Historical Materialism , livre ebook

Read Books Ltd. - Nikolai Bukharin

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

166 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

This classic volume contains Nikolai Bukharin's 1928 treatise, "Historical Materialism". Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-1938) was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and author. Bukharin was an important Bolshevik revolutionary, and spent six years with Lenin and Trotsky in exile. He wrote prolifically on the subject of revolutionary theory. This book will appeal to those with an interest in the Russian Revolution, and would make for a fantastic addition to collections of related literature. Contents include: "The Practical Importance of the Social Sciences", "Cause and Purpose in the Social Sciences (Causation and Teleology", "Determinism and Indeterminism (Necessity and Free Will)", "Dialectic Materialism", "Society", "The Equilibrium Between Society and Nature", "The Equilibrium Between the Elements of Society", etc. Many classic books such as this are becoming increasingly rare and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

World

Russian

Former Soviet Union

Political Science

Informations

Publié par	Read Books Ltd.
Date de parution	23 janvier 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781473348721
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
A SYSTEM OF SOCIOLOGY
BY
NIKOLAI BUKHARIN
1921

Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library C ataloguing-in-Publicatio n Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents
Nikolai Bukharin
Introduction: The Practical Importance of the Social Sciences
1: Cause and Purpose in the Social Sciences
2: Determinism and Indeterminism
3: Dialectical Materialism
4: Society
5: The Equilibrium between Society and Nature
6: The Equilibrium between the Elements of Society
7: Disturbance and Readjustment of Social Equilibrium
8: The Classes and the Class

Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was born in Moscow, Russia in 1888. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, becoming a member of the Bolshevik faction. By age twenty, he was a member of the Moscow Committee of the party.
In 1911, Bukharin was exiled by the authorities. While living in Hanover, Kraków and Vienna, he met all the leading Russian revolutionaries – including Vladimir Lenin, Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev, and Leon Trotsky – and wrote for Pravda , Die Neue Zeit and Novy Mir . He also published his economic study, Imperialism and World Economy (1915). Lenin would freely borrow from the work in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).
After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Bukharin became the editor of the party newspaper Pravda. At this point, according to Lenin, Bukharin was “rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party.” He had an extremely productive three years, publishing the popular primer The ABC of Communism (1919), the more academic Economics of the Transitional Period (1920) and Historical Materialism (1921).
However, in the years after Lenin's death in 1924, party factionalism saw Bukharin increasingly clashing with Joseph Stalin, and in February of 1937 he was arrested and charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state. While in prison, Bukharin wrote at least four book-length manuscripts including a lyrical autobiographical novel, How It All Began , a philosophical treatise entitled Philosophical Arabesques , and a collection of poems, Socialism and Its Culture.
In 1938, Bukharin was a defendant in the last of the public Great Purge trials. Despite sending thirty-four letters to Stalin, protesting his innocence and professing his loyalty, he was found guilty of counter-revolutionary activities and espionage, and was executed on 14th March, 1938.

