338 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
that long chains of specialization and command shielded many officials from the larger conse-
quences of their behaviour. Also, the difficulty of making officials accountable to their clientele,
as opposed to their superiors, meant that the pathology of group ‘commandism’, on one hand, or
individual corruption and self-serving, on the other, were rampant. High-modernist schemes in
revolutionary, authoritarian settings like that of the Soviet Union are thus likely to go off the rails
more easily and remain off the rails far longer than in a parliamentary setting.
78 The rush towards collectivization was momentarily halted by Stalin’s famous ‘Dizzy with Success’
speech of March 1930, which prompted many to leave the collectives; however, it was not long
before the pace of collectivization resumed. In order to have enough capital for rapid industrializa-
tion, 4.8 million tons of grain were exported in 1930 and 5.2 million tons in 1931, helping to set
the stage for the famine of the years immediately following. See Lewin, The Making of the Soviet
System, p. 156.
79 Compare this with Bakunin’s forecast of what state socialism would amount to: ‘They will con-
centrate all of the powers of government in strong hands, because the very fact that the people are
ignorant necessitates strong, solicitous care by the government. They will create a single state
bank, concentrating in its hands all the commercial, industrial, agricultural and even scientific
producers, and they will divide the masses of people into two armies – industrial and agricultural
armies under the direct command of the State engineers who will constitute the new privileged
scientific-political class’ (quoted in W. D. Maximoff, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific
Anarchism [New York: Free Press, 1953], p. 289).
80 The term ‘elective affinity’ comes from Max Weber’s analysis of the relation between capitalist
norms and institutions on one hand and Protestantism on the other. His argument is not one of
direct causation but of ‘fit’ and symbiosis.
81 See books 4 and 5 in vol. 2 of Gabriel Ardant, Théorie sociologique de l’impôt (Paris: CEVPEN,
1965).
82 Quoted in Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1964), p. 239. As Abram de Swaan has noted, ‘The nineteenth-century school regime does reveal
some unmistakable similarities with the factory regime of that time: standardization, formaliza-
tion and the imposition of punctuality and discipline were paramount in both’ (In Care of the
State, p. 61).
83 Scott J C. 1998. Chapter 8 in Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press.
84 For a detailed account of the relationship between the private plot and the collective just prior to
1989, see Timofeev, Soviet Peasants, or The Peasants’ Art of Starving.