ABSTRACT
It is impossible to over-emphasise the significance of the Soviet debate on the terms of trade between the products of ‘town’ and ‘country’. It concerned what undoubtedly is the single most important issue in economic growth, namely, that of accumulation. Those arrayed on either side of the debate still started from the same postulate: accumulation is basic to growth and, in a closed economy, is largely determined by the terms of trade between the two leading sectors. Once Rosa Luxemburg’s schema for accumulation-cum-realisation is internalised, it too, as we have seen, has the same message to convey : the course of capital formation is a function of the mutual price relationship between agriculture and industry. Preobrazhensky’s assumptions differ radically from Luxemburg’s, but the frame of analysis is not dissimilar : the terms of exchange between town and country decide the rate of accumulation, and class relations decide the terms of exchange. Bukharin disagrees with Preobrazhensky’s prescriptions, but does not disown the logical structure set up by the latter. The parameters of class relations keep changing from one author to another; that these are the crucial elements for determining the actual terms of trade between agriculture and industry-and consequently the rates of capital formation and economic growth-however emerges clearly in each case.
