The Great Market Debate In Soviet Economics

The most agonizing and protracted of all the Soviet reform debates has been the debate over economic reform. This anthology of essays and roundtables from party, professional and literary journals surveys the key issues in the market debate.

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.

The most agonizing and protracted of all the Soviet reform debates has been the debate over economic reform. This anthology of essays and roundtables from party, professional and literary journals surveys the key issues in the market debate.

This book presents a narrative of one of the more interesting utopian experiments in comparative political and economic history: the first decade of the Soviet experience with socialism (1918-1928). Though historical and textual analysis, the book’s goal is to render this experience intelligible, to get at the meaning of the Soviet experience with socialism for comparative political economy today. The book examines the texts of Lenin, Bukharin, and other revolutionaries, as well as the interpretations of contemporary historians of the revolution and the writings of more recent interpreters of Soviet political and economic history. Arguing that the first three years of the Bolshevik regime (1918-1921) constitute an attempt to carry out the Marxian ideal of comprehensive central planning, and that the disastrous results, which all commentators agree occurred, were the inevitable outcome of this Marxian ideal coming into conflict with the economic reality of the coordination problem that all economic systems face, the book draws clear conclusions and elucidates the air of mystery that often surrounds the subject. Offering a radical challenge to contemporary comparative political economy at the level of high theory, applied research, and public policy, this book is appropriate for students and scholars interested in Marxism, economic history, political economy, and Austrian economics.

Although the history of centrally planned economies has been widely studied, the development of socialist thinking on the subject has remained largely uncharted. In this 1991 work, Pekka Sutela presents a detailed analysis of Soviet economic thought and theory. Dr Sutela traces the competing currents in the Marxist tradition of socialist economies from the Revolution to the present day. In particular he shows how the Gorbachev economic reform programme of 1987 rose from the work of Nobel Prize economist L. V. Kantorovich and his followers. However, this programme failed and the author explains in some detail why this happened. Since then, Soviet economists have tried to abandon their traditional theory of central planning and move along the path and long established contacts with leading Soviet economists, Pekka Sutela is able to show how Soviet economic thinking has moved from dogmatism through reformism to pragmatism.