This is the book at the centre of the whole enterprise. Of the roughly two hundred Progress titles gathered in this series, most are monographs, polemics or reference works orbiting a doctrine; Political Economy is the doctrine itself, in its fullest teaching form. Prepared by a large collective of the USSR Academy of Sciences under Academician A. M. Rumyantsev — the book's own closing note describes it as "a systematic course in the political economy of capitalism and socialism … intended for students of political economy and social-science lecturers" — it is the canonical Soviet textbook of the subject, the single exposition through which more people learned what the Soviet state meant by Marxist economics 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. The interest of the book is that its two halves are built to the same specification and only one of them holds, and that the reason the second fails is written, in plain sight, into the first.
A word first about when it was written, because the spine misleads. The English volume is dated 1983 and the copyright line reads "© Progress Publishers 1983"; the underlying Russian course had appeared through Politizdat some years earlier. But the text in your hands is not that earlier text reprinted. Its statistical spine reaches into the early 1980s — "In the early 1980s the capitalist world is experiencing the third economic slump over the last decade", NATO military expenditures "during 1980 and 1981", the US share of world exports "by the beginning of 1982" — and it cites, as current Soviet policy, the Central Committee and Council of Ministers resolution "On Improving Planning and Strengthening the Impact of the Economic Mechanism on Raising the Efficiency of Production and the Quality of Work", adopted in July 1979. Whatever its ancestry, this is a text revised to sit squarely in the late-Brezhnev years — the period that Soviet economists themselves would shortly be calling the era of stagnation. That dating is not a pedantic point. It fixes the book at the precise moment when the economy whose laws it expounds was, in fact, seizing up: growth rates sliding, investment returns falling, the chronic shortages and assortment failures of a command economy settling into permanence. The textbook teaches the serene functioning of a planned socialist order at the hour of that order's exhaustion. Everything that follows turns on the gap between the two.
The bulk of Political Economy — Chapters Three through Eighteen, the whole of Part One after the methodological opening — is an exposition of Marx's Capital, and it is a good one. It proceeds in Marx's own order and by Marx's own logic. Chapter Three takes the commodity, the twofold character of labour, the development of the value form and the genesis of money; the circulation formula C—M—C is set against M—C—M with precision, and the passage notes that "commodity-money circulation contains within itself the possibility … of economic crises of overproduction". Chapter Four derives surplus value and states the basic economic law of capitalism as the production and appropriation of surplus value; Chapters Five and Six handle wages and the general law of capitalist accumulation; Chapter Seven the circuit and turnover of capital; Chapter Eight the formation of the average rate of profit and the transformation of values into prices of production, worked through a numerical example that comes out, correctly, with the aggregate mass of surplus value equal to the aggregate mass of profit and total value equal to total price of production. Chapter Ten gives ground rent, referred accurately to "Part VI of Volume III of Capital"; Chapter Eleven the reproduction of social capital and the theory of crises; and Chapters Twelve to Sixteen expound Lenin's Imperialism — the concentration of production, finance capital and the financial oligarchy, the export of capital, the division of the world, the colonial system and its collapse. The book quotes Marx where Marx should be quoted and gets him right: "The rate of profit is the motive power of capitalist production. Things are produced only as long as they can be produced with a profit." It teaches commodity fetishism as a category, not a slogan. It is, in short, real Marxist political economy, competently taught to millions, and a reader schooled in it would emerge genuinely equipped to analyse a capitalist economy.
This is worth stating without hedging, because the anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition from which this introduction is written shares that analysis. On the anatomy of capital — value, exploitation, accumulation, the tendency to crisis, the imperialist stage — there is no quarrel between this textbook and its critics. The disagreement is not about Capital. It begins at the exact point where the book turns from the mode of production Marx analysed to the one the USSR claimed to embody, and asks the reader to carry the same categories across the frontier unchanged.
The decisive thesis of the book — the thing it exists to establish, and the thing the revolutionary-Marxist tradition contests — is that socialism has its own political economy, governed by its own objective economic laws. Part Two opens by asserting that a "political economy in the broad sense" became "meaningful with the origination of the political economy of communism (socialism)", and proceeds to enumerate the laws of the socialist economy as a parallel system to the laws of capital: a "basic economic law of socialism", a "law of the planned and proportionate development of the economy", a law of distribution according to work, and — this is the load-bearing claim — the continued operation, under socialism, of commodity production and the law of value.
The book is entirely explicit about this. Socialism, it says, retains "commodity-money relations" as one of its defining features. "The production of commodities under socialism means that the law of value, which determines the production and exchange of commodities in accordance with their social value, also operates under socialism." What changes is only the manner of operation: "Within the system of the economic laws of socialism, the law of value does not operate as an elemental regulator of production, but is used for its balanced management." Under socialism, we are told, "the production of commodities and, accordingly, the law of value have a specific character, because the functioning of the law springs from other factors than it does under capitalism, because it does not operate haphazardly but is used in a planned and balanced manner". Money, price, trade, credit and profit persist too: "Commodity-money relations exist in the transition period. Their existence, together with the laws of value, determines the existence of related economic forms and categories: money, price, trade, credit, and profit."
