The question is not Stalin but why is and was Soviet industrialization an imitation of the industrialization that took place in Britain, which evolved from the slave trade?
It imitates the US and Great Britain because it is driven from above. Actually, even before Stalin took power there was an open proposal of "primitive socialist accumulation" from Preobrezhensky. Trotsky found these ideas seductive, but it was Stalin's left turn in the late 1920s that truly put him in the same category of the Western capitalist class. Adam Ulam saw Stalin in this light, even though I disagree with his class analysis. History would probably regard Bukharin as being more clear-sighted than either Trotsky or Stalin on these questions. A forced march in agricultural collectivization nearly destroyed the Soviet economy.
Just curious. Why is "primitive accumulation"of capital in quotes when any schooled boy that has read the question and studied the matter know the difference between the formation of the capitalist class and reproduction on the basis of bourgeois property.
Please explain?
Because the term is generally understood as a capitalist category. That is why I put it in quotes. Capitalism was not being built. Instead industrialization resting on collective property relations was being built, albeit on rotten foundations as Chernobyl would demonstrate.
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
