Preobrazhensky's lessons for Corbyn?*

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With the Labour Party possibly, or even likely, to form the next UK administration, attention turns to how seriously to take their economic programme. I mentioned the Marxist economist, Michaels Roberts's views in my previous post. He reflects the Marxist orthodoxy: that attempts to implement socialist policies within the framework of a capitalist economy and state create a protracted economic and political crisis. Either the workers movement will transcend capitalist relations of production (OK, this is a euphemism for socialist revolution) .. or there will be a catastrophic defeat for the labour movement ushering in a period of reaction and a new rise in the capitalist economy.

I agree those are the alternatives and would expect the latter outcome with overwhelming probability.

It is, however, interesting to think about the nature of the economy after a successful socialist revolution. Unfortunately, the only example we have is the extremely atypical case (as regards 21st century advanced capitalism) of Soviet Russia in the 1920s.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was

"... a member of the governing Central Committee of the Bolshevik faction and, its successor, the All-Union Communist Party, Preobrazhensky is remembered as a leading voice for the rapid industrialisation of peasant Russia through a concentration on state-owned heavy industry.

"Closely associated with Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition movement of the 1920s, Preobrazhensky fell afoul of the secret police during the decade of the 1930s, suffering expulsion from the Communist Party and internal exile in 1932 and a new arrest ending in execution in 1937 during the Great Purge. ...

"He argued in The New Economics that the USSR had to undertake the "primitive accumulation" that early capitalist societies had had to. That is, the peasants' agricultural surplus had to be appropriated to invest in industry. Thus the Soviet Union had to undertake by planning in "socialist primitive accumulation" what England had undergone by happenstance in the 17th century.

"This theory was criticized politically and associated with Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but it was arguably put into practice by Stalin in the 1930s, as when Joseph Stalin said in a speech 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. This argument is disputed by Trotskyists and Soviet historians."

I'm interested to understand his theoretical analysis of economics in a society no longer based on generalised commodity production so have added Preobrazhensky's book to my reading stack (already way too big). Given the current revival of interest in Marxism - as the ideological foundations of neoliberalism continue to fray - perhaps it's time to issue a new edition on Amazon and Kindle?

There are some hard-liners in the Corbyn leadership (McDonnell and Milne) but I suspect that in office they would behave more like a traditional European Socialist Party. But who knows?

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* What are the lessons? I haven't read the book yet, but perhaps that he should refrain from at least the gratuitous killing of the kulaks?