Socialist Accumulation

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Socialist Accumulation

 

the expansion of the material foundation of socialist production, necessary for the increasingly complete satisfaction of the constantly growing needs of society (seeFUNDAMENTAL ECONOMIC LAW OF SOCIALISM).

The law of socialist accumulation is the expression of the objective process of socialist accumulation, which is carried out through the planned utilization of part of the national income, the accumulation fund. The source of socialist accumulation is the surplus product, part of which is channeled, in the form of capital investments, into creating and replenishing the fixed capital stock and into increasing reserves. The factors affecting socialist accumulation are technological progress, increased labor productivity and efficiency in social production, and the profitability of enterprises.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
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.