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The Spokesman, 91
Reviews
Nikolai
Bukharin, Philosophical
Arabesques, translated
by Renfrey Clarke,
Nikolai
Bukharin was arrested in February 1937, and shot in the back of the head
thirteen months later. When he was not actually starring in the show trial
which provided the culminating moment in Stalin’s purge of the old Bolshevik
Party, he was engaged in a desperate negotiation with the secret police to
save his young wife, Larina, and their baby son, from the executioners.
Evidently,
the price of their lives was not only the extinction of Bukharin himself, but
also a dreadful ignominy, in which he took upon himself responsibility for all
sorts of imaginary crimes. The purpose of the Bukharin trial was to
incriminate all the oppositionists which it destroyed in fictitious plots to
dismember the Soviet Union in the service of the Nazis, thus making
unavoidable the golden rule, so often since invoked: ‘there is no
alternative’.
It
was already evident to rational observers that by the time Bukharin was
brought to trial, he was doomed. The fact that he wrote four books while he
was being interrogated is remarkable testimony to his self-control and
personal courage. But since he, above all, must have had a strong presentiment
of the fate which awaited him, he must, at least some of the time, assumed
that he was writing for an audience of one. The principal mystery which
remains is how it came about that these four prison books were kept from the
incinerator when their author was dispatched.
Helena
Sheehan contributes an introduction to Philosophical
Arabesques,
under the title ‘A Voice from the Dead’. It is a thoughtful essay. She
sketches out the work programme that Bukharin had undertaken. The four
manuscripts involved were: Socialism
and its Culture,
‘a sequel to his book The
Degradation
of
Culture and Fascism’
which he was in the course of writing immediately before he was arrested. This
prison manuscript was intended to be published as the second part of a
two-volume work called The
Crisis of Capitalist Culture and
Socialism.
The second prison volume was a collection of poems entitled The
Transformation
of the World.
The third was an autobiographical novel, and the fourth was the book we are
considering,
Philosophical Arabesques.
Thanks
to the intervention of Gorbachev, and the eloquent prompting of Stephen Cohen,
Bukharin’s biographer, these books were exhumed from the archives. Two of
them, the Arabesques
and
the autobiographical work, were published in Russian soon after, and have been
translated into English very recently. The others may be expected when the
publishing industry catches up with these forgotten events.
Whatever
modern philosophers may think about them, there is no doubt that Bukharin
himself regarded his philosophical manuscripts as central to his legacy.
‘I
wrote (them) mostly at night, literally wrenching them from my heart. I
fervently beg you not to let this work disappear … don’t let this work
perish … this is completely apart from my personal fate.’
That
he felt it necessary to address such a letter to Stalin explains how very far
the criticism of events had already gone to falsify his philosophy. Stalin,
here, disposed of absolute power, and could decide on the merest whim whether
to extinguish Bukharin’s life or not. He could also decide whether to
extinguish what was left of Bukharin’s philosophy. Philosophical
Arabesques,
the prisoner told his wife, Anna, was ‘the most important thing’.
Long
ago in his heyday, Bukharin had composed a primer of Marxist sociology, widely
published under the title Historical
Materialism.
This
was a scholarly book, replete with modern instances, but it was squarely
within the tradition of Russian Marxist thinking, established by Plekhanov. A
thousand miles away from the later pieties which were so much esteemed by
Stalin, this was nonetheless a somewhat mechanical work, and drew down a
barrage of criticism from the most significant Marxian philosophers in Central
and Western Europe, such as Gramsci, Karl Korsch and Lukacs. Their criticisms
must have stung Bukharin because they all echoed somewhat comments by Lenin
(in his famous testament), to the effect that Bukharin ‘had never really
understood the dialectic’. Now, in prison, this bruising apologia was
Bukharin’s attempt to claim that dialectic. As a moment in the history of
ideas it is interesting: but not anything like as interesting as it is
poignant. It is as if Galileo were to seek to compose his testament within the
mental framework of the medieval church. Bukharin begins his book with an
obligatory proclamation of the proletarian confession, and a denunciation of
his historical opponents.
‘These
walking dead, these living corpses, remote from material practice, “pure
thinkers,” intellectual human dust, still exist, and most importantly,
continue to infect the air with the excreta of their brains, and to cast their
nets, fine, sticky nets of arguments, which to many people still seem
convincing.’
This
is his general anathema pronounced upon ‘the devil of solipsism’. But that
devil continues to exist, while Bukharin, himself genuinely enlisted among the
walking dead, would soon stop walking.
