Bukharin’s 1921 manual was the canonical text of vulgar-materialist Marxist orthodoxy.
Evidence
The second part of the section consists of Gramsci’s Critical Notes on an Attempt at Popular Sociology , which provide a sustained critique of the “vulgar materialist” aspect of Marxist orthodoxy. Nikolai Bukharin’s The Theory of Historical Materialism, A Manual of Popular Sociology was first published in Moscow in 1921, where it went through several editions. An English translation, based on the third Russian edition, was published by Allen and Unwin in 1926, under the title Historical Materialism, A System of Sociology , and there was a French edition in the following year, which was probabl y the one known to Gramsci. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1346