Evgeny A. Preobrazhensky was Russiaâs foremost economist in the 1920s. This volume editorially reconstructs his theory of socialist industrialisation in an agrarian country and relates it to previous socialist theories and to issues of political struggle, culture and communist morality. The editors create a unique portrait of Preobrazhensky as an economist and social theorist, assess the viability of NEP as a model of economic growth, and identify the fault lines that contributed to the split in the Trotskyist Opposition and its defeat in the struggle against Stalin. The bulk of the work consists of the important An Attempt to Provide a Theoretical Analysis of the Soviet Economy, while the material in Volume III focuses on concrete analysis.
Richard B. Day. Ph.D. (1970), University of London, is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, Canada. He has published extensively on Soviet economic and political history, including Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation (Cambridge, 1973); a translation of Preobrazhenskyâs The Decline of Capitalism (M.E. Sharpe, 1985); and Volume I of The Preobrazhensky Papers (Brill, 2014) with Mikhail M. Gorinov. Mikhail Gorinov, Ph.D., is an historian of political struggles within the Russian Communist Party during the 1920s. He is co-editor of Preobrazhenskyâs works in Russian and has published several works on Preobrazhenskyâs political life, co-edited The History of Russia: The Twentieth Century (Heron Press, 1996), and contributed to The Peopleâs War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (University of Illinois Press, 2000. Sergei Tsakunov, Ph.D., is an economist specialising in Russian economic theory during the 1920s. He is co-editor of Preobrazhenskyâs works in Russian and author of In the Labyrinth of Doctrine (Rossiya Molodaya, 1994). He has published chapters on NEP in several Russian journals and books, including Volume 1 of Soviet Society (Rosiiskii gos. gumanitarnyi universitet, 1997), and History of the Motherland (Politizdat Moskva, 1991).
Preface Abbreviations
Foreword to the First Edition
Part 1 [Socialist and Communist Conceptions of Socialism]
Introduction to Part 1: Socialist and Communist Conceptions of Socialism
[1] The Great Utopians
â1âSaint-Simon
â2âFourier
â3âÃtienne Cabet
â4âRobert Owen
[2] The Communists
â1âAugust Blanqui
â2âThe Parisian Dictatorship
â3âMarx and Engels
[3] French Syndicalism
â1âAgainst the State
â2âAgainst Parliamentarism
â3âThe Way beyond Capitalism. The General Strike
â4âPreparing for a New Society within the Old One
â5âThe Period of Transition to Communism
â6âThe Future Society
â7âAnti-imperialism and Anti-militarism
â8âSyndicalism, Revisionism and Marxism
â9âThe Syndicalists and Bolshevism
Part 2 [Foundations of a Theory of the Soviet Economy]
4 On the Method of Theoretical Analysis of the Soviet Economy
â1âThe Marxist Method of Political Economy
â2âPolitical Economy and Social Technology
â3âThe Method of Studying the Commodity-Socialist System of Economy
5 The Law of Primitive Socialist Accumulation
â1âPrimitive Capitalist and Primitive Socialist Accumulation
â2âThe Struggle between Two Laws
6 The Law of Value in the Soviet Economy
â1âGeneral Observations
â2âThe Law of Value and Monopoly Capitalism
â3âThe Law of Value with Socialisation of Industry in a Peasant Country
â4âThe Commodity, the Market and Prices
â5âSurplus Value, Surplus Product, and Wages
â6âThe Category of Profit in the State Economy
â7âThe Category of Rent
â8âInterest and the Credit System
â9âCooperation
Appendix 1: Foreword to the Second Edition Appendix 2: Once Again on Socialist Accumulation Appendix 3: Reply to Comrades Karev and Kapitonov Appendix 4: Debate on the Report of Comrade Preobrazhensky on âThe Law of Value in the Soviet Economyâ Appendix 5: Economic Notes. On the Benefits of a Theoretical Study of the Soviet Economy Appendix 6: Declaration of E.A. Preobrazhensky to the Presidium of the XV Conference of the All-Union Communist Party(B) Biographical Index References Index
This book will be of interest to developmental economists, historians of the Russian revolution, and students of Marxism and socialist theory.