David’s Reviews > The Red and the Green: The Rise and Fall of Collectivized Agriculture in Marxist Regimes > Status Update

I have been unable to locate any statement of his as to why cooperative farms were somehow superior to private agriculture. By the time Cabral was writing (in the 1960s and early 1970s), collectivization of agriculture had become such an unquestioned article of faith that even Marxist agricultural specialists did not worry about its justification or its relation to the original doctrine.

Except for the increasing acreage of average farms, none of Marx's other propositions on the development of agriculture under capitalism receives much empirical support. Of particular importance, the percentage of hired farm workers as a share of the agricultural labor force is not increasing but declining in most countries, suggesting that static economies of scale are not important.