Rev Left Radio - Nikolai Bukharin: Bolshevism, The Right Opposition, & the NEP

Episode Date: March 31, 2019

Donald Parkinson from Cosmonaut Magazine joins Breht to discuss the life, theory, and legacy of Bolshevik Revolutionary, Nikolai Bukharin. Find and support Cosmonaut Magazine here: https://cosmonaut.blog Follow Donald on Twitter: @donaldp1917 Please donate to help get the Marxist Center’s new magazine, Regeneration, off the ground if ya can: https://chuffed.org/project/revleftradio Outro Music: "39 Thieves" by Aesop Rock Find and support his music here: https://rhymesayers.com/artists/aesoprock ----------- Get Rev Left Radio Merch (and genuinely support the show by doing so) here: https://www.teezily.com/stores/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical. Please reach out to them if you are in need of any graphic design work for your leftist projects!  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- Rev Left Spin-Off Shows: Red Menace (hosted by Breht and Alyson Escalante; explaining and analyzing essential works of revolutionary theory and applying their lessons to our current conditions): Twitter: @Red_Menace_Pod Audio: http://redmenace.libsyn.com  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdxX5eqQyk&t=144s Hammer and Camera (The communist Siskel and Ebert):  Twitter: @HammerCamera http://hammercamera.libsyn.com   Other Members of the Rev Left Radio Federation include: Coffee With Comrades: https://www.patreon.com/coffeewithcomrades Left Page: https://www.patreon.com/leftpage ---- Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we are talking about Nikolai Bukharin, the classic Bolshevik from history, with Donald Parkinson from Cosmonaut magazine. Really interesting discussion. Not only do we talk about Bolshevik history, we talk about some theory differences between Marxist and anarchists and just a whole bunch of really interesting historical facts that I think people will really get a lot out of. This is a little known figure on the left, a controversial figure in some corners, but it's interesting to explore it, especially with someone who has a positive view of this person. So I hope you enjoy this episode. Before we get to it, I just want to shout out the fact that the national organization that we're affiliated with here at RevLeft Radio and, in fact, are the official podcast for the Marxist Center.

They are creating and publishing a new magazine for the Marxist Center called Regeneration, and we are doing a fundraiser for that. So the link to that fundraiser will be in the show notes to this episode. I encourage people to go support that. The more voices, especially on the principled left, that we can get out there, the better. This is another vehicle to do that. And it's connected with what I believe is a good organization, the Marxist Center, which is doing interesting things and that I'm a part of.

So if you're interested in supporting that, please feel free to do that. And if you like this episode, as always, you can support us on patreon.com forward slash rev left radio, or leave us a good review on iTunes. Now, having said all of that, let's go to our episode on Bukharin with Comrade Donald Parkinson from Cosmonaut Magazine. Hey, hey, I'm Donald Parkinson. I'm a part of the editorial board of Cosmonaut Magazine,

and I'm a sympathizer of the Marxist Center group. Yeah, and me and Donald met in real life, at the Marxist Center conference. We had a chance to talk a little bit, you know, and our comrades from each of our group sort of talked a little bit, and it was really nice meeting you and talking with you. And I learned over time that, you know, you have these interesting views on Baccarin,

and you feel like he doesn't get a good rap in the left, you know, conception of its own history oftentimes. So I'm going to be learning along with the audience on this one. This is a topic that I don't know as much about as I do with some other topics. So I'm really kind of excited to learn along with the list. listeners and have Donald sort of teach us about this person in proletarian history, basically, an important figure in proletarian history. So I guess the best way to start is maybe talk about how you identify politically, Donald,

and then maybe say what initially got you into being interested in Bucharn in the first place. How I identify politically. Honestly, I like to turn Marxist centrist because I think that it kind of captures a attitude of being critical of right-wing opportunism, but, also kind of adventurous ultra-leftism and kind of just focusing on the strategy of building a mass communist party that eventually takes power and uh i mean i guess i sometimes call myself like an orthodox leninist and uh you know i used to be more of a left communist and i kind of moved more towards this kind of centrist position and one of the people that influenced me a lot

And that was Mike McNair. And I was interested in Bukharin when I was a left communist because he was actually part of the left communist faction of the Bolshevik Party. And he had a very interesting position regarding the Russian Revolution and the Civil War and the Brescletov's treaty that we can kind of talk more about later. So I was kind of interested in Bukharin initially because of that. But I kind of had this idea that you later on drifted to the... right and allied with Stalin

and kind of just became part of the bureaucracy. But then I read a biography. I just started reading more about Bukharan and the kind of theoretical work he was. I know that Lenin called him the favorite of the party and

that he had, he was one of the Bolsheviks, who was very much a statesman and he was a political person, but he was also a heavy intellectual and I discovered that he had prison notebooks that he wrote when he was in prison under Stalin actually and that these were supposed to be pretty good and so kind of just started getting more and more interested in Bucharin and I read his

his book on historical materialism which I highly recommend and there's a biography of him by Stephen Cohen but it kind of leans towards this interpretation of Bucharren as a proto Gorbachev type figure but it's still a very useful biography that has a lot of useful information. There's a great story in that biography, where Bukharin's giving a speech to a bunch of Bolsheviks about how we shouldn't prosecute anarchists because of their

ideology, and while he's giving this speech, he actually gets bombed by an anarchist. And he's just, you know, all kinds of little stories like that in his life that, you know, he was a fascinating character, and he was a real intellectual. I mean, he made

contributions, like, in all kinds of levels. in theory and practice he helped build the common turn and build like a truly internationalist communist movement he helped organize the bolshevik party in russia and eventually build a party that would become you know the the party of revolution in october yeah i think that a lot of people kind of see bucarin as a market reformer type guy you know he sees the guy that influence gorbachev and jang and deng jang jang and jinging today and jiping today And so they kind of see him as like, oh, he was just the, you know, the guy who wanted to keep the Knapp and keep Russia and capitalism. And there was just kind of a simplistic idea that Bukarn was just like a market socialist and just like a social democrat even.

And I think that if you actually read his writings, and to be fair, a lot of his writings are hard to find. But, and some of them aren't even, most of them aren't even translated into English. but actually read his writings a very much more complex and rich figure comes out of it yeah well let's go ahead and dive a little deeper on that and this question is sort of building off that made that last answer maybe going a little bit deeper but you know just zooming out a little bit who was bucarin what were his general contributions to proletarian history and ultimately why is he someone that you think the left should know more about well i think um i kind of might start with the last one there actually by why I think the left should know more about him

because I think that there's this kind of idea that Lenin's policies and Lenin's views inherently led to the excesses and terror under Stalin and I think that Bucharan kind of represents a road not taken that was actually and I will argue was more faithful to the actual views of Lenin than what ended up coming in the Soviet Union and so I think that Bucharin is someone we can

learn from in that sense. Like I said, his general contributions of proletarian history are, you know, he was, as much as a theorist and intellectual, he was someone who was actively involved in building movements and organizing. Like, he was part of

the Bolshevik party when it was still the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Bolshevik faction. He wrote a lot about economics, too. I think he was probably one of the smarter economist of his time. He wrote a really good book, probably his most popular book, actually. It's the economic theory of the leisure class, which is his takedown of Austrian economics. And I mean,

if anyone's argued about Marxist economics of liberals before, you're probably going to hear like, oh, the marginal utility is the true theory of price and capital is wrong. And Bukharan has a really strong critique of that whole school of economics. That's basically become what's known as you know trickle down economics so I'd say he made both theoretical and political contributions to proletarian history and the two

are very much intertwined too he represents a true kind of unity of theory and praxis as they say well yeah this is incredibly interesting I know a lot of people who just sort of have a general understanding of the Soviet Union know about Stalin they know about Trotsky

trotskyism is a tendency on the left all its own but you never really hear that often about Bukharan, and we'll get into some of the reasons why maybe later. But, you know, he was really interesting. He was a close friend with Lennon, and, you know, Lenin and Bukharin would oftentimes go back and forth and learn from one another. And in fact, in our state and revolution episode here on Rev. Left, we mentioned the fact that Bukharin was the person who pushed Lennon to go back and read Marx and angles on the state, which culminated in Lennon writing that monumental work of Marxist theory. I think at first Lennon referred to Bukharin as an anarchist because

of Bukharan's views on the state, which were tied to marks and angles. And then after Lennon went and read, marks and angles directly on the state, really closely, he saw that Bukharn was onto something. So can you talk about that interaction between Buccarin and Lennon and then talk about Buccarin's theory of the state? Yeah, definitely. And yeah, that's totally true, is that Lenin initially called Buccarin an anarchist for his kind of idea about the state.

