[fer]

How is that communistic?

The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt. It's not dissimilar to pre-1929 kulaks, though the kulaks were encouraged/enabled to become a relatively wealthy/middle class peasantry who employed people and were directly involved in the production without owning large swathes of land, acting as a kind of a social dampener against a revolution.

Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

[orthoxerox]

Kulaks were the stated problem, the real problem were the middling farmers. If you're a smallholder with a surplus of land, your production is very elastic.

You can plant cash crops and sell them to buy industrial products. Or you can plant crops that boost your quality of life directly: fruit, vegetables, tobacco, animal fodder.

The "price scissors" (low price of wheat, high price of goods) meant that middling farmers stopped planting wheat that the USSR needed to feed the cities and to pay for imports. To make the peasants plant wheat again the Soviets took away their land in the name of economy of scale (collectivization), but the real goal was to limit the size of personal plots.

[kubanczyk]

> The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt.

So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.

> Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.

Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.

It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them like banners.

[fer]

>Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.

Lenin preached for state capitalism as a transitory state towards socialism. It's an integral part of the communist ideas, part of the direction even if not part of the ideal final state.

[kubanczyk]

Sure. Historically, at times people had free trade. At times we had no monopolies at all. At times there were really few laws. We had democracy and free speech and more. Various components of "The West" had been tried before.

All these did not compare with the sheer effect of capitalism: let's concentrate the production, let's scale it so big that every worker will become a hyper-narrow specialist. You bet it's unsexy take today, but it was universally understood in Lenin's times that it's a path not possible/feasible to withdraw from. That's the one magic ingredient that seems absolutely required.