> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Bhaskar Sunkara
> <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> The famine of course was used as a political tool by Stalin... and
>> collectivization would have been handled in an entirely different way if
>> Trotsky was in power-- that's indisputable.
>
>
> Indisputable? Really? I think that entails more faith in the center's
> ability to control exact implementation, Trotsky's ability to control the
> center, and Trotsky's aversion to brutality than is justified.
>
> I think it's plausible to argue that if Trotsky had total command over
> Soviet policy he wouldn't have engaged in a Mike Davis-style planned
> famine.
> But I wouldn't call even that "indisputable."
=====================================
Trotsky and his followers criticized the Stalinists' policy as ruinous "left
wing adventurism". They would have collectivized more gradually, enticing
rather than coercing the independent peasantry into an expanding sphere of
mechanized and more productive state farms with higher living standards.
For example, In The Soviet Economy In Danger (1932), he wrote:
"There is nothing so precarious as sympathies that are based on legends and fiction. There is no depending on people who require fabrications for their sympathies. The impending crisis of the Soviet economy will inevitably, and within the rather near future, dissolve the sugary legend, and, we have no reason to doubt will scatter many philistine friends into the bypaths of indifference, if not enmity. "What is much worse and much more serious is that the Soviet crisis will catch the European workers, and chiefly the Communists, utterly unprepared, and leave them receptive to Social-Democratic criticism, which is absolutely inimical to the Soviets and to socialism...
...we considered that the hastily and purely fortuitous 'transformation of the five-year plan into a four-year plan was an act of the most light-minded adventurism'...
"The headlong race to break records in collectivization, without taking into account the economic and cultural potentialities of agriculture, has led in fact to ruinous consequences. It destroyed the incentive of the small commodity producer long before it was able to replace it by other and much higher economic incentives. Administrative pressure, which exhausts itself quickly in industry, is absolutely powerless in the sphere of agriculture...
"Let us recall once again: The economic foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat can be considered fully assured only from that moment when the state is not forced to resort to administrative measures of compulsion against the majority of the peasantry in order to obtain agricultural products; that is, when in return for machines, tools, and objects for personal use, the peasants voluntarily supply the state with the necessary quantity of grain and raw material. Only on this basis – along with other necessary conditions, nationally and internationally – can collectivization acquire a true socialist character...
"Let there be an end to driving and spurring and establishing records; let the productivity of each enterprise be subject to its own technological rhythm. Return to the laboratories whatever has too soon been taken away. Finish building whatever still remains unfinished. Straighten out whatever has been bent. Repair that which has been damaged. Prepare the factory for a transition to a higher stage. Quality quotas must be given a character both supple and conditional in order that they may not interfere with achievements in quantity.
"Nineteen thirty-three must gain complete mastery over the labour turnover, by bettering the conditions of the workers; that’s where the beginning must be made, for herein is to be found the key to everything else. Workers and their families must be assured of food, shelter, and clothing. No matter at what cost!
"The management and the proletarian cadres of factories should be freed of supplementary burdens, such as the planting of potatoes, breeding rabbits, etc. All questions relating to supplying factories with necessities must be regulated as independent and not supplementary tasks.
"Order must be brought into the production of consumer goods. Commodities must be adapted to human needs and not to the raw by-products of heavy industry.
"The process of inflation must be stopped with an iron hand and the stable monetary unit must be restored. This difficult and painful operation cannot be undertaken without boldly curtailing capital investments, without sacrificing the hundreds of millions that have been inefficiently or inopportunely sunk into new construction, in order to forestall losses in the billions in the future.
"A temporary retreat is urgent both in industry and in agriculture. The extent of the retreat cannot be determined beforehand. It will be revealed only by the experience of the capital reconstruction.
"First of all, a retreat is inevitable in the sphere of collectivization. Here more than anywhere else the administration is the captive of its own mistakes. While on the surface continuing to autocratically command, to specify under the signature of Stalin and Molotov the precise number of acres for grain tillage, the bureaucracy in reality is now being carried along by the stream of events.
"Nineteen thirty-three must serve to bring the collectivized agriculture into line with the technical, economic, and cultural resources. This means the selection of the most viable collectives and their reorganization in correspondence with the experience and wishes of the peasant masses, first of all the peasant poor. And, at the same time, conditions for leaving the collective farms must be formulated so as to reduce to a minimum the disruption of the rural economy, not to speak of the danger of civil war."
Full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/10/sovecon.htm