because Bukharin, after, you know, in 1914, you had World War I happen, and socialism split between the pro-bore and the anti-war socialist, and so there was, this kind of opened up a lot of debate about, you know, what did Marxist theory get right and what did it get wrong at this point? And so when it came to the question of the state, Buccarin thought that with the rise of imperialism and monopoly capitalism, this kind of Leviathan state, was developing and he thought that he was very adamant that you know the state this bourgeois state had to be smashed and replaced by a proletarian state which is the main idea in lennon's state and revolution and so uh you know lenin's initial reaction to this was actually more in line with kind of the orthodoxy that was established by cotsky at the time which is more so that the party will come to power and then reformed the existing bourgeois state into a proletarian state

where Mukarin was more clear about no like we're actually going to destroy the bourgeois state and I think what this means in practice would mean dismantling the military dismantling police this you know aspects of the bureaucracy and actually you know

changing the true form of this having kind of a rupture between the bourgeois state and the proletarian state where there's actually a kind of destruction of the old state apparatus and Buccarin really he harped in on this and at first Lennon you know as you said called him an anarchist and said no this is an anarchist deviation from orthodox Marxism this isn't correct I think at one point like Lennon wouldn't even like talk to Bukharan like they became

big time like rivals then you know like as you said Lenin actually read what Marx and Engels had to say about the state and did his study of you know state this classic study of a state in revolution as really just a guide to the views of Marx and Angles, and it became clear that, well, actually, Bucharin is on the side of Marx and angles here, and it really isn't an anarchist position. And so, yeah, that's kind of how that whole story went about. There's also Lenin's theory of imperialism, which was influenced by Bucharan. Yeah, and I think we'll get to that in a little bit, but I think a lot of people, especially, you know, anti-Leninists really sort of misunderstand Lenin's view of the state. Like I think the caricature of Lenin, you know, and by extension Bucharn and Marx and Engels' view of the state,

the caricature of it is that you just want to take over the state and then just, you know, use it as it is. But if you actually read state and revolution, you'll realize, as you said, it's really this altering of the state in the process of proletarianizing it, right? Making it a mechanism for the proletarian class. So the state as a proper thing exists, but the actual details of what that state looks like and how it functions is very different than just, you know, the bourgeois state. Yeah, it's not like any state that's ever existed before because it's a state ruled by a class that isn't trying to secure its rule over another class, but instead is trying to dissolve itself as a class and abolish itself as a class. Yeah. And so it's, yeah, it's based on the mass organization of the proletariat, unlike other states, which are based on, you know, an exploiting class trying to maintain its position as an exploiter. And so, and Lenin kind of comes up with the idea that the workers' councils, the Soviets, will be the main organs of this new proletarian state, the main kind of power that's exercised.

and obviously things get more complex after that and the whole question of what defines a worker's state is like a whole you know that's a whole debate on its own but Bukharin definitely sees the need for this rupture between the forms of the state there's a bourgeois form of the state and it's based on this kind of

a bourgeois rule of law constitutionalism a bourgeois military it's based on imperialism And this, and it's a bureaucratic leviathan, basically. And this state is, you know, it's an obstacle to the proletary. It's not something we can use and wield, as Marks says. It's something that we need to dismantle and build something better in place of. Yeah.

Fundamentally alter and change it as you are engaging with it and using it. It's an interesting thing. But you did mention imperialism really quick, and you might be able to tie that into this broader answer. but in what other ways did Bucharin influence or contribute to Lenin and his theories, and what was their personal relationship like over time? Yeah, I mean, another big place where Buccarin influenced Lenin was on the question of imperialism because some of the first, I mean, there had been economic work on imperialism done before Lenin by Hobson and Hilferding in his finance capital, but Buccarin has his vote.

imperialism and world economy where he really kind of takes this idea that capitalism is kind of entering a new stage based on monopoly state monopoly capitalism I guess it's kind of how he calls it and Lenin uses this whole idea

that basically capital is becoming more and more centralized and as capitalism becomes more centralized it starts to merge more of its national governments and then its national governments kind of compete with each other for control over world trade and this is kind of the cause of modern imperialism and so bucarin kind of

develops that economic argument and then lennon expands on it in a lot of important ways but bucarin really does kind of develop the main idea of kind of the state becoming more tied to capitalism as capitalism becomes more centralized and this is basically a more abundant capitalism that's in its death throws and at least it seemed like it was at the time yeah and what was their what was their personal relationship like over over time i mean if you read lenin's last testament i mean some people claim it was forged i don't know if i believe that but like he says that lenin was i mean lenin says that bucarin was you know he was the favorite of the party so to speak like he they've had you know they had their ups and downs they had their disagreements as far as i know

Buccarin and Lennon, they mostly got along. Lennon famously says that, you know, he was kind of the intellectual titan of the party, but that he didn't really understand dialectics. That was his critique of Buccarin and his last final testament was that, you know,

Buccarin, he's smart, he's a good leader, but he doesn't really understand dialectics. And I think this is kind of a critique of his earlier work on historical materialism because it does kind of have a very economic determinist focus, but I think it's actually a pretty good work. But Bukharin took this critique by Lennon to heart

that he didn't understand dialectics, and part of his prison notebooks that he writes actually are kind of a study of dialectics and attempt to really understand the dialectic and what it is. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, kind of zooming out and talking about the Bolshevik Party as a whole, Can you talk about the factional struggles inside the Bolshevik party after the revolution, especially with regards to how to handle Germany and where Bukharin fell down in those debates?

Yeah, so basically immediately after the Bolsheviks seize power, it's well known that the slogan was peace, land, and bread, but they wanted to take Germany out of this really unpopular, I mean, they wanted to take Russia out of this really unpopular war with Germany. and so they over through Vizar in February and they get a provisional government the provisional government keeps the war going and the economy is collapsing

and the masses are clamoring for change and so basically the October revolution happens and the Bolsheviks and a coalition with the left wing of the social revolutionary party end up taking state power

and so then there's a question of well So what do we do about the rest of the world? Because, you know, the Bolsheviks were kind of banking on their revolt in Russia, sparking a broader world revolution. And there were revolts all throughout the world, you know, around this time that were often directly inspired by the Bolsheviks. And so there was some truth to this theory. But Germany was basically demanding that, you know, unless they, unless, you know, the Bolshevik government, Soviet government signed a peace treaty

with the Germans and the terms of the of the treaty were pretty fucking bad like it was you know they were going to lose a bunch of factories it was kind of seen as a disgrace to accept this deal from the imperialist because you know

it was the German imperialists were basically you know making the Bolsheviks give up all this um he wanted to make them give up Ukraine and basically Bukharin's position was that No, we should not accept. This was a treaty of Bresclatosk.

And Bukharan's position is, no, we really should not accept this. And actually, we should have a revolutionary holy war, basically. And what we should do, instead of signing a peace treaty with the Germans, is stay in war with them, but turn it into a revolutionary war where we build a red army almost ad hoc using guerrilla warfare, through the peasantry, and then we send it into Germany to aid the German revolutionaries to overthrow the German government. And so Bukharan kind of has us like, okay, we need to go all in right now because this is our moment to truly have world revolution.

And if we accept this peace treaty from Germany, we're basically foreclosing on this opportunity. and you know it's extremely risky and you know we may get destroyed in the process of attempting this by the Germans but the argument was that the Germans were being attacked on the Western Front and so basically it was only a matter of time until Germany gave up so there was literally this idea

that Bukharan and other people in his faction I think Felix Tersinski who became the head of the Czechos part of this faction a lot of anarchists and left SR's kind of sided with this position so there was a whole faction it's actually had at one point the majority in the Bolshevik party

and a majority of a lot of the Soviets were actually voting for this position of a revolutionary war against Germany. So at one point there was a lot of popularity for it and Bucharum was really pushing for this position but Lenin was basically

saying no it's this is too adventurous almost it's two ultra-left in a way like we're we need to safeguard the advances that we've made in Russia and protect the Soviet Republic and that's going to take some sacrifice these terms

on Germany they really suck but Germany, you know, the proletariat is fighting hard in Germany and eventually they're going to come to our help anyway and if we don't sign this treaty we're going to get invaded and so basically there's a lot of

random historical details about this but basically they give in and sign the treaty especially when they realize that the actual soldiers who are at the front are war-weary and they don't actually want to fight and so when it comes down to that when they actually have like hard evidence that people aren't they don't want to fight like people want peace right now that was really what got buchar and the kind of concede to lenin and change his position on this and it almost tore apart the Bolshevik part party this whole fight over whether or not the sign a treaty of Bresla-Tosk or to kind of wage a revolutionary war and try to bring out international communism through this kind of

a red jihad or whatever I mean looking back at it I can understand why Bukharan would have this position because there really was this view that the revolution is going to have to internationalize to succeed

