Primitive socialist accumulation


Primitive socialist accumulation, sometimes referred to as the socialist accumulation, was a concept put forth in the early Soviet Union during the period of the New Economic Policy. It was developed as a counterpart to the process of the primitive accumulation of capital that took place during the early stages and development of capitalist economies. Because the Soviet economy was underdeveloped and largely agrarian in nature, the Soviet Union would have to be the agent of primitive capital accumulation to rapidly develop the economy. The concept was proposed as a means to industrialize the Russian economy through state capitalism because it was too underdeveloped to implement socialism at the time.

History

The major proponent of the concept was Yevgeni Preobrazhensky in his 1926 work The New Economics which was based on his 1924 lecture in the Communist Academy, titled The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation. The concept was proposed during the period of the New Economic Policy. Its main principle is that the state sector of economy of the transitional period has to appropriate the peasant's surplus product to accumulate resources necessary for the growth of the industry. To this end, the major mechanisms were the foreign trade monopoly held by the state and price control in favor of industry which in effect caused price scissors.
This theory was criticized politically and associated with Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but it was in fact put into practice by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s as when Stalin said in his speech to The Captains of Industry 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.
Beyond lectures and textbooks, this theory affected the working class as well. Real wages for both regular workers and managers plummeted despite the growing wage differential. Piece work production relations were introduced wholesale. Soviet penal policy also tightened, causing a significant growth of inmates in the Gulag. It was not until after Stalin's death that a minimum wage was introduced, reductions to piece work production relations were made and mass rehabilitations resulted in the dissolution of most of the Gulag.