Background
Bukharin was born in Moscow, Soviet Union, October 9, 1888, the son of schoolteachers.
(Bukharin completed this work in 1914; it represented an a...)
Bukharin completed this work in 1914; it represented an attempt to grapple with the Austrian School of political economy, as represented chiefly by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Bukharin interprets the school as reflecting the social position of the rentier stratum of the capitalist class, which tends to view the economy from the point of view of consumption rather than production. But this is merely the introduction to a close consideration of the theory of marginal utility as contrasted with the labor theory of value which formed the starting point of both Marxism and classical economics. His discussion, therefore, while it does not deal with the many changes and refinements of neoclassical economics, does contrast, in polemical form, Marxism with the fundamental premises of modern academic economics. His discussion of "subjective" and "objective" value definitions, in particular, will help clarify for many the essential differences that distinguish Marxist political economy from other schools.
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A duo of classic Russian Communist texts are presented together in this single volume. First published in 1919 and 1920 respectively, Programme of the Russian Communist Party and ABC of Communism were created as popular introductions, explanations, and commentary for the masses on the new party. Today they serve as historical documents and offer a non-Stalinist view of early Russian Communism. A new introduction and a glossary are included.
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Bukharin was born in Moscow, Soviet Union, October 9, 1888, the son of schoolteachers.
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin's study of economics at Moscow University was interrupted by party work and by several arrests, culminating in his flight to Germany in 1911 and then to Vienna in 1912.
While in Vienna he attended university lectures on marginalist economic theory, developed a lifelong interest in sociology, and came under the influence of the Austrian Marxist theoretician Rudolf Hilferding, whose book Finance Capital also strongly influenced Lenin.
In 1906 Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin joined the Bolsheviks and two years later he became a member of their Moscow executive committee. He rose rapidly in the Moscow Bolshevik organization, was arrested several times, and in 1911 fled abroad, where he remained until 1917. After a year in Germany, he went to Krakow in 1912 to meet Vladimir Lenin, who invited him to write for the party's publications. In the autumn of 1912 Bukharin went to Cracow to meet Lenin for the first time and was invited to collaborate on Pravda (which he later edited from 1918 to 1929).
In 1913 Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin met Stalin in Vienna and assisted him in writing "Marxism and the National Question. " Arriving in New York in November 1916, he remained there until the following April and assisted Trotsky in publishing the newspaper Novyi Mir. When Bukharin reached Moscow in May, he endorsed Lenin's "April Theses, " which broke radically with Lenin's (but not Trotsky's) previous views by advocating a socialist revolution in backward Russia.
Bukharin was elected in July to the party's central committee.
Expelled to Switzerland at the beginning of World War I, he supported Lenin's radical antiwar platform, continuing his activities in Scandinavia and then New York City. When revolution broke out in Russia in early 1917, Bukharin hastened home.
Arriving in May, he immediately took a leading role in the Moscow Bolshevik organization, which was dominated by young radicals. His militant stance brought him close to Lenin.
Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition favored rapid industrialization at the expense of agriculture, in what Preobrazhensky termed "primitive socialist accumulation.
He argued that forcibly appropriating agricultural surpluses would ultimately lead to the disintegration of agriculture because peasants would no longer have an incentive to produce.
Among Moscow Bolsheviks he actively supported the party's seizure of state power in November (October, according to the Julian calendar).
In the following months Bukharin and other "left communists" came into conflict with Lenin.
Bukharin thought "state capitalism" implied rule by capitalists and called instead for extensive nationalization.
In an article on "Left-Wing Childishness" Lenin accused the "lefts" of ignoring the need for any transitional period at all.
Reconciled with Lenin, in March 1919 Bukharin was elected a candidate member of the party's first politburo.
All proletarian organizations were to be subordinated to the workers' state, "the most universal organization, " in which the "collective reason" of the working class was embodied. "
Leaders of the new Soviet trade unions had other ideas, believing that the workers themselves, through the trade unions, should have exclusive responsibility for organizing the economy.
From his study of marginal economics he had adopted the concept of "equilibrium"; from A. A. Bogdanov's theory of "tectology" he had learned to think of society as a "system" maintaining "equilibrium" with a changing environment.
The problem was that a market required a stable currency, and currency stabilization meant curtailing budget subsidies to industry.
In these circumstances, Trotsky warned, small-scale private manufacturing might displace state industry.
Bukharin answered that the real problem was a "sales crisis, " caused by state industry's exercise of monopoly power to raise prices.
In his Critique of the Economic Platform of the Opposition (the first part of which appeared in 1924), he accused Trotsky and Preobrazhensky of "monopolistic prejudices. "
The result of "cartel superprofits" would be "monopolistic decay and stagnation. "
Accumulation of industrial capital required prior growth of peasants' effective demand. Bukharin's policy proved successful in the short run, but by 1925 new problems arose.
He became head of the Comintern in 1926 after the ouster of Grigory Zinoviev and saw the collapse of his policy of cooperation with the Chinese Nationalists.
In The New Economics Preobrazhensky saw monopoly pricing as the only solution; Bukharin replied that to exploit the peasantry like "colonies" would provoke a new "class war. "
Joining forces with Stalin, Bukharin urged peasants to "enrich" themselves in the hope that rural savings might be transformed into credits for industry.
Bukharin supported the 1927 decision of the Fifteenth Party Congress to adopt a five-year plan for Soviet industrialization, but he and the gradualistpolicies he advocated fell victim to the radical and violent way Josef Stalin carried out the plan.
Expecting a "third period" of wars and revolutions, by autumn 1927 Stalin resolved to expand heavy industry at any cost.
Stalin, in complete control of the party apparatus and the secret police, was able to crush the "right opposition" with surprising ease.
