From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Tue Dec 05 2006 - 11:45:04 EST
Jerry, On another errand, I just had a read of an article by Mark Harrison (Warwick University, UK) on "Soviet Primary Accumulation Processes" (in Science & Society 45/4). Harrison notes that Preobrazhensky himself in fact acknowledged that he did not anticipate the (forced) collectivisation of the peasantry, and Harrison writes as follows: "In any case collectivisation failed to secure the "tribute" which Stalin anticipated, because the collective farm economy was subjected to unforeseen resistance, evasions and losses resulting in additional costs of maintenance. In fact, from 1929 the agricultural surplus never financed more than one-third (from 1932 never more than one-fifth) of the annual rate of Soviet industrial investment" (p. 390-391). As sources Harrison cites A. A. Barsov and Michael Ellman. If true, the greater part of the Soviet accumulation fund must obviously have derived from workingclass surplus-labour, expropriations, and foreign/domestic credits. Harrison also notes that the concept of primary socialist accumulation in fact originated with Vladimir Smirnov and Nikolai Bukharin in 1920, not Evgeny Preobrazhensky. At the 10th Bolshevik Congress of 1921, Harrison emphasizes, the programme sponsored by Trotsky and Bukharin for fullscale compulsory mobilisation of labour by the state was however decisively rejected. It was in the context of the New Economic Policy that Preobrazhensky developed his concept of the transfer of agrarian surplus to the state (via taxes and trade mark-ups) for industrialisation purposes. "Perhaps [primary socialist accumulation] is not quite what its originators thought" (p. 390). Jurriaan
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