CHARACTERISTICS AND PECULIARITIES OF CONTEMPORARY SOVIET COMMODITY PRODUCTION

By applying the Marxist method of the analysis of socioeconomic phenomena, this thesis presents a view of the problem of contemporary Soviet commodity production. Unlike other well-known viewpoints on the subject, such as the socialist, capitalist-restoration, and bureaucratic-exploitive, the view under consideration emphasizes that the main reason for the existence of commodity production in the Soviet Union is the presence of two forms of private property--state property of the means of production and the immediate producer's property of his labor power.;A search has been made to discover the social groups which participate in Soviet state-capitalist commodity production. These subjective agents of Soviet society represent two major classes--the bureaucracy as a ruling and dominating class and the worker as a member of the dominated and exploited class.;This thesis tries to show the great importance of understanding Soviet commodity-production relations as a key to the discovery of the true nature of contemporary Soviet society. It points out that state capitalism as a form of Soviet production is not a deviation from socialism, but a necessary and logical product of Russia's pre-October development under the new historical conditions of corporate capitalism and state feudalism, with the first dominating the second and with agricultural serving as a simple means of bringing about the Russian type of industrial revolution.;The analysis attempts to reveal the nature of Soviet commodity production. The latter is found to be of a capitalist character. This is because the union of the means of production with labor power within the production process takes place in a form of wage-labor relations. Since the Soviet economic state is the sole owner of the major means of production in the country, it is argued that Soviet capitalist commodity production takes the form of state capitalist commodity production. However, it is pointed out that though this form of capitalism dominates the non-agricultural sector of Soviet economy, it includes in itself only a portion of Soviet agriculture: state farms (sovkhozy). The collective farms (kolkhozy) where the peasantry is attached to the farm are considered to be of the state-feudal character, with the state playing the role of the feudal lord and the collective farm peasantry, of the serfs.