Nikolai Bukharin and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

Michael Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000706598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1985. Although Bukharin wrote against the background of the Russian Revolution, the very change in political climate is always relevant. How exactly is the transition from capitalism to socialism conceived and achieved? Michael Haynes' study shows that the theoretical applicability of Bukharin's ideas is still far from exhausted, and he provides a clear exposition of his main themes which does not shirk criticism. There can be no better introduction to the thought of this important theorist.

1INTRODUCTION

Writing in the mid-nineteenth century the French revolutionary, Auguste Blanqui, likened revolution to crossing a river. Instead of standing on the bank quarrelling over whether the field on the other side was wheat or rye, he wrote, the point is to cross and see! In this, at least, Marx too would have been at one with Blanqui’s impatience. He also had little time for those for whom socialism consisted of idle speculation about the blueprints for some ideal society. It was Marx’s strength, as Lenin later stressed, that he had no truck with such utopianism. On the contrary, Marx’s early work had been a struggle against the proponents of ‘new moral worlds’ and for a recognition of the working class as the class which would make socialism through its own conscious action. Yet by Lenin’s time the inadequacy of this, except as a most preliminary answer to the question of the nature of the transition to socialism, was already becoming apparent. Indeed, Lenin himself then went on to write State and Revolution, a book which does nothing if not dispute the nature of the field on the other side of the river. Moreover, he wrote this in the very midst of the Russian Revolution – clearly it was not sufficient just to cross the river and see.

What then had changed? What led Lenin and the Bolsheviks, even before the October Revolution had successfully overthrown the Tsarist state, to spend so much energy considering the nature of the transition to socialism? And what makes it important to take up this question again today? Certainly the answer does not lie in some new-found respect for the utopian socialists of old. It lies rather in the recognition that the problem of how to cross the river (and here Blanqui’s analogy breaks down) cannot be separated from the question of whether the field on the other side is really of wheat or rye. In short, the issue of the transition to socialism takes us directly to the heart of contemporary debates about capitalism and the possibility of socialism.

Lenin was writing against a background of discussion in the Second International in which the problem of the transition to socialism had received little explicit attention. Socialism increasingly appeared as a distant utopia which related to the present only as an abstract moral goal. The leading social-democrats of the day came, in practice, to adopt a position that has been likened to that of the Victorian clergyman who assured his doubting parishioner that the Second Coming was undoubtedly on its way — but hopefully it would not arrive in their lifetime. In this way the whole question came to have an air of unreality which was well summed up by the French communist Alfred Rosmer, ‘when the issue had come up as an obstacle in discussion it had been evaded. The transition had been seen as a leap from capitalist society into an ideal society to be constructed at leisure … this was the realm of fairy-tales.’¹

This failure to confront the problem of the transition to socialism had important consequences in the Second International. It was a central part of the separation of means from ends that came to characterise the politics of the social-democratic parties before the first world war. Their programmes were divided into sets of maximum and minimum demands, but increasingly the links between the two became more tenuous. This shift was common to the whole of the Second International and the story of how it contributed to the break-up of the International in the face of war in August 1914 is well known. What is less often appreciated is the negative impact it also had on the development of Marxist theory. On the face of it, the giants of the Second International like Karl Kautsky, Rudolph Hilferding, Otto Bauer and others all pushed Marxism forward in new directions but, when the Bolsheviks rejected the politics of the Second International they also rejected much of its theoretical underpinnings as well. In important respects they challenged the accepted canons on such central questions as the state, imperialism, and the world economy. In this sense the break that had occurred in the Second International between the analysis of capitalism and the analysis of the transition to socialism displaced both politics and theory.

Today the background is, of course, very different from that of the era of the Russian Revolution, but it is this that makes a re-examination of the question of capitalism and the transition to socialism more urgent. Capitalism has changed enormously since the early years of this century. Over the past three decades it has experienced the greatest surge of accumulation in its history. Its structures have been transformed as capital has grown, merged and concentrated. The state is now an ever-present actor directly assisting in accumulation; and yet, at another level, capital seems to transcend national forms as huge multinational companies compete in the world market where they dwarf even medium-sized states. Is this still a capitalism we can recognise? If the optimistic hopes of a ‘post-capitalist’ society now seem shallow so too do those attempts on the Left to pretend that it is ‘all in Marx’.

At the core of the world economy the strength of the system was sapped in the 1970s. ‘Fine tuning’ the domestic economies of the advanced world has been shown to be insufficient to balance unemployment and inflation. The business-cycle is far from obsolete, and we can now dispense with the euphemism of recession and talk openly of depression. But, for all this, the system has not crashed on the scale or in the manner that it did between 1929 and 1933. Can the crisis be managed? Many on the Left would seem to suggest that it can. As faith in post-war Keynesianism has given way to a much less self-confident post-Keynesian economics and a hostile monetarism, so the Left has rediscovered the ‘original’ radical soul of Keynes to justify national roads to recovery in the first instance, and then socialism in the long run. Industry can be wrested from the hands of private capital and regenerated by the state, protected from the chill winds of the world economy by a temporary wall of trade barriers.

