Excursus to Chapters Eight and Nine: On Trade Between Industry and Peasant Agriculture Viewed As a Special Case of Exchange Between “Non-Competing Groups”

Marx’s theory of industrial and commercial crises was mainly what one may term a theory of disproportion. In the course of industrial development under an individualist system there was a continual tendency for various industries and groups of industries to develop, not in proportion, but disproportionately. In Russia one of the chief economic advantages of a socialist system was considered to be the replacing of “anarchy of production” by a system of “planned” production. It was natural, therefore, that when the “sales crises” of spring 1922 and autumn 1923 occurred, they should both be attributed to the absence of an adequate “planning” of productive development as a single whole, Ieading to “lack of proportion” in production. “Sales crises,” on the one hand, and “goods famines” in industry, on the other, of a purely price character may arise from the effect of harvest fluctuations on the productivity of a unit of effort applied to agriculture.