They cover primitive
socialist accumulation, readjustments, and reform 1953-78; market allocation and enterprise reform in the primary stage of capitalism 1978-92; the emergence and development of the socialist market economy 1992-2003; scientific development and domestic demand 2003-11; the era of Xi Jinping 2012-16; and discourse and development: insights and issues.
Preobrazhenskii's theories to characterize the post-revolutionary phase as "primitive
socialist accumulation" (9).
We do not sense a Soviet Union bled by war and civil war, with a dwindling proletariat drowned in a peasant sea while the Bolsheviks were faced with the task of completing an industrial revolution out of "primitive
socialist accumulation." All this helps to explain the rise of the Soviet bureaucracy, just as knowledge of Stalin's bloody collectivization--a second civil war--helps us to understand the increasingly totalitarian nature of the system.
One is Marxism's productionism, which Arthur MacEwan points to as an important weakness leading to the subordination of other avenues of progress to progress in productions and the subordination of other goals to
socialist accumulation.(15) Another factor, in the view of Michael Redclift, is the way value is conceptualized in Marxism--based as it is on labor time rather than on any inherent property of natural substances, leaving the "value" of the environment unclear.(16)
"Primitive
socialist accumulation"-the contradictory definition invented by Preobrazhensky-sums up this Marxist tragedy.
With the backward Soviet Union isolated and forced to pack into a couple of decades an industrial revolution that had taken centuries in Western Europe, with the Bolsheviks compelled to carry out the contradiction in terms "primitive
socialist accumulation,' there was arguably no other solution.
Therefore we must come to terms with what happened, with this strange encounter between Marxism and backward Mother Russia, with the failure of the revolution to spread westward, with the resulting tragic contradiction in terms--a "primitive
socialist accumulation." Though it never was our model, we cannot deny part of the heritage.