Introduction: The Practical Importance of the Social Sciences
a. The Social Sciences and the Demands of the Struggle of the Working Class
Bourgeois scholars speak of any branch of learning with mysterious awe, as if it were a thing produced in heaven, not on earth. But as a matter of fact any science, whatever it be, grows out of the demands of society or its classes. No one takes the trouble to count the number of flies on a window-pane, or the number of sparrows in the street, but one does count the number of horned cattle. The former figures are useful to no one; it is very useful to know the latter. But it is not only useful to have a knowledge of nature, from whose various parts we obtain all our substances, instruments, raw materials, etc,; it is just as necessary, in practice, to have information concerning society. The working class, at each step in its struggle, is brought face to face with the necessity of possessing such information. In order to be able to conduct its struggle with other classes properly, it is necessary for the working class to foresee how these classes will behave. For this it must know on what circumstances the conduct of the various classes, under varying conditions, depends. Before the working class obtains power, it is obliged to live under the yoke of capital and to bear in mind constantly, in its struggle for liberation, what will be the behavior of all the given classes. It must know on what this behavior depends, and by what such behavior is determined. This question may be answered only by social science. If the working class has conquered power, it is under the necessity of struggling against the capitalist governments of other countries, as well as against the remnants of counter-revolution at home; and 'it is also obliged to reckon with the extremely difficult tasks. of the organization of production and distribution. What is to be the nature of the economic plan; how is the intelligentsia to be utilized; how are the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie to be trained to communism. how shall experienced administrators be raised from the ranks of the workers; how shall the broad masses of the working class itself, as yet only slightly class-conscious, be reached; etc., etc., - all these questions require a knowledge of society in order to answer them properly, a knowledge of its classes, of their peculiarities, of their behavior in this case or that; they require a knowledge also of political economy and the social currents of thought of the various groups in society. These questions show the need for the social sciences. The practical task of a reconstruction of society may be correctly solved by the application of a scientific policy of the working class, i.e., a policy based on scientific theory; this scientific theory, in the case of the proletarian, is the theory founded by Karl Marx.
b. The Bourgeoisie and the Social Sciences
The bourgeoisie also has created its own social sciences, based on its own practical requirements.
When the bourgeoisie is the ruling class, it must solve a great number of questions: how to maintain the capitalist order of things; how to secure the so called "normal development" of capitalist society, which means a regular influx of profits; how to organize for this purpose its economic institutions; how to conduct its policy with regard to other countries; how to maintain its rule over the working class; how to eliminate disagreements in its own ranks; how to train its staffs of officials: priests, police, scholars; how to carry on the business of instruction so that the working class may not become savage and destroy the machinery, but may continue to be obedient to its oppressors, etc.
For this purpose the bourgeoisie needs the social sciences; these sciences aid it in its adaptation to the complicated social life and in choosing a proper course in the solution of the practical problems of life. It is interesting, for example, to note that the first bourgeois economists were great practical merchants and government leaders, while the greatest theoretician of the bourgeoisie, Ricardo, was a very able banker.
c. The Class Character of the Social Sciences
Bourgeois scholars always maintain that they are the representatives of so called "pure science", that all earthly sufferings, all conflicting interests, all the ups and downs of life, the hunt for profit, and other earthly and vulgar things have no relation whatever with their science. Their conception of the matter is approximately the following: the scholar is a god, seated on a sublime eminence, observing dispassionately the life of society in all its varying forms; they think (and yet more loudly proclaim) that vile "practice" has no relation whatever with pure "theory". This conception is of course a false one; quite the contrary is true: all learning arises from practice. This being the case, it is perfectly clear that the social sciences have a class character. Each class has its own practice, its special tasks, its interests and therefore its view of things. The bourgeoisie is concerned chiefly with safeguarding, perpetuating, solidifying, extending the rule of capital. The working class is concerned in the first place with the task of overthrowing the capitalist system and safeguarding the rule of the working class in order to reconstruct life. It is not difficult to see that bourgeois practice will demand one thing, and proletarian practice another; that the bourgeoisie will have one view of things, and the working class another; that the social science of the bourgeoisie will be of one type, and that of the proletariat unquestionably of a different type.
d. Why is Proletarian Science Superior to Bourgeois Science?
This is the question we have now to answer. If the social sciences have a class character, in what way is proletarian science superior to bourgeois science, for the working class also has its interests, its aspirations, its practice, while the bourgeoisie has a practice of its own. Both classes must be considered as interested parties. It is not sufficient to say that one class is good, highminded, concerned with the welfare of humanity, while the other is greedy, eager for profits, etc. One of these two classes has one kind of eye-glasses, red ones, the other class has a different kind, white ones. Why are red glasses better than white ones? Why is it better to look at reality through red ones? Why is there superior visibility through red ones?
We must approach the answer to this question rather carefully.
We have seen that the bourgeoisie is interested in preserving the capitalist system. Yet it is a well-known fact that there is nothing permanent under the sun. There was a slavery system; there was a feudal system; there was, and still is, the capitalist system; there also have been other forms of human society. It is evident - and incontrovertibly so - that we must infer the following: he who would understand social life on its present basis must also understand, at the outset, that all is changing, that one form of society follows upon another. Let us picture to ourselves, for example, the feudal serf-owner,