Political Economy

The doctrine itself, in its fullest teaching form.

Prepared by a large collective of the USSR Academy of Sciences under Academician A. M. Rumyantsev, this is the canonical Soviet textbook of political economy - described in its own closing note as a systematic course in the political economy of capitalism and socialism, intended for students and social-science lecturers. More people learned what the Soviet state meant by Marxist economics through this exposition than through any other.

To read it is to read the orthodoxy at full length and on its best behaviour: patient, ordered, professional, and across its first half very largely correct. That first half is an exposition of Capital and of Lenin's Imperialism which proceeds in Marx's own sequence and handles the commodity, value, surplus value, accumulation, the reproduction schemes, the average rate of profit, ground rent, monopoly and finance capital with real competence.

The second half turns to the political economy of socialism - planning, the law of value under socialism, distribution according to work, the collective-farm sector, the world socialist economy - and is built to the same specification.

Having both halves between one set of covers, in the version actually taught, is what makes this the keystone volume of the whole list.

The text is revised into the late Brezhnev years: its statistics reach into the early 1980s and it cites the July 1979 planning decree as current policy.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.