By The Theoretical Bureau of the Revolutionary Maoist Coalition

Nikolai Bukharin, speaking on behalf of the Comintern, opened the 6th congress of the Communist Party of China with the multi-day speech “The Chinese Revolution and the Tasks of the Chinese Communists.”  In this speech he laid out the Comintern’s views on the current world situation and the CPC’s role in this new situation, the so-called “Third Period”, when, after the capitalist powers had regathered their strength following the First World War, a new period of inter-imperialist struggle had began and thus there was an opportunity for the Communist movement to take advantage of this conflict.  Bukharin here also elaborated on an idea that would become central to the political developments in China for many decades and even into this century, the theory of the productive forces.  Bukharin suggests heavy industry as the basis for development of socialism and tells the Chinese comrades that, because they lag behind in heavy industrial development, China cannot yet embark on the path of building socialism and thus must develop the productive forces of capitalism as a basis for a later socialist project.  

1. Third Period 

Bukharin’s idea of the third period and what it requires from the communist parties of the world grows, of course, from his conception of the two earlier periods.

“The first period grew out of the immediate aftermath of the great imperialist war. The major manifestation of this period was the urgent revolutionary crises that occurred in many countries. First and foremost among all the countries of Europe were the two revolutions in Russia, both victorious revolutions that resulted from the seizure of political power by the working classes.”  This first period culminated in the “working class …[defeat] because… among all the workers’ movements of Western Europe, there was no close solidarity and no organization of a sound communist party.”(The Chinese Revolution and the Tasks of the Chinese Communists – An International Delegate’s Political Report to the sixth congress of the Chinese [Communist] Party [Part I]. Chinese Studies in History, p.261)  We see Bukharin justifies not only the necessity of the Comintern but also the paternalistic nature of his present speech in this historiography.  

The second period, which is said to have begun around 1922, he describes as being characterized by the partial stability of the capitalist economy.  “After the defeat of the working class, the bourgeoisie constantly utilized new ways or new means – the occurrence of fascism in Italy, for example – to begin the consolidation of its own capitalist economy, which had disintegrated during the first period… capitalism rescued itself from the conditions of great chaos after the great war, that first it restored the productive forces of its own economies to their prewar level and later surpassed the prewar scale.”(Chinese Studies in History, p263)  Bukharin saw this increase in the productive forces of capitalism as leading both to inter-imperialist war and the opportunity for revolutionary movements to take advantage of those conditions and seize power, just as happened in Russia during the first period.  Therefore, for Bukharin, increased inter-imperialist competition signaled the beginning of a new, third period, which called for more militant activity than the earlier period of the stabilization of global capitalism.  

There is a need to analyze the increased activity in attacking social-fascism in the parties of the Comintern at the time due to this Third Period formulation.  But because of the limited scope of these reviews, focusing on the important trends and instances of revisionism in the history of the communist movement, this topic must be covered at another time and place.  

2. Theory of Productive Forces 

In this speech Bukharin elaborates an early version of the theory of productive forces, a theory “upheld [by] the Khrushchevites, [which]negated the class struggleand concentrated attention towards building modern productive forces, primarily through heavy industry. [The] argument was that productive forces are the main motor of change and it was the backward productive forces in China that were the main factor holding back the development of the country. Changes in production relations should wait until after the productive forces had been developed enough; the cooperativisation of agriculture should wait until industries developed enough to provide machinery for rural mechanisation. All these proposals negated the importance of the relations of production and the class struggle. It would lead to growth of revisionist and bureaucratic trends and the growth of a new exploiting class.” (Communist Party of India (Maoist), Marxism-Leninism-Maoism Basic Course, 2019, p.219)

This focus on heavy industry is a main feature of Bukharin’s description of the possibility of building socialism in China.  For him the level of heavy industry required as a basis for socialist development is about that of Russia at the time of it’s revolution in 1917.  He says “The building of genuine socialism requires the setting up of the conditions of socialism within the country. And the condition for this kind of building is the degree of development of heavy industry. If there is no heavy industry, if production does not proceed in an organized manner by the state political power of the working class, if production is desultory, if there are tens of thousands of or several millions of small enterprises in existence, if there is no big industry that can be converted into the property of the proletariat’s state and into a whole and planned [enterprise], then there are no prerequisites for socialism. (Chinese Studies in History, p.279)”  