and even Even if Russia gets invaded by Germany, the Russian people aren't going to tolerate that and they're going to resist. And as long as basically we maintain some kind of footing, eventually, you know, we can wage a kind of partisan behind the lines war until eventually we, you know, succeed in Germany and beyond in Europe. And so there was kind of a logic behind this position. but I think that when it became realized that the peasants weren't really willing to fight, that's when

just Lenin, you know, rushes off and signs the treaty accepts the terms of Germany. And what happens in response is that the is basically the left S.Rs, who were the former coalition partners of the Bolsheviks, I think this is a total

betrayal of everything. The revolution is dead. The Bolsheviks are now mortal enemies and they engage in a terrorist campaign against the Bolsheviks actually and they're joined by various anarchist groups that see the treaty as of a betrayal and this is actually kind of where the red terror begins is because of this whole you hear people talk about oh the Bolsheviks oppressed other socialists well really this is where that begun was in the left SRs began a terrorist campaign

against the Bolsheviks for signing Bresclatosk. And a lot of Bolsheviks were against it, too, but they didn't join in with these terrorists. They followed party discipline. Like, Bukharan followed party discipline and, you know, didn't join in these, you know, this terrorist campaign, you know. Yeah, I think sometimes the, you know, what could be deemed as the anarchist or the ultra-left critique of the Bolsheviks, it's really one-dimensional, right? It's really like, like with Kronstadt and stuff, it's like the Bolsheviks were authoritarian assholes who stomped out all anarchists. you know, whatever, opposition because they were Bolsheviks and Marxist and authoritarian, but when you really go into the history of it, you see that this was

really, it went both sides. You mentioned earlier an anarchist trying to blow up Bukharan as he was literally trying to argue with other Bolsheviks about not being so hard against the anarchist, or in this situation where the ultra-left, you know, socialist SRs began a terrorist campaign against the new socialist government. So I just think that one-sided, you know, we were 100% the victims and the Bolsheviks for 100% the perpetrators is really kind of a shitty

shallow understanding of what actually happened. Oh, yeah, it's total nonsense. And there's also people who kind of say, oh, but the Mensheviks, like, why didn't the Bolsheviks work with the Mensheviks? They were socialists, too. But what we don't know is that, like, Lenin and Trotsky actually sat down with the Mensheviks

and tried to come to a deal, but the Mensheviks wouldn't join the government unless they literally handed control of the army back to Korenski. like so the it was it was both ways you know and it is it's if you really look at the history it's kind of hard to say that the bolsheviks did the wrong thing because they were forced in the difficult decisions constantly because they were doing something that was never done before which was a time to have a socialist revolution and not just that but in a country that was told by all these other Marxists the socialist revolution couldn't happen in and they were trying to get the peasantry so you know with the working class for you know and that was a really big deal was this kind of unity of the workers and the peasants and you can get more into that as well later yeah just one last question before we move on uh where was trotsky on the treaty initially was he on bucharan side or

leninside um he took a weird middle stance where he kind of thought that um if they just like fumbled around and and kept the um you know the german diplomats waiting and just kept on like screwing with them that eventually the Germans would revolt and there were a lot of revolts against the treaty there were a lot of strikes there were um there was actually some guerrilla warfare even in ukraine i think against the treaty and so his his plan was kind of a he tried to find the halfway house between lenin and bucharin where eventually he did you know, can see that we had to sign the treaty, but he wanted to put it off as long

as possible, so you know, to try to get, you know, in hopes that Bucharan's option might become more feasible, kind of. So was the concession to eventually sign the treaty? Was that in Buchar and Trotsky and other factions coming around to Lenin's side? Was that

a function of just democratic centralism of party discipline, or was it actually being won over by Lenin's arguments? um that's a good question actually i think i'd have to read the actual debates themselves but i do know that maybe initially it was democratic centralism but i i do understand my understanding is bucharan did eventually come around to understanding lenin's position and as far as i can tell okay because i i think in the aftermath of the treaty and which is the absolute just chaos that russia was thrown into with the Civil War, it became kind of clear to a lot of people that it was just

very, it was going to be very difficult to the pull this off, given the level of just productive capacity that Russia was once the Bolsheviks took power. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's just incredibly interesting. I know we could dive into the minutia of every question infinitely, but the next question, and I know this was a big one, so you can take it in any direction that you want to, But can you please talk about Bucharin's theoretical works, politics and economics of the transition period and historical materialism, and specifically maybe talk about his theory of equilibrium?

Okay, so yeah, this is a long, this is a long answer, probably. Go ahead. So, yeah, let's go at it. So Bucharin kind of had this, he wrote this book, Historical Materialism, A System of Sociology. it actually became a textbook in Soviet schools during the 1920s and it's a very sophisticated book and he kind of has this theory

where he tries to kind of replace traditional Hegelian dialectics like theses and antithesis and synthesis. He kind of tries to say okay that's just Hegelian idealist stuff and he tries to kind of develop this theory of equilibrium and he's influenced by a lot of other actual scientists

of his time and one thing about Buchan is that he was a Marxist who really believed that Marxists needed to be in conversation with the natural sciences if Marxism was going to be a truly scientific ideology. So he was very interested in picking apart and critiquing the work of other thinkers. I think he engaged with him

Mock, who was a big philosopher of science. And he kind of had this theory of equilibrium. I mean, it's kind of similar to, I guess, people talk about social, reproduction where you know you have a society and the society has to have some level of what you know it has to be able to reproduce itself like people have to go to work produce food and then feed the people in the society and get up the next day and do the same thing like there's a process of of reproduction but for bucarin in every society like where you have contradictions there's going to

be this kind of move between equilibrium and disequilibrium in that society. And so under capitalism, like we have this constant period of this constant process of social reproduction going on. And so for Bukharin, this process of social reproduction is always kind of moving either towards a kind of equilibrium where everything's kind of running smoothly or it's moving towards a period of disequilibrium where everything's kind of collapsing. If that makes sense. Yeah.

So for Bucarin, because capitalism is basically, it has its own internal contradictions. Like there's a contradiction between the class interests of the proletaire being the bourgeois. There's the contradiction between the capacity of the productive forces. But in the method of distribution and the relations of production, there's the whole falling rate of profit. it. So for Bukharan, like any mode of production, it never has a, it has like a, it kind of goes in this kind of contraction between equilibrium and disequilibrium. It never reaches a full equilibrium, he says. There's never a, a kind of situation where a society is at this perfectly functioned equilibrium where everything works perfectly. But he says that basically,

you know, a given society is either moving towards or away from equilibrium. And in his theory of the transition, politics and economics is the transition period, he basically says that Russia has basically fallen out of equilibrium to this absolute state of disequilibrium. Like if you read just histories of what Russia was like in the period of war communism, it's, you know, it's,

first of all, what happened was all the capitalists were fleeing and leaving the factories locked up. And so workers started seizing, the factories and the Bolsheviks called on the workers to kind of seize the factories and try to run things themselves. But this didn't really work out right. There was a problem of coordination. And so actually nationalizations were demanded. And so even then, like a lot of times factories weren't even running on like a, on a weekly basis, often because they didn't have supplies. Like there was just like a complete state of collapse in Russia. And so for Bukharin, the

kind of restore equilibrium, there was a need for kind of coercive authoritarian even measures in order to basically restore the social equilibrium of society that had been lost by the complete disaster that the Bolsheviks were forced into. And so during this period of war communism, Rukharin was totally on board with like a lot of the, you know, super top down what a lot of anarchists to cry as authoritarian policies to kind of just get society functioning again. And I think it's

easy to be like, oh, the Bolsheviks, you know, they wanted to introduce labor conscription. They wanted to, they shut down self-management and stuff. But I think it's really easy to make that critique, but not actually have to be in the position of getting a fucking country fed.

Right. Because think about it. You have the peasant, the revolution is supposed to be an alliance of the workers and the peasants. And Bukharan says that in order to maintain a social equilibrium, this alliance between the workers and the peasants

has to be maintained. And so during war communism, like, you have to feed the cities. In order to feed the cities, they had, you know, they basically had requisitions from the peasants. Any surplus product that the peasant made, you know,

the Bolsheviks would go in and they would take it and bring it back to the cities because they had people starving. And obviously the peasants didn't like this because they saw it as their wealth being taken away. You had this whole kind of contradiction between the workers and the peasants.

But the thing is, is that the reason that the Reds won the civil war is because even though the peasants didn't really like the system of grain requisitions, the white armies were worse because they wanted to keep the landlord's structure in place and they used

grain requisitions. And so, the alliance between the peasantry, even though, you know, a lot of the peasantry was alienated by the Bolshevik rain requisition policies, it was ultimately maintained. And so, basically, Bucharan sees, like, a lot of these coercive war communist policies as kind of a way of restoring equilibrium. And then that gets into his whole theory of the new economic policy, which basically he says that, okay, we've pushed the peasants as far. are willing to go because peasants don't really want to give up their extra food especially if they're not getting anything in return and the bolsheviks did try to give things in return to the peasants but there just wasn't that much to give yeah and so in a lot of cases commissars were you know using very coercive methods to extract grain from the countryside to get to the cities and so eventually you had the new economic policy which allows the peasants to basically trade amongst themselves.

