Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin

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Nikolai Bukharin (before 1930)

Nikolai Bukharin ( Russian Николай Иванович Бухарин , . Scientific transliteration Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin ; born September 27 . Jul / 9. October  1888 greg. In Moscow ; † 15. March 1938 ) was a Russian politician, a Marxist economist and philosopher . He took part in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and was shot in the course of the Stalinist purges .

Life

Childhood and youth

Nikolai Bukharin was born in Moscow in 1888 as the second son of Lyubov Ivanovna Ismailowa (Любовь Ивановна Измайлова) and Ivan Gavrilowitsch Bukharin (Иван Гаврилович Бухарин). He had two brothers. Both parents taught at a primary school in Moscow. However, his father later found a job as a tax auditor. Nikolai spent most of his childhood in Moscow and four years in Bessarabia .

As a 16-year-old student at a Moscow high school, he radicalized himself as a result of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Russian Revolution in 1905. In 1906 he became a member of the illegal Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (RSDLP) / Bolsheviks . After graduating from high school in 1907 with excellent grades, he studied economics at Moscow University. Together with Grigory Sokolnikov , he organized the national youth conference in Moscow in 1907.

In exile

Through his political activities in the communist youth movement, from which the Komsomol later emerged, and his participation in the Moscow party leadership from 1909, the Russian secret police ( Ochrana ) of the tsarist regime became aware of him. During this time he also got to know his future partner Nadjeschda Mikhailovna Lukina. After a brief stay in prison in 1911, he was deported to Onega in the Arkhangelsk region .

However, he first fled to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the USA. In the West he continued his economics studies, began to study philosophy and sociology and dealt with the philosophical writings of the empiricist Alexander Malinowski (known as Alexander Bogdanow ). In 1922, his work Theory of Historical Materialism was to be created, in which he criticized Bogdanov's empirical criticism from a deterministic-materialistic point of view.

In 1913 he also met Josef Stalin in Vienna , whom he helped as an interpreter. Together with Nikolai Krylenko and Elena Rosmirowitsch, he published a Russian newspaper called Zvezda (Stern) soon after the outbreak of World War I and later, in the USA, together with Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai, the newspaper Nowy Mir (New World).

In Vienna he dealt with a systematic criticism of the Vienna School of Political Economy and the marginal utility theory represented by it . This resulted in his book The Political Economy of the Pensioner (1914). He also developed his theory of imperialism in 1914/15 and wrote the manuscript for what is probably his most important book, Imperialism and World Economy , which was only published in 1917, after the October Revolution , with a foreword by Lenin .

October Revolution and after

During a stay in Sweden, Bukharin was arrested and his manuscripts were confiscated. After the February Revolution he was allowed to return to Moscow in March 1917.

An already recognized Marxist theorist, he was soon elected to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks . From 1917 to 1929 he was the editor of the party newspaper Pravda (Truth). After the October Revolution and in 1918, at the time of the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty , he led the radical left opposition within the Bolsheviks that rejected the peace treaty with Germany. In 1920/21 he was a member of the Politburo , the most powerful body of the Russian Communist Party, for the first time .

When it became clear that the Russian Revolution would remain isolated, he changed his mind. He became an important representative of the " New Economic Policy ", in which he saw the possibility of building a state socialist economy realized.

After Lenin's death in 1924 he became a member of the Politburo again. A theoretical struggle for the future of the party, the newly founded USSR and the “New Economic Policy” had broken out in the party and in the Politburo . He supported Stalin and was his most important thought leader and proponent of the theory of building “socialism in one country” . From 1926 he was appointed chairman of the Communist International (Comintern). In 1926, with his support, the “leftists” Kamenev , Zinoviev and Trotsky were removed from the Politburo.

Opposition to Stalin, death

From 1928 onwards Bukharin opposed Stalin's measures for the forced collectivization of agriculture , whereupon he was removed from the Politburo on November 17, 1929 and then as chairman of the Comintern. From 1929, Bukharin led the International Association of the Communist Opposition (IVKO), also known as the Right Opposition, together with the American Jay Lovestone . Unlike many Trotskyists , however, he was allowed to remain in the party and became director of the Institute for Industrial Economic Research. In 1934 he revoked his ideological position and was rehabilitated by Stalin. Until January 1937 he was the editor of the Soviet daily Izvestia (News). He also worked on the drafting of the Soviet constitution in 1936.

