Socialist Economics

Partendo da una descrizione dei modelli dell’autogestione di Vanek e
Jossa e un breve excursus storico nel primo capitolo, continueremo
mostrando come l’approccio della teoria della libertà ci permetta di
analizzare la natura oppressiva del posto di lavoro capitalistico e,
infine, riportando i casi argentino e italiano concluderemo come le
imprese recuperate – visto il loro livello di redditività – e quindi la
pratica autogestionaria possano essere un’alternativa reale al modo di
produzione capitalistico così come lo conosciamo e al superamento in
toto della figura opprimente dell’imprenditore-capitalista.

The construction boom in Pyongyang, along with other indicators of improved economic performance such as food production and foreign trade, provide further evidence of the ineffectiveness of current economic sanctions. The North Korean economy appears to be beating sanctions thanks to Chinese aid and trade, as well as the reallocation of conventional defense spending to the civilian economy.

Il 28 giugno del 1948, con la risoluzione di Bucarest, la Jugoslavia veniva espulsa dal Cominform. Era il culmine di una crisi che trovava le sue ragioni nel fiero autonomismo dei comunisti jugoslavi dall'URSS, nonché in frizioni di politica estera dovute in particolare ai progetti di federazione balcanica mal visti da Mosca. La rottura metteva in discussione la pedissequa replica del modello sovietico seguita fino ad allora, con il varo nel 1946 di una costituzione federale che riproduceva quella dell'URSS del '36, l'avvio della collettivizzazione nelle campagne e del primo piano quinquennale 1 . Ma invece di capitolare ed andare a "Canossa", come forse si aspettava Stalin, gli jugoslavi proclamarono allora la propria diversità e originalità nel campo socialista. All'inizio Tito ed i suoi furono disorientati, ma quando fu chiaro che la rottura era definitiva, lo "scisma" pose ai dirigenti comunisti un pressante problema di identità e legittimazione sia all'interno, con i propri militanti legati al mito e al modello sovietico, che all'esterno, verso il resto della compagine del comunismo internazionale. La questione non era di facile soluzione per gli jugoslavi che, orfani dell'URSS, avvertivano l'esigenza di differenziarsi per mantenere il potere e sopravvivere. In gioco c'era la stessa evoluzione in senso socialista del Paese: nel contesto di incipiente guerra fredda, una Jugoslavia abbandonata dai sovietici che non avesse trovato una propria via poteva diventare preda del capitalismo occidentale. Gli USA, non a caso, capirono subito che si poteva aprire una finestra di opportunità e si mossero per tenere a galla Tito, includendo il Paese nell'UNRRA con lo Jugoslav Emergency Relief Act 2 . Così gli jugoslavi arrivarono a partorire il proprio inedito disegno, che avviava un'esperienza rimasta unica e singolare nella storia degli esperimenti comunisti, l'Autogestione. I dibattiti del pensiero socialista furono scavati alla ricerca degli elementi su cui basare la nuova teoria, passando da Owen, Fourier, Proudhon, Marx, Lenin e recuperando una distinzione tra "nazionalizzazione" e "socializzazione" dei mezzi di produzione, tramite la quale leggere l'involuzione statalista e burocratica dell'Unione Sovietica. Ferma restando l'interpretazione della Rivoluzione d'ottobre come primo tentativo di introdurre l'autogestione operaia, accanto a questo riferimento fu ripreso l'esempio della Comune di Parigi per quanto atteneva le forme di governo locale. Quest'ultimo modello permise di mettere subito in essere i primi provvedimenti, con la legge del 28 maggio 1949, innestandoli sugli istituti sperimentati durante la lotta partigiana nelle aree liberate, i Consigli popolari 3 . L'anno successivo, il 27 giugno 1950, veniva varata la Legge sul passaggio delle fabbriche alla gestione operaia. L'articolo 1 stabiliva:

This gives a number or examples of the use of Kantorovich's method applied to economic optimisation. The greater part of the document is a detailed literate programming presentation of a programme to implement Kantorovich's method using data in spreadsheet format. A number of improvements to Kantorovich's algorithm to make it more robust are given.

