History of economic and sociological thought. Рубрика в журнале - Economic and Social Changes: Facts, Trends, Forecast
Collective capitalist property in the institutional structure of Russia in the 1930s-1980s
Статья научная
The article deals with a subject of the possibility of applying the institutional theory to the study of the economic structure of Soviet Russia and the use of its individual elements to solve the problems of improving the efficiency of public administration at the present development stage of this country. The purpose of the work is to consider the basic issues of the evolution of the country’s socio-economic development at the stage of bifurcation. The novelty of the research is that it shows the evolutionary trends of the property institute and the political and ideological mechanisms of their ensuring in the 1930s-1980s. The emphasis is put on identifying the stages of property relations transformation: from the formation of collective capitalist ownership in the period of 1930s-1950s to the trends to its individualization in the 1960s-1980s. The turn of the 1990s is considered as a period of fundamental change of the collective capitalist property institute. According to the authors, the formation of a proto-bourgeois class of co-owners, which provided capitalist tendencies in the society’s development, was of great importance in Soviet times. The article shows the ideological content of trends leading to the capitalist transformation of Russia, which consist in justifying the property rights concentration. The change in the social base of the ruling class formation, the inclusion of the representatives of the intellectuals’ class and the intelligentsia in its composition were quite important in this process. It is noted that privatization in the course of market transformations broke the existing property relations in the Soviet period and led to an increase in social inequality. The authors emphasize the urgent need to restructure modern state policy in terms of taking into account the mentality of the “Russian life” and economic traditions that developed during the Soviet period.
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Revisiting the issue of the “initial accumulation of capital” in post-Soviet Russia
Статья научная
The inclusion of those economies that are “peripheral” in relation to so-called “first world” countries into the paradigm of capitalist development is a topical issue of globalization. This process turned out extremely dramatic in its implications for former Soviet republics, in particular for post-Soviet Russia. The country, which had a highly capitalized economy “at the start” of market transformation, faced the fragmentation of socialized property and its transition to the form of private ownership. Politicians, public figures, experts, and scientists often interpret the stage of the 1990s “capitalist transition” from the standpoint of the “initial accumulation of capital” - a well-known category of Marxist political economy. However, we find this approach highly controversial. The goal of our paper is to find out whether it is legitimate to talk about the applicability of the key provisions of this theory to characterize the processes that took place in Russia in the first post-Soviet decade. This can be done by analyzing the theory of initial accumulation and its modern interpretations. In the first part of the article, we give a brief overview of the development of the theory of initial capital accumulation from its original provisions formulated byK. Marx to modern interpretations of this process. The second part considers the content of a discussion on the processes of post-Soviet capitalist transformation in Russia through the prism of the theory of initial accumulation. The third part uses actual data on the dynamics of fixed assets, gross fixed capital accumulation, investment activity to make a critical assessment of the processes of capitalist accumulation of capital in Russia in the last decade of the 20th century. We conclude that in the post-Soviet period there was a fragmentation of socialized property and its transition to private ownership, which contradicts the key provisions of the concept of initial accumulation (liquidation of property of small producers and its socialization). The novelty of the obtained results lies in the fact that the historical process that took place in Russia in the last decade of the 20th century was defined as a process of appropriation and secondary redistribution of state property, accompanied by catastrophic processes of decapitalization.
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Revisiting the type of economic system in the USSR
Статья научная
The article characterizes the type of economic system of the Soviet Union. In the authors' view, modern historiography has reached the impasse trying to address the issue. The overwhelming majority of researchers recognize that the USSR economic system was socialist, with all the attendant “positive” and “negative” aspects. The article proposes to characterize the type of economic system of the Soviet period through the analysis of correlation of important production factors such as labor and capital. This analysis is based on data of the USSR input-output balances of the national economy in the 1970-1980s. This source is introduced into scientific parlance for the first time; previously, it belonged to the category of “confidential”. In order to address the issue of the USSR type of economic system, the authors refer to the content of the tables containing data on common indicators of national economy during 1980-1986, the proportion of direct and materialized labor in total labor costs for 1975-1985, and the ratio of the number of the Soviet workers involved in mechanized and manual labor for 1975-1985...
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State strategic planning experience in the USSR in theoretical and empirical studies
Статья научная
In recent years, the Russian Federation has been forming a strategic planning system, which exists in many countries with market economics. However, success of its implementation is assessed critically in scientific literature. This is where the goal of this article becomes relevant - expansion of theoretical and methodological framework, including instruments of new institutional economic history for studying empirical sources concerning institutional practices of USSR centralized planning from the perspective of needs of the RF strategic planning economics system. The greatest attention to this problem is paid in the development and institutional economics, which are interconnected with each other. The novelty of the research consists in the fact that we put forward our own methodological questions in the context of our original understanding of trends of development economics’ evolution on the basis of our interpretation of studies which explored Soviet experience of centralized planning; formulation of working hypothesis for further empirical studies and their theoretical generalization. We use historical genetic and problematic approaches, general logical methods and techniques - system approach, generalization, analysis and synthesis. We compare individual concepts in the sphere of development economics with empirical studies. We find out that the slowdown of USSR economic dynamics urged development economics theorists to shift their focus from macroeconomics’ modeling of production factors to the analysis of the institutional environment features. The approach to centralized planning as a key instrument of overcoming “traps of underdevelopment” (“market failures”) was substituted with understanding of transactional costs connected with it (“state failures”). It was stated that important issues, such as cooperation between institutions of scientific knowledge and state’s management of economics, were not properly analyzed. The conclusion was drawn that the research on empirical sources, concerning institutions of soviet planning, using theoretical and methodological instruments of development economics, enriched with concepts of institutional economics, will contribute to the formation of new theory of national and regional economics’ planning in the paradigm of post-Soviet institutionalism.
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