And Rukharan kind of sees this as the restoration of the equilibrium that was lost via war communism. That was ultimately a response to the crisis that Russia was thrown into by World War I. That's kind of how he squares the circle between supporting war communism, where you have these requisitions of grain and even like attempts to abolish money. but then this kind of what's seen as a retreat back to the market with the new economic policy. This is what's necessary to restore equilibrium and get people fed and maintain the alliance between the workers and the peasants. Because that's what the October Revolution was founded on, was this alliance between the working class and the peasantry,

and if the workers alienated the peasantry too much, it would lead to disaster. Yeah, and you know, in any sort of attempt to build socialism, there's this transition period and there is this prioritization of how to go about doing things and you can't just snap your fingers and have everything perfect overnight but this labeling of the Bolsheviks

is just authoritarian tyrants is really silly when you look at the history because as you mentioned in the answer to your last question there was an attempt by Lenin and the party to be like the capitalists have fled take over those factories organically run them along worker lines but you know Russia is a big country

the coordination the organization problems, you know, abound. And so what did they, they moved on to nationalizing the factories as a way to bring stability to those places and coordinate and organize the takeover of the factories by the party. So here we see an example where if you just isolate that, you could say, oh, look, you know, in lieu of workers trying to take over the factories, the authoritarian Bolsheviks just nationalized and took it over themselves. When in reality, it's just really complex, ongoing terrain of history unfolding and conditions changing. And does this party trying their best with really no historical precedent to navigate and surf these waves of change.

Yeah, exactly. And what's interesting is the Bolsheviks, they tried a second time after the first time to do self-management or worker control failed. And what you really lose in a lot of these anarchists and kind of ultra-left critiques of the Bolsheviks is that like the Bolsheviks had a lot of faith in the workers to run the new society. And you really, and not just the workers, but also the peasants. This really comes out in Lenin's later writings that influence Bucharan's views a lot. How much faith that they really had in the workers. And so when they did make these kind of, you know, what people see as authoritarian measures, like limiting workers' control and nationalizing factories and having a top-down management system,

it wasn't because they didn't think the workers, like, couldn't run things themselves. It was because just they didn't have the situation didn't allow for it. like Russia was not in this in a shape where they could have had this worker self-management utopia like maybe you know years on you know we could talk about moving towards that but

it's just you know it's it's silly to expect them like if you read Emma Goldman's like memoirs of Russia from the USSR it's like she goes to a country plagued by civil war and famine and complains that it's not a worker's paradise but it's like what did you expect

exactly yeah And I kind of think about, you know, if we tried to wage a revolution here in the U.S. And the first thing we said is just, hey, all workers, go over and take your factories. You know, just the ambient sort of conditioning and the long-term historical thrust of the American citizenry and the consciousness involved, it wouldn't be that easy. And so, you know, you'd have to sort of prioritize what do we really want to focus on beginning and then maybe down the line we can get to that, you know, and then you have this whole Maoist conception of you need a revolution in the superstructure, a cultural revolution to alter the consciousness of the proletariat in the process of socialist transformation that would allow something like worker self-management to someday become a viable option.

But right out of the gate, especially in the context of world war and civil war. I mean, things that, you know, you can have one of those things and it would just be like a country-defining historical moment. But to have all those things, a revolution, a world war and a civil war, all happening sort of back to back to back or at the same time. It's just an impossible situation. And we should not use it as an opportunity to shit on the people, the proletarian movements, trying their hardest to operate in that environment. But we should try to understand just how complex and how precarious of a situation they were in

and how even with all the odds stacked against them, they still managed to have some pretty amazing accomplishments. Yeah, that's another thing is like, like you mentioned cultural revolution and that was actually a big idea of Lenin's that Bukharin also kind of carried on was this idea that we need to raise the cultural level of the masses

so that they can you know take on self-government effectively. Yeah, I remember I just did an episode on Fred Hampton and I played a clip where he was some folks in his community were setting up a credit union and they're trying to get out out of the way of banks and Fred Hampton

Hampton was looking at the idea of a credit union and he's like, okay he's like but where's the educational component here and fred hampton's argument was like you know you can create this credit union but if the people aren't educated if their political consciousness is not raised to understand you know what this revolution is about and what the goals are you know they could just use that credit union as a bank it could become the same thing you know and he was saying like this educational component is absolutely essential to our organization and our movements it can just become like another NGO or just uh yeah just a patronage thing if you have to the people and you have to bring the masses into the revolution.

Exactly, yeah. He was talking about when there's a revolution, if the poor people aren't educated, they could just use that as an opportunity to just steal as much money as they can and try to become rich themselves because they're not educated into knowing what this revolution is about and what its goals are. Well, yeah, and that's funny you bring that up because when the Bolsheviks in the earliest years we're trying to, you know, we're telling the workers to seize the factories, The thing is, a lot of times, like, the workers would seize the factory and then sell it off to the highest bidder and go buy some land to live off of because, like, the peasant life, you know, at that moment seemed a little bit better than having to live in the city.

So, yeah, that's, and that, you know, you can say that's partially because, well, Russia was so rural back then, and America isn't like that anymore. You can't just go buy land anymore, but, you know, it shows a real contradiction and revolution between the kind of bottom up and copy. down elements and how any revolution isn't going to be completely from below, but it's also going to have elements from above. And you have to have a balance between those two. Yep. All right. So in our talks leading up to this conversation, you said that you wanted to talk a little bit about Bucharan's desires or attempts to democratize the USSR after the Civil War and his advocacy of pluralism within the new government. So can you expound on those ideas and tell our listeners what Bucharin's positions were with regards to them?

yeah um actually i'll just uh there's there's a letter that was some a comrade of mine translated from french that bucar and wrote the felix serginski and you know that was he was the leader of the checa you know the infamous you know brutal secret police and then felix serjinsky is a very complex figure actually like he he truly had a like a heart and soul that believed in socialism and truly like um believed in his cause and he actually was kind of disgusted by a lot of the excesses that were done by bacheca and he saw him as himself as kind of controlling a uh out of control organization but um there's a letter where bucharin writes to d'ersinski he says i did not assist in the latest meeting of the central committee i have let myself say on this

occasion that you would have occasion you would have declared among others that So Kalanakov and I were against the GPU, etc. So he's responding to this accusation that he's against the Communist Party. I'm aware of the fight three days ago. And I'm not aware of, I'm not really aware exactly of what fight that was or what he's referring to there. But I guess there was some debate in the Central Committee of the Party

about repression and democracy and whatnot. And he says, Disappate your doubts, dear Felix, Ed Monovich. I wish that you would want to understand what I'm thinking. I think that we should, as early as possible, move to a more liberal, and I'm going to say he puts liberal in scare quotes form of Soviet power. Less repression, more legality, more debates, worker self-management, all under the direction of the party naturally.

In my article in Bolshevik that you approved, this orientation is subject to a theoretical argumentation. This is why I sometimes take positions against suggestions that go in way of granting and extending more rights to the GPU, et cetera. I understand, my dear Felix, Edmonovich, and you know very well how much I love you, that you have absolutely no reason to doubt me whatsoever for whatever bad sentiments that affect you personally and affect the GPU as an institution. It is a question of principle. You are a person at the highest point of passion for politics, but you can at the same time be impartial. again if you understand me I embrace you and strongly shake

your hand and join you in the wishes for a speedy recovery so I mean that's I don't know that's just to me a very heartwarming letter because you can tell that he's in a very intense debate this is like right after this is from 1924 so this is after Lenin has died

so as you can imagine like there's all kinds of arguments going on in the Bolshevik party about what the way forward is and Bukharin's basically arguing here to Derzynski, the leader of the Cheka, that, you know, we need to start moving more towards a genuine Soviet republic. And in my opinion, under the vision that Lenin had in state and revolution. And so a lot of what Bucharan did in this period of the 1920s, he was very much a patron of kind of forming civic society associations that were outside of the party even.

He wanted to promote, as his letter shows, he wanted to. the more and more debate, worker self-management. He wanted less of an... He critiques some, Dürjinsky for being impartial, which I think is kind of, you know, a critique of, you know, just the kind of impartial nature about the repression had taken during the revolution, and that's kind of almost foreboding of what will later come under Stalin.

