Collective farming
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.
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.
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.
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.
[8] Other scholars have argued the economic programme of Trotsky differed from the forced policy of collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928 due to the levels of brutality associated with its enforcement.
[9][10][11] As part of the first five-year plan, forced collectivization was introduced in the Soviet Union by general secretary Joseph 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).
The Soviet Communist Party resorted to the execution and mass deportation of defiant kulaks to Siberia in order to implement the plan (see: Dekulakization).
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.
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.
Collective farms in the German Democratic Republic were typically called Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG), and corresponded closely to the Soviet kolkhoz.
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[24][25] 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.
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.
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.
[36] 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.
[36] 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.
[37] During 1954–1955, farmers in many areas began pooling their land, capital resources, and labor into beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (chuji nongye hezuoshe).
[35]: 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.
[35]: 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.
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.
[41] 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.
[35]: 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.
[35]: 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.
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.
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.
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.
The economy of Vietnam has achieved rapid growth in agricultural and industrial production, construction and housing, exports and foreign investment.
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.
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.
