Primitive 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 as a means to industrialize the Russian economy through extracting surplus from the peasantry to finance the industrial sector.

History[]

The major proponent of the concept was Yevgeni Preobrazhensky in his 1926 work The New Economics which was based on his 1924 lecture in the Communist Academy, titled The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation. The concept was proposed during the period of the New Economic Policy. Its main principle is that the state sector of economy of the transitional period has to appropriate the peasant's surplus product to accumulate resources necessary for the growth of the industry. To this end, the major mechanisms were the foreign trade monopoly held by the state and price control in favor of industry which in effect caused price scissors.^[1][2]

This theory was criticized politically and associated with Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but it was in fact put into practice by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s as when Stalin said in his speech to The Captains of Industry that the Soviet Union had to accomplish in a decade what England had taken centuries to do in terms of economic development in order to be prepared for an invasion from the West.

See also[]

• Capital accumulation
• Capitalism
• Economy of the Soviet Union
• Scissors Crisis

References[]