That is a very dubious argument when you look at the UK 1940 - 1960 when the agricultural workforce halved and over 3 million jobs in domestic service disappeared or Northern Ireland where 230,000 land holdings in 1923 had consolidated to 38,000 by 1963 (there was certainly violence here but after the end of this process rather than during it). Farming involves lots of back-breaking work with relatively low rates of return. A peasant farmer does have a certain independence a factory worker does not, but factory work is generally easier and pays better. As the song goes "I spends me life workin' this dirty old ground/ For a few pints of porter and the smell of a pound". Nowhere but Russia were bayonets involved in leaving the farm for the factory.
The origins of British capitalism were found in the late 1600's and 1700's when the British state enforced enclosure. The idea that factory work is easier or pays better is not historically accurate, there is much research about the degraded conditions of workers in factories. In "The Origins of Capitalism" Ellen Wood sums up the process of enclosure:
The first major wave of socially disruptive enclosure occurred in the sixteenth century, when larger landowners sought to drive commoners off lands that could be profitably put to use as pasture for increasingly lucrative sheep farming. Contemporary commentators held enclosure, more than any other single factor, responsible for the growing plague of vagabonds, those dispossessed ‘masterless men’ who wandered the countryside and threatened social order. The most famous of these commentators, Thomas More, though himself an encloser, described the practice as ‘sheep devouring men’. These social critics, like many historians after them, may have overestimated the effects of enclosure at the expense of other factors leading to the transformation of English property relations. But it remains the most vivid expression of the relentless process that was changing not only the English countryside but also the world: the birth of capitalism.
Enclosure continued to be a major source of conflict in early modern England, whether for sheep or increasingly profitable arable farming. Enclosure riots punctuated the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and enclosure surfaced as a major grievance in the English Civil War. In its earlier phases, the practice was to some degree resisted by the monarchical state, if only because of the threat to public order. But once the landed classes had succeeded in shaping the state to their own changing requirements – a success more or less finally consolidated in 1688, in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ – there was no further state interference, and a new kind of enclosure movement emerged in the eighteenth century, the so-called ‘Parliamentary enclosures’. In this kind of enclosure, the extinction of troublesome property rights that interfered with some landlord’s powers of accumulation took place by acts of Parliament. Nothing more neatly testifies to the triumph of agrarian capitalism.
You also see the forced destruction of communal agricultural property in India when the British forced Indian farmers to farm cash crops. Across Africa similarly the peasant classes were forced out of their communal subsistence existences into agricultural capitalism or into resource extraction through their conquest as colonies. The UK had already undergone its agricultural revolution long before 1940 so the comparison with collectivisation in the USSR is hardly apt. The USSR's forced collectivisation was effectively the Russian method of enclosure (the Communists such as Preobrazhensky even referred to British enclosure as something they should be emulating) but that it was undertaken on a scale unseen before hand doesn't negate the fact that pretty much every corner of the globe went through a similar internal upheaval of varying scales often with the private land owners being supported by the bayonets of the state.
Since the author of this piece uses Sheila Fitzpatrick as a real life writer giving fictional observations of this timeline, perhaps we can look at what she has to say about the population upheaval in USSR from her OTL work "The Russian Revolution": "In the period 1928–32, urban population in the Soviet Union increased by almost twelve million, and at least ten million persons left peasant agriculture and became wage-earners. These were enormous figures, a demographic upheaval unprecedented in Russia’s experience and, it has been claimed, in that of any other country over so short a period. Young and able-bodied peasants were disproportionately represented in the migration, and this surely contributed to the subsequent weakness of collectivized agriculture and demoralization of the peasantry. But, by the same token, the migration was part of the dynamics of Russia’s industrialization. For every three peasants joining collective farms during the First Five-Year Plan, one peasant left the village to become a blue- or white-collar wage-earner elsewhere. The departures were as much a part of Stalin’s revolution in the countryside as collectivization itself."
The migration of peasants from the village to the city was what allowed the newly built factories to actually have a workforce. Over the process of the Civil War, the cities depopulated at an unprecedented scale and they only trickled back in peace. That is why many observers and writers exploring the era make allusions to the idea that, almost as a side effect of the horrific nature of forced collectivisation, the displacement of peasants almost helped ensure industrialisation could be a success even if it was most certainly not the goal. Do I assert that the only way to have the expansive industrialisation of the USSR in this period would have been from forced collectivisation? Not at all. It wasn't even that successful as a method of developing agricultural output as for many years after its implementation most output remained the same and there was the negative side effect of lots of livestock being butchered by peasants wanted to quickly make some money before they were appropriated.
I mentioned Robert Allen because his work has an important conclusion that I feel fits the themes and ideas of a Right Oppositionist controlled USSR, as shown in his essay "A Reassessment of the Soviet Industrial Revolution" which is a supplement to the book of his that I recommended: "First, the New Economic Policy, which involved the preservation of peasant farming and a market relationship between town and country, was a conducive framework for rapid industrialization. Collectivization made little additional contribution to this system of organization. Second, the autarchic development of the producer goods sector was a viable source of new capital equipment. Exporting wheat and importing machinery--i.e. following comparative advantage--was not necessary for rapid growth. Third, the central planning of firm output in conjunction with the soft budget constraint was effective in mobilizing otherwise unemployed labour. This additional employment made a significant contribution to output as well as distributing consumption widely". Whilst being critical of collectivisation, rightly, he also recognises the impressive industrial growth of this period that, although some like to do their best, can't be ignored.
