The Price System in the Soviet Union

Abstract

In a certain sense, the bourgeois economics has mainly been concerned with the analysis of price and interest rate in studying the economy of capitalism. Such an approach has analogously been attempted for the clariflcation of the socialist economy giving rise to a number of misunderstandings, ror instance, it is a well-known fact that the impossibility or the difticulties of the planned economy was concluded from the evaluation of the barometric function of prices by some bourgeois economists durin*' the course of a controversy on planned economy, which has proceeded after the twentieth.1 Against such an approach, the analysis of the functions of prices in the Soviet economy as socialist economy has been proposed by those, who positively admit the possibility of planned economy. Such an attitude is taken for instance by Dobb and Sweezy in their theory of planned economy in favor of the Soviet economy. Another approach of a similar nature has also been tried by bourgeois economists with respect to the turn-over tax. This paper was mainly motivated by such a situation, and we shall not concern ourselves in this paper with such an approach itself or the criticism and analysis of the price system in the Soviet Union, but confine ourselves to its clariflcation. An analysis or clariflcation is attempted in this paper of the commercial system or the price variation or its mechanism-in the Soviet L~nion. The first task of the author is therefore the clariflcation of the variety of prices in the Soviet Union, although they are sometimes referred to simply as the Soviet price. Such a clarification is follo~ved by an analysis of the relations, which are in existence between the various constituents of these prices.3 Such an analysis would certainly