ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on mode, materiality, and non-productivity in Russian and Soviet economics from and to the first years of the Gorbachev era. It examines how workers in non-industrial occupations are said to 'contribute' to economic development under capitalism, socialism, and the inevitable transitional mixtures of the two. The chapter describes how the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) came to have a 'material product' system of national economic accounts. It also examines the current status of the 'non-productive sphere' in light of other pressing economic issues facing Soviet authorities. With the so-called marginalist revolution in economic theory of the 1870s, the banner of unproductive-labor theory passed from Classical to Marxian economists. Marginalist post-Classical economics had only about a decade to make headway before political revolution in the name of Marxism swept through Russian universities and libraries. But there were many attempts to reconcile multi-factor and marginalist value theory with Russia's peculiar agricultural and industrial institutions.
