Bukharin’s philosophical defeat coincided with his political destruction

Evidence

There is no doubt, though, that the text he wrote for the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1933 (published in Marxism and Modern Thought , by N. Bukharin and others, edited by Ralph Fox, London 1935) represents a last-ditch attempt to reconcile the positions of the 1921 Manual with the criticisms levelled against it—and not only from the “idealist” standpoint of Deborin and Lukacs. … By that time however Bukharin’s days were numbered, politically as well as philosophically. He had been under fire for his opposition to the first Five Year Plan and the collectivisation of agriculture and was put on trial for his part in a supposed “conspiracy” and executed in 1938. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1347

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete instance of how intellectual position-taking inside a party carries lethal stakes — useful grounding for later readings on how conformity and dissent operate inside ruling movements.