Version 2 of the file fixes errors in the formatting of the lp-solve examples ( the original had rendered spaces in them as ~ ).

Using a historical approach, I argue why the recent agreement between United States and Cuba is an immediate and historic victory for the Cuban revolution, putting it in a stronger position to face an array of challenges.  In Part 2, I will argue that what has been the unique advantage of the Cuban revolution—that it was led by a revolutionary guerrilla movement from outside of the world Stalinism—has also been a source of its weakness.  To advance the Cuban revolution can relay on its own strength, in particular Che Guevara's theoretical contribution.  But to develop in the 21st century characterized by the combined social and planetary crisis, the Cuban revolution most goes beyond Guevara and Marx to ecocentric ecological socialism.

During the New Economy Policy, livestock total number was reached to 27 million in 1941(This is highest number till 1990) as government was strongly observed the policy to increase livestock total number by promoting livestock husbandry. However, MPR was supplied through the heavy export of cattle and livestock goods to the Soviet Union in low price during the time of World War II.  Even after the war, this process was continued and changed as new factor as Governed Commercial System which has affected to livestock husbandry development.

During these years, the export price and official trade cost of cattle and livestock good was decreased several times. Since the Command Economy, this policy which harms herders’ financial issue was conducted intensively. By the end of 1950s, herders were forced to join kolkhoz (form of collective farm) by giving their “fateful cattle” due to this tough duty of Governed Commercial System.

The overarching question of this article is how can we develop a critical understanding of the social place of highways and automobility in the case of a non-capitalist European context such as socialist Albania? Socialism was a period of modernisation for Albania. Part of this modernisation project was the production of a modern built environment, especially infrastructures and urban spaces. Within this context during socialism thousands of miles of new roads were constructed in the country. The remarkably limited use of roads, combined with their systematic building and maintenance, kept this infrastructure’s materiality in a relatively good condition for many decades. Since the early 1990s, though, the end of the regime has signified a period of booming mobility and automobility. Postsocialism and the wider context of neoliberalism have been marked by state withdrawal from many of its previous roles, and the maintenance of basic infrastructures has become increasingly dependent on international aid. Nevertheless, the roads are currently being socially reappropriated and reconfigured, as people embrace automobility, which was a very limited practice during socialism. This article explores the kind of socio-material relationships that road construction and the roads themselves generated in socialist Albania and how these
are linked to postsocialist spatial practices.

Anarchism and geography have a long and disjointed history, characterized by towering peaks of intensive intellectual engagement and low troughs of ambivalence and disregard. This paper traces a genealogy of anarchist geographies back to the modern development of anarchism into a distinct political philosophy following the Enlightenment. The initial rise of geographers’ engagement with anarchism occurred at the end of the nineteenth-century, owing to Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, who developed an emancipatory vision for geography in spite of the discipline’s enchantment with imperialism at that time. The realpolitik of the war years in the first half of the twentieth-century and the subsequent quantitative revolution in geography represent a nadir for anarchist geographies. Yet anarchism was never entirely abandoned by geographical thought and the counterculture movement of the 1970s gave rise to radical geography, which included significant interest in anarchist ideas. Unfortunately another low occurred during the surge of neoliberal politics in the 1980s and early 1990s, but hope springs eternal, and from the late 1990s onward the anti-globalization movement and DIY culture have pushed anarchist geographies into more widespread currency. In reviewing the literature, I hope to alert readers to the ongoing and manifold potential for anarchist geographies to inform both geographical theory and importantly, to give rise to more practice-based imperatives where building solidarities, embracing reciprocity, and engaging in mutual aid with actors and communities beyond the academy speaks to the ‘freedom of geography’ and its latent capacity to shatter its own disciplinary circumscriptions.