And these laws are presented, insistently, as objective — as operating with the same independence from human intention as the laws of capital. Here is the tell the whole edifice rests on. Economic laws, the book states in its methodological chapter, are "just as objective as the relations of production" and "do not depend on the consciousness and will of men". It repeats the formula for the socialist laws specifically: "Although economic laws do not depend on the consciousness and will of men, men are not powerless in their presence. Under definite conditions, men can use these laws for their benefit." The socialist economy is thus a domain in which men "use" laws that nonetheless govern them from outside their will — laws they must "reckon with" as they would reckon with nature.
Set that against what the book itself taught in Part One, and the trouble is immediate. Marx's political economy was not a description of the economy of socialism; it was a critique — of value, of the commodity, of money, of the domination of the producers by the product of their own hands. Value, in Marx, is precisely 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 on a market. That is what commodity fetishism is, and the book knows it: in Part One it defines economic relations as those "into which men enter in the process of material production regardless of their will or consciousness". 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 assert, therefore, that the law of value and commodity production persist under socialism is to concede — whether the authors intend it or not — that the producers do not yet consciously control their economy; that their labour is still socially validated through exchange and price rather than through transparent common decision; that they are still, in Marx's sense, ruled by their product. And that is not a description of the classless society Marx meant by socialism. It is a description of a transitional economy in which the old forms survive because the old problem — the conscious social organisation of labour — has not been solved. The book's own vocabulary gives the game away. An economy still governed by laws that "do not depend on the consciousness and will of men" is, by Marx's own definition, an economy not yet mastered by its producers. Where there is still a law of value operating objectively, there is not yet socialism in Marx's sense; there is a society on the road, managing its unresolved commodity relations through a state.
The reflexive point, put at its sharpest, is that "the political economy of socialism" is a contradiction in Marx's terms. Political economy is the science of an economy that runs itself, that confronts its participants as an alien objectivity to be studied and obeyed. To the extent that an economy has become genuinely socialist — consciously planned by freely associated producers — it ceases to be the object of a political economy at all and becomes the object of something Engels called simply the administration of things. A textbook that can write a "political economy of socialism" at the length of this one is testifying, in its very existence, that its object is not yet socialist. The book cannot see this, because its institutional function forbids it: it must present the USSR of the early 1980s as socialism achieved — "developed socialism", in the period's phrase, which the book uses more than twenty times — and so it must convert what Marx treated as symptoms of an unfinished transition into permanent "laws" of a completed order.
None of this is a subtlety invented after the fact. It was stated, from inside the Marxist movement and against precisely this bureaucratic tendency, half a century before Rumyantsev's collective set it down as orthodoxy. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), in the chapter on the productivity of labour and the fate of money, Trotsky treated the survival of money and value under Soviet conditions not as a law to be codified but as a measure of distance yet to be travelled. State and money, he wrote, are both "an inheritance from the class society"; 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 how far the society still stood from its goal: "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." He was scathing about the notion that the commodity forms could simply be commanded out of existence — "Money cannot be arbitrarily 'abolished'", he wrote against the ultra-lefts — but the reason cuts equally against Rumyantsev: the value forms cannot be abolished by decree because they cannot yet be dispensed with, and that inability is the standing evidence that the transition is incomplete. What Trotsky read as a symptom, the textbook enthrones as a law. That is the whole difference between a critical and an apologetic Marxism, and it lies in a single move.
Trotsky had made the constructive half of the argument even earlier, in The Soviet Economy in Danger (October 1932), against the first flush of bureaucratic triumphalism about the plan. A transitional economy, he insisted, cannot verify its own plan a priori; it must test its blueprints against reality through the very market forms the bureaucracy imagines it has transcended. "The plan is checked and, to a considerable degree, realized through the market." Only through the "inter-reaction of these three elements, state planning, the market and Soviet democracy" could the economy of the transitional epoch be correctly steered. And he named, exactly, the delusion that Political Economy would later institutionalise. Only "a universal mind" of the kind imagined by Laplace, able to register every process of nature and society at once, "could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan". The bureaucracy, he wrote, "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." Rumyantsev's textbook is that imagination codified into a curriculum: the law of value not confronted as a check on the plan but "used for its balanced management", prices "established in a planned manner", the whole recalcitrance of an unmastered economy dissolved into the confident administration of objective laws by a state that has, on paper, already understood them.
To its credit, the book is not wholly blind to the friction. In its discussion of the contradictions of the socialist economy it concedes, glancingly, that things go wrong: there is "non-fulfilment by some enterprises of their targets on product mix because they find it more profitable to turn out some products and unprofitable to turn out others", there are delays in technical progress "in some units of production", there is "wasteful expenditure of materials, and so on". This is, remarkably, an accurate list — the assortment problem, the innovation-aversion, the input-hoarding that every serious study of the Soviet command economy would document as endemic. And the July 1979 planning resolution is invoked precisely as the remedy for a management standard felt to be lagging. But the diagnosis is quarantined. These are presented as non-antagonistic contradictions arising from a local "failure to reckon with the objective necessity" — correctable friction, not the signature of the system. The book records the symptoms and forbids the inference.
