Дискурс о собственности в советской политэкономии

Вопросы экономики. 2023. № 10. С. 27–52.

Melnik D. V.

The primary task for political economy of socialism was to elaborate a project of the new society. Looking forward into the future, that is positioning beyond current reality, was its mission, not a flaw, for which it is routinely blamed. At the same time, the future socialist society was thought through negation of capitalism as a system based on private property. Therefore, the theme of ownership was at the centre of the socialist project. Creating specific type of discourse was its component part. Sophistication in mastering its rules was a prerequisite of meaningful communication within this discourse. That’s why the texts as artifacts of this discourse need to be deciphered today. In this paper, dealing with the history of Soviet economic debates about ownership, it is attempted to reveal most relevant, even if often implicit, meanings which leading Soviet political economists were aiming to express in their works. The authors analyse historical background of the Soviet ownership discourse, its formation in the early Soviet, as well as in Stalin’s periods, competing research programmes of its transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, and its breakup at the turn of the 1990s. 

Keywords: общественная собственность, власть-собственность, Kronrod, Кронрод, power-ownership, Tsagolov, political economy of socialism, политическая экономия социализма, social ownership, Shkredov, Sukhotin, Цаголов Н.А., Сухотин Ю.В., Шкредов

Publication based on the results of: Советский человек между идеологией и повседневностью: агитационно-пропагандистские практики 1940-50-х в советской провинции (2019)