Abstract
This chapter focuses on one of the major problems of the socialist economies, which were unable to provide needed level of independence for efficient functioning of their enterprises within the constraints of the socialist ownership. Requirement to preserve and maintain the sole existence of the latter was set by the socialist political economy as an unquestionable condition for the socialist economic system. Thus, a seemingly simple practical issue appeared eventually as a complex knot of both theoretical and practical problems, which initiated a lot of attempts for their resolution. The reforming efforts had been carried out in the various socialist countries up to the end of 1980s, i.e. to the last days before the system breakdown. The paper focuses on the experience from the Soviet Union and Bulgaria.
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Notes
- 1.
The English terms for the socialist economics categories are those offered by A Dictionary of Political Economy, an official edition of Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1985, which seldom coincide with modern economics terms, because they keep the original ideological meaning, which is necessary for the correct historical understanding of the analysed system of economic thought.
- 2.
It is important to note that it is not just a wrong practice led by Lenin under the war pressure but a process finding ideological and theoretical support in the writings of the whole Soviet leadership of that time – N. Bukharin, J. Larin, V. Smirnov, Osinskij among the famous ones (World history 1990, vol. 4. 45) – and which, eventually, was laid down in the Russian Communist Party Program of 1919.
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Tchipev, P.D. (2023). Political Economy of Socialism: Theoretical and Practical Controversies of “All-People Socialist” Ownership. In: Backhaus, J.G., Chaloupek, G., Frambach, H.A. (eds) Origins and Change of the Social Market Economy. The European Heritage in Economics and the Social Sciences, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39210-8_12
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