In March 1937 he was arrested on charges of espionage, of contact with the Austrian and Swedish police and of participating in a plot against Stalin. While still in prison he wrote to Stalin: "There is some big and bold political idea of ​​a general purge a) in connection with a pre-war period, b) in connection with the transition to democracy." In the third Moscow show trial against the "bloc of the right and Trotskyists ” he was sentenced to death on March 13, 1938 and shot . He was executed together with the former secret service chief Genrich Jagoda and other former top officials. NKVD boss Nikolai Yezhov personally oversaw the execution. He let Bukharin watch as the other convicts were shot in front of him.

Act

The pensioner's political economy

From 1912 and 1914 Bukharin wanted to work out a “systematic critique of the theoretical economy of the newest bourgeoisie” in Vienna. To this end, he studied the literature of the theorists of the Austrian School of Economics, especially Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk , who was currently teaching in Vienna. He attended some lectures on marginal utility theory . The result of this systematic criticism - the manuscripts for his book The Political Economy of the Pensioner - was confiscated by the Austrian law enforcement officers at the outbreak of the First World War. Bukharin had to flee.

He continued his work in Lausanne and finally brought out his book. The pensioner's political economy was seen as the manual of the market mechanism. His concern: the systematic criticism of marginal utility theory . In it he describes and criticizes the “socially superfluous” way of life of the “pensioner bourgeoisie”.

In the Soviet Union

According to Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin was not only the “darling of the whole party”, but also an “extremely valuable and important theorist”.

He owed this reputation above all to his work on economics before the October Revolution of 1917: The Political Economy of the Pensioner. The theory of value and profit of the Austrian school (1913/14) and imperialism and world economy (1914/15).

During this time he published his most important works, which bear witness to his political change from the extreme voluntarist , radical left wing to the extreme anti-voluntarist, right wing of the party. The current political situation in Russia during the civil war, but above all Bukharin's method of mechanistic Marxism, served as the pivotal point for his transformation.

Even after the Russian Revolution and the bureaucratization of the party, Bukharin was an important theorist, now in the service of Stalin. In his study “Economics of the Transformation Period”, however, Bukharin recommended “non-economic coercive measures” such as shooting “as a method to work out communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era” as early as 1920.

Significant writings from this period are:

  • On New Economic Politics : The Economics of the Transformation Period (1920) and The Present Period and the Basis of Our Policies (1925), in which he prepares the possibility of socialism in a country as a theory for Stalin .
  • The series of articles Down with Fraktionmacherei (1924, 1925), in which he supported the smashing of democracy and the bureaucratization of the party.
  • Theory of historical materialism as a general textbook of Marxist sociology (1922).

aftermath

Review of the writings by and about Bukharin has played a role in rewriting the history of the USSR. His works from 1924 to 1929 on the development of the market were intended to represent an alternative to Stalinism and Trotskyism . From the mid-1980s, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the restructuring of the economy ( perestroika ), his work was republished in order to serve as a theoretical foundation for the opening of the state capitalist market until then.

About the work: Imperialism and the world economy

After the dispute in the Second International on the question of supporting the First World War, Bukharin's work Imperialism and World Economy was an important contribution to Marxist theory.

The theorists of the Second International, such as Rudolf Hilferding and Karl Kautsky , argued that the outbreak of world war was only a deviation from the normal development of capitalism. Socialism can only be achieved in peaceful times, until then the workers would have to stand up to protect their own fatherland. For them, imperialism was not an economic phase, but a short phase of capitalist politics that went against the economic trend. However, due to the normal and peaceful development of capitalism, this policy will soon be replaced by the capitalist development towards “ultra-imperialism”, in which major wars between the nation-states would be a thing of the past due to internationalization.

