Nikolai Bukharin

This fundamental plot, obviously a variant on the marriage plot but very much engaged also in what Benjamin would call the mechanical aspect of reproduction.

This sort of plot, the characteristic plot of socialist realism, began to take hold officially so that in 1934 the Soviet culture minister Bukharin convened an International Soviet Writers' Conference in which it was simply decreed from on high that henceforth literary practice would consist, in the promotion of an exemplification of socialist realism.

And since then, really right up until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, since then, there really was a form of censorship.

I

Uh, but there was no affirmative action for them like there was every other nationality during this time.

And in '36, you start to change, uh, with the new constitution, uh, written by, uh, Bukharin.

And then you see at the end of the Great Terror, uh, Yagoda has already been replaced in, uh, '36 by Yezhov, who was half Russian.

His mother was Lithuanian, uh, but he wasn't Jewish.

That, that is me saying that Lenin's analysis for what they, what they needed to be done was guided by basically responding to an ever-shifting political terrain.

And when you saw the debates in the 1920s in the Comintern, like between Trotsky and Stalin and Bukharin and Zinoviev and Kamenev and all that, I was like, well, all of them are citing Lenin, and frankly, they're all citing Lenin correctly.

Like, depending on the time period you're looking at Lenin at.

And it, it, it kind of got me thinking about the problem that Lenin presents for a lot of us because we do try to turn him into a very coherent set of, like, doctrines that we can add on to more fully fledge out the, the political side of Marxism because Marx and Engels' politics are...

Why don't we, why don't we, um, pause here because now the, what's gonna happen from here on in is the economic stuff.

Um, and we talk about people like Bukharin and everything else.

This is a natural break.

Um, but, um, again, everything, all of these fields, specialized education, sort of, but it had to be based on ideology.

Picking up where we left off last time.

Even sharper changes gripped the economic life of the country.

Bukharin publicly announced at a Communist Party conference in 1927 that, "During war communism, we purged a Russian petty and middle bourgeoisie along with leading capitalists.

When the economy was later opened up to free trade, petty and middle Jewish bourgeoisie took the place of the Russian bourgeoisie and roughly the same happened with our Russian intelligentsia which bucked and sabotaged our efforts.

You know, P- that pamphlet that Lenin wrote in 1916, which I already alluded to earlier, he talks about imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism.

Now, in this, he's using the term imperialism as more or less the equivalent of Bukharin's national capital or, uh, uh, Hilferding's finance capital or monopoly capital more generally and, and so on.

So he's basically saying that capitalism has arrived at its monopoly phase.

These were just different names for talking about the same thing, and that it is at the highest form because from here it has nowhere else to go and it's time to, to transform it.