His power already undercut by the end of 1928, Bukharin was removed formally from the Politburo, the Comintern, and editorship of Pravda during 1929 and systematically vilified. The Great Purges ended the domestic truce.
In February 1929, over Bukharin's desperate protests, Stalin had Trotsky expelled from the Soviet Union, thus preventing any bloc between his two greatest opponents.
By the end of 1929 Stalin had embarked upon forced collectivization and "liquidation of the kulaks [prosperous peasants] as a class. "
The years following 1929 brought Bukharin's partial rehabilitation but no return of his previous authority.
In the era of partial moderation from 1934 to 1936, Bukharin became editor of the government newspaper, Izvestiya, participated in the commission to prepare a new Soviet constitution, and wrote about the danger of fascism in Europe. Nikolai Bukharin and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism.
As the "great terror" of the 1930's approached its climax, however, Bukharin was arrested in February 1937.
In 1938 he appeared as the leading defendant in the last of Stalin's show trials, the case of the anti-Soviet bloc of rights and Trotskyites.
As defendant in the Moscow show trial, Bukharin had no alternative to "confessing"--refusal would have meant summary execution not only for himself but for his young wife and infant child.
Nevertheless, under cross-examination Bukharin refuted all charges of spying or sabotage--he admitted only "moral responsibility" for the political opposition to Stalin.
Andrei Vyshinsky, filling in for Stalin as prosecutor, demanded that the defendants be shot "like dirty dogs. "
Bukharin was arrested in February 1937. In March 1938, along with the Right Opposition, he was tried for treason and counterrevolution in the last great show trial, the Trial of the Twenty-One, where he was the star defendant. In the Khrushchev years, Bukharin came to symbolize an alternative, non-Stalinist path of development for the Soviet Union.
On March 15, 1938, the government announced the execution of Bukharin.
A final appraisal of Bukharin must be a mixed one.
In the post-Stalin era, in many countries, efforts to reform Soviet-style planning raised echoes of Bukharin.
Finally the Soviet Union itself, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, recognized the need for a radical restructuring of its economy on the basis of principles that Bukharin had consistently defended from 1921 on.
He was rehabilitated in 1988, and Larina made public his last written work, a letter to future party leaders, that she had preserved by memory during years of imprisonment.
(High Quality Facsimile Reporduction: Bukharin, Nikolai Iv...)
(Bukharin completed this work in 1914; it represented an a...)
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( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
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( Bukharin’s 1919 anticipation of the growth of the inter...)
(Originally published in ca. 1917. This volume from the Co...)
(1 SOFTCOVER BOOK)
Serving in various capacities during the civil war, Bukharin also published extensively: including Imperialism and World Economy (1918), the popularizing and militant ABC of Communism (1920, with Yevgeny Preobrazhensky sky); Economics of the Transition Period (1920), which celebrated the statization of the economy under War Communism but also began to explore how to build a socialist society after the revolution; and Historical Materialism (1921), a major analysis of Marxism in the twentieth century.
After Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921, debate swirled around the question of the relative importance that should be accorded industry and agriculture to achieve economic development within the framework of a socialist economy.
In Imperialism and World Economy (also written mainly in 1915) he interpreted imperialist wars to be the result of rivalry between the "state-capitalist trusts" of the leading countries. When World War I broke out in 1914 Bukharin was deported to Switzerland, later moving to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and finally the United States.
With the onset of civil war and foreign intervention in the summer of 1918, Lenin's theory of "state capitalism" gave way to "war communism" until the spring of 1921.
In October he and Evgeny Preobrazhensky published The ABC of Communism (a popular manual); and in May 1920 Bukharin published The Economics of the Transition Period, a comprehensive rationalization of war communism.
Trotsky urged pursuit of foreign credits and expanded trade; Bukharin thought Trotsky was a "pessimist" whose theory of "permanent revolution" ruled out building "socialism in one country. "
Believing a period of "civil peace" was needed to avert a return to war communism, in The Road to Socialism and the Worker-Peasant Alliance (1925) Bukharin argued that it was essential to preserve a mutually profitable market relationship between town and country. No sooner had Trotsky and Preobrazhensky been defeated, however, than Bukharin realized that he had helped to create an even greater threat to "civil peace"--Stalin.
As head of the Communist International (having replaced Grigori Zinoviev in 1926), Bukharin insisted that in reality capitalism was experiencing a new period of stabilization.
In July 1988 Bukharin's membership in the Communist Party was posthumously restored to him. Bukharin's most important writings on socialist construction are available in Selected Writings on the State and the Transition to Socialism, edited and translated by R. B. Day (1982).
Bukharin’s pre-1917 writings influenced Lenin’s V|ews on imperialism and the dictatorship of the Proletariat, and in 1919-1921 he wrote two summanes of Marxist theory that served as textbooks for years to come. The first. The A BC of Communism, was designed for a broad popular audience. The second. Historical Materialism, was intended for use in Communist Party schools.
In his overall philosophical outlook Bukharin was indebted to Bogdanov as well as to Engels, and he is known as one of the principal ‘mechanists’ in Soviet philosophy—that is, Marxist materialists who defended a positivistic rather than a Hegelian version of dialectics and who explained motion as a result of external forces rather than internal ‘contradictions’. Bukharin's ‘equilibrium theory’ postulates a system of opposing forces in which development takes place through the disturbance and reestablishment of equilibrium. Bukharin supported Lenin’s New Economic Policy and was opposed to forced collectivization.
He envisaged the transition from capitalism to communism as a more gradual process with a mixed economy and a democratic political system. These views aroused Stalin's ire, and in 1938 Bukharin was convicted of counterrevolutionary activity and executed. The same views are responsible for the strong revival of interest in Bukharin among reform-minded communists and socialists in Eastern Europe in recent years.
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was married to Anna Larina.