Chapter 333: No Problem Is Unsolvable Without Movement
Li Wei's words resonated with many people at the conference.
Especially those leaders who came from untouchable backgrounds.
At this moment, they suddenly realized that they had been mentally PUA by the masters, elders, and landlords for a long time. Yes, maintaining balance requires sacrifice. This is the law of nature, and it is understandable.
But why is it always the untouchables who have to be sacrificed?
The rich have thousands of acres of fertile land and tens of thousands of tons of grain, but they tell the poor and destitute people who have no place to live that the land of Ionia cannot feed so many people, and in order to maintain balance, you need to make sacrifices.
"Ridiculous!" The leaders were excited.
After understanding this logic, everyone immediately completed the necessary ideological preparation and psychological construction for land reform.
They want to redistribute the land of Ionia so that everyone can have equal status as a human being instead of being a pariah.
"But..." Riven was more sober.
She had traveled to Piltover and Zaun, and had a thorough understanding of the theories of the Leader, so she knew that this was just the beginning of the Leader's future work.
After achieving the goal of "land to the tiller", there will still be many problems that need to be solved by leaders.
For example...
"President Levi," Riven asked, "After the land is divided, if the land is privately owned by the farmers of Ionia, will there be land annexation and the emergence of large landowners in the future?"
Farmers with land are also small property owners. And among small property owners, large property owners will continue to emerge. This is the law of the market.
If the free market is allowed to operate without restraint, then under the influence of the 80/20 rule, the polarization between the rich and the poor is inevitable sooner or later.
"The kind of government-run farms in the Noxian Empire."
Noxus has a vast territory and a variety of civilizations, so the countryside naturally presents a variety of rich forms:
There are villages led by landlords, territories controlled by nobles, and plantations run by the Ziben family...
At the same time, there are also farms officially operated by Noxus.
This type of farm has a long history in Noxus, originating from the military farming system in the early days of the empire.
Later, as time went on, military officers gradually became local administrators, and military households gradually became farmers.
The land they reclaimed and cultivated also belonged to public land, the ownership of which belonged to the Noxian Empire. The output must be turned over directly to the national treasury according to a certain proportion and could not be sold freely.
The state-run farms in Noxus sound a bit like what Levi called the agricultural collectivized enterprises.
"But there are big differences between the two." Levi emphasized: "Noxus's state-run farms are more like a product of an absolute planned economy led by the Noxian state."
"The agricultural collectivization enterprises we are going to build will be collectively owned companies that operate independently and bear their own profits and losses under the conditions where planning and the market work together."
State farms and collective enterprises are actually a form of collective production organization in the final analysis, just with different names.
The real difference is that -
Are they in a planned environment or a market environment.
If absolute planning is adopted, then collective enterprises are, to put it bluntly, state farms;
If it is in a market environment, then a collective farm that emphasizes independent operation and self-financing is, in simple terms, a joint-stock agricultural company owned by collective members.
Every villager is a shareholder of this company, but the shares cannot be freely transferred or traded.
"Then..." Riven asked a little tangledly: "President Levi, why do you suggest the latter?"
"This requires specific analysis of specific issues," said Li Wei.
If he were in a world without magic, faced with such a poor and backward agricultural country, he would definitely choose a planned collective farm.
Why? To quickly realize the original accumulation of seed benzene and earn the "first pot of gold" to start industrialization.
If a backward agricultural country has neither money nor resources, and is unable to plunder other countries like advanced countries... then the first pot of gold can only be accumulated slowly by tightening its belt.
The planned collective farms were the fastest way to complete the primitive accumulation of industrialization.
When you are so poor that you have almost nothing, only collective farms can help you raise a large amount of cheap agricultural products in exchange for expensive imported machinery and equipment; only collective farms can help you quickly concentrate a large number of free labor to carry out large-scale infrastructure construction.
On the other hand, in the world without magic—
The degree of industrialization and the level of national defense are often closely related.
