Bukharin was simply one of millions, mostly peasants, who would die in a reign of terror. FULL ARTICLE by Christopher Westley
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/16266/a-bolshevik-love-story/
A Bolshevik Love Story
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“Don’t feel malice about anything. Remember, the great cause of the Soviet Union lives on, and this is the most important thing. Personal fates are transitory and wretched by comparison….”
Replace Soviet Union with your cause célèbre or your nation of choice.
The slave mentality, right to the very end. Chillingly depressing, and pathetically ubiquitous, on both the left and the right.
It’s socialism. Mises compared socialism to potassium cyanide. Socialism, in all its variations, is death. It is not an alternative social organization. Socialism is unlimited power for the rulers. Just look at socialist regimes. Russia, China, and Nazi Germany murdered about 150 million civilians in the 20th century not counting military war deaths.
If you believe in sacrifice for the greater good, then you will praise the secret police executioner with your last breath. If we let the central government grow without limit, we and our posterity will become victims, too.
From Al Jazeera on Syria,
Founded in Damascus in 1947, the Baath party was a originally a pan-Arab secularist party opposed to what it saw as “Western imperialism”. Its motto: “Unity, liberty, socialism”.
From CIA world fact book on Libya,
Following a 1969 military coup, Col. Muammar Abu Minyar al-QADHAFI began to espouse his own political system, the Third Universal Theory. The system is a combination of socialism and Islam…
Nikolai Bukharin was an interesting person. He actually attended Bohm-Bawerk’s seminars and lectures in Vienna. In fall 1914, he completed his book criticizing Austrian Economics from the Marxist point of view. He chose to attack the Austrian School because, “it is well known that the most powerful opponent of Marxism is the Austrain School.” (p. 9) The book was first translated into English in 1927 and goes by the title, “The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class,” which unfortunately can get confused with Veblen’s famous book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class.”
Bukharin sides with Menger in the Methodenstreit and does a nice job smashing the German Historical School. When he turns his attention to the Austrians he confuses what the Austrians mean by subjectivism. He paints subjectivism as having little to nothing to do with anything physical or real. And so his criticisms miss the mark. Nevertheless, it is well worth reading.
Huelsmann discusses some of Bukharin’s arguments in his biography of Mises (see p 386-7). In particular, Huelsmann stresses that Mises’ calculation argument is, at heart, a rejection of the possibility of a value calculus, as opposed to calculation in terms of price. But, the possibility of price calculation is a historically contingent situation (dependent on the existence of free capital markets in the factors of production, a happy set of events that has been anything but universal in human experience). In this sense, Bukharin’s specific critique of the older Austrians’ conception of value relations as universally present facets of human existence is sound, and in fact shared by Mises (the calculation argument of course tears Bukharin’s Marxism to shreds as well). (One might note that this goes to the heart of the neoclassicst conceptions of value equivalencies that are shared to large extent by Hayek.)
I would add that Bukharin never refuted Böhm-Bawerk’s demolition of Marx’s labor theory of value (no one has). As a result, Bukharin’s adherence to some variant of Marxist socialism is erroneous at is core, since the labor theory of value forms the foundation of Marxian economics.
There were not two types of socialists described in that otherwise very good review but three; one kind who agreed with and willingly if not eagerly participated in Stalin’s pathological and psychopathic barbarity, delighting in their intentional infliction of widespread human suffering since “you can’t make an omelette without breakng eggs”, as their kind was to do later elsewhere with Mao Zedong in China, and Pol Pot’ in Cambodia…and so-called “humanists” who would praise fellow Marxists like Bukharin, or later, Krushcev (or Gorbachev) in their guise of “reform”, attempting to give a decent appearance to the absurd and preposterous ideology being built on the lives–and deaths–of millions of people!
A third type is the revolting type of person, by no means confined to advocates of explicit and orthodox Marxism, whom we have all seen too much of in nominally free countries, the kind of hypocritical and deceptive weasels whom, while enjoying the benefits of an (all-too-limited) free market and Constitutional democracy in the West, would fawn and slobber most disgustingly in praise of the tyrant while he and his goons were murdering millions–including many of the more “humane” socialists—in the creating of their “workers and peasants” paradise!
Of the three, the participant, the critic, and the propagandist, I think we should leave no doubt who is the most loathsome and inhuman!
I dare ask the writers of this book, and others like it–What took you so long?
PEACE AND FREEDOM!!
David K. Meller
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