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Was Mao a Bukharinist?: The “Three-Line Struggle” in Economic Debates Preceding the Great Leap Forward

Matthew Strupp examines economic debates in China during the leadup to the Great Leap Forward and assesses comparisons made between Mao and Bukharin. 

Depiction of a People’s Commune in Mao-era People’s Republic of China

A common understanding of the political history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is that it underwent a grand “two-line struggle” in the years from the completion of “socialist transformation” with the nationalization of industry in 1956 up to Mao’s death in 1976. The two sides between which this supposed struggle took place were the Liuists, or capitalist-roaders, and the Maoists, the genuine Marxist-Leninists. This view is still common among Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, and until Liu’s rehabilitation under Deng1 this was the official verdict of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on its own history. It was replaced by a view that attributed to Mao the great merit of having revolutionarily unified the country but no longer asserted the correctness of his line in these struggles, no doubt since his line, posed against capitalist-roaders, had uncomfortable implications for the new leadership.

The problem with the original “two-line struggle model” is that it washes away much of the complexity of the actual politics and virtually ignores the competing bureaucratic interests involved in the decision-making process of the Chinese state, though this is also true of the view that replaced it and in questioning the one the author by no means intends to endorse the other. The effect is to thoroughly reduce the economics and politics of this attempt at socialist construction to a caricature, replacing political and historical analysis with a confession of faith.

An interesting alternative framing to these ways of understanding the politics of the PRC is the approach of R. Kalain. In a 1984 paper, Kalain argued that Mao had a distinct “Bukharinist” phase in the late 1950s, coming to similar politics as the Bolshevik revolutionary, statesman, and economist Nikolai Bukharin despite a lack of a direct influence from him. Bukharin is known for advocating for the continuation of a modified version of the New Economic Policy. He opposed the early ’20s “super-industrializers”, as well as the late ’20s forced collectivization of the peasantry and the first Five-Year Plan.2 Kalain argues that Mao criticized the “Soviet Model” of development for its promotion of heavy industrial construction at the expense of light industry and agriculture along Bukharinist lines. At first glance, Kalain provides a compelling wrench to throw into the “two-line struggle” argument. However, he fails to provide a useful explanation for the developments in Chinese economic policy in the years he describes. In particular, why would Mao have gone from a “Bukharinist” position in 1956 to launching the Great Leap Forward in 1958? 

This article will advance an argument for an understanding of Chinese economic debates, and particularly those between 1956 and 1962, in terms of a “three-line struggle.” This is a notion borrowed from David M. Bachman in Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System. This framing is opposed to the model of “two-line struggle” and to understanding Mao as a Bukharinist. It will particularly highlight the figure of Chen Yun as one whose role is especially illustrative to understand this period. This approach will reveal the Great Leap Forward to not have been simply a whim of Mao Zedong, but a case of his intervention into an existing bureaucratic struggle. The aim is a treatment of the dynamics of an “Actually Existing Socialist” society that goes beyond the standard focus on big personalities, or treating the state and ruling parties of such societies as either monoliths or as engaged in struggles limited to those between defenders of the communist faith and heretics. Rather, we will emphasize the conflicting bureaucratic interests and economic outlooks internal to the party-state, both to correct one-sided historical narratives, and to stress the importance of questions of state and civil institutional arrangements to future attempts to realize the emancipated society of communism.

The “Three-Line Struggle” Model

We will begin with a summary of the “three-line struggle” model. In his 1985 China Research Monograph, Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System, David M. Bachman lays out the ideas as well as the bureaucratic support groups of the “three lines” in Chinese economic debates preceding the Great Leap Forward. Bachman refers to the three groups as the “planning-heavy industry coalition”, the “extraction and allocation coalition”, and the “social transformation group.” The latter is referred to as a “group” rather than a coalition because its support was concentrated in the Party rather than across a handful of ministries.

The planning-heavy industry coalition was represented in speeches at the 8th Communist Party Congress in 1956 by Li Fuchun, Chairman of the State Planning Commission and Bo Yibo, Chairman of the State Economic Commission. It had a base of support in the heavy industrial ministries.3 The extraction and allocation coalition was represented at the Congress by Chen Yun, fifth-ranking member of the CCP and first Vice-Premier of the People’s Republic, Li Xiannian, Minister of Finance, member of the Politburo, and Vice-Premier, and Deng Zihui, head of the Party’s Rural Work Department and Vice-Premier. This coalition had its base of support in the ministries of Finance, Commerce, and Agriculture.4 The social transformation group was primarily based in the Party. It favored mass mobilization as a method for solving social and economic problems and was ideologically opposed to the divide between mental and manual labor, city and countryside, and worker and peasant. Its views were frequently espoused by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party.