Employing a poststructuralist-meets-anarchist stance that advances conceptual insight into the nature of sovereign power, this article examines the dialectics of capitalism/primitive accumulation, civilization/savagery, and law/violence, which are argued to exist in a mutually reinforcing 'trilateral of logics'. In deciphering this triadic system, this article offers a radical (re)appraisal of capitalism, its legal process, and its civilizing effects, which together serve to mask the originary and ongoing violences of primitive accumulation and the property system. Such obfuscation suggests that wherever the trilateral of logics is enacted, so too is the state of exception called into being, exposing us all as potential homo sacer (life that does not count). Proceeding as a diagnostic assessment of sovereign power, where although signposted by Cambodia's contemporary experiences of violent land conflict, this article is not intended as a fine-grained empirical analysis. Instead, it forwards a theoretical dialogue where Cambodia's neoliberalizing processes offer a window on how sovereign power configures itself around the three discursive-institutional constellations (i.e., capitalism, civilization, and law) that form the trilateral of logics. Rather than formulating prescriptive solutions, the intention here is critique, where in particular it is argued that the preoccupation with strengthening Cambodia's legal system should not be read as a panacea for contemporary social ills, but as an imposition that serves to legitimize the violences of property.

Covid-19 has highlighted the destructiveness of modern agro-industry upon biosphere and humanity. Its contribution to environmental degradation intertwines with socioeconomic inequality and labour exploitation. There are increasing calls for a green new deal (GND) to counter these dangers. This article argues that a GND for agriculture must combat environmental degradation, social inequality and labour exploitation, rather than aim to re-boot capitalist economies. This article identifies a number of areas for discussion and political action-reorientation of state subsidies, workers' rights, agrarian reform, the decommodification of food, agroecology, possibilities for urban agriculture, the application of new technologies, and rewilding.

A "Gazdálkodj okosan!" és a '80-as évek gyermekei I. Néhány ötlet egy másfajta játéktörténethez E dolgozat problémafelvetése nem mondható egészen szokatlannak. Arra tesz tudniillik kísérletet, hogy történeti érdeklõdéssel tekintsen be egy társas, azon belül is táblás, még közelebbrõl pedig egy -meglehetõs pontatlansággal -gazdálkodásinak nevezhetõ játék és a társadalom (értsd: a játékon kívüli valóság egésze, a külvilág, de akár azt is mondhatjuk, hogy a kulturális kontextus) viszonyába. A GAZDÁLKODJ OKOSAN!-ba rejtett történelem néhány kérdését fogjuk feszegetni. Nem elsõként és vélhetõleg nem is utoljára. Úgy hiszem azonban, hogy legalábbis a történettudományban unikálisnak számít az a cél, amiért a szobatudós körülnézett a szobájában, vagyis amiért tulajdonképpen a GAZDÁLKODJ OKOSAN! felé fordult a figyelmem: meg kívánom mutatni a gyerekek történelemalakító szerepét (és ezzel a sajátomét is) a magyarországi rendszerváltásban.

My Awakening: How I came to see the Text Jeffrey Ross, who teaches English at a College in Arizona, explains how he learned to see the Text I have developed a frightening, yet powerful awareness. I now stand, mannequin-like, in the store window of life, grimly watching the Textdriven crowds shuffle down the sidewalk, drifting into the distance, subsiding into the horizon.

After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet leadership fully mobilized Kazakhstan's populations for war. Communist Party and government officials in Moscow and Almaty responded to this crisis by conscripting ethnic Kazakhs into the Red Army, mobilizing the republic's industrial workers and collective farmers for intensified production, and waging a grandiose propaganda campaign designed to instill Soviet patriotism in these soldiers and laborers. During the war, Soviet authorities also deported large Soviet German and North Caucasian populations to Kazakhstan, where local Party and government officials forced them to eke out a desperate existence on the Gulag's "special-settlements." This dissertation is the first English-language study that analyzes these wartime mobilizational campaigns inside Kazakhstan. Drawing on a wide range of previously unexamined archival holdings in Kazakhstan and Moscow, published documentary collections, Soviet newspapers, and memoirs, the dissertation argues that mobilization catalyzed the integration of the republic's population into Soviet military, economic, and ideological institutions. As a direct result of this integration, the republic's Kazakh population acquired a much stronger Soviet identity, but the boundaries of Kazakhstan's ethnic hierarchy became more pronounced and the republic's status as a raw materials base for Russia became more firmly entrenched.

