'Big is Good!': Or How Factory Machineries Industrialized Agriculture (A Technology-Based Approach to Collectivization in Communist Albania’s Land of Sugar)

• In Event: Local Dynamics of Collectivization in Central and Southeastern Europe

Abstract

The existing literature on collectivization in communist Eastern Europe widely considers the establishment of farming cooperatives as a technology for controlling the rural population. Using Foucault’s minted term, this literature claims that collectivization widely reflects the communists’ governmentality: an onslaught on private property so as to erase or reduce the spaces of freedom of the peasantry and enable their monitoring and social engineering from the communist state and party agencies. Such approaches are very much informed by the inefficiencies of the collective farms and the focus of the scholarly analysis on the realm of ideas, e.g. the dogmatic and rigid tackling of the economy by the East European communist leaderships. While not dismissing entirely this conclusion, this paper will complicate the dynamics of collectivization and the sources that informed it. Taking as a case study the plain of Maliq, which became the center of sugar production in communist Albania, I will include in the equation material and technological factors that in specific locations played a first-hand role in collectivizing the land. In areas designated for producing industrial crops but where the structure of property did hamper large-scale production, the communists saw the small peasant plots as anachronistic remnants of a primitive economy inherited from the past. Collective farms with large plots that allowed mechanization and mass production were the solution. The goal of this paper is to problematize the dichotomy ration/irrational that still dominates the literature on collectivization in communist Eastern Europe.

Author

• Artan R. Hoxha, Academy of Sciences of Albania (Albania)