The planning-heavy industry coalition tended to favor higher rates of investment in heavy industry, direct allocation of goods by the ministries, and higher rates of extraction from the peasantry to finance capital construction. This policy served the bureaucratic interests of the ministries who supported the coalition. This was because it maintained their control over a larger portion of the social product, and created a closed loop in which the products of factories operated by a ministry would be allocated by that same ministry for new construction.5 These policies were a far cry from the policy favored by the extraction and allocation coalition, who controlled the taxation system, the budget drafting process, and the distribution of the products of agriculture and light industry.6 Due to its role in the distribution process and its contact with the working-class, and especially with the peasantry, the extraction and allocation coalition was highly sensitive to the new problems in the Chinese economy that had come along with the completion of “socialist transformation,” the previous focus of most bureaucrats, and shifted their focus toward these new issues. These problems included the over-extraction of grain from the peasantry, the supply problems related to the disorganization of production, and disproportion in investment that favored heavy industry over light industry and agriculture which led to shortages of agricultural products. They also pointed to the availability of too few consumer goods to satisfy the increased worker purchasing power that had come with recent wage increases, which threatened inflation in the short run.7 The extraction and allocation coalition thought that these problems had to be paid special attention, and that above all, rashness should be avoided. They tended not to think of the benefits of a planned economy in terms of rapid industrialization, although they affirmed the goal of a “strong, socialist country.” Instead, they focused on its ability to avoid the irrationality, disproportion, and destructive instability of capitalism. They thought that uses of the planning system that resulted in such instability and did not meet the needs of the population were abuses of this system. As Li Xiannian put it at the 8th Communist Party Congress, due to the existence of the planned economy in China: 

…it is possible for us to pay attention to the connection between one year and another in a planned way, and to regulate the range of the year to year fluctuations, so as to avoid, as best we can, excessive fluctuations …. Had we been a bit more conservative last year and thus saved some raw materials and commodities, it would be helpful for working out the plan for 1957 …. We should gradually expand our material reserves . . . and thus ensure the even, smooth progress of our national construction, thereby further exploiting the superiority of a planned economy.8 

This was a view that stressed evenness in development, rationality in planning, and the avoidance of a destructive level of fluctuation.

The extraction and allocation coalition favored moderate levels of grain extraction and increased investment in agriculture and light industry. They believed in the “three balances” of budgets, loans and repayments, and material production and allocation. They also advocated use of the market in distribution where the planning system did not yet have the requisite capacity to distribute all products, increased prices for grain to increase peasant standards of living and incentives for production, and larger private plots for peasants. They favored cutting investment in heavy industry in the short term, but thought that the increased revenue provided by the quick turnaround of investments in light industry would put heavy industry on a more solid basis in the long term.9 This was a far-reaching alternative to the policies that the CCP had hitherto followed. It stood in clear opposition to the program of the planning-heavy industry coalition.

Bachman argues that while this debate was raging through the state ministries, much of the Party, and therefore the social transformation group which included Mao himself, were too distracted by the ongoing Hundred Flowers campaign to pay much attention to economic matters.10 When they did pay attention, it was the planning-heavy industry coalition that was able to successfully make the case to Mao and the Party that its policies were superior. It promised to resolve what the CCP had declared to be the principal contradiction in Chinese society: the contradiction between the advanced “socialist” relations of production and the backward “underdeveloped” forces of production, while also addressing the inequalities in Chinese society that had persisted since the completion of “socialist transformation.” These inequalities had begun to worry Mao more and more.11 

