Of the roughly two hundred Progress titles in this series, the fullest statement of Soviet economic doctrine is the academic course Political Economy prepared under Academician A. M. Rumyantsev, reprinted and introduced separately in these pages. Fundamentals of Political Economy is that same doctrine reduced to a primer. In nineteen short chapters and some eighty thousand words it carries a reader from the definition of a productive force to "the economic competition between the two world economic systems," and it was meant to be the first book on the subject a student or a self-taught worker ever opened. Its title page names three authors — M. N. Ryndina, G. O. Chernikov and T. N. Khudokormov — and Progress issued it in the "Marxist-Leninist Theory" series, translated from the Russian by Lenina Ilitskaya. The first two of those authors elsewhere produced a Political Economy of Capitalism that halts at the capitalist frontier. What distinguishes the present book is that here they do not halt. Chapters One to Ten expound the political economy of capitalism, and expound it competently; Chapters Eleven to Nineteen cross over into "the political economy of socialism," and it is the crossing that fails. The reason it fails is written, in the book's own words, into the half that holds.
The spine says 1980, and for once the spine is close to the truth, but it is worth being exact, because the exact date is part of the argument. The latest events in the book are the Twenty-Fifth Congress of the CPSU of 1976, from which Brezhnev is quoted more than once; the recession of 1974–75; the Soviet Government statement of 4 October 1976 on restructuring international economic relations. The tenth five-year plan of 1976–1980 is described as still under way — retail prices "were kept stable" through it, collective-farm pay "is to increase by another 26 per cent" before its end — and the socialist countries are said to be "now implementing economic plans for the period up to 1990." There is no Twenty-Sixth Congress, which met in February 1981; the word constitution does not occur once, though the 1977 Constitution's signature phrase, "developed socialism," runs through the book eighteen times. So the manuscript closed around 1979 and reached English in 1980. That places it three to four years ahead of the Rumyantsev course and before the July 1979 planning decree on which the larger book leans. This is the doctrine caught in its last untroubled year: after "developed socialism" had been officially proclaimed and before anyone with a Moscow chair would call the decade that followed the era of stagnation. The book teaches the serene functioning of a completed socialist order at the last moment such serenity was still official.
The first ten chapters are an exposition of Marx's Capital and Lenin's Imperialism, and they are a good one. They proceed in Marx's order and by Marx's logic. Chapter Three takes the commodity, the twofold character of labour, the money form and the law of value; it defines the law of value accurately as "an objective economic law governing commodity production," traces how the "spontaneous operation of the law of value" both develops the productive forces and ruins producers, so that "simple commodity production breeds capitalist relations," and it teaches commodity fetishism as a category rather than a slogan. Chapter Four derives surplus value and states the basic law of capitalism; Chapters Five and Six handle the distribution of surplus value, the reproduction of social capital and the theory of crises, correctly locating the roots of crisis in the contradiction between "the organisation of production in individual enterprises and the anarchy of production in society in general" and in the lag of effective demand behind the growth of the two departments of production. Chapters Seven to Ten expound Lenin's theory of imperialism — monopoly and finance capital, the export of capital, state-monopoly capitalism as "a complete material preparation for socialism" — and expound it faithfully. A reader schooled in this half would emerge genuinely able to analyse a capitalist economy. This must be said plainly, because the tradition from which this introduction is written shares that analysis without reservation. On the anatomy of capital there is no quarrel between this textbook and its critics. The quarrel begins at the exact point where the book asks the reader to carry Marx's categories across the frontier into the Soviet economy unchanged.
The thesis the second half exists to establish is that socialism has its own political economy: a parallel system of objective economic laws, discovered rather than made, that govern the socialist economy as the laws of Capital govern the capitalist one. The book enumerates them — a main economic law of socialism, a law of the planned, proportionate development of the national economy, a law of distribution according to work — and, as the load-bearing member of the set, the continued operation of commodity production and the law of value. On this it is entirely explicit. "The law of value also operates," it states, "its existence arising from the presence of commodity-money relations under socialism"; indeed money, price, trade, credit and profit persist with it. What changes is only the manner of operation. "The law of value operates in socialist society through the mechanism of planned price formation"; it is no longer "a regulator of social production" but is consciously used, "in the acts of sale and purchase, when the prices of goods are realised."