Kautsky argued:

“ There is no economic necessity for the arms race to continue after the world war, not even from the standpoint of the capitalist class itself, with the exception of certain arms interests. On the contrary, it is precisely these conflicts that seriously threaten the capitalist economy. Every far-sighted capitalist today has to call out to his comrades: Capitalists of all countries, unite! "

Bukharin countered this argument, claiming

that imperialism is, in the nature of capitalism, a continuation of capitalist competition on a world scale. According to Bukharin, the world economy can be defined “ as a system of production relationships and corresponding exchange relationships on an international scale. "

Bukharin identified two processes in this: the internationalization and the nationalization of capital:

A world market with world prices, with world supply and world demand has arisen. The social division of labor is increasingly no longer just taking place within a nation state, but increasingly on an international level. In the future, there will be more and more differences between progressive industrialized countries and retrograde agricultural countries. The capitalist contradictions that existed within nation-states would not simply go away; they would be reproduced on a larger, international level. As a result, capitalist crises would arise on a world level from now on.
But at the same time as internationalization, another process of nationalization is taking place. The tendency towards the concentration and centralization of capital and the organization of capital through the amalgamation of industrial capital and bank capital into finance capital “ creates an extraordinarily strong tendency to transform the whole national economy into a vast combined enterprise under the direction of the financial magnates and the capitalist state . "

For Bukharin, the national economic units now took the form of “ state capitalist trusts ”, thereby anticipating the theory of state monopoly capitalism formulated by Lenin in 1916 . The goals of the capitalist economy and the capitalist state are no longer only related to each other, as in the past, they are organizationally intertwined. This entanglement now includes a new method of conflict in competition - the armed struggle between nation states, the imperialist war. The capitalist competition between the individual capital units ensures that the possibility of peaceful capitalist development postulated by Kautsky no longer exists.

Bukharin emphasized the contrast between progressive industrial states (state capitalist trust) and underdeveloped agrarian states:

“ The difference between“ city ”and“ country ”and the“ movement of this antithesis ”, which previously took place within the borders of a country, is now reproduced on a vastly expanded scale. From this point of view, whole countries - namely the industrialized countries - already appear as “cities”, while the agricultural areas represent the “country”. "

This theory anticipated later theories of the emergence of a third world , but neglected the inequalities within individual countries.

Imperialist state and state capitalism

Bukharin also believed that the state capitalist trusts could only be disturbed from outside.

There are no longer any contradicting developments inside: “ The process of organization gradually disappears the anarchy between the individual components of the national economic mechanisms ”. Here, capitalism was no longer understood as a contradicting system of social relations, but as a system of organization.

He thought of the last stage of capitalism and portrayed it as a uniform structure:

“ A system of collective capitalism has been created… The independent capitalist state disappears: it becomes an association capitalist, a member of an organization: it no longer has to compete, but rather cooperate with its compatriots; ... domestic competition is dying out. "

This thesis ran contrary to the view of the Second International around Kautsky. The state - according to Bukharin - could not simply be taken over because it was inextricably linked with the economy, but had to be broken up.

His theory was intended to provide a new view of the possibilities that capitalism can take. Capitalism was not only determined by private property, it was possible that capitalism could take such state capitalist forms without losing its exploitative quality. Ironically, he also gave an analysis of the economic conditions for Stalin's Russia that corresponded more to reality than his analysis of the “socialist” Stalinist USSR. Bukharin was thus a pioneer of a theory of state capitalism .

The national question

Bukharin developed the theory that small states are devoured by large state units. Therefore the fight against the oppression of nations could only take place in a fight against imperialism . A deviation like the struggle for national liberation was pointless for Bukharin. It distracts the working class from the real struggle against imperialism and must therefore not be supported, but must even be prevented. Stalin used this theory as a justification to bind the Russian republics to Russia.

In contrast to Bukharin, Lenin saw in the individual national liberation movements an opportunity for the working class to become active themselves and not to be satisfied with what had been achieved after national liberation and to continue fighting.

