10 - The Soviet collective farm as a producer cooperative

Summary

Imagine that most of the obstacles facing Soviet kolkhozes (collective farms) today, such as output and delivery quotas, administrative interference, shortage of strategic inputs (materials, spare parts, fertilizer), depressed prices of outputs, etc., suddenly vanish, and the kolkhozes find themselves in a Lange-Lerner type of a competitive world where everything can be bought and sold at a market price, and where peasants are free to run their own affairs provided the essential structure of the kolkhoz is retained. How would Soviet agriculture, or for that matter any economic sector so organized, fare in such a wonderland?

Freed from existing restrictions and abuses, the kolkhoz would presumably revert to its prototype – a producer cooperative which utilizes the labor of its members, purchases other inputs, sells its outputs, pays a rent and/or taxes, and divides all or a part of its net proceeds among its members. The presumed democratic nature of such a co-op and its freedom from capitalist exploitation has made it highly attractive to socialists and social reformers for ages. But its popularity has not prompted its proponents to analyze it with the same loving curiosity that the “bourgeois” economists have shown toward the capitalist firm. And yet it must have been obvious, at least to some of these proponents, that co-op members are likely to be ordinary human beings bent on maximizing the benefits from their participation in the co-op.