But, yeah, I think that letter is very revealing of the kind of attitudes that Bukharin had. And when he says liberal, and the reason he puts it in scare quotes is because he's talking about a very specific narrow slice of what we mean by liberalism he's not talking about capitalism or anything like that he's talking about the social

liberalization of certain policies regarding you know protection of rights and a legal framework for you know dealing with problems etc is that correct? Yeah exactly exactly he's I'm and I would even say that I wouldn't I would say he's actually saying what it means is democratic

because I think what liberalism has come to mean is actually very much opposed to what we would see as democracy. Because for me, liberalism is all about the rule of law and the rule of private property and the rule of constitutionalism. And democracy is about the collective coming to form decisions together, and often those two come in the collision with each other. And so, you know, the people might be thrown off by the use of liberal.

Like, oh, you know, Bukharn was a liberal. He wanted to return capitalism in USSR, after all he was guilty. But I think that really what he's arguing for is for truly pursuing the vision that Lenin laid out in Staten Revolution. Yeah. And one thing I like when, I mean, well, two points.

One is the State and Revolution thing. I even said this in our episode of State and Revolution. I really wish more people who hate Leninists so much would go and read that text because I think a lot of the caricatures of what Leninism is really get dispelled with Lenin's own words. The way he talks about the bourgeois state needing to be smashed and goes back to Marx and Angles

and really shows that there is this very vibrant democratic, anti-Bujois state strain in Marxism and there always has been and that's survived onto Leninism, I think, in its best forms. And so I think that... Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And the second point I would make is just the affection between men in that letter is like it's very hard to imagine

in American society that open level of just, you know, telling another man that you love them and being so affectionate with them. I mean, that's so hard-warning. In the middle of like a fierce political, you know, debate. Yeah. Like, he's like, you know, I love you so much. You're just a great soldier for the proletariat.

You know, please don't misunderstand my critiques. Like, that's not the kind of political culture that later develops in the Soviet Union, sadly. Yeah. But there is something there, and I think it's beautiful. Yeah, it is. It's, you know, a lot of these letters are just really, really great. So let's move on to talk more about Stalin and Trotsky And I think this is a really interesting little part of this discussion

And the best way to start this little subpart of this discussion is to talk about the relationship So what was the relationship between Bukharin and other prominent Bolsheviks like Stalin and Trotsky Both personally and theoretically So this is where things get complicated because you have the whole After Lenin dies you have the rise of the left opposition with Trotsky. And initially, Bukharan is very, I mean, I don't really know that much about the personal relationships between Bukharn and Trotsky. Like, I don't know if they necessarily hated each other that much. I know that, um, Stalin and Trotsky had a feud going all the way back to the civil

war because Stalin was against using Tsarist officers in the war in Trotsky got, and he actually ended up, um, Stalin ended up executing some form. Merzarist officers, and Trotsky was like, what the hell are you doing? We need these people to like work with us. And so, um, but I think Bukharin, like, my, my guess is that he tried to kind of keep, like, he tried to keep on good terms of everyone, almost to an extent where it screwed him over even. And I think that, um, at first politically, Stalin was aligned with Bukharan, because Bukharan was part of what became called the right opposition. and so the left opposition's big program was that

basically we need to industrialize and we need to increase the size of the proletariat because we have too many peasants we're too dominated by the peasantry and so therefore we need this process of rapid industrialization accompanied by a revival of Soviet democracy because the reason why they didn't think you could have a broad Soviet democracy at that time

was because it would give too much power to the majority of the peasantry, which would therefore bring in some kind of like peasant utopian type society that would just suck. So that was kind of the left opposition's platform. The right opposition's platform, and at first Stalin was with this, was basically we have to continue the new economic policy, and yes, we need to industrialize, but it needs to be under the new economic policy, and we need to maintain the alliance of the peasantry. I would argue that this position is actually closer to Lenin's last writings,

like on cooperation, our revolution, better, fewer, but better. And just as the comment on what you said about Lenin being like a big critic of state bureaucracy, like a really good book that I wish more Anthony Linus would read is called Lenin's Last Struggle. It's by Masha Lewin. and this really goes over like Lenin's critiques of the Soviet bureaucracy and Lenin's critiques of Stalin's kind of national chauvinism of what he saw and how Lenin, even under, you know,

in a Soviet republic, he actually called it a bureaucratically deformed worker state, funnyly enough. Like that's how he described the state that he found it. He was extremely self-critical of the bureaucracy. Yeah. So talking about the right and left opposition a little bit more. I know people might get really confused on that topic. Can you talk about what that actually meant, what the center was constituted by

and why it's not right to think about the right and left opposition really along right and left terms that we colloquially think about it with? Yeah, because I think people see the left opposition as like the principled opposition to Stalin. And this is understanding because at first Stalin was part of the right opposition. Which was, you know, the big difference, and from what I can tell, is that the right opposition didn't want to apply coercive force on the middle peasants. And there was plenty in Lenin's work. Not that Lenin was right about everything automatically, but just by his work alone, like, he said multiple times, you cannot be coerced.

You cannot coercively force the middle peasants into socialism or into collective. You can't have forceful collectivization. He said, coercion applied to the middle peasants would cause untold harm, coercion would ruin the whole cause. Nothing is more, and this is Lenin, nothing is more stupid than the very idea of applying coercion and economic relations of the middle peasant. The aim is not to expropriate the middle peasant, but to bear in mind the specific conditions in which the peasant lives, to learn from him methods of transition to a better system, and to not dare to give orders. so basically like lenin is arguing for this it's like kind of what you said earlier of this kind of cultural revolution perspective where you know we have to you know raise the cultural level of the peasants and you know there's the famous quote by bucarin that

everyone goes after for him for enrich yourselves you know yeah and i think a lot of people say oh that's bucarin promoting capitalism but you got to realize like the peasantry in the 1920s was still dirt poor and he wanted the peasantry to develop culture and to develop culture you need a material, you need some level of material abundance so you're just not

scraping by and you know every day like you need you know schools and literacy programs and things like that and the idea of that Bucharin kind of had was you wanted you know there's this idea that Bukharan you know he also wasn't really

like a he didn't want full communism. But really what he saw as, he saw it as, is that the peasantry is not going to be collectivized through this is a super top down state industrialist way, that he sees in the left opposition's program.

But the peasantry is going to be collectivized through basically forming cooperatives. And we're going to promote the use of these cooperatives. If the peasantry promotes cooperatives will trade them, labor-saving devices. So that will incentivize them to

develop. So Bukharn is kind of saying before you can develop heavy industry like the left the opposition wants to do, the peasantry has to be more developed. You need an actual surplus from the peasantry that can come over to the industrial side of things. And so it's very much critical of this idea that we just need heavy industry, heavy industry. He thinks that you know, we can't apply too much force on the peasants. And so that kind of brings to the question of the center. Because a lot of people say, well, the center basically just stole Trotsky's position after kicking out Trotsky. And honestly, like, there is some truth to this.

And I think it's easy to lose a nuance, though, because Trotsky did disapprove of Stalin's tempos and how fast he industrialized. But really, what's interesting is a lot of Trotsky supporters like Carl Rattuck and Prio Brizensky actually ended up, siding with Stalin's super industrialization phase. And so, Bucharin's whole line was basically that, you know, we can't have this whole program of crash course forced industrialization

off the back of the peasantry. Because if we do that, we ruin the alliance with the peasantry, which is at the core of the Soviet Republic. And if we do that, it will create this state of disequilibrium. It will cause all kinds of nasty social conflict and famine.

And it will cause like a rise in bureaucracy and it might even cause like the worker state itself to be replaced by this kind of exploitative bureaucracy as just pumping grain out of the peasants and industrializing at a rapid pace without regard for life what was what would somebody who would defend Stalin say about the industrialization process would their argument just basically be like yes i mean it was messy and shitty stuff did happen but you know the USSR was able to catch up to the capital of superpowers in an unprecedented amount of time and therefore it was overall worth it yeah i mean that's that's the question is like could bucharin through his methods have industrialized fast enough to

be the nazis and this is you know this is one of those what-ifs of history you know i think that there's no real way to know that question sure what we do know is that like stalin's methods did greatly alienate the peasantry and caused famine like i do think that I don't think Stalin was I don't believe in the whole of the more or whatever like I don't think Stalin was trying to genocide Ukrainians or whatever but like the policies that Stalin

the center later took up that were influenced by the left opposition and by Trotsky and Trotsky did say that he would never side with Bukharan and he would side with Stalin against Bukharan because he saw Bucarin as a greater threat which I think was one of Trotsky's big flaws

there was this kind of sectarianism because in the end I think Stalin ended up being the bigger threat to Soviet democracy. And was the argument from the right opposition in Bukharin basically that by maintaining the NEP that it would actually act as a stabilizing mechanism so that you could go about doing things maybe at a slower pace but a more stable and sustainable ways? Because it would establish this equilibrium that would allow them to maybe at a slower pace because Russia was really backwards.

