# Primitive socialist accumulation

Primitive socialist accumulation, sometimes referred to as the socialist accumulation, was a concept put forth in the early Soviet Union during the period of the New Economic Policy. It was developed as a counterpart to the process of the primitive accumulation of capital that took place during the early stages and development of capitalist economies. Because the Soviet economy was underdeveloped and largely agrarian in nature, the Soviet Union would have to be the agent of primitive capital accumulation to rapidly develop the economy. The concept was proposed originally as a means to industrialize the Russian economy through extracting surplus from the peasantry to finance the industrial sector.

## History

The major proponent and main theorist of the concept was Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, a Soviet economist. His 1921 lectures, From N.E.P. to Socialism and 1924 lectures The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation provided the skeletal framework for what he would expand on in his 1926 work The New Economics. The concept was initially developed during Preobrazhensky's interaction with and analysis of the New Economic Policy. Its main principle is that the state sector of economy of the transitional period has to appropriate the peasant's surplus product to accumulate resources necessary for the growth of the industry. Preobrazhensky describes this process as "the exploitation of one system by the other." The goal of primitive socialist accumulation was for the state to eventually "achieve the level of present-day capitalist technique", to make possible the changing of the technical basis of the state economy, and "to organize labor scientifically."
Preobrazhensky aligned himself with the Left Opposition after his signage of the Declaration of the 46, and the theory of primitive socialist accumulation became the main economic platform of the Left Opposition; with Preobrazhensky becoming their foremost political theorist. His theory would come under fire from other Soviet economists at the time such as Bukharin.
While some have argued that Stalin would eventually implement primitive socialist accumulation as the economic policy of the USSR, Ernest Mandel, Marxist economist, challenged the view that Stalin implemented the policies of Trotsky with the same methods as he stated "Stalin is said to have put Trotsky's programme into practice, even if with a brutality Trotsky himself would not have approved". He further elaborated that the economic programme advocated by Trotsky and the Left Opposition "undoubtedly underwent many changes in the period 1923-35". Mandel also argued that the policies of the Left Opposition are distinguishable from the proposals of the United Opposition of 1926-7 and the alternative strategies developed by Trotsky in his later works such as "The Revolution Betrayed (1936) and "The Transitional Programme (1938)". It should also be noted that there was a fundamental difference between the forced industrialization practiced under Stalin and the theory as supported by Trotsky and Preobrazhensky. For example, both did not believe in the use of coercion, and did not believe in the utilization of forced expropriation or collectivization.