Bukharin's “radical left” internationalism

Workers and soldiers had overthrown the Romanov dynasty in February 1917 and challenged bourgeois democracy with its own democracy - the councils (soviets). When Bukharin heard this fantastic news, he immediately traveled back to Russia. Upon his arrival in April, he was immediately elected to the local Moscow leadership of the Bolsheviks - now known for his theoretical writings. Unlike other leading members of the Bolsheviks , such as Stalin or Kamenev, Bukharin supported Lenin's April theses, which called for “all power to the councils”.

After the October Revolution , Bukharin was elected to the Constituent Assembly. His speech at that 1918 meeting shows how enthusiastic he was:

“ Comrades, we must now remember our responsibilities. We must not forget that current human history is in a moment of breakthrough that has never happened before - not in the time of the Thirty Years' War, not in the days of the great French Revolution, not in any of the civil wars of liberation made as big a step forward as today. Comrades, we are now laying the basis of human life for a millennium. "

Bukharin, like most Bolsheviks at the time, was convinced that the revolution in Russia can only be successful if it spreads on a global scale. This is what he says in The ABC of Communism , which he wrote together with Yevgeny Preobrazhensky in 1920 :

“ The communist revolution can only win as a world revolution. If z. For example, if the working class seized power in some country, but in other countries the proletariat remained surrendered to capital not out of fear but out of conviction, the great predatory states would eventually strangle that country. "

But the revolution in other countries, such as Germany or Austria-Hungary, was crushed and Russia remained isolated. Socialism as the next step after capitalism, however, requires worldwide cooperation and a worldwide division of labor. Instead, the Russian working class was only a tiny part of the global proletariat in a still agriculturally industrial country.

In such a situation tactical decisions had to be made, which move in the field of tension between two poles. On the one hand, what is currently necessary and, on the other hand, what is currently possible. One way to act in this field was to make the necessary a principle and ignore the possible. Lenin called such a policy radical left.

Bukharin's economism guided him to this policy. The “iron logic” of imperialism theory dictated what to do regardless of what was possible at the time.

This policy mainly had an impact on the peace negotiations between Germany and Russia and in later war communism:

The Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty

While Lenin and Trotsky at this time understood and searched for the influences on and solutions for the Russian revolution inside and outside Russia, for Bukharin the (only) main task of the Bolsheviks was to extend the revolution to the whole world. Here his economic writing on imperialism helped him further. In 1918, in his theses of the Petersburg Committee of the CPSU (B), he declared that Europe must become the arena for international class struggles. The struggle for revolution between the world proletariat and the world bourgeoisie should take place here.

The negotiated peace treaty between Brest-Litovsk, the “first workers state” in Russia and capitalist Germany, was for him a betrayal of the world revolution. The majority of the Bolsheviks did not agree. After the peace treaty was signed in February 1918, Bukharin, three other members of the party's Central Committee (CC) and three CC candidates resigned on the grounds that the decision to sign was " under pressure from petty-bourgeois elements and their concerns " and that this would be the " ruin of the proletariat, from demoralization to suicide ".

This one-sided internationalism made them forget the problems within Russia, such as the social malaise or the civil war that had arisen; their answer was the "immediate introduction" of socialist production.

At the time of war communism

After the peace treaty was signed in 1918, civil war broke out in Russia. The period from 1918 to 1921 has come to be known as that of war communism . Although the Red Army emerged victorious from this civil war, that victory came at a terrible price.

During this time (1920) Bukharin wrote his book The Economics of the Transformation Period . In it he settled with the theory about the nature of the collapse of capitalism. Here again he challenged the Second International in particular, which thought that the transition to socialism was a painless, gentle and gradual path through parliament.

He argued that revolutions were an inevitable necessity, as processes leading to higher modes of life and production were regularly interrupted by capitalist crises. In the long run, progress can only win if capitalism is smashed.

The smashing of capitalism, according to Bukharin, causes great (economic) costs. He hopefully declared that the capitalist categories such as market, price and commodity would disappear under communism and the following phases of revolution would occur:

  1. The ideological revolution
    The economic conditions destroy the ideology of civil peace. The working class is becoming aware of itself as a class and striving for power.
  2. The political revolution
    The ideological revolution turns into action, into “civil war” and the struggle for political power. The political apparatus of the bourgeoisie is destroyed. It is being replaced by a new system, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
  3. The economic revolution
    The dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the concentrated power of the working class, acts as a great lever for economic progress. The capitalist mode of production is smashed, a new model of production relations is created. The basis for a socialist society has been laid.
  4. The technical revolution
    The growth of the productive forces occurs.

