Sergei Ivanovich Solntsev

Sergei Ivanovich Solntsev

Sergei Ivanovich Solnzew ( Russian Сергей Иванович Солнцев , scientific. Transliteration Sergei Ivanovich Solncev * 2 ^{. Jul} / 14. October  1872 ^greg. In Tereschok in Roslavl , Smolensk , Russian Empire ; † 13. March 1936 in Moscow ) was a Russian - Soviet economist.

Solnzew studied in Saint Petersburg , where he belonged to the group of students of the social historian Alexander Lappo-Danilewski . Before the First World War , he spent several years abroad for research purposes. From 1913 until his death he taught at various universities and institutes in Saint Petersburg and Leningrad, in Tomsk , Novorossiysk and Odessa . Since 1929 he was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences . At the beginning of his academic career, Solncev was a Marxist liberal, but gradually switched to Marxist positions after the October Revolution .

After 1920 Solnzew was the most prominent spokesman for a group of Soviet economists who represented an interpretation of Marx's critique of political economy that differed considerably from the subsequently established reading . Solnzew took Marx seriously as a critic of the unconscious movement of the capitalist mode of production and denied that the categories of this criticism - commodity , value , money , etc. - still had any practical or theoretical significance after the overcoming of capitalism. A socialist planned economy knows no "laws of motion" that are "objectively" inevitable. As a result, the science of political economy dies with capitalism, a “political economy of socialism” is a contradiction in terms, it has no object and is therefore impossible. In 1926, in his Introduction to Political Economy, he wrote :

“Where there is a planned economy, we don't need to look for spontaneous social laws; There people build their economic life consciously, according to their own plan, according to their own 'laws' and their own projects; there, in this planned economy, political economy as a social science is superfluous. "

This position was dominant in Soviet specialist literature until the end of the 1920s, but then disappeared almost without a trace within a short time. With the transition to overall economic planning from 1928 under the conditions created by the NEP , its practical premises were also reproduced in the theoretical production. In the process, new categories (“socialist production of goods” and the like) were developed, from which the political economy of socialism , which Solnzew still considered absurd, emerged as an independent scientific discipline operated extensively in all socialist countries. It was taken for granted that the law of value would also be effective under socialist conditions; it serve

“In the Soviet state (...) the consolidation and development of socialist production. The Soviet state uses value, value relationships, goods-money relationships for the systematic recording and distribution of the socialist social product, for the implementation of the socialist principle of payment according to performance, for the material promotion of socialist production, etc. "

Works (selection)

• Zarabotnaja plata kak problema raspredělenija , Saint Petersburg 1911.
• Obščestvennye klassy. Važnejšie momenty v razvitii problemy klassov i osnovnye učenija , Petrograd 1923.
• Vvedenie v političeskuju ekonomiju. Pretmed i metod , Leningrad 1926.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Chavina, SA (inter alia), Bürgerliche und Kleinbürgerliche Wirtschafts Theorien über den Sozialismus (1917–1945), Berlin 1978, p. 163.
2. ↑ Quoted from Chavina, Theorien, p. 166.
3. ^ Encyclopedia of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Volume 1, Berlin 1950, column 808.