On Stalin's Political Testament
On Stalin's Political Testament
Vladimir M. Yefimov
Doctor of Economic Sciences (PhD), Independent Researcher, France, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Doctor of Economic Sciences (PhD), Independent Researcher, France, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Journal of Economic Regulation, 2020, Vol. 11 (no. 1),
p. 6-35
DOI: 10.17835/2078-5429.2020.11.1.006-035
DOI: 10.17835/2078-5429.2020.11.1.006-035
Now young people are turning to Marx's "Capital", looking for help in understanding what is happening in Russia. Quite a large number of them see the future of Russia in a return to Soviet socialism of the Stalin’s period. They believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union was associated with the distortion by the post-Stalin leadership of the system built by Stalin. The article attempts to understand whether this is so. For this purpose, the most important sections of Stalin's "political testament", which is his work "Economic problems of socialism in the USSR", are analysed. The interpretation of the Soviet economic system, carried out in this work of Stalin, was based on the Marxist concepts. This was necessary because the activities of coming to power, and then political and economic construction had to be justified on a single conceptual basis, coming from Karl Marx, whose texts received a sacred status in the USSR. The article discusses some concepts of Marxist political economy from an institutionalist point of view. The trouble with the existing social order in the West, according to the author, is that the most important, if not the main, source of power is money. Therefore, the position expressed by K. Marx and F. Engels in their "Manifesto of the Communist party" remains basically true that "the executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie". Understanding money as a social institution sheds light on this position. For those who wish to fight for a just social order, it is very important to understand the nature of money and the mechanisms of its production and functioning. Marx's consideration of money as a commodity contributes little to this understanding. The analysis given in the article is based not only on the study of literature, but also on the personal research and life experience of the author.
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