And these laws are insisted upon as objective. In its opening chapter the book holds that under capitalism "economic laws operate spontaneously," whereas under socialism "they are realised through the conscious, organised activity of the people." But conscious realisation, it is careful to add, does not make them any less objective: "the economic laws operative under socialism are objective. They are not invented and cannot be annulled or altered at will." Under socialism, we are told, "people can not only learn the content of economic laws, but also provide the best possible conditions for their correct operation," and so "the working people under socialism become genuine makers of their own history." The book wants both halves of this at once: laws that govern from outside the will, and producers who are their masters.
The remarkable thing is that the book states the objection to its own doctrine and then rejects it. There are theorists, it complains in Chapter One, "who identify the spontaneous action of economic laws with their objective character. They imply that no objective laws exist in socialist society as there are no and can be no spontaneously operating economic laws in it." That is precisely the point Marx makes, and the book treats it as an error. But it is not an error; it is the whole content of Capital, and the book itself teaches it forty pages earlier. Value, in Marx, is the category of a society in which production is not consciously controlled — in which the labour of individuals is validated as social labour only behind their backs, after the fact, through the exchange of things. That is what commodity fetishism is, and Chapter Three defines it correctly: under commodity production "these relations form spontaneously and dominate men," so that "people are dominated by their own production relations, which are manifested in things." The chapter then draws the conclusion the second half will have to unsay: "With the abolition of private ownership, commodity fetishism disappears."
Set the two halves side by side and the book refutes itself. If commodity fetishism disappears with the abolition of private ownership, and if — as Chapter Sixteen insists — the law of value nonetheless still operates under socialism, then either fetishism has not disappeared or the law of value is not what Part One said it was. Both cannot stand. The law of value governs from behind precisely because, and for exactly as long as, the associated producers do not govern their own economy in front. To say that it still operates under socialism is to concede, whatever the authors intend, that the producers do not yet consciously control their economy; that their labour is still socially validated through price rather than through transparent common decision; that they are, in Marx's sense, still ruled by their product. That is not the classless society Marx meant by socialism. It is a transitional economy in which the old forms survive because the old problem — the conscious social organisation of labour — is unsolved. A "political economy of socialism" of this length is, in its very existence, testimony that its object is not yet socialist: political economy is the science of an economy that runs itself and confronts its participants as an alien objectivity, and to the extent that an economy has genuinely become the transparent joint work of its producers it ceases to have a political economy at all. The book cannot see this because its institutional function forbids it. It must present the USSR of 1979 as socialism achieved — "developed, mature socialism," in its own phrase — and so it must convert what Marx read as the symptoms of an unfinished transition into permanent laws of a finished order.
This is the same fault the introduction to the Rumyantsev course anatomises at greater length, and a reader who wants the argument developed against the full academic version will find it there. The primer is if anything the sharper specimen, because it does the incriminating work in fewer words and states the objection to itself out loud.
None of this is hindsight. It was set down, from inside the Marxist movement and against exactly this bureaucratic tendency, four decades before Ryndina's collective codified the orthodoxy. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), in the chapter "The Struggle for Productivity," Trotsky treated the survival of money and value under Soviet conditions not as a law to be enshrined but as the measure of a distance still to be travelled. State and money, he wrote, are alike "an inheritance from the class society, which is incapable of defining the relations of man by man except in the form of fetishes"; in a communist society both "will disappear," and "their gradual dying away ought consequently to begin under socialism." The persistence of money was therefore an index of incompletion: "We shall be able to speak of the actual triumph of socialism only at that historical moment when the state turns into a semi-state, and money begins to lose its magic power." Note what this does to the textbook's own vocabulary. Ryndina's book announces in Chapter Three that fetishism has already been abolished; Trotsky says the "deathblow to money fetishism will be struck only upon that stage" — a stage explicitly located in the far future, "entirely to posterity" — when social wealth has grown enough to make the value calculus fall away of itself. The forms cannot simply be commanded out of existence: "Money cannot be arbitrarily 'abolished'," he wrote against the ultra-lefts. But the reason cuts equally against the textbook, because the value forms cannot be dispensed with by decree for the same reason they cannot yet be dispensed with at all, and that inability is the standing evidence that the transition is unfinished. What Trotsky read as a symptom, the primer teaches as a law.
