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From Socialist Worker, No. 128, 26 June 1969, pp. 2–3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The ABC of Communism
Bukharin and Preobrazhensky
Edited by E.H. Carr
Penguin 8s
FIRST WRITTEN IN 1919 while Soviet Russia was still fighting for its life, the ABC was intended to be an elementary textbook for cadres serving in the Red Army or trying to re-organise the war-devastated economy.
‘When the Mensheviks find fault with us on the ground that we have “repudiated” our old programme, and in so doing we have repudiated the teachings of Marx, we reply the essence of Marx’s teaching is to construct programmes, not out of the inner consciousness, but out of life itself.
‘If life had undergone great changes, the programme cannot be left as it was. In winter we have to wear thick overcoats. In the heat of summer only a madman wears a thick overcoat. It is just the same in politics.’
This simple approach shows the attitude of the Bolsheviks in 1919 when the revolution was accomplished but all the options remained open. The ABC is not only of academic interest but shows a flexibility and openness of approach which the Marxist Left has lost in the main today and which was the strength of the Bolsheviks.
Bukharin, the senior contributor, undertook all the theoretical chapters as well as the chapter on the organisation of industry. At this time both were left wingers: indeed Bukharin was the chief target of Lenin’s pamphlet On “Left” infantilism and the petty bourgeois spirit after he had attacked Lenin’s programme of using former entrepreneurs in state trusts, denouncing this as ‘state capitalism” not socialism.
E.H. Carr’s foreword is masterly in its biographies of two men who later seemed to epitomise the different wings of the Bolshevik Party.
Bukharin, the chief defender of the rich peasants, the Kulaks, coined the slogan even Stalin disowned of “enrich yourselves” in the late 1920s when he led the rightist block against Trotsky and the Left Opposition and his former collaborator Preobrazhensky.
The latter was the spokesman in his New Economics of collectivisation and in 1929 he rejoined Stalin in his lurch to the left. Both Bukharin and Preobrazhensky died in the great purges, although the latter was never publicly tried or the manner of his death reported. Bukharin fell in the third purge trial in 1938 and was shot.
The ABC of Communism gives a clear indication of the policies pursued by the Bolshevik government in terms of both the real situation and the expected ‘withering away of the state’. It was officially a workers’ and peasants’ government.
Its aim was the destruction of the former state apparatus and the destruction of classes and class antagonism. The dictatorship of the proletariat would itself ‘ripen into communism, dying away together with the state organisation of society’.
The ABC insisted that “every member of a soviet should play some definite part in the work of state administration.’
The Russian party programme of March 1919 was categorical on the need for economic progress.
“It is an essential part of the economic policy of the soviet power to secure a universal increase in the productive forces of the country ... All other considerations must be subordinated to one practical aim — a rapid increase, by all available means, in the quantity of goods urgently needed by the population.”
The party programme was not always so prosaic and the ABC makes this clear: “Within a few decades, there will be quite a new world with new people and new customs.”
Many problems which were to arise in the course of the creation of the soviet state are skated over, as in a passage by Bukharin:
“The proletarian state cannot exploit the proletariat, for the simple reason that it is itself an organisation of the proletariat. A man cannot climb on his own back. The proletariat cannot exploit its own self."
But what happens if the proletariat destroyed by war and a new elite of bureaucrats under a ruthless and opportunistic leader gains control of the means of production? Then a new class stands above the people.
The ABC of Communism did not foresee such problems. Nevertheless, it has an historic significance. Stalin banned it in the 1920s and it has never been reprinted in Russia. Penguin are to be congratulated for producing it once more.
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Last updated on 16 January 2021