On Principles

Allow me to indulge this week in some frivolous analogy written at the last minute. The semester is in full swing, and I am teaching at two different universities, so my time is short but my commitment to deliver bi-weekly posts is unwavering. I’ve had some personal conflicts of principle as of late and thought I could quickly recall the best example I know of principled communism in practice.

The Bolshevik Party was not a homogenous bloc, but a compilation of multiethnic and complex individuals with varying strengths and weaknesses. Among the coterie of world-historical individuals—some who excelled at elicit activities, a few public polemicists, and a few more effective organizers—Nikolai Bukharin stood out as a particularly apt theorist. Lenin, an individual who probably best embodied all the traits listed, said of Bukharin “[he] is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole Party” adding that his only weakness was perhaps a flimsy ability to apply dialectics.

Bukharin authored and co-authored a number of invaluable theoretical texts in his lifetime, but perhaps his best known is Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology in which he argued, that nature, technology, and society should strive for equilibrium, and that Marxism is thee preeminent sociological method. He famously got into a debate with Lenin over the value of studying non-Marxist sociology, maintaining that even if we don’t accept it as objective, we still need to understand it. He also co-authored the ABC of Communism with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, which became an instant staple for anyone needing a short course lesson in Marxist philosophy and political economy. Perhaps less known is the role he supposedly played in co-authoring a theory of nationalities with Joseph Stalin, who later took full credit for the theory.