If you don't industrialize quickly, you won't have guns or cannons, and you will have to passively take the beatings, allowing robbers to plunder the little money you have just saved time and time again.
If you don't want short-term pain, the result will only be long-term pain.
So you have no choice but to grit your teeth and accelerate industrialization and strengthen the economy and national defense.
"But in Runeland, we have magic and the goddess Janna." Levi said, "Here, national defense strength and industrialization level are not completely linked."
Demacia has no industrialization at all, but its military strength is more than a hundred times that of the Twin Cities.
Therefore, even if Ionia does not develop planned farms in the future, it does not have to worry about being invaded and bullied due to the slow industrialization process and the lack of national defense.
And the most important thing is...
"The most developed industrial country in Runeterra right now is ourselves, Zaun."
"In the future, the whole world will be integrated. The boundaries between countries will gradually blur and disappear under the flag of Jana."
"Under such circumstances, Zaun certainly can't rely on its technological hegemony to bully you and take advantage of the Ionians just because Ionia's industrialization is backward."
"We will do our utmost to support Ionia's modernization in the future - machinery, equipment, and various advanced industrial products can all be provided at preferential prices close to cost."
This greatly reduces the cost of Ionia's modernization, allowing Ionia to achieve primitive accumulation in a more gentle and gradual way.
So Levi chose collectivized enterprises rather than planned farms.
"Wait, President Levi..." At this time, Fia, who was a businessman, also raised a question.
But what Riven was entangled with before was that the "enterprise" in this collectivized enterprise was too conservative.
How can there be a market if we engage in collectivization?
What Feiya is worried about is that the “collective” in this collectivized enterprise is too radical.
How can the market be collectivized?
"If everyone is working on the land of a collective enterprise, will they still be motivated to work?" Feiya asked concernedly.
"Haha." Levi smiled and said, "You'll know if you go to Zuan again."
It is said that state-owned enterprises have rigid systems, but don’t large private enterprises also have the “big company disease”?
When there are a lot of people, there will be rivers and lakes, and there will be office politics. No matter whether your boss is an individual or the whole public, as long as the company managers still have selfish motives, there will be intrigue and factional struggles.
The practice of Leader in Zaun has proved that the state-owned enterprises and joint ventures managed by Leader still have strong vitality even in a market environment where they operate independently and bear their own profits and losses.
Even because of the participation of leading cadres in management, internal personnel friction within the company is completely avoided. After accepting joint ventures, many private enterprises have doubled their efficiency and grown rapidly.
“Collective enterprises managed by leaders are not inferior in market competition.”
"This is still true in Ionia and in the countryside."
"And, besides that..."
There is another very important reason for promoting agricultural collectivization:
“That is to improve agricultural production efficiency.”
Ionia's population has long been saturated, and thanks to the "unremitting efforts" of the Noxian invaders, the contradiction between population and land has been greatly alleviated in recent years.
But overall, there are still too many people in Ionia.
If the land is divided equally, it will only produce small self-cultivating farmers with small plots of land.
To improve agricultural production efficiency, we need to develop large-scale farms and large-scale mechanized agricultural production.
The only way is to use collectivization to concentrate the land from these small farmers.
"Mechanized production..." Riven frowned again, as if she had noticed something wrong: "Mr. Levi, if we carry out large-scale mechanized production in rural areas, then we won't need so many rural laborers, right?"
A Zaun-produced alchemical tractor is as efficient as 100 Noxian farmers.
In the future, all Ionian rural areas will engage in mechanized production. Where should the excess rural labor force be placed?
Going to the city to work?
"But Ionia cannot be highly industrialized. Even if we develop tourism and service industries, the city cannot accommodate so many employed people, right?" Riven asked worriedly.
"Well..." Levi was very frank.
He simply spread his hands and said, "Actually, I don't have any solution to the problem."
Ionia cannot be highly industrialized, which is entirely due to natural conditions.
