The most significant news regarding developments in the former USSR is so often obscured by capitalist propaganda here that it is well-nigh impossible to divorce fact from fiction.However, it can now be confidently stated that the collective and state farms in the former USSR, rather than having completely fallen victim to privatization, have held up firmly. This was confirmed for the first time in the imperialist press in a front-page article in the New York Times on April 26 by Serge Schmemann. Schmemann boasts of being the descendant of rich Russian landowners who were expropriated by the Russian Revolution. He has become the Times' expert on Soviet agriculture.
What kind of economic crisis?
Before reviewing the hard facts in Schmemann's article, however, we must ask ourselves, what is the central question with regard to the former USSR? What is causing so much suffering, chaos and even fratricide among the republics and the nationalities?
Are they perhaps suffering from the so-called cyclical economic crisis so characteristic of the capitalist system? Has there been a downturn in the economy because of capitalist overproduction?
Obviously not, because capitalist overproduction, whether in agriculture or industry, results in a superfluity of commodities of all sorts. They cannot be sold and so they pile up in the warehouses and stores. This of course is not the problem in the former Soviet republics.
The problem cannot be reduced to one particular economic, social or political cause. It is clearly systemic in character.
Trying to forcibly impose capitalism
It is the result of an attempt to artificially impose a new social, political and economic order on the USSR.
An attempt is being made to forcibly change from one mode of social production to another--to break up a socialized planned economy and impose a full-blown capitalist system.
Up until now, all universal modes of production have developed spontaneously out of the previous system--from early communal society to slavery to feudalism to capitalism. Of course, force and violence accompanied the change to each new social system, but in essence they grew spontaneously, especially capitalism as it developed out of feudalism.
It was the cheap commodities of European capitalism that, according to Marx, broke down the "Chinese walls" and penetrated the ancient feudal regimes--of course, with accompanying force and violence.
Here it is the very opposite. Capitalism is not growing spontaneously on the soil of the former USSR. Petty commodity production and the so-called shadow market have existed and grown in the USSR over the nearly 75 years of its existence. But they were supplementary to the economy. They never became the danger often anticipated by the authorities in the USSR and outside.
Here we find an attempt to artificially impose the capitalist mode of production.
The imperialists of all shades, as well as the bourgeois stratum in the Soviet Union, had thought it would be a relatively easy process, given the political paralysis of the working class and the eagerness of the ruling summits of the Communist Party apparatus to embark on the road of capitalist reform. Now they find that the road of imposing capitalism will be long and are beginning to think that, ultimately, it may not succeed at all.
There's no free market
Talk in the imperialist press about the free market coming to the former USSR is in fact a gross misrepresentation. The free market entails individual capitalist entrepreneurs and merchants spontaneously, on their own, risking their own capital and finding an easily accessible road, socially and politically, to capitalism. But this is not what has been happening.
We are living in the age of monopoly capitalism and not in the competitive stage of early capitalism. The individual entrepreneurs from the West are not breaking down the walls of Moscow or Novgorod or Kiev. It is the imperialist governments--the representatives of monopoly capitalism--and the monopolies themselves that are being imposed upon the USSR through their collective instrumentality, the International Monetary Fund/World Bank.
This is being done through a political process that is as far from the 19th-century competitive stage of capitalism as Heaven is from Earth. Even such a powerful oil company as Chevron does not venture into the former Soviet Union without U.S. government backing and coordination with the other giant oil monopolies. So once the IMF agreement is signed, the former USSR must begin selling oil at the world market price, and not the lower price it had been charging its allies. This is monopoly imposition, not the free flow of capitalist marketing.
Planning, imperialist-style
Imperialist economic doctrine teaches that socialism is faulted because it is a planned economy whereas capitalism is the free flow of prices and commodities. But this is not true in relation to what's happening to the USSR. The imperialists are coming with a plan, some of it worked out in detail, on how to establish the "free" market in the USSR.
The difference between a socialist and a capitalist economy lies not so much in planning. A capitalist economy is also planned--by the monopolies. The fundamental difference is that under socialism, the planning is on the basis of public ownership of the means of production, whereas under capitalism the planning is to preserve and strengthen the private property of the few millionaires and billionaires as against the overwhelming majority of the people.