But we could slowly start socializing, start bringing the peasants. in the socialism and we can do this in a way that doesn't alienate them and I think that the real difference of this actually bears out in the Chinese revolution because the actual land reform and collectivization in China

went way different than it did in Russia because Mao built a base amongst the peasantry and won their support and so it wasn't this process of basically the urban proletariat and you know basically trying to force itself on

the peasantry through coercive violence. I see. Yeah, that's interesting. So Mao looked at the Soviet Union, you know, saw some of the flaws, went about creating that base of support in the peasantry, so that contradiction between the rural and the urban centers wouldn't necessarily be as strong or as intense as it was in the Soviet Union, which led to a lot of these problems that occurred. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because, like, a lot of the famines, in my opinion, like, the main cause of the famine,

And I do think Stalin has some personal culpability for it because he promoted these policies, which led to these results, and he didn't stop these policies when it became queer, they would lead. First of all, he was warned by Bukharin that superindustrialization and decouacization will lead to famines and create just chaos in the countryside. But, you know, Stalin eventually had Buccar, he basically had Buccaron demoted from any political position. of responsibility at this point. And so he was basically just, he did a lot of cool stuff still, but he was no longer a big name in the Soviet state, basically.

Okay, well, that leads great into the next question, which is, can you talk about the rise of Stalin within the party, how Stalin viewed Bukharin during this period, and why how Bukharin was eventually removed from those political offices? Basically, what Stalin did was, is he sided with Bukharin and Rikov, was another guy in Bukharan's

team, the right opposition, whatever you want to call it, and he was the trade union leader, and so I think Stalin, and I think Bukharin and Rikov were kind of the popular leaders of the working class at that time, because of the NEP, they represented

the new economic policy, and the new economic policy actually had risen the living standards to eventually do a point where they finally recovered from the huge crash in 1914, where they were finally feeding their people better than they were before. So they had a lot of the popular support.

And so Stalin sided with them in the right opposition. And so Trotsy kind of saw Stalin as like, you know, him and Bukharin are the real problem. But then eventually, Stalin basically, you know, takes, it's what Robert C. Tucker kind of calls a revolution from above. And he completely breaks from the NEP and breaks from Bukharan. And I think Bukharin, at that point, he was on the Politburo. And I think he basically, after that, he worked mostly in the academy. And he actually led one of the first delegations of Soviet scientists to a international science conference in 1931. Basically, Bukharin was completely politically demoted at that point.

And at this point, Trotsky was exiled, so there was no hope. and really there at that hope that they would actually form some kind of alliance kind of failed and so

Stalin you know he actually there's also a rumor about Bukharan said in 1930 that he was finished and eventually he was

going to like get executed either way no matter what he did so he was I don't know if that's true or not but it's kind of a funny rumor

but yeah so before unlike getting exiled Bucarine was kind of demoted from the party. And he kind of tried to keep cool with Stalin. He didn't really go too hard against Stalin. And it's really like kind of between the lines and a lot of his writings in this period where you can see his critiques of Stalin. That makes sense? Yeah, like he was trying to be

subtle about it and not call him out by name, but still critique him. Yeah, yeah, because he's still very critical of the five-year plans and the decouacization programs. And another thing happens of the unions during this time is that the unions during a new economic policy the unions actually had a considerable amount of power on the drop floor and they were able to win concessions for

workers but like during the five year plan with Stalin's kind of revolution from above as it's called there's this transformation of the unions into kind of ways for the state to ensure the correct level of productivity

from the workers if that makes sense and so there's also that transformation in the unions that alienates the right opposition from the Stalin center and I mean I don't mean to say that like Stalin wasn't popular at all because there were a lot of workers who were really excited about this prospect of forming

of building socialism in one country like they were ready to be you know they even though they actually faced more adverse conditions than they did in the super war at one point because there was like a huge level of austerity essentially employed in order to finance the super industrialization. They went along with it because they saw it

as you know they were building out the utopian dream of building socialism in one country and Bukharn was you know he was also very weary of how this kind of really forced industrialization could be real scientific planning based on actually looking at the inputs and outputs in the economy and actually developing like a real plan that met the needs of the people if that makes sense yeah was that a result you think of just bucharin being an economist and stalin not being one in bucharin really having the the economic paradigm that he came to the table with that might honestly be part of it because i think bucharin was a very he was a very

economically sensitive figure like sensible figure he was and he was also well trained in like thinking about things in a kind of economic determinist way whereas Stalin kind of was just more interested in okay how many tanks do we have to build by then how much iron does that need and I want you to go make that happen

and so they kind of be he had a kind of like a political volunteerist level to him but he also at the same time had his view that we just need to develop the productive forces and as a productive forces get more developed then that will inherently lead to

socialism and this idea gets critiqued by Mao and Al Thusser and all kinds of people. Yeah, absolutely. That was a huge part of Mao's critique. What is it called? Economism? Yeah, economism, which is, you know, critiqued as other things, too, by Lenin. Like, Lenin critiques, like, focusing on bread and butter structures, struggles, and not the, you know, the battle for democracy and political rights is basically, like, a form of economism, like. And we would probably, we would call the class reduction as socialists, you know, who are kind of just like, we just need to vote for Bernie and forget about, you know, fighting against imperialism.

That would be like, you know, economism, too. I see. Okay, so eventually this all led to Bukharin being imprisoned and eventually executed. So can you talk about his time in prison, specifically his prison notebooks and the trial that eventually led to his death? Well, first, let me, maybe I just thought about how he ended up in prison. I think the great purges had happened between 1936 and 19. 38 and I think

in this period alone you had like I don't know like 500,000 executions like it was you know it wasn't the 10 million people people say it was but it was a lot of people and it was you know the purges are really complicated because there is kind of this view that it was just like Stalin kind of you know cynically manipulating people to get more power and consolidating his power when really there was kind of a a weird kind of popular element to the purges where people were turning in other people. There was a kind of weird bottom-up element to it as well. It wasn't just, you know, Stalin sitting in his room picking who was going to get killed.

But, you know, it did have a massively destructive aspect on Soviet society. And so Bukharin was found guilty of crimes against the people. He basically was in prison. And while he was in prison, he basically bent. that his notebooks not be burned and you know he and if you read his notebooks he even has like some lip service stolen and it just

which I guess I imagine was just to make sure about these manuscripts like survived like that was one of his only things that like these manuscripts survived and it is true that Bukharin publicly confessed to the crime that he was accused of but it's it's not true that

there's all kinds of claims thrown against Bukharan. What is that, like, he wanted to kill Lennon at one point, which is back during the Brescuhtov's debate. And even in his final confession, where Bukharn basically admits, yes, I want to destroy the Soviet Union because I'm a wrecker, he still says, I did not want to kill Lenin. That was not part of my plan. Like, maybe some anarchists wanted to do that, but that was not like, you know, I'm guilty of, you know, putting glass in bread and whatever and all these other ridiculous like claims but I did not

want to kill Lenin that's that's not it's the thing is is he was tortured his family was threatened so it was he was going to admit he was going to confess publicly if it meant saving his family and saving his manuscripts and especially with the

you know the all the torture that he was under and it was at the same time when like you know the NKVD was persecuting dissident Marxists and Spain. Right. So wait, hold on.

I got the date. It was March 2nd to 13, 1938, was when the trial happened. Okay. And it was the block of rights and Trotskyites. And so basically, like, the whole idea was that, you know, the right opposition and the left opposition actually did unite after all, but they secretly did so. And they were, you know, sabotaging production in the USSR. And they were trying to get the generals to over, and it was, you know, just like,

you got all these crazy accusations. And I think that even if you want to defend Stalin on the grounds that, well, in the end, he defeated Hitler. I think you should at least just recognize that this was fucked up. This was not how socialists should operate

in a principled way. This is dealing with political differences by killing each other, not by debating and using democracy. And it sets of just a bad precedent for the world communist movement. Yeah, I actually do agree with that. And I know, you know, people that listen to this probably listen to our episode

on Stalin, and you can get that perspective on that episode. But one of the arguments from that episode was that, you know, Bukharin admitted that he was a wrecker and that this was not actually a show trial, but a legitimate trial based on legitimate subversive attempts by Bukharen to overthrow the Soviet Union or whatever. So my question is twofold. Why did, what did Stalin necessarily gained by getting read of Bukharan? And what is your response to the argument that this was a show trial or that this was not a show trial and that Bukharin's confession was legitimate? I mean, to the first idea that Bucaran, like, why Stalin wanted Bucar now, it was obvious because he represented a different political path. I think a lot of the purges were

honestly not necessarily due to Stalin going after political enemies. But I think if you look at Bukharin and Rikov and a lot of people who actually did kind of represent potential political opposition, Stalin did have a reason to go after

them for political reasons. Even if the mass majority of like deaths and the purges was basically just bureaucrats settling scores and stuff like that. I do think that Bukharin, you know, he did represent, like I said,

for he kind of represents a different path, path not taken. And I think that the level of paranoia, the level of bureaucratic, just arbitrariness, I think that kind of mindset led to them thinking that, you know, Bukharin could actually, you know, represent an alternative to our leadership and this would, you know, destroy the Soviet Union. I guess, you know, you could say that it's kind of because the rise of fascism is happening. And so in the Soviet Union versus siege mentality where, you know, if you're under siege and you critique the captain, you're therefore helping the people who are sieging you. And so I guess that might be, you know, a justification. But, I mean, the Soviet Union was under siege, you know, when Lenin was in charge, yet they were able to have these debates within the Bolshevik Party and settle them and not kill each other.

