In the late 19th century, the term "economics" gradually began to replace the term "political economy" with the rise of mathematical modelling coinciding with the publication of an influential textbook by Alfred Marshall in 1890. Earlier, William Stanley Jevons, a proponent of mathematical methods applied to the subject, advocated economics for brevity and with the hope of the term becoming "the recognised name of a science". Citation measurement metrics from Google Ngram Viewer indicate that use of the term "economics" began to overshadow "political economy" around roughly 1910, becoming the preferred term for the discipline by 1920. Today, the term "economics" usually refers to the narrow study of the economy absent other political and social considerations while the term "political economy" represents a distinct and competing approach.
Political economy, where it isn't considered a synonym for economics, may refer to very different things. From an academic standpoint, the term may reference Marxian economics, applied public choice approaches emanating from the Chicago school and the Virginia school. In common parlance, "political economy" may simply refer to the advice given by economists to the government or public on general economic policy or on specific economic proposals developed by political scientists. A rapidly growing mainstream literature from the 1970s has expanded beyond the model of economic policy in which planners maximize utility of a representative individual toward examining how political forces affect the choice of economic policies, especially as to distributional conflicts and political institutions.
Leninist revolutionary leadership is based upon The Communist Manifesto (1848) identifying the communist party as "the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country; that section which pushes forward all others." As the vanguard party, the Bolsheviks viewed history through the theoretical framework of dialectical materialism, which sanctioned political commitment to the successful overthrow of capitalism, and then to instituting socialism; and, as the revolutionary national government, to realize the socio-economic transition by all means.
In the early 20th century, the socio-economic backwardness of Imperial Russia (1721–1917) — combined and uneven economic development – facilitated rapid and intensive industrialisation, which produced a united, working-class proletariat in a predominantly agrarian society. Moreover, because the industrialisation was financed mostly with foreign capital, Imperial Russia did not possess a revolutionary bourgeoisie with political and economic influence upon the workers and the peasants, as had been the case in the French Revolution (1789–1799), in the 18th century. Although Russia's political economy was agrarian and semi-feudal, the task of democratic revolution fell to the urban, industrial working class as the only social class capable of effecting land reform and democratization, in view that the Russian bourgeoisie would suppress any revolution.
In the April Theses (1917), the political strategy of the October Revolution (7–8 November 1917), Lenin proposed that the Russian revolution was not an isolated national event, but a fundamentally international event – the first socialist revolution in the world. Lenin's practical application of Marxism and proletarian revolution to the social, political, and economic conditions of agrarian Russia motivated and impelled the "revolutionary nationalism of the poor" to depose the absolute monarchy of the three-hundred-year dynasty of the House of Romanov (1613–1917), as tsars of Russia.
As revolutionary praxis, Leninism originally was neither a proper philosophy nor a discrete political theory. Leninism comprises politico-economic developments of orthodox Marxism and Lenin's interpretations of Marxism, which function as a pragmatic synthesis for practical application to the actual conditions (political, social, economic) of the post-emancipation agrarian society of Imperial Russia in the early 20th century. As a political-science term, Lenin's theory of proletarian revolution entered common usage at the fifth congress of the Communist International (1924), when Grigory Zinoviev applied the term Leninism to denote "vanguard-party revolution." The term Leninism was accepted as part of CPSU's vocabulary and doctrine around 1922, and in January 1923, despite objections from Lenin, it entered the public vocabulary.
Communism: The principle of state capitalism during the period of transition to communism: “The authorities pretend they are paying wages, workers pretend they are working.” Alternatively, "So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work." ~ Russian political joke [persisted to the '80s].
According to Marxist–Leninist theory, communism in the strict sense is the final stage of evolution of a society after it has passed through the socialism stage. The Soviet Union thus cast itself as a socialist country trying to build communism, which was supposed to be a classless society.
As a term, socialist economics may also be applied to the analysis of former and existing economic systems that were implemented in socialist states such as in the works of Hungarian economist János Kornai. 19th-century American individualist anarchistBenjamin Tucker, who connected the classical economics of Adam Smith and the Ricardian socialists as well as that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx and Josiah Warren to socialism, held that there were two schools of socialist thought, namely anarchist socialism and state socialism, maintaining that what they had in common was the labor theory of value. Socialists disagree about the degree to which social control or regulation of the economy is necessary; how far society should intervene and whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change are issues of disagreement.
The Comintern, also known as the Third International, was formed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917. This had seen the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seize power in Russia and establish the world’s first socialist state. Fearful that the world’s capitalist countries might crush the fledgling communist government, the Bolsheviks sought to spread the ideals of communism and support revolutionary movements in other countries.
The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, was an international organization founded in 1919 that advocated world communism, and which was led and controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress in 1920 to "struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state". The Comintern was preceded by the dissolution of the Second International in 1916. Vladmir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were both honorary presidents of the Communist International.