It was State Economic Commission Chairman Bo Yibo and State Planning Commission Chairman Li Fuchun who pioneered the approach that synthesized the preoccupations of the social transformation group with the policies of the planning-heavy industry coalition. This approach involved embracing the construction of small and medium-sized enterprises in the localities funded by the localities themselves; calling for greater efficiency in production through sheer voluntarism to make up for proposed cuts in light industry investment, and making up for cuts in the central investment in agriculture by relying on peasant labor mobilization and additional investment in heavy-industrial fertilizer plants. This would allow them to achieve their desired results of greatly increasing investment in large heavy-industrial plants while decreasing the external demands for heavy industrial goods by the localities. The localities would now be supplied by the small and medium-sized enterprises. The fears of Mao and the social transformation group about the divide between city and countryside, a divide which was growing as China industrialized, would be assuaged by bringing industry to the countryside, and the concerns about neglect of agriculture would be assuaged by advocating peasant labor mobilization. Mao rallied to this program at the Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in September-October 1957. There, he summed up its ethos as “more, faster, better, and more economical,” and the Great Leap Forward was set in motion.12

Backyard Steel Furnace during the Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward was not simply a whim of Mao Zedong, but the program of an alliance of bureaucratic interest groups. These were the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group, who had come together in the course of the “three-line struggle” in the Chinese state and the Communist Party. Their battle against Chen Yun and the extraction and allocation coalition would continue over the course of the Great Leap Forward. Chen conveniently claimed to have fallen ill between the Third Plenum and late summer-early fall of 1958, the period of the initial offensive of the Great Leap. He then gained Mao’s full favor between March and May of 1959, a period when Mao was more critical of the Leap.  He supposedly fell ill again during the renewed radical phase of the Great Leap Forward between May 1959 and the fall of 1960. Chen only returned to prominence in 1961 as a leader of the economic recovery effort after the extent of the damage caused by the Great Leap Forward was undeniable.13

Assessing Mao’s “Bukharinist Phase”

After having undertaken a survey above of the “three-line struggle” in the economic debates occurring in the PRC before the launch of the Great Leap Forward, it should now be easier to assess the merits of R. Kalain’s argument in their 1984 paper, Mao Tse Tung’s ‘Bukharinist’ Phase. Kalain argues that Mao had a distinct “Bukharinist” period in the late 1950s that he abandoned by the time of the Great Leap Forward. According to Kalain, Mao’s views in this period were characterized by a preference for “a more balanced relationship between agriculture and industry in contrast to the Soviet model’s emphasis on heavy industry” and he “viewed agriculture and light industry as the foundation for the development of heavy industry and the economy in general.”14 Kalain claims that the core of Mao’s “Bukharinist” case can be found in his 1956 speech On the Ten Major Relationships, and in his works critiquing Soviet books on economics: Concerning Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1958), Critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1959), and Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy (1961-62).15

One problem with this claim should be immediately clear. With the exception of the 1956 speech, all of these works in which Mao supposedly argues for a position which he had abandoned by the time of the Great Leap forward were written during the period of the Great Leap itself, that is, in the period 1958-1962. Kalain mitigates this problem by only using quotes from the 1956 speech, On the Ten Major Relationships16, in their paper. However, it is undeniable that the purpose of these later texts was to provide theoretical underpinnings for the Great Leap Forward. By looking at the text this picture becomes even starker. In Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy, Mao writes: “The vast majority of China’s peasants [are] ‘sending tribute’ with a positive attitude. It is only among the prosperous peasants and the middle peasants, some 15 percent of the peasantry, that there is any discontent. They oppose the whole concept of the Great Leap and the people’s communes.”17 It is difficult to see how this statement by Mao can be reconciled with Kalain’s claim about this text: that it represented a position that was opposed to the Great Leap Forward.

This should not prevent us from acknowledging that Kalain is not totally off base in including Mao’s early critiques of Soviet economics as examples of his “Bukharinism.” At points Mao’s critique does seem to line up pretty well with what Kalain describes as a “Bukharinist” perspective insofar as Mao criticizes the prioritization of heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry as well as the inequalities between the city and countryside. For example, in his 1956 speech, On the Ten Major Relationships, Mao indeed offered a more “Bukharinist” solution to some of these problems. He states that “The emphasis in our country’s construction is on heavy industry,” but claims that in the Soviet Union and in the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe, “there is a lop-sided stress on heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry.” He claims that if more importance is attached to agriculture and light industry and a greater proportion of investment made in them “there will be more grain and more raw materials for light industry and a greater accumulation of capital. And there will be more funds in the future to invest in heavy industry.” On the subject of the extraction of grain from the peasantry he stated: 

The Soviet Union has adopted measures which squeeze the peasants very hard. It takes away too much from the peasants at too low a price through its system of so-called obligatory sales and other measures. This method of capital accumulation has seriously dampened the peasants’ enthusiasm for production. You want the hen to lay more eggs and yet you don’t feed it, you want the horse to run fast and yet you don’t let it graze. What kind of logic is that!18 

This should not be seen, however, as a new and distinct proposal for sweeping changes to the policies of the PRC or an argument for the abandonment of a whole economic model. Although Mao points out some problems with the economic policies of the PRC, in this speech he mostly counterposes China as a positive case against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as negative cases because of the PRC’s already prevailing lower rates of grain extraction in comparison with these other countries. 

