[PEN-L:5222] Re: defining the poverty line

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (jones/bhandari)]

Stalin's chief economist Varga's conceptualization of poverty was
challenged in tenth plenum of the Bosheviks in 1929 by Otto Kuuisinen.
Kuuisinen suggested that Varga remained beholden to bourgeois economics.

Here is an overview of the challenge from Richard B Day's "'The Crisis' and
the 'Crash': Soviet Attitudes Towards the West (1917-1939)". London: NLB,
1981.  I find Kuusinen to be more persuasive than Day does:

"Kuusinen admitted that in his work for the Comintern Congress of 1928
Varga had given 'due prominence to the intensification of labour in
capitalist rationalization'. Nevertheless, Varga's belief in rising real
wages had prevented him from understanding that 'capitaist rationalization
brings with it an absolute worsening of the position of the working class.'
 BY DEFINING 'REAL WAGE' AS MONEY INCOME IN RELATION TO THE LEVEL OF PRICES
(my emphasis), Varga had used the term in what Kuusinen called 'the
narrowest sense.'  Marx, in contrast, thought that even with a rising real
wage the workers' income would fall below the value of labor power (its
replacement cost), 'if the increased wear and tear of labour powr...is not
compensated.' The purpose of this convuluted argument was to demonstrate
that the worker's well being would decline because he would expend more
energy through industrial speed-ups than he could replace with his income."
(p. 166)

Rakesh Bhandari