>Hmm, call me Plekhanov or Wittfogel, but isn't collectivized agriculture a
>precipitant of evil total state control? Is there any example of
>agricultural collectivization without huge nasty bureaucracies?
>
>I don't suppose it must necessarily be so, but the statist commitments of
>the collectivizers definitely finds me in Brad's camp on this one,
>delusional as his ideas about 'defending South Vietnam' are.
>
I'd like to point out three things. The first is that the main danger of
agricultural collectivization comes from the tendency of such systems to
create "monocultures" of crops, i.e., more and more farmland gets
devoted to raising particular kinds of crops, which makes them more
susceptible to diseases, market crashes, surpluses, and the like. Also,
mistakes and bad policies (like Lysenko's nonsense) affect much greater
areas of agriculture. The second is that corporate farming is
collectivization as well, is susceptible to the very same dangers, and
also creates a really horrible bureaucracy.
The third is that none of these flaws are inevitable, and that it's perfectly possible for agricultural policy to be centrally supervised and yet diverse and resilient enough to avoid the above.