The Comintern held seven World Congresses in Moscow between 1919 and 1935. During that period, it also conducted thirteen Enlarged Plenums of its governing Executive Committee, which had much the same function as the somewhat larger and more grandiose Congresses. Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, dissolved the Comintern in 1943 to avoid antagonizing his allies in the later years of World War II, the United States and the United Kingdom. It was succeeded by the Cominform in 1947. During its existence, the Comintern provided financial and ideological support to communist parties in around the world, and helped them to organise campaigns for proletarian revolution. It also served as a forum for debate and discussion among communist leaders and intellectuals.
However, the outbreak of World War II and the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany saw the Comintern’s influence began to wane. When Germany invaded the USSR two years later, Stalin begin actively seeking to improve relations with capitalist powers in order to focus on the war effort against the Axis forces.
In this context, the decision was made to dissolve the Comintern in May 1943 as a gesture of goodwill towards the Western Allies, particularly Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. He also sought to demonstrate the Soviet Union’s commitment to cooperation in the fight against fascism. While the dissolution of the Comintern was a prudent move in the context of the Second World War, communist parties across the world continued to maintain close relations with each other and established the Cominform in 1947.
The Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties (Информационное бюро коммунистических и рабочих партий, Informatsionnoye byuro kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partiy), commonly known as Cominform (Коминформ), was a co-ordination body of Marxist-Leninistcommunist parties in Europe during the early Cold War that was formed in part as a replacement of the Communist International. It worked to ensure that communist governments in the Soviet bloc operated according to Stalinist principles, rather than those of alternative forms of communism. The Cominform was dissolved during de-Stalinization in 1956.
"Smith – who he was, is, and what he stands for – has been invented and reinvented by different people, writing and arguing in different times, for different purposes. It can be tempting to dismiss some past interpretations and uses of Smith as quaint, superficial, misleading or wrong. But they also reveal something about how and why we read him. Smith’s value has always been political, and it’s often politicised. But much of that value stems from assumptions about the neutrality and objectivity of the science he invented when, in fact, those assumptions are ones that his later readers projected onto him. Smith was a scientist, no doubt, but his ‘science of man’ (in David Hume’s phrasing) was not value-free. At the same time, we should be wary of reading his science through the lens of a single normative value – whether that is freedom, equality, growth or something else.
Adam Smith’s works remain vital because our need to identify and understand the values of a market society, to take advantage of its unique powers and temper its worst impulses, is as important as at any time in the previous two centuries. Economic ideas carry immense power. They have changed the world as much as armies and navies. The extraordinary breadth and sophistication of Smith’s thought reminds us that economic thinking can not – and should not – be separated from moral and political decisions."
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As the British historian Emma Rothschild has shown, [Dugald] Stewart’s depiction of Smith’s ideas cherrypicked in order to imbue political economy with scientific authority. She writes that he wanted to portray political economy as ‘an innocuous, technical sort of subject’, to help construct a politically ‘safe’ legacy for Smith during politically dangerous times. Stewart’s effort marked the beginning of Smith’s association with ‘conservative economics’.
Smith would soon earn a reputation as the father of the science of political economy – what we now know as economics. Initially, political economy was a branch of moral philosophy; studying political economy would equip future statesmen with the principles for making a nation wealthy and happy. From the 1780s to the mid-19th century, The Wealth of Nations was often used as a textbook in political economy courses in the US. Even when new textbooks and treatises on political economy were published, they were often compared with ‘the standard treatise on the Science of Political Economy’, in the words of one 19th-century American scholar.
That founding-father status took Smith’s ideas far. Politics became the arena in which his ideas – and economic ideas in general – were tried, tested and wielded. Politicians found much in Smith to support their beliefs, but the ‘invisible hand’ had yet to become a catchphrase of capitalism.
In the US, congressmen invoked Smith’s name to bolster their positions on the tariff. In 1824, George McDuffie of South Carolina defended his position on free trade ‘upon the authority of Adam Smith, who … has done more to enlighten the world of political economy than any man of modern times. He is the founder of the science.’ By the second half of the 19th century, Smith was being dubbed the ‘apostle of free trade’. Even those who championed protectionism appealed to his ideas, often only to delegitimise them. ‘The chief object of protection is to develop the home trade,’ one congressman declared in 1859, ‘and in this it has the sanction of the apostle of free trade, Adam Smith himself.’
This ‘sloganising’ of Smith’s name and ideas is perhaps most recognisable to us today in the phrase ‘the invisible hand’. Its popularity as a political catchphrase stems from the rising so-called Chicago School economists in the mid- to late-20th century, of whom Milton Friedman is a prominent example. Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand was a central theme in much of Friedman’s public-facing works – op-eds, television shows, public debates, speeches and bestselling books. In 1977, Friedman described the invisible hand as representing the price system: ‘the way in which voluntary acts of millions of individuals each pursuing his own objectives could be coordinated, without central direction, through a price system’. This insight marked The Wealth of Nations ‘as the beginning of scientific economics’. What is more, Friedman also linked Smith with American founding values. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was the ‘political twin’ of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, according to Friedman in 1988, and economic freedom was a prerequisite for political freedom in America.
In popular imagination, Smith’s invisible hand has become so strongly associated with Friedman’s openly conservative economic agenda that people often take for granted that is what Smith meant. Many scholars have argued the contrary.