The forbidding is most visible in a single word. Stagnation appears four times in the book, and every time it names capitalism — the monopoly economy's "tendency towards stagnation and decay", the recession of West German industry, the uneven fate of the imperialist powers. Not once is it turned on the Soviet economy, though the Soviet economy was in 1982 the more stagnant of the two. The same holds for "crisis", reserved throughout for the capitalist cycle, and for the vocabulary of shortage, which the book applies to the developing world and the capitalist money market but never to the Soviet consumer. The analytical instrument that Part One builds with such care is, in Part Two, pointed in one permitted direction. The reflexive test the anti-Stalinist tradition applies to this whole library — can the category be turned on the speaker's own side? — comes back, here as elsewhere, negative: crisis, stagnation and anarchy of production are things that happen to the other system.
And then history supplied the control experiment. Within a decade of this textbook's appearance, the economy whose objective laws it expounded had abandoned the plan for the market — the enterprise law of 1987, the cooperatives, the price reforms of perestroika — and then ceased to exist. The "basic economic law of socialism" and the "law of the planned and proportionate development of the economy", taught here as the deep grammar of a superior mode of production, did not describe a viable order. This is not hindsight scoring a cheap point; it is the balance sheet the book's own method demands. 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.
There is one further silence, and it is the most telling of all, because it concerns the discipline's own past. Political Economy presents "the political economy of socialism" as though it were the natural continuation of Marx and Lenin. It was nothing of the kind. As a distinct academic discipline with its own "laws", the political economy of socialism was a Stalin-era construction, canonised around 1943 and given its 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 the basic economic law of socialism was the securing of the maximum satisfaction of society's growing material and cultural requirements through the continuous expansion of socialist production. Rumyantsev's collective reproduces that framework entire, down to the wording. Their basic economic law — "assurance of full well-being for all the members of society and the free and all-round development of the individual through a steady boosting and improvement of social production" — is Stalin's 1952 formula, lightly rephrased. The template is unmistakable. And the name of its author appears in this book exactly zero times.
The erasure is not confined to Stalin. The real Soviet economic debates — the ones that were genuinely foundational, fought out in the 1920s over industrialisation, accumulation and the fate of the peasantry — have been removed from the record entirely. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, whose The New Economics (1926) made the law of value under Soviet conditions its central problem and gave the debate its most powerful category, "primitive socialist accumulation", appears nowhere: a search of the whole text returns not one occurrence of his name, nor of "primitive socialist accumulation", the very concept a serious history of this discipline would have to reckon with. Bukharin, his great antagonist in that debate, appears once — inside the title of a Lenin polemic. The agrarian economists Kondratiev and Chayanov, whose work on peasant economy was of the first international importance, are absent. Trotsky appears twice: once, again, inside a Lenin title, and once as the supposed author of a "Trotskyite principle" of distribution — "shock work in production, egalitarianism in distribution" — held up for condemnation as "left" revisionism, a doctrine attributed to him without a single citation to anything he wrote. The New Economic Policy is discussed, and discussed respectfully, but as Lenin's policy alone, sealed off from the men who argued over how to end it. This is not an oversight. The economists who conducted the founding debates of Soviet political economy were, most of them, physically destroyed in the Terror — Preobrazhensky shot in 1937, Bukharin executed in 1938, Kondratiev shot in 1938, Chayanov in 1937. The discipline that this textbook teaches was built on the graves of the discipline that preceded it, and its serenity depends on the reader not knowing they are there.
Political Economy should be reprinted, and read, for what it is: the most complete and competent statement of Soviet economic orthodoxy in the language of international circulation, and — in its first half — a genuinely usable exposition of Marx. The reader who wants the counter-argument on the second half has it close to hand, and much of it stands in the same tradition the book claims and cannot name. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed remains the standard against which every Soviet account of Soviet society should be read; its treatment of money, value and the state supplies the reflexive analysis this textbook forbids itself. Within this series, three companion volumes from the same Soviet political-economy stable show the identical structure of insight and blindness applied to narrower subjects — V. V. Rymalov's The World Capitalist Economy (1982) and Irina Osadchaya's Keynesianism Today (1983), both first-rate on the crisis of the capitalist order and both silent on the sickening of their own, and the earlier Sdobnikov-edited Socialism and Capitalism (1971), which frames the same contest between the two economic systems that the present book stages as "economic competition between the two systems". And the deepest of the disagreements between the Marxisms — whether a planned economy can dispense with the market and the law of value at all — was fought out, in these very years, between Ernest Mandel and Alec Nove in the pages of Quatrième Internationale (no. 28, 1988). That debate presupposes, as its first premise, that the socialist economy is a genuine object of critical economic analysis, capable of crisis, disproportion and failure, and not merely the triumphant subject of a curriculum. That premise is the one thing Political Economy cannot grant — and the whole of its second half is the record of what a serious economics costs when it is required, by the state that commissions it, to face in only one direction.