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View Full Version : "Politico-Economic Problems of Capitalism" (by Varga, 1968 Soviet book, PDF)



Ismail
13th April 2015, 14:04
https://archive.org/details/PoliticoEconomicProblemsOfCapitalism

A book I scanned for historical interest.

Eugen Varga was a Soviet economist who adopted revisionist positions on various issues. He was condemned during the Stalin period. After 1956 his views were rehabilitated. The book itself was published in 1964 and translated into English in 1968, a sizable portion of the work consists in attacking the supposedly "dogmatic" or "un-Marxist" positions of Stalin and Soviet economists under him.

Chapters are as follows:

Marxism and the Problem of the Basic Economic Law of Capitalism
The Question of the Bourgeois State
Problems of State-Monopoly Capitalism
The Problem of Inter-Imperialist Contradictions and War
The Problem of the Bourgeoisie's Role in the National Liberation Struggle of the Colonial Peoples
The Problem of the Proletariat's Relative Impoverishment
The Problem of Absolute Impoverishment
The Labour Aristocracy after the Second World War
The Flow of Capital During the Levelling of the Rate of Profit. Rate of Profit under Monopoly Capitalism
The Capacity of the Capitalist Market
Problems of Price Formation, Inflation and Gold
Changes in the Reproduction Cycle Following the Second World War
The Problem of Agrarian Crises
Theoretical Problems of the Common Market Economy
The Reason for the Popularity of Keynesian Theories
The Asiatic Mode of ProductionThe praise of the Soviet revisionists is obvious from the 1970s Great Soviet Encyclopedia summary of him

Varga, Evgenii Samuilovich
Born Nov. 6, 1879, in Budapest; died Oct. 7, 1964, in Moscow. Soviet economist, academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939), prominent figure in the international Communist movement. Member of the CPSU from 1920. Born into a teacher’s family.

While a student at the University of Budapest, Varga participated in the revolutionary movement in Austria-Hungary and Germany. In 1906 he became a member of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, siding with its left wing. He contributed to theoretical organs of the Social Democratic press. In 1909 the University of Budapest conferred on him the degree of doctor of philosophy, and in 1918 he became professor of political economy at the university. Varga was people’s commissar of finance and then chairman of the Supreme Council on the National Economy of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. He emigrated to the Soviet Union alter the defeat of the Hungarian proletarian revolution of 1919. From the first years of the existence of the Communist International, Varga was one of its prominent members. He met and corresponded with V. I. Lenin, was a delegate to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Comintern Congresses, and attended the plenary sessions of its Executive Committee, where he delivered reports and speeches. Varga was director of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1927 to 1947, a member of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and editor in chief of the journal Mirovoe khoziaistvo i mirovaia politika (World Economy and World Politics).

Varga was a major scholar in the field of the political economy of capitalism. His numerous works offer a creative development of Marxist-Leninist economic theory and a profound analysis of the laws of development of imperialism. He studied the economic and political contradictions of imperialism, new trends in the development of present-day state monopoly capitalism, economic cycles and crises, business conditions of the world capitalist economy, and the competition of the two world social systems; and he developed critical approaches to bourgeois and reformist ideologists. Varga’s works have been published in many countries of the world. In 1963 he received the Lenin Prize for distinguished contributions to the development of Marxist-Leninist science. He was awarded three Orders of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.

Noa Rodman
15th April 2015, 11:19
Nice. I'm just co-editing a book with translations about Marxist theory of money for HM, with also translations of Varga from the Die Neue Zeit controversy (with Kautsky and Bauer defending the orthodox position).

There is still another article by Varga which I can't source. It's called 'The value of gold in the teaching of Marx on value'. Maybe it only appeared in Russian, I don't know. Any clues would be helpful.

It appeared in the 1923 anthology Den’gi i denezhnoe obrashchenie v osveshchenii marksizma: sbornik statei O. Bauera, E. Vargi, R. Gil’ferdinga, K. Kautskogo, i dr. (mentioned in a footnote here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1912/xx/gpccintro.htm)

(I found this Varga article referenced in a work by Georgy Matyukhin, who sides with Varga - btw Matyukhin became later the first chairman of the Russian central bank).