Research On Lenin’s Socialist Commodity Economy Thought

Many contemporary socialist countries used to repudiate and reject commodity economy as they treated it as a dreadful monster or a synonym of capitalism. Commodity economy has transited from negation to affirmation in the history of Marxism for its survival and development in socialist countries.After the success of October Revolution, Russia has become an extremely poor country dominated by small-peasant economy with the destruction of wars in consecutive years. In such arduous conditions, Lenin guided peasants on the way to socialism, gradually recognizing and affirming the necessity of commodity economy. Particularly after the implementation of new economic policies, Lenin proposed numerous significant concepts on the development of commodity economy in socialism and created plenty of articles and literature, which was a great breakthrough in the unexplored field of developing commodity economy in socialist countries concerned by Marx and Engels, greatly enriching Marxism’s theories of commodity economy. Lenin has altered and changed his views on commodity economy with his great contributions to such theories in the history of socialist countries.In this paper, the formation and development of Lenin’s concepts of commodity economy is investigated from a new perspective with the analysis on how Lenin has altered his views from the original belief of commodity economy means capitalism to the advocacy of commodity economy. With the focus on Lenin’s painstaking explorations for commodity economy in the period of socialist construction in Russia, the author intended to discover the historic route of Lenin’s concept changes on socialist commodity economy and evaluate his great theoretical breakthroughs during that time. The paper has studied Lenin’s thoughts with four parts:it narrated his cognition process of commodity economy in four timely phrases, generally from negation to partial affirmation, and then conviction; it concluded the main content of his concepts of socialist commodity economy; it explored the deep influence of Lenin’s concepts of commodity economy on China; finally, it discussed the significance and reflections of his thoughts.