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Socialist Accumulation
Primitive socialist accumulation, sometimes referred to as the socialist accumulation, was a concept put forth in the early Soviet Union during the period of the New Economic Policy. It was developed as a counterpart to the process of the primitive accumulation of capital that took place during the early stages and development of capitalist economies. Because the Soviet economy was underdeveloped and largely agrarian in nature, the Soviet Union would have to be the agent of primitive capital accumulation to rapidly develop the economy. The concept was proposed originally as a means to industrialize the Russian economy through extracting surplus from the peasantry to finance the industrial sector. History The major proponent and main theorist of the concept was Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, a Soviet economist. His 1921 lectures, ''From N.E.P. to Socialism'' and 1924 lectures ''The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation'' provided the skeletal framework for what he would expand on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet Union, it dissolved in 1991. During its existence, it was the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country by area, extending across Time in Russia, eleven time zones and sharing Geography of the Soviet Union#Borders and neighbors, borders with twelve countries, and the List of countries and dependencies by population, third-most populous country. An overall successor to the Russian Empire, it was nominally organized as a federal union of Republics of the Soviet Union, national republics, the largest and most populous of which was the Russian SFSR. In practice, Government of the Soviet Union, its government and Economy of the Soviet Union, economy were Soviet-type economic planning, highly centralized. As a one-party state go ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ernest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel (; 5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter, was a Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist, and Holocaust survivor. He fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium. Life Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. The beginning of Mandel's period at university was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university. During World War II, while still a teenager, he joined the Belgian Trotskyist organisation alongside Abraham Leon and Martin Monath. He twice escaped after being arrested in the course of resistance activities, and surviv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verso Books
Verso Books (formerly New Left Books) is a publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of ''New Left Review'' (NLR) and includes Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson on its board of directors. According to its website, it's the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world, publishing one hundred books a year. '' Harper's'' called it "Anglo-America's preeminent radical press," and ''The Sunday Times'' called it "a rigorously intelligent publisher." Operations In 1970, Verso Books began as a paperback imprint of New Left Books and became its sole imprint. It established itself as a publisher of nonfiction works on international politics. Verso Books has also periodically published fiction over its history. On April 8, 2014 Verso began bundling DRM-free e-books with print purchases made through its website. Verso's managing director and US publisher, Jacob Stevens, stated that he expected the new offer on the Verso w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scissors Crisis
The Scissors Crisis () was an incident in 1923 in the economy of the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP), when there was a widening gap ("price scissors") between industrial and agricultural prices. The term is now used to describe this economic circumstance in many periods of history. History Like the blades of a pair of open scissors, the prices of industrial and agricultural goods diverged, reaching a peak in October 1923 where industrial prices were 276 percent of their 1913 levels, while agricultural prices were only 89 percent. The name was coined by Leon Trotsky after the scissors-shaped price/time graph. This meant that peasants' incomes fell, and it became difficult for them to buy manufactured goods. As a result, peasants began to stop selling their produce and revert to subsistence farming, leading to fears of a famine. The crisis happened because agricultural production had rebounded quickly from the famine of 1921–22 and the Russian Civil War. In c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economy Of The Soviet Union
The economy of the Soviet Union was based on state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, and Industrial engineering, industrial manufacturing. An administrative-command system managed a Soviet-type economic planning, distinctive form of Economic planning#Soviet Union, central planning. The Soviet economy was second only to the United States and was characterized by state control of investment, prices, a dependence on natural resources, lack of Final good, consumer goods, little foreign trade, public ownership of industrial assets, Economic stability, macroeconomic stability, low unemployment and high job security. Beginning 1930 in the Soviet Union, in 1930, the course of the economy of the Soviet Union was guided by a series of Five-year plans of the Soviet Union, five-year plans. By the 1950s, the Soviet Union had rapidly evolved from a mainly agrarian society into a major industrial power. Its transformative capacity meant communism consistently appea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by a number of basic constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth. Capitalist economies tend to experience a business cycle of economic growth followed by recessions. Economists, historians, political economists, and sociologists have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include '' laissez-faire'' or free-market capitalism, state capitalism, and welfare capitalism. Different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public ownership, obstacles to free competition, and state-sanctioned social poli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Capital Accumulation
