Re: [Marxism] land reform in Venezuela

["Paul H. Dillon" <illonph@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael,

A "one-size-fits-all" approach to land reform has always shown itself to be
a massive mistake.  The problems of collectivization are huge: new
organizational forms that the people aren't familiar with and that don't
function well initially; lack of familiarity with the parts of the
organization responsible for articulating the agricultural output to the
market and consequently lack of management experience. This isn't just
propaganda, the demise of various types of agricultural production after the
agrarian reforms in Bolivia and Peru is historically documented.  And it
would be pollyannish to assume that the "new moral man" is going to be on
the scene when previously landless or nearly landless peasants, or even more
complexly, urban immigrants and their progeny occupy expropriated
agricultural lands in various stages of development.

Collective agriculture has two elements: resources in land and other
productive resources (tractors, seed, etc.), on one hand, and collective
labor, on the other.  Both sides have redistributive implications.  Whereas
it might be easy to promulgate the collectivization of the former,  the
organizational forms that could put those means of production into motion
can't be established by decree.  People have to develop these forms since
they haven't existed previously.  They have to shift the fulcrum of their
choices from  themselves and families  onto the collectivity.  Getting less
so that everyone can have more is something people do all the time within
the context of their own families but that virtue doesn't pass over easily
into collectivities beyond the family.

This is hard even when the collectivities already exist  that provide
common, shared  identities- say where all the tenants on the
hacienda/latifundio recognize themselves as members of the same village.
This has been amply demonstrated in the histories of the Peruvian and
Bolivian agrarian reforms.  How much harder is this going to be when the
people who populate the newly exprpropriated lands don't even know each
other and have no sense of common identity with each other, or the land
they've come to live on.

The history of agrarian reforms has also shown that a failure of agrarian
policy that results in food shortages is one of the quickest ways to turn
the urban support for a revolution into oppposition.

Paul Dillon











: From: "Michael Sims" <mjsbpmagen-mxmail@xxxxxxxx>
To: "Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition"
<marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 12:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] land reform in Venezuela


> Saving pennies as a map-maker - sounds like a well educated surveyor and
> not a corsican peasant shepherd or fisherman.
>
> From whom did he get the land from ?
>
> It is essential that land re-distribution only takes place in the form
> of collectives - otherwise, as R.Luxembourg pointed out, one is only
> re-cycling the problem and land-accumulation will start occurring again.
>
> The Bolsheviks did not "decide" to re-distribute land to individuals,
> but their decision was pre-empted by the local peasants and, under the
> circumstances, the bolsheviks could not reverse it.
>
> RL's criticism of the Bolsheviks was misunderstood - she was pointing
> out the correct position, even if the Bolsheviks "decision" was forced
> by circumstances, in order that later, people would not be confused and
> believe that the Bolshevik's action was the correct action.
>
> Chavez should insist on collectivisation, which works fine and even now,
> and is of spoken positively in eastern Europe and other places.
>
> Collectivisation was a traditional way of working - even in natural
> societies (which some call "primitive").
>
> Michael
>
>
>
>
>
>
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