So I think there was a real degeneration of democratic culture that basically happened that allowed for this kind of thing. happen and to the people who would say that oh this wasn't a show trial was a legitimate trial i mean to kind of repeat back to them just like read the trial yourself and then read the history beyond the trial like you know mukharin was his family was threatened he was tortured and so you know he confessed and even in his confession he kind of doesn't give you know complete uh he doesn't give everything they want he says you know listen i didn't want to kill leon yeah and i you know i mean as a as a father as a family person as a human being when it comes to your family being threatened that would make you know any person do almost anything to protect their family um and you know

it is funny that both your your your offer and the offer from um the proles of the roundtable on the stalling episode both sides said go read the actual transcriptions of that trial for yourself And so, you know, I think, I think, I think that's, that's the call. You know, both sides have said it. So go and read it and draw your own conclusions. And, of course, you know, read the history surrounding it as well. It's an important part of the thing. And I totally do agree at the end of the day, regardless of where you fall on these debates.

You know, Donald's point about, you know, seize mentality aside that, you know, the way we handle our disputes between each other, even if they're very serious and rabid. You know, at the end of the day, we're still comrades and, you know, executing one. another is not the most constructive way to handle those problems and to carry forth our project. And I think it was Bucharne who said at the very end of his life, he said, you know, you should know, you should know, comrades, that there is also my drop of blood on the red banner, which you will carry on your triumphant march to communism. So even until the very end, Bukharin was still insisting that, you know, he was a communist and that he was on the side of Lenin and, you know, take that for what you will, but I think that speaks volumes about where his mind was at as he was, you know,

walking towards his death. Yeah, and I mean, I don't see any reason for him to be an opportunist and lie about that. Everything that I've read about Bukharin and by Buccar, and it shows a man who was very much dedicated to communism, and he truly believed in communism. He wasn't like a market socialist. His vision wasn't like, you know, modern China or the free market, where you have like special economic zones where basically you have, you know, free trade and, you know starvation wages and the government basically allows us to happen like that wasn't his view his his idea was that you know you you can't freaking force the peasants in the collective farms at gunpoint and expect them to you know except this to not go in a way that will lead the famine

will lead to mass hostility to the soviet regime yeah it's funny because you know lenin criticized buchin for not being a good enough dialectician but that's a dialectical point is like you know you know in the short term you can go ahead and do it by gunpoint but the backlash that you're going to receive from that method of approach is going to create more problems for you down the line and so this is an interesting dialectical sort of view of how conflict you know continues and gets perpetuated and how you know to try to avoid that hostility and that all-out attack on one another there's different routes possible but i don't know just an interesting thought yeah and i mean i think that's one of the things that a lot of communists have to learn

from the 20th century is that socialism through military invasion or you know using extremely coercive methods as a mean of creating socialism just you know it just doesn't really work like you see this in you know we saw in Afghanistan where you know they tried to kind of force socialism on gunpoint on you know the Afghani peasants and as much as you know the Soviets might have been fighting for the right cause they didn't have the people on their side and so no amount of military strength was ultimately going to win. Like you say, same thing in Poland, where you had a socialist government that was alienated from the people.

And we can talk about, you know, the concept of alienation and how scientific it is. But I think that there's just a general truth that you can't create socialism through coercive, bureaucratic methods purely. Like, I think, yes, you know, somewhat. We have to use some levels of coercion. We have to accept some level of. bureaucracies just because we're living in a capitalist world and not everything can be perfect, but when we think about building socialism, we need to think about it in terms of mobilizing the

people to build a better society. Yeah. And that's one of the things that's always led me to like Mao so much is precisely because Mao really took this idea of having the masses on your side seriously. And he talked about organizational methods like the mass line, which continually keeps in contact with the masses and I mean he even went so far as to do something which you can never imagine Stalin doing which is quote unquote unleashing the masses on the party itself so I really think it was interesting that was probably the most interesting that was one of the most interesting aspects of the Chinese revolution to me it was that whole experience of the cultural revolution that's one that's one thing I want to read more about just because you had people

rebelling against the state but under the you know they rebelling basically against the the Chinese Communist Party but under the banner of Mao Zedong thought which I just think is absolutely fascinating so yeah and some of the some of the factions in different cities they would be like so radically different in everything they thought and believed but every single faction claimed that it was the actual real you know the it was tied to Mao Zedong thought and it was actually the real representation of what Mao wanted and that led to all sorts of chaos and excesses and failures and eventually, you know, Mao had to reassert control and go in and kind of, you know, tamper down this cultural revolution because

it did get out of control, but, but Mao's experimentation and Mao's real, real sort of like looking at the Soviet Union and understanding how important it is to have the masses on your side, I just think that's an important theoretical outcome of the cultural revolution, regardless of the specific failures of the act itself. Yeah, I mean, I would say just also Cuba is another example of that. If you look at Che's like a kind of experiments in the 1960s of trying to create like a new socialist

man and rallying the masses to build socialism and kind of socialism being a heroic act and his strong emphasis on revolutionary ethics and this you know I think that's also an important thing to keep in mind that you know even in

these situations of bureaucratic socialism or whatever you want to call it. You do have, you know, movements to try to overcome these bureaucratic limitations and whatnot. Yeah, absolutely. That's incredibly important to remember. So now we're going to go into the last section, the conclusion section, and I want to ask you, what do you think Bucharan's legacy on the left is, right?

How is he viewed by different tendencies on the left? And what do you think people get most wrong about Buchanan? Okay, so I kind of touched on this earlier, but like I was saying, a lot of people, people see bucarn as kind of the uh the proto cruschev the proto dang the guy who kind of um came up with a socialism of market characteristics or whatever you want to call it like he was basically the protege for all these market reformers in the eastern block and in china and in the eastern block they led to the absolute disaster that was the collapse of the soviet union whereas in china they've turned you know what was formally you know it's supposed to be a socialist or

public into a capitalist powerhouse of the world. And so a lot of people kind of see Bukharin's desire to keep the nep and maintain the nep as basically where a lot of these people got their ideas from. And as far as I know, that might actually be true. Some of these people might have been like, oh, Bukharan, he wanted to keep the nep. So maybe markets aren't so bad after all. So let's reintroduce the market and have market socialism. But I think that if you actually look at Bukharan and his whole view,

of transitioning to socialism he wanted to have a moneyless economy that was purely planned he just didn't think that you could get rid of markets by fiat and this is why because let's say you have a consumer good that you just don't have the productive capacity to produce enough for everyone

and so what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to ration that consumer good and if you ration that consumer good that means that you have to have a bureaucracy who decides who gets that good and who doesn't get that good that instantly creates animosity amongst the public because patronage networks form and so there's kind of an argument that when you can't when you don't have an abundance of a product sometimes just letting the market take care of it is the best option and and that's kind of um i guess you know that might be a heresy in the left for example in cuba they've you know they've actually had

market reforms that haven't led to a full-on restoration of capitalism on the level you see in China, for example. And I think that's because they realize that, well, if you actually have a scarcity of an item, sometimes the market is superior to bureaucratic rationing as a way of distributing that good, especially if it's kind of just like a consumer luxury good, for example. Right. And so I think that in Bucharn, obviously, like, in his vision, he would want to move beyond that where you don't need markets, but, you know, the idea is that you have to transcend the need

for markets rather than just getting rid of the market by Fiat, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, it makes complete sense. And, you know, during a transition, you know, markets could be a tool. And if you're trying to do a bunch of stuff with education and health care and natural resources, maybe it's not, you know, the best idea to immediately try to lump all the consumer goods in with that as well. And so, you know, for restaurants and stuff to continue functioning. Perhaps you allow that, you know, for a time during a transition while you solidify control over the necessities of life and then you can slowly move over to the markets, yeah. Like the commanding heights, as they call it. Like you want to, you know, you want to

focus on collectivizing all those major industries and then you kind of have these small proprietors. And in Bucharan's ideas about transition, what you want to do is you want to try to convince them to form co-ops and convince them that that would be more economically beneficial for them and that eventually they're going to get run out of business anyway because they're not going to be able to compete with the socialized sector. So you might as well, you know, cooperate with the socialized sector and integrate yourself into it without, you know. And I think that makes a lot more sense. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So having said that, you know, what are some legitimate critiques of Bucharan, in your opinion? My critiques would probably be more of his role in

the common turn actually i think when it came to domestic policy he was pretty good when it came to a kind of international revolutionary strategy i think he kind of had a ultra left volunteerist streak to him like um he supported what was known as the theory of the offensive and so i'm kind of about to go on a historical rant here just to warn you but like go ahead and in 1920s germany they had this um there was this idea that basically basically, you know, the Communist Party was trying to become, like, you know, the most powerful force in the working class. But the problem was that most of the workers supported the Social Democrats who were basically just reformists and they didn't want to overthrow the Weimar Republic and have a Soviet Republic. You know, they were anti-communist and, you know, they let Rosa Luxembourg get killed, you know, as we all know.

