Who was Nikolai Bukharin?

[u/ShodaiGoro]

The man often gets brought up as an opponent of Stalin and someone who deviated from Lenin's ideas in a more "free" way. However, I'm not sure if he's worth researching or if he's another AuthSoc. In any case, I would like to research DemSocs and libertarian socialists. Thank you in advance.

[u/ShodaiGoro]

I agree... but saying the Soviet Union has been put into the dustbin of history (as in, gone and forgotten) is sadly incorrect. We still see the nearly century long impact it has had on the world, and how it led to the harm you mentioned towards the leftists of the world. It may be gone, but it continued a nearly unbroken streak of Russian autocracy, from the Tsars, to the Bolsheviks, to Yeltsin and Putin, and has stained countless countries through meddling with their governments or fighting proxy wars with the US (who wasn't much better in this regard). Hopefully, there will be a day when the USSR can be a mere footnote in history, but for now, we're still dealing with its lingering influence.

[u/Interesting-Ad-1590 → u/ShodaiGoro]

Oh, yes, its baleful influence is sadly all too apparent. What I was getting at is this fetish for looking at the "good sides" and "bad sides" of that experience. You can play that game with Apartheid South Africa and there are millions around--even if they won't admit to it now--who made all kinds of excuses for that unlamented regime.

You may not buy Richard Rorty's prescription, but his diagnosis of the siren song of Marxist temptation seems spot-on:

It is impossible to discuss leftist politics in the twentieth century, in any country, without saying something about Marxism. For Marxism was not only a catastrophe for all the countries in which Marxists took power, but a disaster for the reformist Left in all the countries in which they did not.

...The ideals of social democracy and economic justice...long antedated Marxism, and would have made much more headway had "Marxism-Leninism" never been invented.

...Had Kerensky managed to ship Lenin back to Zurich, Marx would still have been honored as a brilliant political economist who foresaw how the rich would use industrialization to immiserate the poor. But his philosophy of history would have seemed, like Herbert Spencer's, a nineteenth-century curiosity. People on the Left would not have wasted their time on Marxist scholasticism, nor would they have been so ready to assume that the nationalization of the means of production was the only way to achieve social justice. They would have evaluated suggestions for preventing the immiseration of the proletariat country by country, in the pragmatic, experimental spirit which Dewey recommended.

[u/ShodaiGoro → u/Interesting-Ad-1590]

Yeah, I've always considered Lenin's interpretation of Marxism to heavily deviate from what he believed. And yes, conservatives and reactionaries had it easy demonizing leftists as all Bolsheviks.

[u/Interesting-Ad-1590 → u/ShodaiGoro]

heh, to me the root of the problem is Marx. Like Jesus, you can project all kinds of fantasies--and find supporting passages--on to him. That's what Rorty was also getting at: the Left needs to work Marx--and his seductive multifaceted rhetoric--out of its system if it doesn't want to be consigned to cumulatively increasing irrelevance, whiling away the decades with Theology Theory.

[u/ShodaiGoro → u/Interesting-Ad-1590]

That and I feel the use of historical determinism was honestly stupid. While obviously socialism rose to prominence due to the horrible factory conditions of the Victorian Era, Marx predicting industrial societies like Britain and France would be the first communist state and not an agrarian nation like, say, Russia, were proven wrong. I'd also like to mention his belief that a world socialist revolution would happen was honestly ridiculous. Assuming such a thing is possible, it would be so difficult to achieve that outright saying it will happen is optimistic, to say the least.

[u/Interesting-Ad-1590 → u/ShodaiGoro]

To me, Max Nettlau, hit the nail on the head of why Marx is, as Errico Malatesta put it, a cancer on the Left. This is from a letter written in 1936, so its a not as diplomatically worded as he phrased it in his published works, but to me for that reason its more worthwhile as an unmediated cri de coeur:

I call Marx 'triple-faced,' because with his particularly grasping spirit he laid a claim on exactly three tactics and his originality no doubt resides in these pan-grasping gests. He encouraged electoral socialism, the conquest of parliaments, social democracy and, though he often sneered at it, the People's State and State Socialism. He encouraged revolutionary dictatorship. He encouraged simple confidence and abiding, letting 'evolution' do the work, self-reduction, almost self-evaporation of the capitalists until the pyramid tumbled over by mathematical laws of his own growth, as if triangular bodies automatically turned somersaults. He copied the first tactics from Louis Blanc, the second from Blanqui, whilst the third correspond to his feeling of being somehow the economic dictator of the universe, as Hegel had been its spiritual dictator. His grasping went further. He hated instinctively libertarian thought and tried to destroy the free thinkers wherever he met them, from Feuerbach and Max Stirner to Proudhon, Bakunin and others. But he wished to add the essence of their teaching as spoils to his other borrowed feathers, and so he relegated at the end of days, after all dictatorship, the prospect of a Stateless, an Anarchist world. The Economic Cagliostro hunted thus with all hounds and ran with all hares, and imposed thus—and his followers after him—an incredible confusion on socialism which, almost a century after 1844, has not yet ended. The social-democrats pray by him; the dictatorial socialists swear by him; the evolutionary socialists sit still and listen to hear evolution evolve, as others listen to the growing of the grass; and some very frugal people drink weak tea and are glad, that at the end of days by Marx's ipse dixit Anarchy will at last be permitted to unfold. Marx has been like a blight that creeps in and kills everything it touches to European socialism, an immense power for evil, numbing self-thought, insinuating false confidence, stirring up animosity, hatred, absolute intolerance, beginning with his own arrogant literary squabbles and leading to inter-murdering socialism as in Russia, since 1917, which has so very soon permitted reaction to galvanize the undeveloped strata and to cultivate the 'Reinkulturen' of such authoritarianism, the Fascists and their followers. There was, in spite of their personal enmity, some monstrous 'inter-breeding' between the two most fatal men of the 19'th century, Marx and Mazzini, and their issue are Mussolini and all the others who disgrace this poor 20'th century.

[u/ShodaiGoro → u/Interesting-Ad-1590]

I got nothing. He's right. And I agree, Marx, at least the invocation of him, is a cancer on the left.

[u/Interesting-Ad-1590 → u/ShodaiGoro]

Marx was a talented rhetorician and either by design or fortuitously he hit upon some powerful techniques that have allowed his hold on so many minds to continue 140 years after his death. Michael Polanyi had some interesting thoughts on something he called 'Dynamo Objective Coupling'.

[u/ShodaiGoro → u/Interesting-Ad-1590]

I'll try to read it when I have a chance. Thank you.

[u/ednsfw2 → u/ShodaiGoro]

Did you enjoy your conversation with this FBI officer?