Using a historical approach, I argue why the recent agreement between United States and Cuba is an immediate and historic victory for the Cuban revolution, putting it in a stronger position to face an array of challenges.  In Part 2, I will argue that what has been the unique advantage of the Cuban revolution—that it was led by a revolutionary guerrilla movement from outside of the world Stalinism—has also been a source of its weakness.  To advance the Cuban revolution can relay on its own strength, in particular Che Guevara's theoretical contribution.  But to develop in the 21st century characterized by the combined social and planetary crisis, the Cuban revolution most goes beyond Guevara and Marx to ecocentric ecological socialism, Cuban History, Marxist political economy, Fidel Castro, Cuban Revolution, Socialist and Post-Socialist Area Studies, Transition to Socialism, and Ecological Socialism

Contemporary theories of social emancipation contend that it is time to dispense with the concept of revolution and leave it merely as the legacy of political struggles belonging to the age of industrial economy. Today's globalization, semio-capital, speculative design,  crypto-economy, would engage epistemologically different emancipatory lexicons and techniques of resistance. The paper analysis the outcomes of premature and coercive establishment in 1917 of the power of proletariat as the subject of enlightenment, and treats the socialist project not as the unrealized, but the effectuated utopia, thus disputing seminal standpoints of Althusser and Balibar of historical socialism's capitalist undercurrents.

Мы закончили переводить, анализировать и дальше исследовать чертвертую главу книги Сыроежина. Такое изучение требовало помочь других источников Советского времени, чтобы дать лучшие результаты в этой, комплексной, работе: в частности, книга Н. К. Байбакова От Сталина до Ельцина (Москва, Газоил пресс, 1998) и работа В. В. Новожилова “Проблемы планового ценообразования и реформа упрaвления промышленностью” (Экономика и математические методы, 1966, Том II, с. 327-339). До сих пор, никто не переводил эти работы – или часть – ни на один западный язык.

Publishing the full translation of IV chapter, along with the analysis and the researches related to it, we start the second part of this book, dedicated to “planification”. The arguments that have been touched by this research work, required further deepening of investigation and collection of materials, most of them from original sources. Between them, several pages have been translated from Nikolaj Konstantinovič Bajbakov, From Stalin to El’cin (От Сталина до Ельцина, Moskva, Gazoil press, 1998), as well as it has been fully translated Viktor Valentinovič Novožilov, “Problems of planned pricing and reform of industry management” (”Проблемы планового ценообразования и реформа упрaвления промышленностью”, Ekonomika i matematičeskie metody, 1966, Tom II, pp. 327-339), stil untranslated up to now.

Con la pubblicazione dell’analisi, degli approfondimenti, e della traduzione integrale del IV capitolo, si inaugura la II parte, relativa alla “pianificazione”, sempre nella consueta struttura a puntate. Gli argomenti toccati hanno reso necessario il confronto e il ricorso ad altre fonti, quasi sempre originali, al fine di rendere il più possibile organico l’impianto complessivo dei risultati di questa attività di ricerca. In particolare, sono stati tradotti ampi stralci dall’autobiografia di Nikolaj Konstantinovič Bajbakov, Da Stalin a El’cin (От Сталина до Ельцина, Moskva, Gazoil press, 1998), così come è stata inserita la traduzione integrale del saggio di Viktor Valentinovič Novožilov, “Problemi di formazione centralizzata dei prezzi e riforma della gestione industriale” (”Проблемы планового ценообразования и реформа упрaвления промышленностью”, Ekonomika i matematičeskie metody, 1966, Tom II, 3° uscita, pp. 327-339), inediti in lingue occidentali.

This article will enquire into the everyday life of the Romanians in the 1980s using the queue (the omnipresent food line) as its starting point of enquiry into reactions and perceptions of shortages. I count among the reactions to shortages the long debated “solidarity” among citizens of Socialist states; I argue that the queue can be described as a form of community activity whose organization was left almost entirely in the hands of the community itself. Officially non-existent, the queue provided an opportunity for Romanian citizens to exercise their organizational and communitarian skills. This is of course a reading that emphasizes “the bright side” of queuing; a more complex description of the phenomenon will be provided in the body of the article.
The second part of the article is concerned with perceptions of shortages. An account of the answers to the question ‘Why are we queuing?’ will be presented at both official and unofficial level. Analyzing the unofficial answers (extracted from oral history sources) I will argue that they were mainly a reworking of the state propaganda, successfully internalized by its citizens.
The main arguments of this article, i.e. the existing agency of Romanian citizens even in harshest times and a level of belief in state propaganda higher than previously remarked upon, support a broader conviction that the binary oppositions derived from dissent discourse are no longer useful theoretical tools in accounting for the reality of everyday life in Socialist states.

