On the interpretation of Bukharin's economic ideas

heavily dependent upon perspectives of a post-Stalinist and largely Western origin. This is due, in part, to the proleptic nature of much of the Western literature on the economic ideas of this period. For Erlich,1 whose pioneering work on the 1920s has greatly influenced subsequent interpreters, the most interesting and significant aspect of the debate was what he regarded as its 'anticipation' of the developments in economic theory which came to form the corpus of Western development economics some 20 years later. His principal task was to discover in these controversies ideas which, when stripped of their 'outlandish garb',2 would be recognised by his contemporaries. This forwardlooking approach to interpretation has been particularly evident in the discussion of the ideas of Bukharin. Cohen and Lewin,3 though less interested in economic ideas than Erlich, were primarily concerned to emphasise the 'anticipations' and 'premonitions' of subsequent versions of market socialism in Bukharin's thought. The economic ideas of the protagonists of the 1920s, however, cannot be reconstructed in modern terms without considerable loss of meaning, and the prevalence of anticipatory readings of Bukharin has, as I argue, led to an exaggeration of the cogency, as well as the contemporary relevance, of his ideas. Much of Bukharin's appeal derives from the belief that he, more than his opponents, stood for the principles of the market and that his defence of the market was bound up with his greater sensibility to the need for an economic strategy which preserved the economic interlinkages or balances in the economy which the NEP had been introduced to establish. Bukharin's concern, which is apparent in his writing throughout the 1920s, with the concepts of equilibrium, balance and proportionality is often taken as evidence for this view and Bukharin's position is contrasted with the supposed voluntarism of his opponents. Moreover, for Bukharin, equilibrium implied more than economic equilibrium but stood also for social equilibrium. He viewed the market as inherently benign in the sense that market relations between town and country, which provided the basis for maintaining the necessary economic balances, also provided the framework for maintaining harmonious social relations between the workers and peasants. Preobrazhensky's call for unequal exchange and the exploitation of the peasants was evidence, for Bukharin, not only of Preobrazhensky's disregard for the worker peasant alliance but also of his disregard for the need to maintain

Economics · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Mathematics education · Economic Theory and Institutions · Mathematics · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Russia and Soviet political economy

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