Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 00:00:06 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Malthusianism


In message <3.0.1.32.19980129105148.011d3294-AT-pop.cc.columbia.edu>, Louis
Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> writes
>This is wrong. As a Left Communist, Preobrezhensky was opposed to the NEP
>and argued for the "primitive accumulation" approach.

The author of the New Economics was opposed to the NEP? Preobrazhensky
was a champion of the NEP (though admittedly he did disagree with
Bukharin's interpretation of it as a wager on the peasantry).

This is P's interpretation from the essay Economic Policy of the
proletariat

'The tasks can be stated as follows: (1) How to increase the output of
large-scale industry on the basis of a system of distribution that,
given the present level of culture and socialist consciousness of the
working class will ensure maximum productivity of labour; (2) how to
increase the country's output, using the motives forces of petty
production itself, and at the same time gain control over petty
production in the way that capital has always done so, namely through
trade and credit; and (3) how to move on to the next stage, when the
technological base of petty peasant production must be tranformed.'

The Crisis of Soviet Industrialisation, p22

> Trotsky began as a
>supporter of the NEP, 

He remained a supporter of the NEP, but like everyone, he knew that it
entailed considerable risks, risks which came to a head in the 'scissors
crisis', when Kulaks were on the verge of establishing trade links
directly with the West, side-stepping the soviet state, selling their
grain abroad for farming goods and shafting the working class.

>but soon began to echo the Left Communist critique.
>Lenin really hadn't thought through the whole question of how the NEP would
>lead to socialism and even left open the possibility in "On Cooperation"
>that there would be nothing but agricultural cooperatives for decades in
>the USSR. Industry was put on the back-burner.

That's Bukharin's view, not Lenin's.

>Belief in "economic progress" is hardly synonymous with Marxism. 

No indeed. But the advocacy of economic regression, population
reduction, and religious obscurantism is an outright rejection of
Marxism. Marxism entails economic progress.

-- 
James Heartfield


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