Page:Building Up Socialism - Nikolai Bukharin (1926).pdf/16

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BUILDING UP SOCIALISM

utilised all its possibilities and exhausted itself to the very bottom. Take those countries, said Cunow, where capitalism is not yet sufficiently developed; take the markets which are not yet completely capitalist commodity markets; take those countries where capitalism is only at the beginning of its development and it will be perfectly clear that capitalism still has an enormous scope for development. And after the war—so asserted Cunow—owing to the partial destruction of forces of production further scope for development of capitalist relations was created for the reason that to the extent that forces of capitalist production were destroyed during the war to that extent the markets which even prior to the destruction caused by the war were too big to absorb capitalist output will now have become relatively larger; for that reason it is absurd and utopian, anti-Marxian to think that society in the near future will transfer to Socialist lines.

The argument here is so clear and unambiguous that it would be superfluous to refer to other critics who follow the same line of reasoning. It will be sufficient to refer to another critic, a Russian this time, the Marxian or semi-Marxian writer, A. A. Bogdanov. In one of his works, "Questions of Socialism," he says:

"In confirmation of this [the necessity and possibility of the transition to Socialism—N.B.] reference is made to the gigantic growth of those branches of industry in which means of production are produced. And yet, if we take the world output of these two fundamental materials of industry, namely, cast iron and coal and on the basis of their prices, the payment for labour power and the approximate rate of its exploitation calculate what propor-