientific Taylorist principles. Most importantly, farmers must resemble a highly qualified and disciplined proletariat, not the peasantry. Stalin himself, even before the practical failures that discredited belief in giant projects, approved collective farms ("grain factories") with areas ranging from 125,000 to 250,000 acres, as in the previously described American system.