This study examines the cooperation between two former socialist sister states, the German Dem-ocratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) and the Polish People's Republic, in the field of industrial-ised housing construction in the 1970s. Using the East German housing series WBS 70 and the Polish W-70 ("Warszawa 1970") as examples, both successful and unsuccessful aspects of this partnership are highlighted. Structures, contacts as well as the scope for action are analysed from the institutional to the individual level. Did both sides influence each other? What role did Western societies play? These and other key questions are answered in a way that avoids stereotypical no-tions of hierarchical decision-making processes in socialist states. This balanced analysis rather tells the story of the pan-European transfer of ideas and knowledge in post-war modernism.
In this way both the GDR and Poland expected to exceed their five-year plans – a feature of the planned economic system. Thus the Wk-70 and WBS 70 systems became the culmination of standardised, open, industrialised residential construction in Poland and East Germany respectively.

La Segunda Internacional marcó una etapa en la historia del movimiento obrero caracterizada por la formación de partidos de masas, el crecimiento de los sindicatos, el desarrollo de numerosas organizaciones sociales y la constitución de un ámbito internacional de circulación de ideas. En este trabajo investigamos comparativamente los debates sobre el imperialismo de dos de sus partidos más importantes, la socialdemocracia alemana (SPD) y francesa (SFIO). Indagamos en su análisis de la expansión colonial europea, de las causas del imperialismo y de las perspectivas de una guerra entre las potencias. A su vez, examinamos su acción política en torno a estos temas y las posturas sobre el imperialismo de sus principales tendencias internas, ponderando su impacto en la política partidaria. Ambas organizaciones debatieron y se posicionaron frente a estas cuestiones en el marco de una agitada situación política marcada por guerras de conquista, episodios de rebelión en las colonias y varias crisis bélicas entre los Estados europeos. El desarrollo contradictorio de estos debates es un factor importante para explicar las diferentes reacciones en estos partidos frente a la Primera Guerra Mundial y la posterior escisión del socialismo internacional entre comunistas y reformistas.
Manuel Quiroga es Doctor en Historia por la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina.

Who has the easiest life in Poland? Mainly large enterprises. The sectoral and ministerial plans depend directly on their work. If they go short of a single screw, the minister thunders and the lightning flashes… Next, things are not too bad for the producers of export goods. Finally, an easy life is the lot of those who cheat a little." Jerzy Burzyński, in 1965, writing about Poland's Bytom machine-building plant 1 [It was] a system that worked, more or less, but which was incapable of finding a positive solution to any of the basic problems in the latter half of the twentieth century," Radoslav Selucký, in 1970, a Czechoslovak economic reformer 2 "Those who state that we have resuscitated… the mechanisms of the market, introducing them into socialism by stealth, are wrong. The market, buying and selling, and money have always existed in a socialist economy. But their existence did not meet the needs of the situation [in 1950. Today] there are enterprises which are still enjoying an unjustified right of monopoly, which makes the managers lazy and places the customers at the enterprises' mercy. That is why these problems must be resolved at the earliest possible moment." Reszö Nyers, in 1969, CP Central Committee Secretary, Hungary 3 Reszö Nyers saw it all, from the inside. Once a printer and a Social Democrat present at the creation of communist Hungary, Nyers served its Ministry of Domestic

This paper decomposes global inequality in redistribution, using data from the World Development Indicators data set of the World Bank. It finds that per capita income has a modest, yet persistent effect on redistribution. More provocatively, the paper also demonstrates that, over and beyond the impact of per capita GDP, global inequalities in redistribution over the last generation or so strongly reflect the double legacies of colonialism (improving the likelihood of redistribution in former-colonizer societies and sharply reducing it in erstwhile-colonized, recently independent societies). In addition, it also finds that the history of recent exposure to state socialism increases the presence of redistributive institutions, partly counterbalancing the effects of lower national incomes. The data have been obtained from the World Bank's online open-access data site World Development Indicators, http://data.worldbank.org.