So, you know, a lot of the workers still sided with them. And so a lot of the people in the commenter, people like Bukharin was one of them, Bella Kuhn was one of them, August Thalheimer was one of them, Ruth Fisher, she was one of them. They had this idea of the theory of the offensive, which was that basically like a small vanguard of dedicated communists could basically spark off like a action,

and that would cause the reformist workers to shake out of their reformist slumber and wake up and you know rise up and it was kind of like a weird propaganda of the deed but applied to Marxism and this was it was a popular idea in the common turn in like 1920 1921 and in Germany they tried this with the march was called the march action where the Communist Party basically tried to basically have a push and it really didn't go well. You had communist workers and social democratic workers like fist fighting each other in the streets

and they tried to call a general strike but like only the communists went on strike and so the strike just failed and they weren't able to have unity of the working class basically was the problem and so this idea of you know we kind of just like do really

militants and radical things as a minority and that will kind of push the working class to come with us and that idea really didn't work out and I think the united front strategy that you know we unite with the reformist on specific campaigns and we maintain the right to criticize them and we say independent of them but we try to win them over by uniting with them on specific demands I think that was a more successful strategy for the communists and there was a point where bucaran was kind of on the more ultra left like you know just revolution now side. Because the thing is, you

had a lot of workers who came back from World War I, who were ready to have revolution now. They didn't want to wait till the party was popular enough. They didn't want to have to wait. They'd get democratic legitimacy. They just wanted to go in the battle with the bourgeoisie immediately

because they were so pissed about World War I and about the conditions they came back to. And a lot of these workers made up the base of the Spartacus boon and the Communist Party. And there was kind of the base of left communism where it's just, you know,

they wanted revolution now and, you know, Bukharin kind of was, you know, like I said, he was a left communist at first. Like when he was, in the early days of the Russian Revolution, he was one of the people who was pushing for, like, you know, send the Red Army into Berlin, like full revolution

now. I see. I certainly understand the impulse, but yeah, I think history's borne out that it's not a, it's not a successful way to build and defend over the long term a proletarian movement and it hasn't really there's not a lot of historical instances where that sort of ultra left adventurist approach has really resulted in good

things and so I think kind of looking over history you can kind of realize what has and hasn't worked in that approach I don't think has much in its way and and that's something that I've actually discussed a lot in some of my work for cosmonaut magazine is kind of um I wrote an article called from a workers party the workers are public where I kind of discuss fees debates within the common turn between the theory of the offensive and the united front and kind of what worked and what didn't and what we should be looking at well you know maybe we shouldn't be

like trying to mimic because i feel like a lot of leftists like they see themselves as a small vanguard that's going to just kind of like you know jump into the spontaneous mass movement and push it into a radical direction and that's going to lead to the revolution and i think we need a more a strategy of patience based on like you know base building patiently and building up our forces you know because before you go in the battle you want to have a you want to build an army you don't go in the battle and hope to build an army while you're fighting when you build an army and then go in the battle if that makes sense exactly yeah I think the whole idea of revolutionary patience it's not necessarily especially with climate change barreling down on us

the idea of patience on the left is becoming like less and less in vogue but it just means that you have to have the mass base and you know a lot of people want the revolution without the work that it takes to build the revolution and i think that's a big problem on the left people just want to run out into the streets i think they can you know fistfight their way to a revolution storm the barricades sort of thing but in reality what leads to that shit is is hard long-term mass work getting into the communities in which we live and doing the the not as glorious work, but the essential work of building that mass base of support so that when push comes to shove, when climate change really presses the bourgeois state against the wall that will

actually have a mass base to operate from and not just a bunch of people who've been talking to each other on Twitter for the last 10 years jumping out on the street. So yeah, I guess the last question is what overall lessons do you think we can learn from Bukharin as a revolutionary for those of us existing and organizing today? I think what's interesting about Bukharin is that I was thinking about this earlier today. Like, he kind of had a mix of this. He was very scientific. He was very into economics and history and studying historical materialism and making a concrete analysis of the concrete situation.

But at the same time, he did kind of have like, you know, a romantic streak to him almost. And you kind of see this in what I was talking about earlier with some of his more ultra-left positions. But like you see it in his prison notebooks where he talks about. all kinds of things like, you know, building a new socialist culture and how part of socialism, it's not just transforming the base, but it's also transforming superstructure and how, you know, we need to promote things like worker education and we need to basically, you know, kind of a new humanity and not just build like industry is kind of what he's getting at. And I think that was, and he kind of had that kind of streak

but alongside a very scientific streak that would be criticized for example by the philosopher Lukash for being kind of too technologically determinist but I think that he could he kind of balanced it too he could kind of balance being like a super

scientific you know materialist Marxist but also having a true sense of ethics and revolutionary duty and I think that's kind of something that you know I think people who are serious about communism today should kind of try to aim for is being

you know very educated and intelligent even if you're not a university student or whatever but just you know understanding theory understanding the history but having that kind of undying love for revolution and desire to change the world and love for humanity that really actually gets people out in the streets to fight for a better world

yeah I could not agree with that more and I think you see that in figures like Che Guevara, like Thomas Sancar, like Fred Hampton. The reason these people are so inspirational, I think, is because they had the both sides to them, you know, and that side that was, that was, you know, materialist and, you know, could do the the research and the analysis, but also the side that could really touch people in their heart and bring them over to our side through, you know, force of just, I mean, just, just charisma and personality and this idea that it's not just about, you know,

reading these theories and carrying out these theories. It's really about building a better world. in it because we love one another and we care about one another. And I think that goes a long way to inspiring people, but also overcoming people's stereotypes about who socialists and communists are. Like, we're these, you know, godless, cold-hearted, you know, bureaucrats just wanting to dominate others. Yeah, I mean, that's really good point because,

I mean, part of what I think, you know, is the challenge of communists today is kind of winning the battle of ideas and changing that perception about us. And I feel like changing the name, changing, you know, who we support historically. I don't think that's going to like, you know, trying to distance ourselves from our history. But if communists in the real world are doing good things and they're good people, that will get people to change their mind about communism and realize, oh, wait, maybe, you know, the communists aren't these horrible, bad people that, you know, I've been told they are my whole life.

Like there's a story from like the 1930s, CPUSA, I think it was an auto worker. And he said, you know, they keep telling me that, you know, the communists are bad people, but the communists in my shop are good people, so I know they're lying to me. Like, that's the kind of attitude we need to create. Yes, absolutely. I could not agree more. I think you're doing your best to do that. I'm doing my best to do that.

The comrades I love and respect most are doing their best to do that. And so I really appreciate you coming on, Donald. I really admire and appreciate your historical mind. I know my friend Brendan, who I've had on the show many times, also has that. that very detailed historical mind and I love engaging with it but before I let you go can you let listeners know where they can find you and your work online um yeah cosmonaut dot blog uh that's uh the um web zine or whatever you want to call it that I'm working on right now we have we're kind of trying to build a collective of socialist writers one thing we want to write more about

is central planning actually and kind of what a planned economy in the future would look like but we write a lot about strategy, history, you know, just lots of just, we call ourselves scientific socialist because that's what we're really about. It's just, you know, having a scientific socialist view. And I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook as Donald Parkinson.

If, you know, I post on there. But really check out Cosmonaut. And honestly, if you, you know, even if you've never written before and you, you know, want to give it a try just email us if you have any ideas we're trying to get people who are outside of the academic bubble who are just like in the movement you know to write and and share their knowledge with us because i think a lot of leftist publications are very academic

focused it's just kind of like a list of all the big names and left academia and when i'm trying to do is kind of create more writers and kind of develop an intellectual culture that isn't you know it's you know smart and but it's it's not academia if that makes sense right no absolutely it absolutely makes sense well thank you i really encourage people to go check that out it's been an honor to talk to you donald i'm sure we will interact and it's been great comrade absolutely solidarity and thank you for coming on yeah thanks for having me on it was a great time doing the show another dark night see then i'm all gonna be sheep like i'm walking from the 39 thieves and a beat scores of a warm hevetica brown proper for the odd guys

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