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Home , Nikolai Bukharin

Nikolai Ivanovitch Bukharin

DONALD J. HARRIS

Nikolai Bukharin is commonly acknowledged to have been one of the most brilliant theoreticians in the Bolshevik movement and an outstanding figure in the history of . Born in Russia in 1888, he studied economics at Moscow University and (during four years of exile in Europe and America) at the Universities of Vienna and Lausanne (Switzerland), in Sweden and Norway and in the New York Public Library. While still a student, he joined the Bolshevik movement. Upon returning to Russia in April 1917, he worked closely with Lenin and participated in planning and carrying out the . After the victory of the he proceeded to assume many high offices in the Party (becoming a member ofthe Politbureau in 1919) and in other important organizations. In these various capacities he came to exercise great influence within both the Party and the Comintern. Under Stalin's regime, however, he lost most of his important positions. Eventually, he was among those who were arrested and brought to trial under charges of treason and was executed on 15 March 1938. At the peak of his career Bukharin was regarded as the foremost authority on Marxism in the Party. He was a prolific writer: there are more than five hundred items of published work in his name, most ofthem written in the hectic twelve-year period 1916-1928 (for a comprehensive bibliography, see Heitman, 1969). Only a few of these works have been translated into English and these are the works for which he is now most widely known. A brief description of the major items gives an indication of the scope and range of his intellectual interests. The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (1917) is a detailed and comprehensive critique of the ideas of the Austrian school of economic theory, as represented by the work of its chief spokesman Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, but situated in the broader context of marginal theory as it had appeared up to that time. In and World Economy (1918) he formulated a revision of Marx's theory of capitalist development and set out his own theory of imperialism

38 J. Eatwell et al. (eds.), Problems of the Planned Economy © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 1990 Nikolai Ivanovitch Bukharin as an advanced stage of capitalism. This was written in 1914-15, a year before Lenin's Imperialism, and is credited with having been a major influence on Lenin's formulation. The theoretical structure of the argument is further elaborated in Imperialism and the Accumulation of (1924) by way of a critique of the ideas of , another leading Marxist writer of that time. The ABC of (1919), written jointly with Evgenii Preobrazhensky and used as a standard textbook in the Twenties, is a comprehensive restatement of the principles of Marxism as applied to analysis of the development of capitalism, the conditions for revolution, and the nature of the tasks of building . in the specific context of the Soviet experience. This book, taken with his Economics of the Transition Period (1920), constitutes a contribution to both the Marxist theory of capitalist breakdown and on the one hand and the theory of socialist construction on the other. : A System of Sociology (1921), another popular textbook, combines a special interpretation of the philosophical basis of Marxism with what is perhaps the first systematic theoretical statement of Marxism as a system of sociological analysis. In style much of this work is highly polemical and geared to immediate political goals. But it reveals also a versatility of intellect, serious theoretical concern, and scholarly inclination. Arguably, his works represent in their entirety 'a comprehensive reformulation of the classical Marxian theory of ' (Heitman, 1962, p. 79). Viewed from the standpoint of their significance in terms of economic analysis, three major components stand out. There is, first, the critique of 'bourgeois economic theory' in its Austrian version. Bukharin's approach follows that which Marx had adopted in Theories of , which is to give an 'exhaustive criticism' not only of the methodology and internal logic of the theory but also of the sociological and class basis which it reflects. He scores familiar points against particular elements of the theory, for instance, that utility is not measurable, that B6hm-Bawerk's concept of an 'average period of production' is 'nonsensical', that the theory is static. Such criticisms of the technical apparatus of the theory have since been developed in more refined and sophisticated form (see Harris, 1978, 1981; Dobb, 1969). Moreover, certain weaknesses in Bukharin's presentation, such as an apparent confusion between marginal and total utility and misconception of the meaning of interdependent markets, can now be readily recognized. But these are matters that were not well understood at the time, even by exponents of the theory. Bukharin views them as matters of lesser importance. What is crucial for him is 'the point of departure ofthe ... theory, its ignoring the social-historical character of economic phenomena' (1917, p. 73). This criticism is applied with particular force to the treatment of the problem of capital, the nature of consumer demand, and the process of economic evolution. As to the sociological criticism, his central thesis is that the theory is the ideological expression of the rentier class eliminated from the process of production and interested solely in disposing of their income through consumption. This thesis can be faulted for giving too mechanical and simplistic an interpretation of the relation between economic theory and where a dialectical interpretation is called for (compare, for