While Mao’s concerns on the balance in investment between agriculture and industry could indeed be called “Bukharinist,” because Bukharin paid considerable attention to similar problems in the early Soviet Union, and his early approach to these problems bore some resemblance to Bukharin’s, Mao’s ultimate solution to these problems in the Great Leap Forward was anything but “Bukharinist.” Again in Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy, Mao writes: “If we want heavy industry to develop quickly everyone has to show initiative and maintain high spirits. And if we want that then we must enable industry and agriculture to be concurrently promoted, and the same for light and heavy industry.”19 Unlike Bukharin, who advocated investing a greater share of revenue into light industry and agriculture, and using the faster turnover time on these investments to finance heavy industry; Mao proposed solving the disproportion in development between agriculture and industry and between light industry and heavy industry through initiative and high spirits.  If we follow David M. Bachman’s “three-line struggle” model of the economic debates in the Chinese state and Communist Party, it becomes clear that Mao’s critiques in these later texts represent his social-transformationist concerns about the inequalities baked into the “Soviet Model” of development. And this mobilizational approach to the problem was precisely the program of the alliance between the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group that formed in opposition to the more “Bukharinist” extraction and allocation coalition.

Mao’s overall trajectory in economic matters in the late 1950s should not be seen solely in terms of individual innovation, that is, from an innovative Bukharinist policy to the innovative Great Leap Forward. Rather, it should be thought of in terms of Mao coming to actively intervene in an already existing bureaucratic struggle taking place within the state and the Communist Party. His position was initially closer to that of Chen Yun, one of his highest ranking economic advisors, and soon to be one of the leaders of the extraction and allocation coalition. Once the “three-line struggle” heated up and Chen became known as a partisan of the extraction and allocation coalition, though, Mao shifted his position to be in favor of the side that he felt had the superior program for industrialization and social transformation, that of planning-heavy industry coalition leaders Bo Yibo and Li Fuchun, in the Great Leap Forward, justifying this policy in his critiques of Soviet economics written between 1958 and 1962.

Chen Yun: Conservative Marketizer or Communist?

The departures Mao makes from the Soviet Model should not be understood as unique to him. Rather, as David M. Bachman argues, departures from the Soviet Model were precisely the sort of thing that Chen Yun had already been saying for years, beginning in 1954 in speeches he gave on the PRC’s first Five-Year Plan.20 The figure of Chen Yun is a relatively neglected one in the standard narratives of the PRC’s history. This is unfortunate because, in the actual political struggle that preceded the Great Leap Forward, the program of his bureaucratic coalition, the extraction and allocation coalition, was the only alternative proposed at the heights of the party leadership to the new course. It was also aimed at solving the broader problems that the Chinese economy faced after the successful completion of “socialist transformation.” At least in the English language literature, Chen Yun seems to have hitherto only attracted interest from supporters of China’s capitalist restoration. These tend to downplay his differences with Deng Xiaoping. They value him both as a leading champion of the market in the CCP for many decades and as a moderating influence on a process of marketization that ran into difficulties when it proceeded too rashly. This is certainly true of David M. Bachman, as well as of Nicholas R. Lardy and Kenneth Lieberthal, authors of the introduction to a collection of Chen’s speeches from 1956-1962 translated into English, titled Chen Yun’s Strategy for China’s Development: A Non-Maoist Alternative; and of Ezra Vogel, who wrote a biographical paper on Chen titled Chen Yun: his life.21

Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping at the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1978

For example, Bachman stipulates in a number of places that Chen Yun was categorically not a “market socialist” of even the Yugoslav variety, and that he saw the market solely as a supplement to the plan. Bachman stipulates that in all cases Chen thought it should be subordinated to the needs of a socialist society, becoming the leading internal opponent of the Deng marketization after it went far beyond the measures he recommended.22 Yet, Bachman does not consistently portray Chen as someone with serious communist commitments that might lead him to come at the problem from a totally different perspective than that which motivated this latter process.23 Bachman makes an open-ended process of “reform” one of the key tenets of Chen’s economic thought and refers to him as on the conservative end of a spectrum of reformers that ends with Zhao Ziyang, the most aggressive of China’s marketizers. 