In reality there are no “prerequisites for socialism.”  Socialism can be developed at any economic level.  Not only is this demonstrated by historical practice but theory as well.  For Marx, the lower stage of communism, which we Leninists call Socialism,  was still “economically… stamped with the birthmarks of the old society.”  Bukharin’s understanding clearly differs from that of Marx. Bukharin thinks that if elements of the capitalist or pre-capitalist economy remain, that there cannot be said to be socialism.  Marx understands that socialism is a process of development in which society seeks to rid itself of the contradictions held over from the old way of life.  Ultimately socialism can be said to exist, or at least it can be said that it is developing, even in the most economically backward areas as long as the workers are in charge of the state and projects are being dveloped to consolidate industry and build the new social productive forces.  Bukharin, in his speech, disagrees saying “If under these circumstances the proletariat attains political power, what can it do next? It may think of organizing the several million handicraft workshops; but how can the several hundred thousand, the several million handicraft shops be organized? Naturally they cannot be organized, because how much can be produced, what kind of overall plan should be used, and how tools should be distributed among them cannot be calculated. Since it is such a desultory economy, they cannot be united by a single general plan or overall management, much less can there be socialism.” (Chinese Studies in History, p.280)  Socialism need not be “a single general plan” for the economy but rather a general plan of development broadly speaking.  It can be made up of many different small projects and plans which lead to certain ends.  It would be absurd, clearly, to call the USSR during the period of the NEP anything other than a socialist state despite the objective growth of the capitalist sector.  This is because we understand the NEP as a socialist project, a project with socialist aims, which is strictly managed by the state due to the dangers of capitalist development.  This is far different from the unmanaged development of capitalism which Bukharin suggests as the prerequisite for socialism and which would lead not to an eventual change in relations of production but rather a development of capitalist relations of production.  For example, as the so-called united states has “developed” its economy it has not become easier to develop socialism from this economic base but more difficult.  This is because the capitalist economy has no plan big or small and the development of capitalism which did engender easy development of socialism, relative centrality of the economy, concentration of workers in industry etc… existed only as a phase.  Today american imperialism has made the development of socialism more difficult by separating workers into smaller and smaller units within the service economy, moving industrial centers to the imperial colonies, developing the domestic labor aristocracy, and lavishing the population in the spoils of imperialism.  

Lessons & Conclusions

While an analysis of Bukharin’s conception of the third period is crucial to understanding the Comintern and the development of the communist parties of the world during that time, the theory of productive forces continues to be practiced and theorized among the so called actually existing socialist states and revisionist Marxist-Leninist parties around the globe, making a thorough analysis of the theory crucial to a formation of Marxist, and therefore Maoist, politics and policy.  What is important to understand about this theory is that it is unscientific and vulgar materialist. For the productive forces theorist the basic requirements for developing new social relations to production are constantly shifting.  China has clearly surpassed the level of heavy industry to equal that of Russia in 1917 and fulfill Bukharin’s requirement.  The beginning of the development of socialism is constantly moving into the future, because the moment that capitalist industry develops on its own accord into socialist relations of production does not exist. Much like the many religious sects developed around a doomsday prophecy, the adherents of productive forces theory simply throw up their hands when the supposedly imminent shift to socialism is meant to arrive saying “the material conditions are not yet right to begin fully planning the economy and curtailing anarchy in production.” Bukharin would have been happy to uncritically continue the policies of the NEP which developed the capitalist sector, believing this sector could develop new relations of production by simply advancing the material conditions of production.  It’s obvious that the development of the cotton gin, for instance, did not free the slaves of the so-called united states, advancing the class struggle, but rather advanced the nature of their exploitation. There has to be a clear and violent break in the realm of superstructure followed by a planned development in the material economic base, rather than a gradual and one sided development in the base alone for it to be said that socialism is developing or that conditions for socialism are being engendered.  

Mao describes the process of this type of change as it takes place in a bourgeois national revolution:

“The bourgeoisie first changed the superstructure and took possession of the machinery of state before carrying on propaganda to gather real strength. Only then did they push forward great changes in the production relations. When the production relations had been taken care of and they were on the right track they then opened the way for the development of the productive forces. To be sure, the revolution in the production relations is brought on by a certain degree of development of the productive forces, but the major development of the productive forces always comes after changes in the production relations.” (Mao Zedong, Selected Works Vol.8, 2020, p.333)

Mao’s understanding, as opposed to Bukharin’s, is a dialectical materialist rather than a vulgar materialist one. It does not see simple cause and effect in materialism but rather relationships and their development through and into different qualities. 

This lesson can be understood in a physical analogy if we consider the concept of super cooling.  If we super-cool water, by for example cooling it very quickly, it can go below the normal point of phase shift at equilibrium.  At this point it takes the agitation of an outside force to precipitate the phase shift.  The development of the productive forces-relations of production dialectic functions in the same way.   If we one-sidedly develop the productive forces without applying the agitation of an outside force to precipitate a change in relations of production we will be doomed to continue in the same phase of historical development.