39 Problems of the planned economy instance, Dobb, 1973, ch. 1, and Meek, 1967). But the issue of the social-ideological roots of the marginal revolution remains a problematic one, as yet unresolved, with direct relevance to current interest in the nature of scientific revolutions in the social science (see Kuhn, 1970; Latsis, 1976). Secondly, Bukharin's work clearly articulates a conception ofthe development of capitalism as a world system to a more advanced stage than that of industrial capitalism which Marx had earlier analysed. This new stage is characterized by the rise of monopoly or 'state trusts' within advanced capitalist states, intensified international competition among different national monopolies leading to a quest for economic, political and military control over 'spheres of influence', and breaking out into destructive wars between states. These conditions are seen as inevitable results deriving from inherent tendencies in the capitalist accumulation process, at the heart of which is a supposed falling tendency in the overall average rate of profit. Altogether they are viewed as an expression of the anarchic and contradictory character of capitalism. The formation of monopolies is supposed to take place through reorganization of production by finance capitalists as a way of finding new sources of profitable investment and of exercising centralized regulation and control of the national economy. This transformation succeeds for a time at the national level but only to raise the contradictions to the level of the world economy where they can be resolved only through revolutions breaking out at different 'weak links' of the world-capitalist system. The idea of a necessary long-term decline in the rate of profit, and also the specific role assigned to financial enterprises as such, can be disputed. A crucial ingredient of the argument is the idea of oligopolistic rivalry and international mobility of capital as essential factors governing international relations. In this respect the argument anticipates ideas that are only now being recognized and absorbed into the orthodox theory of international trade and which, in his own time, were conspicuously neglected within the entire corpus of existing economic theory. Much of the analysis as regards a necessary tendency to uneven development between an advanced centre and underdeveloped periphery of the world economy has also been absorbed into contemporary theories of underdevelopment. Underpinning the whole argument is a curious theory of 'social equilibrium' and of 'crisis' originating from a loss of equilibrium. 'To find the law of this equilibrium', he suggests (1979, p. 149), 'is the basic problem of theoretical economics and theoretical economics as a scientific system is the result of an examination of the entire capitalist system in its state of equilibrium'. The third component is a comprehensive conception of the process of socialist construction in a backward country. These ideas came out of the practical concerns and rich intellectual ferment associated with the early period of Soviet development but have a generality and relevance extending down to current debates both in the development literature and on problems of socialist planning. The overall framework is one that conceives of socialist development as a long-drawn-out process 'embracing a whole enormous epoch' and going through four phases: ideological, political, economic and technical. The process is seen as occurring in the context of a kind of war economy involving

40 Nikolai Ivanovitch Bukharin highly centralized state control, though there is an optimistic prediction of an ultimate 'dying off of the state power'. Room is allowed for preserving and maintaining small-scale private enterprise. The agricultural sector is seen as posing special problems, due to the assumed character of peasant production, which can only be overcome through transformation by stages to collectivized large-scale production. Even so, it is firmly held (in 1919) that 'for a long time to come small-scale peasant farming will be the predominant form of Russian agriculture', a view which Bukharin later abandoned in support of Stalin's collectivization drive. In industry, too, small-scale industry, handicraft, and home industry are to be supported, so that the all-round strategy is one that seems quite similar to that of 'walking-on two-legs' later propounded by Mao for China. An extensive discussion is presented of almost every detail of the economic programme, from technology to public health, but little or no attention is given to issues of incentives and organizational problems of centralization/ decentralization which have emerged as crucial considerations in later work.

SELECTED WORKS 1917. Economic Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. 1918. Imperialism and World Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973. 1919. (With E. Preobrazhensky.) The ABC of Communism. Harmondsworth and Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969. 1920. The economics of the transition period. In The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period, ed. K.J. Tarbuck, London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. 1921. Historical Materialism, A System of Sociology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. 1924. Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dobb, M. 1969. Welfare Economics and the Economics of Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dobb, M. 1973. Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Harris, D.J. 1978. and Income Distribution. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Harris, D.J. 1981. Profits, productivity, and thrift: the neoclassical theory of capital and distribution revisited, Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 3(3), 359-82. Heitman, S. 1962. Between Lenin and Stalin: Nikolai Bukharin. In , ed. Leopold Labedz, New York: Praeger. Heitman, S. 1969. Nikolai I. Bukharin: a Bibliography. Stanford: Hoover Institution. Kuhn, T. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn, enlarged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latsis, S. (ed.) 1976. Method and Appraisal in Economics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Lenin, V.1. 1917. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. New York: , 1939. Meek, R. L. 1967. Economics and Ideology and Other Essays. London: Chapman & Hall.

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