Monday, January 08, 2024

LOS AGRICULTORES Y LOS FANTASMAS DE MAO Y STALIN (FARMERS AND THE GHOSTS OF STALIN AND MAO)

 


Therefore, he reasoned (Preobrazhensky), private property and the market should be abolished in the countryside, so that all investible surplus could be squeezed out of it by the government suppressing agricultural prices. Such surplus was then to be shifted to the industrial sector, where the planning authority could make sure that all of it was invested. In the short run, this would suppress living standards, especially for the peasantry, but in the long run it would make everyone better off, because it would maximize investment and therefore the growth potential of the economy.

 

(...)

 

However, in 1928, it all changed. Upon becoming the sole dictator, Stalin filched his rivals' ideas and implemented the strategy advocated by Preobrazhensky. He confiscated land from the kulaks, the rich farmers, and brought the entire countryside under state control through collectivization of agriculture. The lands confiscated from the kulaks were turned into state farms (sovkhoz), while small farmers were forced to join cooperatives or collective farms (kolkhoz), with a nominal share ownership.

 

Stalin did not follow Preobrazhensky's recommendation exactly. Actually, he went rather soft on the countryside and did not squeeze the peasants to the maximum. Instead, he imposed lower-than-subsistence wages on industrial workers, which in turn forced urban women to join the industrial workforce in order to enable their families to survive.

 

    Stalin's strategy had huge costs. Millions of people resisting, or being accused of resisisting, agricultural collectivization ended up in labour camps. There was a collapse in agricultural output, following the dramatic fall in the number of traction animals, partly due to the slaughtering by their owners in anticipation of confiscation and partly due to the shortage of grains to feed them thanks to forced grain shipments to the cities. This agricultural breakdown resulted in the severe famine of 1932—3 in which millions of people perished.

 

The irony is that, without Stalin adopting Preobrazhensky's strategy, the Soviet Union would not have been able to build the industrial base at such a speed that it was able to repel the Nazi invasion on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Without the Nazi defeat on the Eastern Front, Western Europe would not have been able to beat the Nazis. Thus, ironically, Western Europeans owe their freedom today to an ultra-left-wing Soviet economist called Preobrazhensky.

 

Why am I nattering on about some forgotten Russian Marxist economist from nearly a century ago? It is because there is a striking parallel between Stalin's (or rather Preobrazhensky's) strategy and today's pro-rich policies advocated by free-market economists.

(Ha-Joon Chang: 23 Things they don't tell you about capitalism; pages 138-140)

The Great Leap Famine and Amartya Sen (LA HAMBRUNA DEL GRAN SALTO ADELANTE Y AMARTYA SEN)

The Great Leap Famine and Amartya Sen: Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate argues, “in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.”[1] According to Sen, severe famine does not happen if a country is autonomous (independent), fair and accountable (democratic), and encourages free exchange of ideas (free press). Autonomous government has the power to allocate resources according to domestic concerns, and democratic government has duty to accommodate societal concerns guided by the rule of law. Relatively free press allows citizens to express their concerns freely and notifies government with challenges in society. The Great Leap Famine in China could also have been prevented if China at the time was independent, democratic, with a relatively free press, as Sen suggested. The Great Leap Famine was led by three key factors: Mao ignoring precautionary alarm suggested by the political elites; Mao silencing intellectuals from suggesting alternative agricultural-scientific theories; and top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was not informed about the villagers dying of famine. These could have been easily prevented under the Sen’s conditions because democratic institutionalization allows political elites to freely discuss policies, freedom of expression encourages intellectuals to freely criticize scientific theories, and democratic election and mass media coverage motivates citizens to freely address their concerns.

The infamous Great Leap Famine in 1959 to 1962 is the worst famine in modern Chinese history. The catastrophic famine caused gigantic causalities, estimated from 23 million to 46 million people.A professor from Hong Kong University of Science and technology, James Kaising Kung and a professor from Peking University, Justin Yifu Lin, argues that political radicalism created the Great Leap Famine.2 Ineffective policies were carried out – grain procurement and steel and iron production – while government officials focused on protecting their careers by enforcing unrealistic goals which starved peasants to death.
 
 
   
 

Flesh and blood, body and soul are gone. All is well, and the little fulcrum of truth that could lift the world is lost. As such, history becomes a collection of legends, of lost and imagined stories, that are baseless and unfounded. From this perspective then, how important it is that we can remember, and possess our own memories that are neither revised nor erased. It is the least amount of certainty and evidence that we can provide when we speak a little truth. 

 Memories cannot change the world, but it gives us a genuine heart. 

If there comes another Great Leap Forward someday and people revert to using backyard furnaces, it can at least convince us that sand will not turn into iron, and one mu [a unit of measurement, approximately 667 sqm] of yield will not weigh 100,000 catties. We will at least know that this is the most basic common sense, and not some miracle of consciousness producing matter, or air creating food. If there’s another Cultural Revolution of some sort, we’ll at least be able to guarantee that we will not land our parents in prison or on the guillotine. 

Because of this, I hope that each of you, and all of us who’ve experienced the catastrophic Covid-19 will become people who remember; people who derive memories from memory. 

Writing poems after the Auschwitz concentration camp period was indeed barbaric, but it is even more barbaric if we simply choose to forget it in words, in conversations and in memories—it is indeed much more barbaric and horrifying. 

If we can’t be a whistle-blower like Li Wenliang, then let us at least be someone who hears that whistle. If we can’t speak out loudly, then let us be whisperers. If we can’t be whisperers, then let us be silent people who have memories. Having experienced the start, onslaught, and spread of Covid-19, let us be the people who silently step aside when the crowd unites to sing a victory song after the battle is won—the people who have graves in their hearts, with memories etched in them; the people who remember and can someday pass on these memories to our future generations.

"Air creating food"  stands also for "politicians or policies or corporations or the State" producing food. History shows the catastrofic outcomes of it.

Farmers are a key part of the "little fulcrum of truth".
 
Western elites are seeking today, without any memories and/or insight and under the disguise of climate change concerns (instead of communism), a similar "Great Leap Forward" addressed, as said by German farmer@AnthonyLeeLsvD, to get rid of farmers, their economies and knowledge.



 

 

 

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