distribution rather than production: in any year a large proportion of produc-
tion rots in the fields because it cannot be harvested, or in storehouses because it
cannot be distributed. Furthermore, the problem of matching agricultural
production with both the needs of consumers and the livelihood of farmers
is endemic to all economies, and is shown especially in the wasteful subsidies
paid to farmers in both the USA and European Union. Historically, collecti-
vization is one of the two great sins attributable to the Stalinist period, the other
being the great purges. While the policy was clearly brutal and inhumane, it has
to be seen against the pressing need rapidly to industrialize a desperately
backward country. In total utilitarian terms it remains to be proven that the
experience of the Russian agricultural sector has ever been anything but
appalling, and it is certainly not proved that collectivization as a purely technical
answer to mass food production is any less sensible than most other methods.
Colonialism
Colonialism is the holding and ownership of colonies, or the treating of
another country as though it was in fact a colony. Indeed recently the concept
has been extended to refer to ‘internal’ colonialism, where the capital or
economically dominant part of a country treats a distant region just as it might
a genuinely foreign colony. For true colonialism to exist two conditions are
necessary. The land held as a colony must have no real political independence
from the ‘mother country’, but also the relationship must be one of forthright
exploitation. The entire reason for having colonies is to increase the wealth and
welfare of the colonial power, either by extracting resources, material or labour
from the colony more cheaply than they could be bought on a free market, or
by ensuring a market for one’s own goods at advantageous rates. In this way a
set of colonies may be rather different from an empire. The far flung lands that
constitute an empire may be integrated equally in economic and political terms
with the original homeland, the motive for imperial expansion being the
spreading of a way of life or of a political design, or merely the distancing of
external borders, and thus military danger, from the heartland. To some extent
this demonstrates a change in meaning of ‘colony’. The original colonies were
new settlements by Greek city states, where over-population led to a need for
expansion. Expansion was not, principally, at the cost of an indigenous
population in the new territory, and the relationship between the parent city
and the colony was neither exploitative nor one of political dominance.
In practice there are no pure examples either of colonialism, or of this non-
exploitative version ofimperialism. Colonial government has often been
justified, sincerely or otherwise, as an attempt to spread ‘civilization’ to socially
underdeveloped societies, and few empires have not rested, fundamentally, on
the economic advantage to producers and merchants in the imperial centre of
Colonialism