Capital accumulation is the dynamic that motivates the pursuit of profit, involving the investment of money or any financial asset with the goal of increasing the initial monetary value of said asset as a financial return whether in the form of profit, rent, interest, royalties or capital gains. The goal of accumulation of capital is to create new fixed capital and working capital, broaden and modernize the existing ones, grow the material basis of social-cultural activities, as well as constituting the necessary resource for reserve and insurance. The process of capital accumulation forms the basis of capitalism, and is one of the defining characteristics of a capitalist economic system.''Capital'', Encyclopedia on Marxists.org: http://marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/a.htm#capital Definition In economics and accounting, capital accumulation is often equated with investment of profit income or savings, especially in real capital goods. The concentration and centralisa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Primitive Accumulation Of Capital
In Marxian economics and preceding theories,Perelman, p. 25 (ch. 2) the problem of primitive accumulation (also called previous accumulation, prior accumulation, or original accumulation) of capital concerns the origin of capital and therefore how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be. Concept Adam Smith's account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process in which some workers laboured more diligently than others and gradually built up wealth, eventually leaving the less diligent workers to accept living wages for their labour. Karl Marx rejected such accounts as 'insipid childishness' for their omission of the role of violence, war, enslavement, and conquest in the historical accumulation of land and wealth. Marxist scholar David Harvey explains Marx's primitive accumulation as a process which principally "entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Industrialization In The Soviet Union
Industrialization in the Soviet Union was a process of accelerated building-up of the industrial potential of the Soviet Union to reduce the economy's lag behind the developed capitalist states, which was carried out from May 1929 to June 1941. The official task of industrialization was the transformation of the Soviet Union from a predominantly agrarian state into a leading industrial one. The beginning of socialist industrialization as an integral part of the "triple task of a radical reorganization of society" (industrialization, economic centralization, collectivization of agriculture and a cultural revolution) was laid down by the first five-year plan for the development of the national economy lasting from 1928 until 1932. In Soviet times, industrialization was considered a great feat. The rapid growth of production capacity and the volume of production of heavy industry (4 times) was of great importance for ensuring economic independence from capitalist countries and s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Death Agony Of Capitalism And The Tasks Of The Fourth International
''The Transitional Program'', originally titled ''The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International'' and later reprinted under the title, ''The Transitional Program and the Struggle for Socialism'', is a political platform adopted by the 1938 founding congress of the Fourth International, the international Leninist organization founded by Leon Trotsky. It is an example of a transitional programme. Intent The "transitional" idea of this program, roughly, is the following. The working class is not acquainted with the necessity of embracing the revolutionary ideas of the Fourth International due to "the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation". Hence The problem lay in the fact that the "epoch of progressive capitalism" had ended in the prior period. This meant that "every serious demand of the proletariat" reached beyond the limits of what the capitalist and the bourgeois state were prepared ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Revolution Betrayed
''The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?'' () is a book published in 1936 by the former Soviet leader Leon Trotsky. The book criticized the Soviet Union's actions and development following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. The book is regarded as Trotsky's primary work dealing with the nature of Stalinism. The book was written by Trotsky during his exile in Norway and was originally translated into Spanish language, Spanish by Victor Serge. The most widely available English translation is by Max Eastman. Historical background Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879–1940) was one of the leaders of the October Revolution which brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917. In 1900, as a leading Marxism, Marxist theoretician and revolutionary, Trotsky was exiled to Siberia for his socialist activities against the Russian Empire. In 1905, Trotsky returned to Russia for the 1905 Russian Revolution, where his oratory skills made him ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United Opposition (Soviet Union)
The United Opposition (, sometimes translated Joint Opposition) was a group formed in the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in early 1926, when the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky, merged with the New Opposition led by Grigory Zinoviev and his close ally Lev Kamenev, in order to strengthen opposition against the Joseph Stalin-led Centre. The United Opposition demanded, among other things, greater freedom of expression within the Communist Party, the dismantling of the New Economic Policy (NEP), more development of heavy industry, and less bureaucracy. The group was effectively destroyed by Stalin's majority by the end of 1927, having had only limited success. Background and Formation To promote party unity, factions within the Bolshevik party were banned at the 10th Party Congress in 1921. Despite the ban, unofficial factions remained, and differing opinions continued to be voiced. The future goals of the United Opposition were expressed by multiple groups througho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