The book is still seen by some today as a triumph of revolutionary thought. One of the book's weaknesses was the description of the current situation in Russia. Although the Russian Workers' Party had taken state power, it was unable to build a socialist economy due to the poverty of the agricultural country, international isolation, civil war and a lack of economic and technical leadership.

During the civil war, Bukharin declared at the Third Comintern Congress in 1921:

“When the dictatorship of the proletariat has been achieved - and when the party is really a communist one, that is, when it expresses the interests of the working class, then the dictatorship of the party is the same as the dictatorship of the class itself, even if the party itself is declassed and the dictatorial Communist Party continues its power. ”(Quoted from The Tragedy of Bukharin [own translation from English].)

"Right Deviant"

After Lenin's withdrawal from politics, Bukharin formed a bloc together with Stalin against the “left” Trotskyists in 1923 . He supported the New Economic Policy and opposed Trotsky strictly . Bukharin thought that with NEP the strength for a socialist economy and industry would grow. Thereafter, Stalin rejected the increasing private capitalist tendencies of NEP. With the decision of the central committee in 1927, NEP was abolished and from 1928 the collectivization of agriculture was initiated. Bukharin saw this as a departure from building socialism in the USSR. He opposed Stalin.

In 1934, under the pressure of Stalin's power, he revoked his previous ideology. In the third Moscow show trial in 1938 he was convicted and executed as a “right deviator” and traitor on the indictment of the “bloc of the right and Trotskyists”.

The New Economic Policy (NEP)

Bukharin's first reaction to NEP in 1921 was still that of a war communist. At first he thought that NEP was necessary to make concessions to the starving farmers. In his book Der Weg zum Sozialismus (1925) he described NEP as a departure from the direct path to communism. However, a detour via such an unorthodox policy must be made, as was also the case on the XVI. Congress of the CPSU formulated:

“ I repeat, I insist, the necessity of war politics inevitably led to the fall of production in the economic sphere, but now that the political goal has been reached, our power is consolidated and the dictatorship of the proletariat established - the hegemony of the proletariat is a certain fact, and now there is only a need to increase productivity in order to build the dictatorship of the proletariat. "

At the eleventh party congress of the CPSU in 1922, Bukharin stated that “ we are building our own state-socialist production ” ourselves. Here he denied his internationalism for the first time and concluded that the building of socialism in one country is possible. In The Road to Socialism he added :

“ The more we expand ourselves… the greater the proletarian division [of labor ] becomes , and if we continue to grow, at the end of the day we will swallow up capitalist production. This day will mark the final victory of communism. "

Socialism in one country

Stalin had developed the theory of socialism in one country in his text On the Questions of Leninism . With his commitment to the New Economic Policy and his works, The Economics of the Transfer Period and The Road to Socialism, Bukharin provided a template for Stalin's theory. Stalin himself did not give a reason why the building of socialism was possible. Bukharin also took on the intellectual defense of this theory, he tries to explain it as follows:

" Because of the class differences within our country, because of our technical backwardness [we] will not perish, ... we [can] build socialism ourselves on this miserable technical basis, ... this growth of socialism [will] perhaps proceed much more slowly, ... We [will] perhaps only step forward in its construction with snail steps, but we will complete it. "

Due to the isolation of the Russian Revolution, strong internal party opposition to the political course developed, especially through the Trotskyists . The response of Stalin and Bukharin was the party's first purge of 1926.