Resumen: La contribución italiana al debate sobre el cálculo económico socialista (SECD) no puede limitarse a las aportaciones importantes y funda mentales de Pareto y Barone. De hecho, si sus contribuciones son todavía ambiguas y tenemos que esperar al trabajo de Mises de 1920 para obtener las aclaraciones necesarias, durante la década de los sesenta Bruno Leoni siguió los pasos de los austriacos en lo referente a este tema, estimulando en Italia un gran debate. El papel de Bruno Leoni es importante debido al debate que promueve y a los académicos que implica, pero también porque sitúa la cuestión del cálculo económico socialista en el contexto más amplio del Estado de Derecho.

The DPRK is said to be an economist's nightmare. There are almost no reliable statistics available, making any analysis speculative at best. The few useable figures that we have, though, fly in the face of the media's curious insistence on a looming collapse. Food production and trade volumes indicate that the DPRK has largely recovered from the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. Indeed, Pyongyang's reported rising budget figures appear more plausible than Seoul's pessimistic politicized estimates. Obviously, sanctions, while damaging, have failed to nail the country down. There are signs that it is now beginning to open up and prepare to exploit its substantial mineral wealth. Could we soon be witnessing the rise of Asia's next economic tiger?

This paper reviews Vietnam’s recent experience with reforming the state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector. It therefore sets the stage by overviewing key developments since Đổi Mới and highlighting some stylized facts about the SOE sector before quantitatively assessing the legal and institutional reforms and equitisations that have taken place over the last years. While there is little compelling evidence that the state of the SOE sector is as dismal as some analysts suggest, the paper highlights an increasing implementation lag of legal reform progress, possibly reflecting fault lines in the political economy.

I argue that SOEs can and should play a vital role in Vietnam’s development strategy going forward but that a more precise vision for the sector, based on a more elaborate assessment of market failures and externalities in different parts of the economy, is needed.

This article explores child care and preschool educational policies in Hungary from the end of World War II until the 1956 revolution, focusing mainly on the forms of organization of preschool education, methods of financing, and the quality of educational facilities. Special attention is devoted to the gender dimension of the educational system, provisions concerning women's employment, and women's entitlements as mothers and caregivers. The article considers preschool education as the point of collision between (forced) productive and reproductive roles of women in the socialist system. In addition to analyzing the legislation on child care, the article studies the different stages of the policy process, in an effort to identify how competing discourses on welfare policies by multiple actors and agencies-such as the state, parties, local and county administrators, various interest groups, the women's movement, and parents-were strategically used in political narratives striving for dominance in the political field. It is also concerned with the implementation of these laws, and with their effect upon those directly affected by these policies.

The socialist economic calculation debate is an important episode in the history of economic thought. It represents the struggle of socialist economists against the claim made by Mises that socialism is theoretically impossible and Hayek's argument that it is practically unfeasible. Keynes showed little interest in both sides of that debate. But, if he had participated, what would have been his position? The paper proposes some possible answers to this question by arguing that he had a unique perspective on economic planning that did not suit the antagonistic sides of the controversy.

The article represents the domestic and foreign environmental policy of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which was a nonaligned communist country within the Soviet-led bloc. Thus, Yugoslavia had a bridging position between East and West, between the capitalist and communist states. During the 1970s, Yugoslavia began to define a domestic environmental policy. After the adoption of the constitution in 1974 and assembly of the individual republics, Yugoslavia adopted the first laws related to the environment and established ministries for environment in most republics. At the same time the state was involved in numerous international environmental activities with democratic as well as socialist countries. It participated in the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and was a member of the Committee on the Environment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and has cooperated with the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

For the last twenty years, the Left has appeared to lack any alternative to the existing social and economic order. In recent years, communist movements have only existed as serious forces in a few countries, for example India and Nepal, where once they were worldwide phenomena.

