|Peter Boettke|
Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was the intellectual architect behind the Bolsheviks effort to establish a pure communist system after the revolution (later to be known as "War Communism") and the retreat from that policy in the wake of disastrous results to the reintroduction of market forces with the "New Economic Policy". During the early years of perestroika, Bukharin was intellectually resurrected after decades of Stalinist suppression as a pre-cursor of market reforms within a socialist system. I discuss Bukharin in-depth in my first book -- The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism: The Formative Years, 1918-1928 (1990), but also see Why Perestroika Failed: The Politics and Economics of Socialist Transformation (1993).
I am flying to Vienna, Austria today, where I will be giving a lecture at the Institute for Human Studies on "The Socialist Calculation Debate: Viennese Origins, London Refinements," and also discussing the research project "Between Bukharin and Balcerowicz". This is a very exciting development at IWM and very much looking forward to our discussions.
As the description of the research program states:
"Our project is particularly timely now because this is perhaps the last occasion on which the task of the conceptual reconstruction of economic ideas under communism can be accomplished with both empirical precision and intellectual empathy. Experiencing the rapid erosion of archival materials and the passing away of key eye-witnesses, it is doubtful whether future generations of historians will have the chance to understand what economists under communism might have meant when struggling (and often risking their lives), for example, for including the term of “socialist commodity production” in their textbooks, or for justifying the use of mathematical models in central planning."
Comments