During
the First World War Lenin had devoted some time in exile to the study of
Hegel’s logic. In his notebooks on that study, he had insisted that the
consistency of thoroughgoing idealism was closer to the truth than mechanical
materialism. In short, he recognised a greater affinity between Marx and Hegel
than had become fashionable among most of the Marxists of the late nineteenth
century. That is perhaps why Bukharin, seeking to claim the patrimony of
Lenin’s view, was at pains to begin his work with an attack on solipsism, or
‘subjective’ idealism. In its classic embodiment, Bishop Berkeley had
argued that our knowledge of the external world could not penetrate beyond the
sense-data through which we received it. For those for whom it matters, it is
possible to play quite a large number of word games based on this perception.
Does the material world exist? Hegel and Marx were not concerned with
unravelling word games, but with understanding the connections in reality,
which one called ‘ideal’ and another ‘material’.
When
refuting Bishop Berkeley’s earlier exposition of solipsism, Samuel Johnson
was said to have kicked a stone, and proclaimed: ‘I refute it thus’.
Bukharin cites a number of other such vulgar refutations. Stalin’s
refutation, however, was even more vulgar and brutal. The annihilation of
Bukharin guaranteed that the one-time numerous public which avidly followed
the progress of his earlier thought would shrink to the merest coterie, while
the principal interest of his book for scholars would be as a trigger to
assist the understanding of the dictator’s aberrant psychology.
I
was involved in the late history of this affair. Approaching the fiftieth
anniversary of Bukharin’s execution, his son, Yuri Larin, drafted an appeal
to Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, to intercede
for the rehabilitation of his father. Since Berlinguer did not respond, Roy
Medvedev sent a copy of this appeal to me, with the request that I do what I
could to secure a favourable response.
Bukharin’s
rehabilitation had been in train in 1956, but it was aborted by Khrushchev,
because important Communist Parties in Western Europe had taken objection to
it. Following the Secret Speech of 1956, they had lost very large numbers of
members, and they thought that the haemorrhage could even wash them away if it
were not staunched. Evidently, Yuri Larin had rightly intuited that something
was stirring in Italian Communism, which was made of different and more
inquisitive stuff from the rigorous orthodoxy of the latter-day Stalinists in
France.
A
large part of the support for Bukharin’s rehabilitation naturally came from
those who approved of his economic policies. Their numbers had much increased
in Russia itself, in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. I did not share their
view, but I did share the opinion that the rehabilitation of Bukharin was
important in the struggle for the re-establishment of human rights, and for
the reassertion of a measure of freedom of enquiry. So I drafted an appeal for
the Russell Foundation, and we set about the systematic collection of
signatures among Socialists and
Very
nearly straight away, prominent Italian Socialists such as Riccardo Lombardi,
Lelio Basso and Enzo Agnoletti signed the appeal, and announced that they had
done so in the Italian press. There followed a rapid and generous response
from leading Italian Communists. Others joined their voices, from Australia
all the way across to the United States. Then came Berlinguer’s answer to
Larin’s appeal: the Istituto Gramsci promulgated a seminar on the life and
work of Bukharin, with keynote papers by Steve Cohen, his biographer, and by
prominent scholars such as Alex Nove, Moshe Lewin, Wlodzimierz Brus, Su
Shaozhi and Guiseppe Boffa.
As
this argument continued to gather force, it found powerful supporters in the
Soviet Union, and ultimately it brought about Gorbachev’s decision to
repudiate the infamous trial, and make belated amends to Bukharin’s family
for his destruction. So it came about that Steve Cohen established a major
victory, and restored these books to the open library shelves.
But
the political momentum of this restoration went far further, restoring greatly
more of the market than anyone in Bukharin’s time had imagined to be
possible. Thus poor Russia endured a plague of oligarchs and speculators, who
established new world records for cupidity and unbridled greed.
I
cannot here digress into the impact of these events in China, which was in
some ways even greater. There, my short booklet on the Bukharin case was
translated into Chinese on the initiative of Su Shaozhi, later to become the
head of the Institute of Marxism, Leninism, Mao Tse-Tung Thought, and one of
the first exiles following the confrontation of Tiananmen Square.
In
a way, Bukharin’s rehabilitation was too complete, even if it was at least
as muddled as its own subject. Socialism with Chinese characteristics has at
one level been incredibly successful, and owns a very large part of the
American National Debt. But at another level, it would have been a great
disappointment to Bukharin, since it can still only be promoted in smoke
signals, and in the language of hints, nods and winks.
Solipsism
may not avoid the reproaches levelled at it by those previous generations of
Marxists: but compared to the depredations of capitalist Communism, it might
seem relatively rational.
Ken
Coates