He had made the constructive half of the case earlier still, in The Soviet Economy in Danger (22 October 1932), against the first bureaucratic triumphalism about the plan. A transitional economy cannot verify its own plan in advance; it must test its blueprints against the very market forms the bureaucracy imagines it has transcended. "The plan is checked and, to a considerable degree, realized through the market." And he named, exactly, the illusion this textbook institutionalises: only a "universal mind" of the kind imagined by Laplace, registering every process of nature and society at once, "could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan." "The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy." Fundamentals of Political Economy is that imagination compressed into a curriculum: the law of value not confronted as a check on the plan but "used" through "planned price formation," the recalcitrance of an unmastered economy dissolved into the confident administration of objective laws by a state that has, on paper, already understood them.
There is a last silence, and it is the most telling, because it concerns the discipline's own past. The book presents "the political economy of socialism" as the natural continuation of Marx and Lenin. It was nothing of the kind. As a distinct discipline with its own codified laws it was a Stalin-era construction, given authoritative form by Stalin himself in Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1952) — the text that ruled that commodity production and the law of value would persist under socialism, and that laid down the "basic economic law of socialism" as the securing of society's growing requirements through the continuous expansion of production. Ryndina's collective reproduces that framework entire. Its main economic law — the "well-being and all-round development of all members of society" through the growth of production — is Stalin's 1952 formula, here rephrased and hung instead on a sentence lifted from Lenin. The 1952 template is unmistakable, and the name of its author appears in this book exactly zero times.
The erasure runs deeper than Stalin. The real founding debates of Soviet economics — fought in the 1920s over industrialisation, accumulation and the peasantry — have been removed from the record altogether. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, whose The New Economics (1926) made the law of value under Soviet conditions its central problem and coined the debate's most powerful category, "primitive socialist accumulation," is absent: not one occurrence of his name, nor of that concept, in the whole text. Bukharin, his great antagonist, is absent. Trotsky is absent — this primer does not even trouble to condemn him, as the fuller courses do; it simply proceeds as though the argument had never happened. The agrarian economists Kondratiev and Chayanov, whose work on peasant economy was of the first international standing, are absent. This is not oversight. Those economists were, most of them, physically destroyed in the Terror — Preobrazhensky and Chayanov shot in 1937, Bukharin and Kondratiev in 1938 — and the book chooses the one sentence that turns the knife without knowing it does. "In the Soviet Union," it declares, "the main work on building socialism was completed in the latter half of the 1930s. Today the Soviet Union is a country of developed, mature socialism." The latter half of the 1930s is the years of the shooting. The discipline this primer teaches was built on the graves of the discipline that preceded it, and dates its own completion to the season of the executions. Its serenity depends on the reader not knowing they are there.
And then history ran the control experiment. The book closes, as such books had to, on "the economic competition between the two world economic systems," and it is confident of the result: Soviet growth rates "decisive," living standards rising, "no inflation," while in the capitalist world "crime is on the increase. People are turning to drugs. Capitalist culture is deluged with pornography." Within a decade the economy whose objective laws these were had abandoned the plan for the market and then ceased to exist. A political economy claims to have found the objective laws of its object; when the object collapses within ten years, the claim is answerable, and the honest verdict is that the laws were not laws. That is not a cheap point scored after the fact — it is the balance sheet the book's own method demands.
Fundamentals of Political Economy should be reprinted and read for what it is: the most economical statement of Soviet economic orthodoxy in the language of international circulation, and, in its first half, a genuinely usable exposition of Marx and Lenin. The reader who wants the counter-argument on the second half has it close to hand, and much of it stands in the tradition the book claims and cannot name. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed remains the standard against which every Soviet account of Soviet society in this series should be read; its treatment of money, value and the state supplies the reflexive analysis this primer forbids itself. The companion introduction to the Rumyantsev Political Economy carries the same critique against the full academic course, and the sibling volumes from the same stable — Rymalov's The World Capitalist Economy (1982), Osadchaya's Keynesianism Today (1983), the earlier Sdobnikov-edited Socialism and Capitalism (1971) — show the identical structure of insight and blindness, first-rate on the crisis of the capitalist order and silent on the sickening of their own. The reflexive test that the anti-Stalinist tradition applies to this whole library is simply whether the categories a book builds can be turned on the speaker's own side. Ryndina's collective builds the finest analytical instrument in the catalogue and, in its second half, points it in only one permitted direction — which is the record of what a serious economics costs when the state that commissions it requires it to face away from itself.