Self-sufficiency implies a tolerable level of dead babies

In 1967, President Julius Nyerere of newly independent Tanzania, announced the Arusha Declaration.  In it, he described a new African Socialism and the imposition of self-sufficient collective farming villages.

The Ujamaa policy would reduce Tanzania’s people to the poorest in the world, and disrupt the nation as the army and police forced them onto barren and famine-struck land.

Nyerere wasn’t alone in his fatuous and violent pursuit of self-sufficiency through collectives.

In the 1920s, Stalin tried it through the Sovkhoz and Kolkhoz collectives in the Soviet Union.  Millions starved to death.  China’s Great Leap Forward, in 1958, resulted in the death by starvation of an estimated 20 to 30 million people. 

More recently, in 2002, Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, has led the Millennium Villages Initiative for the UN.  As with other collective farming initiatives, this promises self-sufficiency and increased human development.  According to the project website, this time collectivism will succeed because of “improved science-based technologies and techniques that have only recently become available, such as agroforestry, insecticide-treated malaria bed nets, antiretroviral drugs, the Internet, remote sensing, and geographic information systems.”

For more than 60 years, collectivisation of production has been tried and – without exception –failed.  Sachs believes he can change this run by virtue of the Internet.   Never mind that communism couldn’t produce the Internet in the first place.

So where does the bright idea that collective farming could work come from?  Israel.

In 1909, Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms fled to Trans-Jordan in what was then the Ottoman Empire.  A small group, led by Yossef Baratz, settled at the Sea of Galilee and created the world’s first Kibbutz; a collective farm based on communist principles.

Everything was held in common, even children were raised as a single group separately from their parents.  No-one would own anything and everyone, irrespective of their abilities or effort, would receive the same benefits.  In a harsh land, beset by hostile migrants and in the failing Ottoman Empire, it was a winning combination.  Jews from around the world donated money in support of land purchases and sponsorship for these new Kibbutzim.

For a long period the system appeared to work. However, after the formation of the Israeli state, things declined.

100 years ago skill differentiation and division of labour was not that complex.  In order to become wealthy in 1909 required much simpler skills than it does in 2009.  A group then could be considered successful if they fed and housed themselves.  Today they require electricity, broadband Internet, entertainment, medical support and all the diversity of our technological society.

The problem with self-sufficiency is that single word: sufficiency.  It means that what you have must suffice; must be enough.  There is nothing outside the box.

If one out of every 1,000 babies dies, then that is what it is.  If the parent of that one dead baby wants to dedicate their life to reducing the number of dead babies, then that parent needs the permission and investment of the collective.  Only a representative committee has the power to decide.  They may prefer to spend the money on a new plough instead and demand that the parent push that plough.

That the Kibbutz philosophy has survived this long is down to two reasons.  The first is that joining a kibbutz is voluntary.  Unlike those of Stalin, Mao or Nyerere, Kibbutzniks can leave if they don’t like it.  The second is that Israel is an industrial state and some Kibbutzim have successfully developed products to export.  No Kibbutz is self-sufficient; all rely on exports or donations to keep going.

Despite these lessons, the South African government continues to centralise planning.  All state purchases to be run from Pravin Gordhan’s office.  All President Zuma’s promised new jobs to be state employees.

Leaving the poorest and most vulnerable to suffer the dead hand of central planning.