The Tragedy of Bukharin by Donny Gluckstein (Pluto Press £9.95 pbck). Reviewed by DAVE OSLER THE TRAGEDY of Bukharin offers a concise and readable account of the political ideas of a key leader of the Russian revolution.
In doing so, it knocks a number of holes in the author's own brand of Marxism, namely that of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was rightly hailed by Lenin as an important Bolshevik theoretician, despite the ultra-leftism which marred his early work After Lenin's death, he shifted to the hard right of the party, arguing that market mechanisms in agriculture should be actively encouraged while 'socialism in one country' was built, in his own words, 'at a snail's pace' Bukharin became the ideas alsation to proceed al a tormiopposition to Stalin's postto ensure his execution in anti-Stalinist credentials. the countryside will be seen again and again in future revolutions. Hence the clear value of Gluckstein's book.
The author has made extensive use of Soviet archives the USSR between 1917 and first five year plan constituted that in the 1920s, 'the class lay between the two poles of It was a degenerated workers' the word-processor; similar This is the first time, to my knowledge, that an SWP theoretician has used the term, with the party hitherto holding the view that such a phenomenon is a logical impossibility, that either the proletariat is the ruling class or it isn't.
Unfortunately the author Russian Revolution achieved by force of arms in 1917: was it overturned by 1928 events? does not define the meaning of "degenerated workers state', a singular omission in the circulustalice.
Gluckstein only comes back on side by ripping up Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire and depicting the events of 1928 as a social revolution, somehow resulting in the rule of a new class without smashing the existing (degenerated workers') state machine!
Positive view
Gluckstein is also forced to positively evaluate Bukharin's first major work Imperialism and World Economy, which postulates a 'very strong tendency toward transforming the entire national economy into one gigantic combined enterprise under the tutelage of the financial kings and the capitalThis idea is acknowledged as a building block for the theory of state capitalism, which holds that the driving force behind accumulation in the excompetition with other blocks Yet such development can only ever be a tendency under capitalism. It is precisely only where capitalist relations have been destroyed - namely in degenerated and deformed workers states - that such a tendency has ever been actualTo suggest otherwise is to fall prey to Bukharinism - of its earlier, ultra-left variety.