25. Collectivization Was Stalin’s Attempt to Transform Farming Into Factory-Like Work
A thousand industrial workers in a factory can produce more than a thousand artisans working individually in their cottages. So Stalin and communist economists hoped that a thousand farmers in a factory-like collective farm could produce more than a thousand farmers tilling individual plots. They also hoped that economies of scale would produce huge savings in labor. Giant factory-like farms using modern agricultural practices and machines would be more labor efficient, and thus would not need as many farmers.
Millions of farmers could be taken from the countryside where their labor would no longer be needed, and redirected to factory work in the cities to fuel industrialization. There was an added benefit of transforming peasants into factory workers: the strengthening of communism. Factory workers, or the industrial proletariat in Marxist-Leninist speak, were viewed as communism’s most reliable class. Peasants, by contrast, were viewed as hidebound and reactionary, instinctively inclined to opposing communism. Transforming peasants into industrial proletarians would thus increase communism’s most reliable class, while decreasing its least reliable one.
