2 points
In both the Soviet and Chinese famines, collectivized farms outperformed privately owned ones in terms of food produced per hectare. Without collectivization, those famines would have happened anyway, and they would have been worse.
1 point
Really? Why did they allow those private farms at all then? My understanding was that the farms that were collectivized only produced enough for themselves to eat, so they went back a little and said “okay, you can have SOME capitalism until we get it figured out”. How they figured it out was quotas, and hey, on paper it looks good. You just have to tell Stalin a good number. Somehow the store room’s still empty.
