Private Capital in the USSR. The objective of the work
I. The objective of the work
There is no disagreement that the study of one's enemies is no less necessary than the study of one's own creative activity. There is no disagreement that the role of the bourgeoisie in the national economy is one of the essential obstacles in the matter of our internal construction, in the matter of preparing for the full development of the socialist system. This role is much greater than it might seem at first glance when looking at our state factories, mills, and railways alone. If we take, for example, the totality of wage labor in our country, then, according to recently made calculations in the "Control Figures" of the State Planning Commission, of all wage workers and employees in our country, 28% are employed by private individuals, and these calculations are still underestimated. Taken there, for example, the number of agricultural workers is much smaller than according to the data of Vserabotzemles, so this is the minimum that can be discussed. Of all the hired workers and employees in our country, up to 30% still work in private households and enterprises. Already by this figure alone, one can judge the significance of the phenomenon in question.
It must be emphasized that we will be talking specifically about the role of private capital, and by no means about the private economy in general. In our country, quite often people speak completely uncritically, for example, about private industry in general. Meanwhile, there is private capitalist industry, organized by bourgeois capital, which is a form of bourgeois accumulation and based on the exploitation by bourgeois capital of the labor power it employs. And there is private labor industry, which is simple commodity production without the exploitation of other people's labor, based solely on the expenditure of the small handicraftsman's and craftsman's own labor power without hired workers. Both of these forms are different socio-economic categories, different social and economic strata, and it is wrong to confuse them together when judging private capital. The same is true in other branches of the economy; everywhere it is necessary to single out the capitalist part of the private economy as a whole in order to judge the relative weight of the capitalist bourgeoisie in our economy.There is an enormous amount of material on the question of private capital—there is hardly anything we write and talk about more than this—but this material is not systematized, not brought together into a single whole, not sufficiently generalized. First, to bring together the material that is available on the origin of bourgeois capital in the Soviet country, to classify the several types and types of primitive bourgeois accumulation in the period 1921-1924. (partly in a weakened form preserved to this day). Secondly, to give, without any glossing over and exaggeration (such as the substitution of private capital by private economy in general), a picture of its current role in industry, agriculture, trade, and the money market, taking into account, if possible, also the disguised forms of its activity. Thirdly, our task is to make those generalizations that can be made on the basis of an analysis of the development of private capital in recent years.
The work is based on three reports read by me at the Communist Academy on March 19 - April 16, 1927.
The materials that are used in this are mainly as follows.
Under various people's commissariats and institutions, commissions were formed to study private capital in our country, collecting information about its activities in various sectors. The relevant reports and data were then submitted to the commission on private capital, which worked under the chairmanship of Comrade Ordzhonikidze with my participation from December 1926 to May 1927. These are the materials I use in the first place. The second, source of this kind.
I asked in 1926; assistant prosecutor of the USSR comrade Kondurushkin to develop materials of larger court cases that have been brought before the courts of the republic in cases of economic crimes over the past six to seven years. These materials provide many interesting comparisons. Comrade Kondurushkin's work has now been completed and will soon be published by Gosizdat. Thirdly, and finally, information kindly communicated to me officially by various government agencies on special requests.
Next; Initial formation of bourgeois capital in the USSR
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