The daily worker., 1924-08-15


Of The DAILY WORKER, Saturday,
August 10. Watch for It'll
BY NICHOLAS 5UKHARIN.
/ COME to the second question-one
/ of the most important.
At the beginning of the war there
were bourgeois economists who ac-
tually went mad in the effort to JUS
tify the imperialist war and invented
the theory that the war was very
useful thing from the standpoint of the
development Of productive power
The basis was that there was a
decided shifting of productive power
in the metallurgical industry, in the
war industry, in heavy industry. This
great shift resulted in decrease of un-
employment Only very superficial
"savants" failed to notice that from
the standpoint Of the next cycle of
capitalism, all these phenomena in
reality indicated gigantic process of
the destruction of productive power,
Of fixed capital
criticzes Boris.
Arising out of the enormous in
crease of non-productive consumption,
these imbecile illusions of the bour-
geois economists vanished some time
after the beginning of the war. Now,
several years after the beginning of
the imperialist war, the courageous
Boris, who of course, is in no way
crazy or absurd, writes the following
"He (Bukharin) asserts that the
war led to the destruction Of a tre-
mendous mass of means of produc-
ton"
The very opposite is true.
And in another passage he says:
Neither can one talk of the de-
struction of productive forces by the
war"
How is this to be understood? We
all know that ten million people were
killed during the war, but according
to the deductions of the supervise
Boris, it means that we have an in
crease of living productive forces; the
destroyed railways mean an increase
in means of communication, while the
destroyed factories and villages in
Germany and Belgium signify an in
crease of the productive forces. This
is sheer nonsense.
War Does Bring Destruction.
No sensible person can talk in this
strain. One could say that the sores
of the war have partly been healed.
But this is not what Boris asserts; he
claims that the war does not cause
the destruction of productive forces.
1 will quote only the most glaring
instances. Boris is not bit worried
by the question of productive and non
productive consumption. This ques-
tion is far more important than the
question of destruction, of the loss OF
human lives, of which have spoken
What is the meaning of this prosper
ity theory? It is repetition of the
views which existed among bourgeois
economists, and which were accepted
by the social democrats.
With these l dealt in my first re-
port at the Fourth World Congress.
At that time l exposed the statements
made by leading social democrats
upon this question. For instance, one
of these gentlemen goes so far as to
say that capitalism has emerged even
stronger from the war Thus you see
the theoretical proportions"
War Weakened Capitalism.
The simplest liberals, the pacifists,
the clerks, and the bourgeois econo-
mists, nearly all of them see more or
less the economic weakness of the
capitalist world, and not one of them
denies this. And then the social
democrats, ostensibly MARKHAM, come
along and declare that capitalism has
emerged even stronger from the war.
1t sounds almost like clamoring for
new war. An ostensible Commun-
ist chimes in with a similar statement.
How can such things be taken up
even as a matter for discussion, as
Korsch says? If we are to take up a
discussion on every bit of bourgeois
nonsense (and such nonsense is pro-
duced in abundance), what would be
the result? We can very well say
that super-profts and extra wages are
the justification of the imperlalist
war. II the imperialist war is such
process that in the course of it we
get an increase of the productive
forces, then why should we raise the
alarm?
! THEORY OF CRISES