Even the financial crash and world recession of the last two years have done little to revive the fortunes of the Left. There seems to be no coherent force to oppose the existing “free” market world order. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, what remains of the Left is
bogged down in ideological confusion. The collapse of the state-owned economies of the Eastern Bloc appears to have destroyed the practical basis for any alternative to capitalism.

In the immediate post-war era, things looked rather different. To begin with,the socialist nations were apparently successful, at least in economic terms. However, their economies subsequently stagnated and eventually made a transition to economies organised on a “free” market basis.
This article will examine the claim that this reversal happened because of some underlying flaw in the socialist economic system. In this article we will analyse what actually happened, mainly using the example of the Soviet economy. It will be shown that the basis of this economy changed radically after the death of Stalin in 1953. In short, within the span of a few years, a dynamic, socialist system was replaced with a stagnant capitalist system. It was this capitalist system that suffered
slow-down and final dissolution in 1991.

According to a major tendency in Marxism, the leaders who came after Stalin were revisionists. This tendency holds that these leaders wished to revise Marxism by mixing it with capitalist ideology. The economic analysis given below provides evidence to support the anti-revisionist line.

To put it another way, the form of the Soviet system may have remained
socialist, after 1953, in the sense that there was state-ownership and the semblance of central allocation of the means of production. However, changes introduced following Stalin’s death meant that the means of production became commodities.

After 1953, what was being “planned” was in fact capitalist commodity production.

Therefore in essence the system after 1953 was capitalist, not socialist.
We will find that, after 1953, the means of production in the Soviet Union
were sold at their prices of production, like capitalist commodities. This was in opposition to Stalin’s line. Stalin was clear that the means of production should not be regarded as capitalist commodities. Stalin stated that the means of production should be distributed according to decisions made in the course of economic planning and they should be sold at subsidised prices to facilitate this. Consumer goods, unlike
means of production, were sold as commodities in the Soviet Union, prior to 1953, but Stalin understood the importance of this practice being brought to an end as socialism developed. Soviet leaders after Stalin, however, changed this system as they favoured the distribution of the means of production among the various branches of the economy by means of semi-spontaneous market forces. In effect, capitalist profit
criteria rather than central planning decisions were to determine the way in which the Soviet economy developed. Rather than struggling to restrict commodity production, the new leaders of the Soviet Union deliberately expanded it to the entire economy.

These leaders wanted to create a market socialist system where state owned enterprises would behave just like capitalist enterprises.
However, what emerged was a dysfunctional hybrid system, neither effectively planned from the center nor regulated by economic competition. Subsidies for purchasing new means of production had been used to facilitate the planned introduction of innovation up to
1953. Once this system of planning and subsidies was swept away, the incentive to innovate was largely eliminated, as economic competition did not exist to provide an alternative system of incentives. Progressive economic stagnation set in and there was the rapid growth of rent-seeking behaviour (seeking rewards unrelated to effort or
quality of work) by enterprise managers and industrial ministries.

"Following models in Britain and France, Germany began to develop her own models of community-based business and cooperatives. The cooperative movement grew in strength, anchored in both liberal and socialist traditions. Connected to 1848 revolutionaries, coops were considered a dangerous political force, or even an enemy, by restaurative governments. It took a long political campaign, and a coalition with nationalism, to bring about useful and protective legislation for cooperatives. Once attached to power, however, internecine fighting began, as some coops lobbied the government for aid against competition.

GERMAN/DEUTSCH - Genossenschaften: Vor 150 Jahren kämpfte eine Volksbewegung für die staatliche Anerkennung der modernen Selbsthilfe-Firma.
Schlagwörter: Bewegung, Darlehensverein, Frankreich, Genossenschaften, Genossenschaftsgesetz, Großbritannien, Interessenvertretung, Lobby, Nationalismus, Raiffeisen-Bewegung, Reichstag, Sozialisten, Verbände, Volksbanken
Organisationen: Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV), Fortschrittspartei, SPD
Personen: Otto von Bismarck, Walter Koch, Ferdinand Lassalle, Karl Marx, Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch
Publikationen: Die Gartenlaube"