The case for collectivism

The case for collective, rather than private, ownership and management of land is simply one specific aspect of the general socialist argument for socialism rather than capitalism. Comparing socialist with capitalist agriculture, Marxists have traditionally considered that the socialist system has four important advantages. First, it prevents rural exploitation, that is, the emergence of a rural proletariat side by side with an agrarian capitalist class. Secondly, it allows the rational use of the available resources. Thirdly, it ensures a rapid growth of the marketed output of agriculture. Fourthly, it provides a large source of resources for accumulation. Consider each argument in turn.

Writers such as John Stuart Mill (1891), Doreen Warriner (1969) and Michael Lipton (1974) advocated organising agriculture on the basis of peasants or smallholders operating efficient, family-sized, farms. On the basis of theoretical and empirical analysis Marxist researchers have traditionally argued that this ‘solution’ to the agrarian problem is illusory. As Engels explained in his famous essay The peasant questionin France and Germany (1894): ‘we foresee the inevitable ruin of the small peasant’. The reasons for this were both social (concerning exploitation and class conflict) and technical (concerning economies of scale and technical progress). The former were clearly explained by Lenin in The development of capitalism in Russia ([1899] 1956: 172), his classic study of Russian rural society in the 1890s.