Capitalism developed historically from feudalism, which was basically an agricultural society characterized by rural life. Cities were small. However, over the centuries petty trading and handicrafts slowly developed into a new capitalist mode of production.
What was the situation in the USSR? Before the Bolshevik revolution, the former czarist empire was predominantly rural and agricultural, although industry was growing rapidly in a few large cities. But with the establishment of socialized industry and the collectivization of agriculture, the USSR grew quickly into a technological and industrial giant--a superpower, to use the words of the imperialists themselves.
Now, in what appears to be an incredible task, the bourgeoisie are trying to turn this industrial and technological giant back into rural Russia.
Struggle over land
"The most fateful struggle underway in Russia," says Schmemann's article in the New York Times of April 26, is "the struggle for the land. ... The revival of private ownership of land goes to the very core of the Communist legacy. ..."
This admission, startling in itself, really boggles the mind of anyone who has followed the propaganda in the capitalist press, or even in much of the Soviet press under the Gorbachev and then Yeltsin leaderships.
We have been told repeatedly over the years that the collectivization of the land and especially the establishment of government-owned state farms was so onerous that the peasants were virtual serfs, waiting to be liberated. Once the government gave the state and collective farms the right to authorize privatization, it was said, millions of peasants would take advantage of it and set up their own private farms.
The only thing holding back the process of privatization, according to this view, was the heavy-handed bureaucracy and the fear of repression. But that has now been lifted. The Yeltsin government, far from discouraging private property, instead promotes it as a miracle cure for all ills.
So we must ask ourselves, where is the predicted stampede of the peasants out of the collectives and state farms and into the purchase of private plots? Why hasn't it happened?
More than 96 percent remain on collectives, state farms
Somewhere toward the end of the New York Times article, it admits that only 4 percent of the agricultural work force consists of private farmers. This is despite the fact that Yeltsin has "issued decrees ordering state-owned farms to turn 10 percent of their land over to private farmers."
Furthermore, "The overwhelming majority of private farmers are not from state or collective farms, but from farm-related occupations in the towns and cities," says the article. In other words, more than 96 percent of the collective and state farm workers have decided to stay where they are.
Schmemann looked for but had difficulty finding much enthusiasm for privatization among the collective and state farm workers. He tells of the Suvorov collective farm or kolkhoz, which has been suffering from the general chaos unleashed by the capitalist reforms. A general meeting of the members of the collective was held in February to decide what to do.
"In the end, after considerable recriminations, the members voted against dividing up the kolkhoz and against turning it into a share-holding company. They simply changed the name and left everything else more or less intact."
Growing your own vegetables isn't privatization
Again and again we have been told there is an innate, instinctive drive, especially by the rural population, to own their own land. It's now more than six years since Gorbachev began proposing the leasing of land. He didn't propose ownership--he was only for going halfway. Yeltsin, however, is for going all the way. Why haven't the peasants by the millions grasped the opportunity?
The propaganda of the bourgeois economists is very cagey. They try to confuse two different types of innate urgings for privatization, two different tendencies in the agricultural and industrial population. One is the natural desire, more in the cities than in the agricultural areas, to have a little patch of land where an individual or a family can by their own labor grow a garden to supplement their diet, or just have a place to get away from the city.
This is not an anti-socialist desire. It's not appropriating the labor of others. It's merely using your own labor to supplement your food supply or for recreation. It's no different than someone deciding to build their own boat or their own shack in the country.
But the bourgeois propagandists have confused this with the alleged desire of the vast mass of the peasantry, collectivized and state, to leave these farms and go into private ownership. If that were true, it would be a very different matter. They would be leaving the jobs where they have free medical, educational, and also pension rights in order to go into business with the hope of making a profit.
A few might want to do that, even considering the risk. The people who have done this (mostly from the cities, remember) have undoubtedly been influenced by the media (now in the hands of the counterrevolutionaries), which have touted the wonders of privatization. But, as it turns out, the vast majority of the peasants have not lost their heads and are staying right where they are.
Schmemann tells of the Batyrov family--three brothers, their parents and wives--who came from Georgia to Russia, purchased land, got a few dozen cows and a tractor. While they are doing better than most, things still aren't going too well for them.