However, Chen Yun’s economic thought offers something to those of us interested in the project of a planned economy as well. He offered a serious assessment of the problems that the Chinese economy faced after “socialist transformation” and proposed measures he thought would strengthen the overall planning system even if it required making limited use of the market. In both the Mao era and the Deng era he opposed every round of “overheating” forced on the Chinese economy, which usually carried detrimental consequences. This was in accordance with an overall view of the benefits of a planned economy which insisted that the goal of socialist planning was to serve the needs of the population in a way that avoided the violent disproportion and irrationality of capitalism. Lastly, he had a “bird-cage” model of the relationship between planning and the market, in which the bird is the market and the cage is the plan. If the cage is too small, the bird will suffocate, if there is no cage the bird will fly away. This metaphor offers an interesting light in which to view the plan-market relationship.24

Reflections

David M. Bachman’s “three-line struggle” model of the economic debates taking place in the CCP and in the state bureaucracy of the PRC preceding the Great Leap Forward is a useful lens for understanding the bureaucratic interests involved in the debate. It holds that the policies at the heart of the Great Leap Forward came into being as a result of an alliance between the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group in opposition to the extraction and allocation coalition. We have applied this model to assess the veracity of R. Kalain’s claim of a novel “Bukharinist” approach coming from Mao. We found this model to be insufficient because it confuses Mao’s social-transformationist concerns in his writings critiquing Soviet economics with earlier proposals that were in line with recommendations made in 1954 by one of his highest-ranking economic advisors, Chen Yun. We have also reassessed Chen’s legacy in light of scholarship that has cast him as simply a “conservative marketizer.” In contradistinction to this portrayal, we ought to emphasize his communist convictions and the usefulness of his thought to those attached to the project of a planned economy today. 

Overall, this article has looked to explore the nexus of politics and economics in the PRC, going beyond cardboard cutout narratives of capitalist-roaders and genuine Marxist-Leninists still popular today, and to refine our understanding of the complex interplay of the two, taking into account conflicting bureaucratic interests and economic outlooks internal to the party-state. This has been carried out in the interest of correcting one-sided historical narratives of “Actually Existing Socialist” societies and for the benefit of future attempts at the realization of a communist project, stressing the importance of questions of the arrangement of state and civil institutions to the course of such projects.

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Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: A Discussion

Christian and Donald sit down for a discussion on Moshe Lewin’s 1974 tome Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates. They discuss Bukharin, the Left Opposition, Stalin, Soviet reformers, cybernetic planning, and more. Our conclusion: this book has greatly humbled us, letting us know how hard actually creating a new society outside of capitalism is. Unfortunately, Lewin’s book is out of print but we recommend getting your hands on a used copy if possible. If you can’t, his book The Soviet Century is still in print from Verso Books. We hope to continue this as a reading series on the problems of building socialism. Edited by P.H. Higgins.

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The Solution of Bukharin by Amadeo Bordiga

Translation of and introduction to Amadeo Bordiga’s “The Solution of Bukharin” by Leon Thalheimer. 

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin persists as a somewhat elusive character in the history of the Russian Revolution. Overshadowed by the figures of Stalin and Trotsky and their “mythic” conflict in the 1920s, the name of Bukharin was either forgotten or universally cursed until the 1970s. The study of the man and his ideas had an ambiguous meaning: on one hand, it represented the beginning a more honest and open study of the Revolutions of 1917 and their consequences. On the other hand, Bukharin was appropriated by a generation of reformers in the Eastern Bloc who turned him into the prophet of a project nothing short of bourgeois democracy and liberalism.

This tendency became more or less noticeable both in supporters and opponents of this “Bukharinism”. His most famous biographer, Stephen Cohen, seemed to find Bukharin in all attempts to reform the Eastern Bloc., from the Nagy cabinet to Dubček. The prominent Portuguese Communist Francisco Martins Rodrigues considered Bukharin to be no more than a bourgeois democrat. The appropriation of Bukharin’s legacy by the likes of Gorbachev further helped settle this image.