“But is there actually a real danger of a petty-bourgeois transformation of our party? Yes, it exists. Why does it exist? Because the proletariat itself is splintered and “small-bourgeoisie”. In order to liquidate this process, we [have] to purge our party at the same time. "

Fight against party democracy

Bukharin, who supported the leadership as the editor of Pravda , also described the typical functioning of the party as completely undemocratic:

“ ... the secretaries of the local organizations are usually appointed by the district committees; It should be noted that the district committees do not even ask for the approval of the local organizations for the candidates, but content themselves with appointing this or that comrade. The safest method is usually used when voting. You ask the congregation, 'Who is against it?' and depending on whether one is more or less afraid to speak against it, the candidate appointed by the district committee is chosen ... "

But this inner-party dictatorship, strongly criticized by Trotsky , was necessary for Bukharin in the struggle against the inner-party factions. Bukharin wrote a series of articles in Pravda called Down with Fraktionmacherei . Bukharin initially supported Stalin with this course, but later, when he turned against Stalin's collectivization , he no longer dared - he knew how the purge was carried out - to openly oppose it.

Bukharinism after Bukharin

Since Gorbachev's perestroika , the Bukharin economic model has been seen by many as a historical alternative. The New Economic Policy of 1922 - introduced to cushion the catastrophic consequences of the civil war - was intended to provide the ideological basis for liberalizing the economy in the 1980s. On the other hand, Bukharin himself vigorously fought against any deviation from the party line and ideologically prepared the ground for the development of the totalitarian Stalinist system.

Bukharin's methodology

Despite his reputation as “an extremely valuable and important theorist”, Lenin went on to say in his will that Bukharin's views “can only be counted as completely Marxist with very great reservations” because “there is something scholastic about him” and he continues : "He never studied the dialectic and, I believe, never fully understood it".

Bukharin's philosophical work Theory of Historical Materialism testifies to the correctness of this statement . Common textbook of Marxist sociology , where his method, which suffers from an undialectical one-sidedness, is self-confidently argued out.

Bukharin wrote this book at the same time as he was writing The Economics of the Transfer Period - that is, 1920/1921. It was finally published in 1922. It is one of Bukharin's most widely read works, and it has been translated into many languages. It gives an insight into his method, which is considered a constant element in Bukharin's thinking and political action and in which lies the origin of his turn from left-radical voluntarist wing to right-wing reformist anti-voluntarist wing.

Through his method, he always had to choose one or the other instead of showing respect for all aspects of two dialectical pairs of opposites and recognizing their mutual struggle and influence. This mechanistic approach is clearly visible at the following points:

Historical materialism as sociology

In contrast to Marx , Lenin or other (later mainly Western) Marxists, for Bukharin historical materialism was not the analysis of the changes in a society, which are determined by objective and subjective conditions, but a science that, like any other, was based on determinable laws. In this way historical materialism becomes a social science for him. The various social processes are taken apart and examined in other sciences. After they have been reassembled, the historical-materialistic picture of history can then be determined mechanically. Bukharin, in the theory of historical materialism:

“ Among the social sciences there are two important sciences that do not consider a single area of ​​social life, but the whole life of society in all its complexity; ... Such sciences are history on the one hand and sociology on the other. ... The story follows and describes how the flow of social life ran at this and the time in this and that place. … Sociology, on the other hand, raises general questions. ... This shows the relationship between history and sociology. Since sociology discovers the general laws of human development, it serves as a method for history. "

Since science is divided into two classes in a class society, he accordingly defines historical materialism as the “sociology of the working class”.

People no longer make “their own history ... under circumstances immediately found, given and handed down”, as Marx described it in The Eighteenth Brumaire by Louis Bonaparte . Rather, with Bukharin, people - regardless of their goals - are beings who are determined by the “social result”, which is “an unconscious elementary something”.

With his alleged under-emphasis on people as subjects, as actors in society, he refers to a point of view of Feuerbach and this also prompts him to see people as "living machines" that are determined by economic conditions regardless of any goals.

Principle of causality versus teleology

Of course, Bukharin did not deny that people can set goals. But a goal presupposes someone who sets that goal. People can do that, but regardless of this personally set goal, there is no measurable law that proves that this goal will be realized and thus affect society. At the level of society there can be no such thing as a predetermined plan or a goal, since there is no supra-social being, like a god, whose goals society acts according to. So he basically rejects the effects of goals:

“ Above all, we have to turn against the concept of the goal that is not set by anyone. It is exactly the same as talking about thoughts without thinking beings. In reality, when people speak of an 'intrinsic' goal, they are tacitly assuming the existence of some subtle and inconceivable 'inner force' that is devoted to that goal. Outwardly, this mysterious power has little to do with the god that is roughly imagined as a bearded old man, but actually there is also an invisible god involved here. ... Teleology ... leads straight to theology. ... "

The regularities of the phenomena of society are therefore not represented as a goal or purpose-determined order of events, but only as causal laws. Every thing or event has a cause. This strict rejection of teleology makes, for example, any organization of individuals in society that pursues certain goals, such as political parties, irrelevant.

