ABSTRACT

I will end by again invoking the support of Leon Trotsky. Commenting on Stalin’s bureaucratic central planning in the early 1930s, Trotsky argued strongly for the need to combine ‘plan, market and Soviet democracy’ throughout what he called ‘the transitional epoch’. He stoutly defended the need for economic calculation, a sound and stable currency. Far from agreeing that collectivisation of private agriculture provided the means of reducing the area of ‘commodity-money relations’ (i.e. the market), he thought that, by reducing peasant self-sufficiency, it made possible and desirable ‘the great extension’ of such relations.15 True, Trotsky envisaged the ultimate achievement of full communism in which they would cease to exist, and would therefore have strongly disagreed with some of the other propositions which this book contains. But we are dealing here with ‘the transitional epoch’ and, in the above-cited statements, so was he.