Nikolai Bukharin and the “Right” Opposition were accused of everything: defending the kulak, proposing the abandoning of the proletarian class party, capitulating to bourgeois democracy, fighting for capitalist restoration, and nurturing a renewed narodism [populism]. These accusations still echo for many and the history of Bukharin stays tarnished.

Amadeo Bordiga is seen in a vastly different light. Accused by all of being inflexible, unpractical, intransigent (a characterization that he himself came to partially admit, although proudly), he became the most famous name of the so-called Italian Communist Left, and more specifically of Programmismo tendency. His linear, almost mechanical writing style was entangled with a taste for poetic figures of speech, a very peculiar form of expression that suited his simultaneously dialectical and intransigent defense of Communism. The most superficial presentations of his work — such as this one, ironically — could leave no doubt: there is nothing farther apart from each other than Bordiga and Bukharin.

However, a more careful analysis would reveal the facts to be more complex. There is a much to be discovered in the depth of Bordiga’s thinking, such as his capacity to go beyond appearances and give life to Marxism in the concrete situation (much like Lenin). Both Bordiga and Bukharin were strongly grounded in Lenin’s final writings, appealing repeatedly to articles such as On Cooperation, Our Revolution and The Tax in Kind. However, as Bordiga himself admits, much of this wasn’t even Lenin’s original thought, but was already present in Marx, pointed out by Lenin in Our Revolution. The translation we now present is clear evidence of this fact.

Despite a great number of differences that undoubtedly exist between the two communists, this exact translation is important because it reveals a notable point of convergence and its numerous consequences. The importance of the worker-peasant alliance, the quickest route to complete the agrarian revolution, the best way to avoid bureaucratization and maintain proletarian power in the condition of international isolation and imperialist encirclement: these were all worries shared by Bukharin and Bordiga.

Furthermore, Bordiga, to the surprise of many, would go as far as saying that Bukharin’s “compromise” with the kulak, represented by the famous “Enrich yourselves!” was a truly Leninian compromise as outlined by Lukács in his Lenin.

The translation that follows is a very short extract of Amadeo Bordiga’s Economic and Social Structure of the Russia of Today [Struttura Economica e Sociale della Russia d’oggi]. This work is of great importance and represented the highest point of Bordiga’s intriguing analysis of the Russian Revolution, with its double character as a bourgeois and proletarian rev with its isolation leading to the strangling of the proletarian one. The chosen segment is very short, but crucial nevertheless, as it contains key parts of the whole argument. We recommend, after reading this extract, reading the larger translation made available by Libri Incogniti.

The Solution of Bukharin by Amadeo Bordiga, 1956-12

Translation of the chapters 111, 112 and 113 of Economic and Social Structure of the Russia of Today, Amadeo Bordiga. Traduction française: STRUCTURE ÉCONOMIQUE ET SOCIALE DE LA RUSSIE D’AUJOURD’HUI. 2° partie : “Développement des rapports de production après la révolution bolchevique” (1956-57). Published in italian in Il Programma Comunista N° 25 (december 1956).

When later Stalin was asked which fraction was worse, Left or Right, he replied that they were both worse and he made it clear that his plan was to crush both of them. In the meantime, what was the “Stalin” fraction? It was the one that consisted in not having a tendency, in not respecting principles, in administering the state for the state, in governing Russia for Russia, in replacing the position of class and the international position with a national and then imperial position: even assuming that neither Stalin nor his followers were originally aware of it.

It seems strange to those who write History “by taking an interest in people” that, from 1927, the right and the left came together to engage in an unequal struggle against the “leadership”. It would be strange to think that in insulting Stalin (ten times less than it should have), the Left was insulting a Right deviation in the theses from which Stalin, true weather vane of politics, had drawn before drawing, as we shall see, from the doctrine and theses of the Left But it is not strange if one makes history by the school of Marx and Lenin and not in the manner of Tecoppa. The explanation does not lie in Joseph Stalin’s “maffioso character”, but it rather another proof that the revolution had been historically “shortened” from a double revolution to a bourgeois-only revolution, wherein the latter the leaders cut each other’s heads to steal ideas and brains.

Trotsky himself, tied to the traditions of this struggle, devalued the “Right” even in his subsequent works, and he failed to understand the truth: that the Left and the Right were both on the ground of the Marxist principles, and that the “Center”, in each of its successive turning points in Russian as well as international politics, moved away a little more each time.

