/edu/ - Education

newfag thread; engage with accordingly, and point out any level of moronocy

The USSR engaged in huge amounts of primitive accumulation that was no different then what bourgeois governments; especially those of England and France; engaged in. If anything, the parallels are comically striking, especially after the fall of the NEP (New Economic Programme) and the failure to develop a solid alternative. The USSR under Stalin lead arguably one of the largest and most efficient attempts at primitive accumulation in history. And while they arguably helped create the economy that ended up beating the Nazi menace, the path there was mired in nothing but bloodshed.

First, some background: the NEP had offered the USSR a significant rebound from the civil war conditions of War Communism. While richer peasants continued to hoard and manage a significant amount of grain, the ability to sell it on a market let prices generally lower and allowed for some form of access to food, cooling the woes. However, in 1928, the situation fell apart. From PDF:

>In fall 1928, the economic situation grew worse. Harvest collections fell again, and the price of food and grain on the free market shot up. Workers’ riots intensified, and peasants, spooked by earlier confiscations, reduced their sown area. In early 1929, V.M. Molotov and Stalin visited the Urals and Siberia to oversee grain collections, impose delivery quotas on kulak households, and arrest hoarders. These “extraordinary measures”, extended throughout the country, allowed the state to meet its procurement and export targets.

The collectivization campaigned that followed, however, was not just hurt by the clear backwardness of the peasantry (especially the clerics), but by a rushed decision.

> That summer, an emboldened Party mobilized 25,000
workers to go into the villages to organize collective farms. The hasty decision, made under pressure of urban strikes and rural disturbances, produced a cascade of unanticipated consequences. Neither Party leaders nor worker activists were prepared for the intensity of resistance. Rumors swept the countryside. Angry, frightened peasants slaughtered rather than collectivize their livestock, and village priests warned that the Apocalypse was at hand.

This isn't totally Stalin's fault; this was well aided by the internal peasant woes by all means; but the fact of the matter is that the hasty plan to collectivize lead to a major panic. A year later, the plan to liquidate the Kulak Class went underway, with over 1.7 million people exiled, including non kulaks, to outposts, new towns, and special settlements, often in increasingly useless locations (the forest, tundra, wasteland, etc). This entire process is literally just primitive accumulation here, mass dispossession of the peasant class in trying to make way for a new foundation of social relations. Thousands of peasants who left these settlements were left much like the English counterparts of the 1700's; forced to wander the countryside, masking there identity, in search of new housing and work.

That was also cut short. Between 1929 and 1932, nearly 11 million people entered the workforce, a huge sum. That jump was over double the original number of people in the workforce. Stalin then proceeded to issue internal passports, meant to stem the flow of migrant workers. In 1724, Peter the Great had done the same, in preventing peasants from entering his vast new work projects. They had been abolished by the Bolshevik's in 1918; their reintroduction in 1932 was "a reversal of all previous revolutionary programs".

>The Soviet state apparatus quickly found the passport system a useful means of control and discipline. It slowed the influx of peasants to the cities, reduced labor turnover, and helped purge the towns of dispossessed kulaks, private traders, people deprived of voting rights, criminals, and vagabonds. Factory directors were encouraged to comb their personnel records to ensure that outcast groups were not “masquerading” as workers.