Nor is this type of solution unique to the advanced world. In the so-called Third World three decades of unparalleled boom in the world economy have been sufficient to lift only a few of the poorer economies from the pit of economic backwardness. For the rest the dictates of the world economy have continued to enforce a basic dependency as raw material producers. Does the solution then lie in destroying this dependency and breaking free of the world economy? Is this the path that the mass of humanity must take in their transition to socialism? That it is has been a central part of much radical thinking about development over the past decade. Attractive to, if not sponsored by, professional and state elites in these societies such policies of national independence find wider and wider support as the already inadequate stimulus from the advanced world weakens.

But what then of that part of the world which claims to have already established some form of socialism? How are we to understand their experience as their problems force them into an ever closer dependency on the world economy? States as diverse as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, China, Tanzania, Libya all claim to have established at least the rudiments of socialism though they cannot agree on what these are, and if they have problems in this respect then so too do we as they also lurch into crises which seem no less deep than those of the West. Have they really broken with capitalism? Can we identify a different set of social processes operating in them? Is the rhythm of their systems and of revolt against them really that different from the rhythm in the West? If they are a picture of the future, if only at the level of economic organisation – why do they not work?

It is against a background of debate on issues like these that this book has been written. It tries to break through the compartmentalisation of these problems and to raise general questions about the nature of capitalism and the transition to socialism. It does so through a critical study of the contribution made to this question by the Russian Marxist, Nikolai Bukharin. Our argument will be twofold. First, that Bukharin was the one twentieth-century Marxist to provide the basis for a coherent analysis of capitalism and the transition to socialism which still stands the test of time. Secondly, we shall argue that in important respects Bukharin’s analysis is still in advance of much contemporary discussion, and to the extent that it can be reappropriated it can advance that discussion. In this latter sense, our purpose is significantly more than that of writing an intellectual history which traces the antecedents of accepted positions since the positions themselves are still controversial.

These are large claims to make for Bukharin, and the reader must judge at the end of the book whether they have been sustained. But one of the reasons that they may sound more grandiose than they should is that the legacy of Bukharin’s work has been subject to the vicissitudes of historical reinterpretation in such a way as to obscure much of his real theoretical contribution. In this respect the calumnies visited on Bukharin in the 1930s by Stalin’s propagandists are relatively easy to lift, but the situation is more complex with the recent reassessment of Bukharin’s career and politics. Since we shall differ from this reassessment on a whole number of points it may be helpful to offer the reader some guideposts to what is at stake and how the discussion that follows will differ from the previous debates.

Over the past two decades a major academic battle has been fought out in the West over Bukharin’s political legacy, a debate given further point by a renewed interest in some of his ideas amongst reformers in Eastern Europe and the brief flowering of a campaign for his political rehabilitation in the Soviet Union.² Grouped on one side in this clash we find the orthodox historians of Soviet Russia who have been heavily influenced in their analysis by parts of Trotsky’s argument though not by his politics. On the other side is a liberal revisionist school led by Bukharin’s biographer, Stephen Cohen. What has really been at issue between the two sides is less Bukharin than the interpretation of Soviet history and the rise of Stalin. Bukharin, however, has been the site of the battle. For the former school Trotsky’s arguments on the rise of Stalin have been used to argue fatalistically for its necessity. Given the failure of the utopian hopes of permanent revolution, the rise of Stalin was an inevitable consequence of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution: regrettable and unfortunate perhaps, but without doubt necessary. For the revisionists there is no such necessity. Stalin could have been opposed and was opposed by a liberal alternative which, whilst also rejecting the romantic hopes of world revolution, did offer a real alternative to the totalitarian regime that Russia became in the 1930s. If this opposition failed it was not because it conflicted with some inevitable logic of industrialism or totalitarianism or any other ism but because of real historical factors. In this way an historical alternative is opened up. It did not have to happen this way. And at the centre of this alternative is Nikolai Bukharin. He was defeated by Stalin in 1928 and 1929, but what was truly inevitable about this?

The debate has ranged far and wide and it has thrown up many fascinating contributions including Cohen’s major historical biography. Whether it has done full justice to Bukharin and his Marxism is less clear because his Marxism has not been the issue – indeed, it has often seemed a positive embarrassment to many of the participants. Not only have they reduced Bukharin’s contribution to the development of Marxism to specifically Russian dimensions (so losing sight of his intention to analyse capitalism as a whole), but they have then shrunk his arguments to fit alternative models of Soviet history whose assumptions he may not have accepted and would at least have found problematic.