In addition, Bukharin argues that the actions of individuals are directly determined by an economic basis.

Determinism versus indeterminism

Determinism had the greatest impact in distorting theorists' Marxism in Stalinist Russia. Bukharin, together with Bogdanov, was the founder of the extremely heterogeneous Russian philosophical group of the "Mechanists", who believed that the phenomena of the world can in principle be completely "reduced" to physical phenomena, or at least can be traced back to them:

“ The changes in the organism, the physiological cause, created a certain desire. "

The reason was the regularity of the social phenomena:

“ If social phenomena are lawful and if they are the result of human actions, then the actions of every individual must also be dependent on something. So one comes to the fact that man and his will are not free, but bound, are also subject to laws. "

For Bukharin, the only correct point of view is determinism, distinguishing it from Kautsky's fatalism. Because “fatalism is the belief in the blind, inevitable fate, the 'fate' that weighs on everything, to which everything is subject.” Instead of the blind, inevitable fate, he sets the blind, inevitable historical necessity.

His understanding of Marxism does not fundamentally deny the will of man, but the will of man is directly and immediately determined by his economic being. Marxism explains and can explain the will of man because it inevitably arises from a historical necessity:

“ When the Marxists organize the communist party and lead it into struggle, this is also an expression of historical necessity, which is expressed precisely through the will and actions of the people. "

His one-sided answer to the question of either 'causality or teleology' or 'determinism or indeterminism' - “So we have to decide which point of view is the right one” - leads to a completely mechanical Marxism in which Marxist dialectics has no place. He describes his interpretation of the dialectic in a similar mechanical way.

Balance versus dialectical struggle

After the October Revolution and the capitalist-economic collapse in Russia, Bukharin asked himself how society managed to survive despite the collapse and what the basis for a stable social system was.

Influenced by Marx, Bukharin argues that changes come about through internal contradictions or their struggle. But while Marx emphasizes change in his dialectical materialism , Bukharin emphasizes stability - the balance of contradictions. He develops his theory through his observations in natural science.

Animals are adapted to a certain milieu. The fish on the water. The mole to the earth. If the animals were thrown into another milieu, they would perish immediately. It is similar with the movements of the heavenly bodies. The earth revolves around the sun and does not fall on it.

“ After all, we perceive a similar phenomenon in society. Good or bad, society exists in nature: it is more or less 'adapted' to it, is in balance with nature one way or another. The different parts of society are, insofar as society lives, so adapted to one another that their simultaneous existence is possible: how many years did capitalism exist with the capitalists and the workers! From all of these examples it becomes clear that it is actually one and the same thing, namely balance. "

This equilibrium is not absolutely immutable - he describes it as equilibrium in motion. The dialectical triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is deformed in Bukharin, so that the original equilibrium, the thesis, is negated by an antithesis outside of it and thus reaches a higher level (a new equilibrium), the synthesis. Changes no longer flow, as with Heraclitus , Hegel or Marx, they hop from one stable level to the next.

This view coincides with his view as a war communist, where he said that the capitalist equilibrium in the West could only be thrown off course by a revolutionary war from outside.

While for Lenin, for example, due to his Marxist-dialectical view, there was the possibility that the dictatorship of the proletariat and state capitalism could exist side by side, for Bukharin there was a clear break between one system of equilibrium (dictatorship of the proletariat) and the other (state capitalism).

During the war communism, Bukharin did everything in his power to ensure that the social necessity was carried out on the next level and that he threw himself into the struggle in a completely voluntaristic manner to ensure that the predestination was fulfilled. But when the next level had been reached for him - with the introduction of the New Economic Policy - he made every effort to ensure that this new equilibrium was not disturbed. In this way he became an important representative of the New Economic Policy.