Georgia and Russia are now two "independent countries." The writer doesn't tell us when the Batyrovs moved. What currency did they use? How did they get the funds? Who is going to service their tractor? Are they relying on the government for services?
Where are they going to sell their produce? They expect the government to buy it. They also expect free schools and maybe a daycare center.
So much for relying upon themselves.
Government subsidies for private farms
Ever since Gorbachev and then Yeltsin came to power, the refrain of all the bourgeois economists has been that subsidies must be reduced to decrease the government deficit. They have heavily propagandized against investment in technological change in agriculture, especially transportation, warehousing, and other facilities needed to bring the farms closer to the city and rural standards in general up to urban levels.
The new bourgeois economists railed against the investment and subsidies needed to reindustrialize and modernize socialist agriculture.
Now, this new bourgeois grouping, having seen the bankruptcy of their own ideas, want to revive subsidies--but for whom? The private farmers.
The Batyrovs have no money to build up their farm and become rich kulaks who exploit poor peasants. What is to be done? The government should subsidize them, say the pro-capitalist economists.
Almost all the imperialist countries find it necessary to subsidize agriculture, each blaming the others for doing it through subterfuge, tax breaks and other means. But they do subsidize large-scale farming. The tendency, especially in the U.S., is to ruin the small farmers and build up the larger ones who produce more efficiently.
But in the USSR, where huge agricultural complexes already exist on at least a semi-socialist basis, the design of the bourgeois economists is to ruin and dismantle them while subsidizing the small, ineffective, feudal-like and bankrupt private farms.
In developed capitalist society, the trend is to large-scale capitalist farming that relies on huge pharmaceutical, chemical and fertilizer industries and takes advantage of developed transport and warehousing systems.
Less than a century ago half the population of the U.S. lived on farms. That has now dwindled to a few million as the U.S. has gone through the transition from a rural to an industrial society.
This vital transition, which was necessary for the development of capitalism, is not to be allowed the USSR by the imperialist monopolies, however. Instead, they want to break them down and go back to the feudal period, or at least the very early stages of capitalist development.
Revolution needed in agriculture
Gorbachev and his advisers and administrators were originally gung-ho on "liberating" the peasant, offering the leasing of land and thinking that somehow or other money would be found by the peasants. But even when the land was given away almost free, they found that the peasants were not in a mood to stampede for it.
Socialist agriculture in the USSR certainly had problems, but they cannot be solved this way. Rather, they showed that the process of socialization has to be taken further, from collectivization to statization.
A new revolution in agriculture was necessary, one that would be seen as the most important issue in socialist planning. What had already been achieved in engineering and other high-tech sciences would have to be applied to agriculture.
Successive party secretaries in charge of agriculture, if they tried, proved unable to persuade the Central Committee and the planning authorities that that was the only road. Instead, the authorities cut down subsidies and investment in agriculture in favor of a quick fix--reliance upon loans from capitalist countries. But these would never be granted in the interest of further socializing agriculture. That's one thing the imperialist bankers would never agree to.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came along, he talked about leading a great scientific-technological revolution in the USSR. He also talked about the crisis in food production. In his report to the 19th Party Conference on June 29, 1988, he said, "I will begin with the food problem, as this is perhaps the sorest point in the life of society, the most acute problem."
But instead of presenting a program on how to apply new technology in order to increase the food supply, he went on to say:
"Experience shows that the shortest and most reliable path to a sufficiency in foodstuffs is to introduce broad, general leasing and other effective methods of organizing and stimulating labor. Everything depends on how quickly we get people interested and to set up the work of leased and sub-contracted collectives, how broadly we involve rural workers in this process and make the peasant the genuine master of the land."
After three years in office as General Secretary, with the support of the Politburo and the Central Committee, he found a way not to go forward with the socialist reorganization of agriculture via the scientific-technological revolution, but to begin chipping away at the collective and state farms through subcontracting and leasing, the first steps toward privatization. Instead of using technological means to improve agriculture, he went about changing the relations of production instead.
He spoke passionately about the crisis in food production, but didn't give the restructuring of agriculture the priority it deserved. It can be seen that agriculture was the decisive factor and should have been the starting point of the scientific-technological revolution. But that would not have pleased the Western imperialists and the IMF, with whom he wished to accommodate.