Property as an Object of Theoretical Research: Political Economy and Economic Policy

The article reveals the understanding of property in institutionalism and in classical political economy with an emphasis on the Marxist direction of the latter. It is shown that in the works of modern authors belonging to the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism – one of the main directions of modern theory of classical political economy in Russia – the specific, concrete historical content of property relations is firstly investigated. This content in the framework of this direction, inheriting the tradition of the “Tsagolovskaya†school of political economy, is connected through the system of production relations of a particular society. It is shown that both private and public forms of property have different socio-economic contents in historically different socio-economic systems – pre-bourgeois, bourgeois, post-capitalist. The author proposes political and economic systematization of patterns of property that are characteristic of the modern stage of economic development, which in the article is defined as late capitalism. These forms include not only different types of private and public property, but also transitional forms that contradictory combine private-capitalist and associated forms of appropriation. It is specially emphasized that public property is not reducible to state property and includes a special type of relationship – “ownership by everybody of everything†, which is characteristic of the sphere of co-creation. It is shown that in certain types of economy, state ownership can hide relations not only of public, but also of private-capitalist appropriation, as well as non-economic coercion. The contradictions of the transformation of property relations under the conditions of late capitalism and the most relevant practical problems associated with this are revealed.The article includes a polemic dialogue of the author with representatives of the institutional direction and the works of George B. Kleiner.