Trotsky has the immense merit of having, since 1923, individualized this demonstration which was to kill the Marxist party which alone had seized power: the handling of the apparatus of State, cruel and cold machine built to exert the terror on the class enemy, against the party apparatus – and such a pathological crisis stemmed from the retreat of the external revolutionary forces and the mistrust of an overwhelming non-proletarian population towards these revolutionary forces. On this question, the Italian left was completely with Trotsky – but for motives that have nothing to do with later “Trotskyism”. These episodes of abuse did not hurt the non-Marxist demand for “democratic respect for grassroots consultation”, they hurt the Marxist doctrine that the revolutionary dictatorship does not have as physical and concrete subject the people, nor even the national working class in general, but the international and historical communist party.

The path of the revolution that retreated from the socialist revolution to the bourgeois revolution was then marked by the maneuvers inflicted by history – and not by the caprice of the “non-collegiate” Stalin, nor by the defamed “capitulators of the Right” – at the machine of the Russian state. When Right and Left saw that most of the Bolshevik tradition and world communism was in danger, they united, but belatedly, after having suffered the end of the Curiatii – in the order Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin – in the struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution that ultimately killed them.

So let us not be astonished if we rehabilitate Bukharin, not of the accusation of having been an agent of the foreign bourgeoisies — a charge that the disgusting exterminators themselves had to swallow as the insane who eat their own shit — but of the strong criticisms that Trotsky himself addressed to the famous “Enrich yourselves!”.

Soviet collective farmers


Marxist Appeal to the Dialectics

The first exigence of the Soviet Republic was to survive, either by means of the world revolution or by the “existential” means of the Russian State and the people of Russia; and this demand dominates the terrible historical dilemma of 1926. We showed in due time that if Bukharin followed Stalin in this historical orientation it was because he conceived of this withdrawal as a strengthening of Russia in view only of a gigantic “revolutionary” war against all the capitalist states that were trampling on the European working class. And it must be said that even Stalin proclaimed such a perspective on the eve of the Second Imperialist Conflict in which he had the brilliant idea of applying the same policy against the imperialist states as he had used against the internal “fractions”: exterminate them in several stages and remain the sole victor like Horatius Cocles! Strayed out of the way of the party and of the doctrine towards which he manifested a congenital impotence once he could no longer “steal” the ideas from the corpses, Stalin, once dead, paid dearly for all this by the humiliation that he received from those who the State Monsters of Capital did not want to kill but to imitate in a common race to the exploitation of the world, hand in hand, even if they have the faith of the thieves of Pisa .

So the economic problem is to survive. Which means, as we have said, finding a formula to truly connect industry and land — and we know the meaning of the transition from the formula of War Communism to the formula of the NEP, from the first to the second stage. It is now a question of understanding the development between the second and the third stage, stages of which we have given this series.

Center, Left, and Right were, in 1927, firmly attached to the theory of Lenin: that agriculture under the form of small enterprises is the death of the socialist revolution.


Lenin was indeed forced to accept, from a Marxist viewpoint, the anti-Marxist programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. He accepted this without hiding it, without ceasing to show that it was radically anti-Marxist. Only then were the Bolsheviks able to take power and lay the bases for the foundation of the Communist Parties of the world — Paris was well worth this Mass. However, the system of petty production had expanded by itself; which means that the potential of the countryside had taken huge steps backward, both technical and political.  


The formula of slavery of the peasants by the workers’ state, foolishly advanced by some members of the “Left”, had failed. From one who does not produce, first because he cannot, then also because he does not want, nothing can be gained; neither by coercion nor by expropriation nor by murder.

And yet the dilemma remained: either starve or break out of rural fragmentation.

The nationalization of the land, and even more the statization of land ownership, serves only to prevent the formation of a new agrarian “great property”. Unfortunately, for the same reason, it ends up preventing the passage of the small to the big “enterprise”, and it locks the land in the technical limitations of its culture. But everyone wants the big agricultural enterprise that the industry could develop by providing it with new equipment – on the condition that the industrial workers be fed!

Trotsky and Zinoviev remain on the ground of Lenin: to pass, without coercion if possible, the very small peasant enterprise to enterprises where the collective work is directed by the State (the sovkhozes), that is to say with the State-owned land and the State’s exercise of capital (and so they are for intense industrialization).

Stalin wants to allow, by denationalizing the land, the reform of vast land possessions where a big farmer organizes collective production, obviously with employees, the rent going to the owner.