No matter how much the leaders value fighting against heaven and earth, they must abide by the law of balance here. Otherwise, if they over-exploit natural resources, Ionia will become unbalanced and full of evil spirits.
Moreover, this "evil spirits" problem cannot be completely solved by simply asking a goddess to come and kill the evil spirits.
In fact, those so-called evil spirits are more like... a kind of "chaos corruption"?
In other words, it is something like "nuclear pollution".
The twisted evil spirits will completely pollute this land, making it as dead as the Shadow Isles, and as barren as Icathia. It will take hundreds or thousands of years to purify it.
Many of the lands that the Noxian Empire had ravaged had become such deadly places filled with evil spirits.
"Therefore, Ionia is destined to not be highly industrialized, and it is destined to not be able to build super-large industrial cities to accommodate enough rural migrants."
This leader has no way to solve it.
Then...what should I do?
In fact, Levi did not run a planned farm, and allowed and even encouraged the free migration of villagers, for this reason -
"Actually... I just want to get as many Ionians as possible to move out of Ionia and live somewhere else."
Levi had previously emphasized the need to improve Ionia's education and transportation.
This is not to allow all Ionians to stay comfortably in their hometown, but to give them better conditions and encourage them to find jobs and settle down in other places.
For example, if an Ionian studied alchemical engineering at the future Presidium University—
After graduation, it would be almost impossible for him to find a job in Ionia, and he could only go to Zaun and other places to seek opportunities.
By this time, if Hextech flying gate technology has developed to be cheap and convenient enough, traveling back and forth between Zaun and Ionia will only take a day...
Then the Ionian would naturally be very happy to move to Zaun to work and settle down.
A good education here is more like a resettlement fund, so that Ionians can settle down more easily in other places.
Convenient transportation here is more like a straw, which is used to attract the employed population that cannot be accommodated locally to other big cities.
"In the final analysis, Ionia has too few exploitable resources and too many people."
"If everyone stays here to farm, we will all be poor together."
Therefore, Levi's helpless solution is:
Run if you can, and don’t stay here if you have the conditions to run.
In this way, those who stay in their hometown can become "big farmers" engaged in mechanized production, and those who move out can become urban workers with guaranteed benefits as leaders...
This means that everyone has a bright future.
"Although this method only treats the symptoms and not the root cause, it is the best solution I can think of." Levi pessimistically admitted the shortcomings.
But at the same time, he said optimistically: "But don't be discouraged."
"Don't forget, whether it's Goddess Janna or Nagakabouros, they both told us that everything changes, and the world is also developing forever."
“The problems we cannot solve now may not be unsolvable in the future.”
"As long as our faith remains unchanged, our direction remains unchanged, and our pace does not stop, we will surely achieve ultimate victory and allow the Ionians and people all over the world to live a better life!"
…
Outside Wuji Village, on the rocks.
Levi's passionate voice also reached here and reached the ears of Jie and Yi.
"Did you understand what he said?" Jie asked Master Yi beside him thoughtfully.
Master Yi said...
“???” He didn’t understand at all.
As a young man from the mountain village who had never left the mountains in his life and had little experience of feudal society, it was really too difficult to ask him to understand the issues of modernization construction that Li Wei talked about.
"I didn't quite understand it either." Jie smiled.
"But I understand a little bit." Jie's eyes became extremely deep:
"They, these leaders, have always been thinking and working for a better life for the Ionians."
This is something that no force in Ionia had been able to do before.
Irelia only knows how to fight Noxus, but doesn't know what to do after driving the Noxians away.
The Navoli Brotherhood knew what to do after the war, but they only talked about making "Ionia great again", but never thought about how to make the Ionians, especially the poor peasants and untouchables of Ionia, great together.
Only the leaders.
Only they care about the millions of people of Ionia, the millions of "born untouchables" like Zed.
“Yi, I think…” Jie’s expression gradually became firm: “I know what to choose.”