Works (selection)

Anarchism and Scientific Communism , 1919

literature

  • Anna Larina Bucharina: I'm well over twenty now. Memories. Steidl, Göttingen 1989, ISBN 3-88243-131-8 .
  • Stephen Cohen: Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. A political biography. Knopf, New York NY 1971, ISBN 0-394-46014-6 .
  • Donny Gluckstein: The Tragedy of Bukharin. Pluto Press, London a. a. 1994, ISBN 0-7453-0772-8 .
  • Wladislaw Hedeler : Nikolai Bukharin. Bibliography . = Bukharin bibliography . Decaton-Verlag, Mainz 1993, ISBN 3-929455-11-0 .
  • Elisa Kriza: "From Utopia to Dystopia: Bukharin and the Soviet Constitution of 1936", in: Ross Kjærgård, Jonas; Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe (ed.): Discursive Framings of Human Rights. Negotiating Agency and Victimhood , Routledge, London, 2016, ISBN 978-1-138-94450-3 .
  • Anna Larina: This I cannot forget. The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow . WW Norton & Co, New York 1993, ISBN 0-393-03025-3 .
  • Lenin: Comments on Bukharin's “Economics of the Transitional Period”. VTK, Frankfurt am Main / Gelsenkirchen 1981, ISBN 3-88599-001-6 .
  • Lenin: Foreword to N. Bukharin's brochure “World Economy and Imperialism”. (in: WI Lenin: Works, Volume XXII. Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin, pp. 101–106)
  • Adolf G. Löwy: World history is the world judgment. Life and work of Nikolai Bukharin. Promedia-Verlags-Gesellschaft, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-900478-28-7 .
  • Klaus Söndgen: Bukharinism and Stalinization. On the political importance of NI Bukharin in the transition period 1927–1929. In: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 43, 1995. H. 1, ISSN  0021-4019 , pp. 78-96.
  • "Non-persons". Who were they really? Bukharin, Rykov, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-320-01547-8 .
  • Wladislaw Hedeler : Nikolai Bukharin. Stalin's tragic opponent. A political biography. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2015 ISBN 978-3-95757-018-5 .

Web links

Wikisource: Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Nikolai Bukharin  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ Soendgen, K. (1995). Bukharinism and Stalinization: On the Political Significance of NI Bukharin in the Transitional Period 1927–1929. Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe, 43 (1), new series, 78–96.
  2. ↑ Nikita Petrov : Palatschi. Oni wypolnjali sakasy Stalina. Moscow 2011, p. 199.
  3. ↑ a b Archived copy ( memento of the original dated August 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stalinwerke.de
  4. ↑ cf. “Nikolai Bukharin” in Der Spiegel No. 52/1987, p. 113.
  5. ↑ a b c Bukharin, Nikolai: Imperialism and world economy
  6. ↑ quoted from The Tragedy of Bukharin [own translation from English]
  7. ↑ Bukharin in a contribution to the discussion at the 14th party congress of the CPSU (B) in December 1925, quoted from Trotsky , Leo: “Socialism in one country”; Trotsky Writings 1.2, p. 995.
  8. ↑ Bukharin, Nikolai I .: The Party of the Working Class. 1921.
  9. ↑ Klaus Soendgen: Bukharinism and Stalinization. On the political importance of NI Bukharin in the transition period 1927–1929. In: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 43 (1995) H. 1, S. 78-96.
  10. ↑ Theory of Historical Materialism, pp. 6-7.
  11. ↑ Proletarian Revolution and Culture
  12. ↑ Theory of Historical Materialism, p. 16.
  13. ↑ Theory of Historical Materialism, p. 27.
  14. ↑ Theory of Historical Materialism, p. 25.
  15. ↑ Theory of Historical Materialism, p. 47.
  16. ↑ Theory of Historical Materialism, p. 74.
personal data
SURNAME Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Николай Иванович Бухарин (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet politician and Marxist theorist
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH March 15, 1938
Place of death Moscow