Bukharin, Stalin, and Voroshilov among a group of delegates to the Fourth All-Union Congress of Soviets, Moscow 1927


“Enrich yourselves!”

Bukharin defends, like the Left, the legal nationalization and is not for free property. The latter is a safeguard position not to fall back into the past and not lose power. But he understands that for big industry you need big capital. He sees that the industry can hardly start producing manufactured consumer goods (in addition to the production of goods for military use, necessary for the coming conflict, for him “offensive” – his dream rejected by Lenin at the time of Brest-Litovsk), at most it can produce capital goods to expand the industry itself, but not to transform agriculture. His formula is that the land remains in the state but the agrarian capital is formed outside of it.

Trade and the N.E.P. had already given rise to capital accumulation, but in the hands of traders, speculators who were no longer legally smugglers but Nepmen, hated by the peasants (but mostly because of the reactionary attachment of the latter to the management of the plot). This capital, threatened both socially and politically, is sterile from the point of view of production and the improvement of its technical potential.

Bukharin, who was often mocked by his master Lenin, knows his Capital perfectly. He knows that the classical primitive accumulation was born of the agrarian rent, as in England and elsewhere, and it is from this origin that the “bases” of socialism were born. He is nourished by other correct theories: that it is madness to think of having a tremendously expanding business, to treat in a mercantile form, as Trotsky justifies it, the industrial production itself, and not to see the growth of capitalist forms, state or private, but always capitalist. If in industry passing from private forms to state forms represent a progress in the countryside, yet there is no capital, neither private nor owned by the State, it is laughable to think that one can have not only socialism but even simply the statization of capital.


Bukharin is in line not only with Marx but also with Lenin. In the countryside you have to go from form 2 to form 3: from peasant petty production to private capitalism.


The land remains in the State, and the peasant rich “in land” disappears (it is not true that Bukharin and his people defended the kulak), but it is the “farmer of the State” that appears and the latter, with its working capital and its employees (in forms which are not radically different from the wage-earning of State-controlled and then owned factories), it produces on its own land a very large mass of products for the general economy, and it pays the rent to the state and no longer to the former landowner.


For the size of the average enterprise to grow it is needed, clearly, that the average enterprise capital grows as well as the number of rural proletarians. This result cannot be achieved if the agrarian entrepreneur does not accumulate and become larger. Another correct thesis, firm in the intelligent mind of Bukharin, was this: no State has the function of “building” and organizing, but only of forbidding, or of stopping forbidding. By ceasing to forbid the accumulation of social agrarian capital (Marx: the capital that is accumulated by individuals is only part of the social capital) the communist state takes a shorter route to climb the scale of forms, the ladder of Lenin.


The formula, the form of social structure that emerged from history, the kolkhoz, leads less rapidly from peasant fragmentation than the solution proposed by Trotsky (and Lenin), and especially that of Bukharin – and by affirming this we do not say that there was a choice between three possibilities when the controversy exploded. And this formula of the kolkhoz was not invented by Stalin, who was only a fabricator of formulas a posteriori with demagogic effect in which there is no genius (which needs parties and not heads in modern history, and perhaps ever) but great political force.


Yes, the brave Bukharin shouted: “Enrich yourselves!” But Stalin did much worse and was about to shout: “Make money from the land! Leave us only the industrial State, the armed force!”. He did not understand that whoever has the land has the State.


The phrase of Bukharin, which everyone remembers without being able to reconstruct its doctrine (it is difficult to do so from the texts), has this scope: “We open the doors of the land of the State to you; enrich yourselves with capital of the agrarian enterprise, and the moment we expropriate you from what you have accumulated will arrive more quickly, passing also in the countryside to step four: State Capitalism”.


For the fifth step, Socialism, one needs neither laws nor Congress debates, but only one force: the World Revolution. Bukharin did not understand it then and this was serious.


Stalin used Bukharin’s thesis to defeat the Marxist Left. When Bukharin saw that history pushed Stalin not to choose routes to economic Socialism but to bring the political state back to the capitalist functions, both internal and external, there was no longer any difference between the Right and the Left, nothing remained right of the Center, and all the revolutionary Marxists were, for reasons of principle much deeper and more powerful, against Stalin. They were certainly vanquished, but they belong to the fertile series of all crushed revolutions whose revenge will come, a revenge that can only be global.