Fundamentals of Political Economy

Soviet economic doctrine reduced to a primer: nineteen short chapters carrying the reader from the definition of a productive force to the economic competition between the two world systems. It was meant to be the first book on the subject a student or a self-taught worker ever opened.

The first ten chapters expound the political economy of capitalism, and expound it competently - an exposition of Capital and of Lenin's Imperialism proceeding in Marx's own order, through the commodity, value, surplus value, accumulation, the average rate of profit and the theory of crises, then monopoly, finance capital and the export of capital. Chapters eleven to nineteen cross over into the political economy of socialism: planning, the law of value under socialism, distribution according to work, the collective farm, and the world socialist economy.

What distinguishes it from its companion volume by two of the same authors is that this one does not halt at the capitalist frontier. Whatever one makes of the second half, having both halves of the doctrine set out plainly and at introductory length, in one volume, is genuinely useful - this is what the orthodoxy claimed about its own economy as well as about everyone else's.

The manuscript closed around 1979. The tenth five-year plan is described as still running, there is no Twenty-Sixth Congress, and developed socialism runs through the book as the settled horizon.

By M. N. Ryndina, G. O. Chernikov and T. N. Khudokormov. Translated by Lenina Ilitskaya.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.