The Thinking Reed

Another — and no less dangerous — mistake made by Bukharin sadly confirms Lenin’s opinion of him: that ‘he has never made a study of dialectics and, I think, never fully understood it.’146 Bukharin sees the danger to the revolution’s future not in the Party bureaucracy but in the old intelligentsia, especially the technical intelligentsia. He thinks that the enlistment of intellectual forces educated in capitalist society is ‘quite inevitable and historically necessary’, but that it is ‘fraught with very great danger’. It is from the direction of the intelligentsia that the threat of ‘degeneration of the proletarian state and the proletarian party, comes.’147 He writes:

We must not forget that the intellectual forces which are obliged to work with the proletariat, and even those among them who work conscientiously, bringing essential benefits, nevertheless represent (here I stress: at a particular phase of development) the experience of the old culture… For them socialism is not the regulating principle of their work.

And finally, while recognizing the danger that even that section of the administrative cadre which is drawn from the working class may become separated from the masses, he sees this as happening only under the influence of their colleagues from the old intelligentsia.148 Only through the fault of intellectuals of the old type can the apparatus degenerate ‘into the embryo of a new ruling class.’149 This way of presenting the problem actually prepared the ideological and psychological arguments for Stalin’s subsequent massacres of the old intelligentsia and the Party’s old guard, including Bukharin himself: for he, after all, embodied (‘at a particular phase of development’, of course) ‘the experience of the old culture’. It was precisely the inability of the Bolshevik theoreticians to counterpose, against advancing Stalinism, a consistent programme based on a critical analysis of the experience of the revolution that rendered them quite helpless before the bureaucracy. Those who, in 1921, could not break out of the, theoretical dead end were in 1937 thrust against the wall for execution. Both Lenin and, later, Trotsky also saw one of the principal causes of the increasing bureaucratization in the low cultural level of the masses. Although one cannot refrain from pointing to the defects in Lenin’s analysis of ‘the bureaucratic phenomenon’, it does call for special attention because it constitutes the point of departure from which any analysis of present-day Soviet society must begin.

‘Our state apparatus is so deplorable, not to say wretched,’ wrote Lenin in his last article,

that we must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, bearing in mind that these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not been overcome, has not reached the stage of a culture that has receded into the distant past. I say culture deliberately, because in these matters we can only regard as achieved what has become part and parcel of our culture, of our social life, our habits. We must say that the good in our social system has not been properly studied, understood and taken to heart; it has been hastily grasped at; it has not been verified, or tested, corroborated by experience, and not made durable, etc. Of course, it could not be otherwise in a revolutionary epoch, when development proceeded at such breakneck speed that in a matter of five years we passed from Tsarism to the Soviet system, [emphasis added]149