In this respect the traditional orthodoxy in whatever form finds least difficulty with Bukharin. He stands condemned for his apparent political instability in Russian politics in the 1920s. In this account, taking its cue from Trotsky (who is often imbibed indirectly through the histories of Isaac Deutscher and E.H. Carr), Bukharin is pictured as the wayward theorist who paved the way for Stalin’s rise to power. Having joined the Bolshevik Party after the revolution of 1905 he distinguished himself until 1921 as a representative of the Left. Then, turning to the ‘Right’ under the influence of the New Economic Policy with its more positive evaluation of the role of the peasantry, he opposed Trotsky and worked hand-in-glove with Stalin to defeat the Left opposition. Not until 1928 and 1929 did he realise the dangers in his support for Stalin. Then on the eve of industrialisation he drew back, but his subsequent opposition was too little and too late to save him. His eventual death as a result of the third and greatest purge trial in 1938 was rough justice no doubt, but justice nevertheless for the ambiguous role he had played. If Bukharin has any attraction then, according to this interpretation, it is only that of an innocent who acted in good faith in a world too big for him.

Interestingly, the revisionists accept much of this interpretation.

Against it historians like Stephen Cohen and Moshe Lewin have tried to vindicate Bukharin by arguing that between 1926 and 1927 he redefined his policies to create the basis for a genuine alternative to the policies supported by Stalin. It is in this later guise that Bukharin assumes a decisive significance, and his earlier role is then reinterpreted to fit this perspective. As a result there tends to be as much dismissal of his Marxism as a whole as there is in the orthodox case.³

What is important for us is to recognise the narrowness of the focus of this whole discussion and the way in which both sides dismiss and disparage Bukharin’s Marxism. For the revisionists what is important is the defence of a particular set of policies. If these clash with earlier positions held by Bukharin then so much the worse for these earlier positions: they can be written off as romantic and youthful excesses compared to his later realism. For Bukharin’s opponents there are no such problems, the contradictions in his position need not be analysed, they can be dismissed as part of the weaknesses which led to his general failure. Though not immune himself to the occasional piece of middle-aged romanticism, like his continued support of international revolution, Trotsky was right in his 1920s’ critique of Bukharin, and if Trotsky’s argument leads to ambiguities over the assessment of Stalin’s industrialisation this is so much the better. These very ambiguities in Trotsky enable him to be drawn on all the more widely. And in all this Bukharin lays claim to our attention only for his role in Soviet history and not as a central figure in the development of Marxism after Marx.

In contrast, our concern will be with Bukharin the Marxist. His analysis is our central interest and from this basis it becomes possible to redefine the issues fought over in the recent debates and to get both a better understanding of Bukharin’s real contribution as well as an awareness of its real limitations. Starting with his discussion of capitalism, we shall explore his political economy as a whole, identifying and working out the contradictions in the positions at which he arrived. Our analysis will not be uncritical. At a number of points we shall suggest different conclusions from those which he eventually drew. But, unlike other accounts, if we disagree with the path he took it will be because we draw different conclusions from his premises – not because we are working from a different position. Moreover, this said, we shall then argue for the power and the vision of his general analysis. Without a development of his arguments, albeit a critical one, the modern world cannot be understood.

Notes

1. A. Rosmer, Lenin’s Moscow, London: Pluto Press, 1971, p. 60.

2. See K. Coates, The Case of Nikolai Bukharin, Nottingham: Spokesman, 1978.

3. S. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, passim; M. Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, London: Pluto Press, 1974, passim.

2CAPITALISM AS A WORLD ECONOMY

Nikolai Bukharin was born in 1889 at a time when the tide of imperial expansion was in full flood. Often supported on the ground only by adventurers and missionaries, the European powers raced to secure their place in the sun. By the time of Bukharin’s adolescence the map of the world had effectively been painted in European colours. In the three and a half decades before the first world war, territory was colonised at an average rate of some quarter of a million square miles each year. Europe had divided the world, and as it did so the world became divided by the divisions in Europe. Then, in August 1914 the whole system seemed to recoil, the expansion of European capitalism turned in on itself. Europe’s war became a world war but the struggle for world power now took place in the mud of a not so distant field. For four years the immediate contest was to gain or defend a few thousand yards — at times a few hundred yards — of European territory and for this at Ypres, Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele more men were sacrificed each day than had been lost in conquering tens of thousands of square miles in Africa and Asia.

In trying to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Capitalism as a World Economy
• 3. Capital and the State
• 4. Towards a Political Economy of the Transition Period: Revolution and Civil War
• 5. Towards a Political Economy of the Transition Period: the New Economic Policy
• 6. The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution
• 7. Completing the System
• Index