Bogdanov as a Thinker39
V.A. Bazarov (Vladimir Alexandrovich Rudnev, 1874–1939) was a Social-Democratic activist, philosopher, and economist. Bazarov and Bogdanov first met when they were students in high school in Tula, and, following graduation, they both enrolled in the natural sciences faculty of Moscow University. After being expelled from the university for student activism (Bogdanov in 1894, Bazarov in 1895), they found themselves together in exile in Tula, and it was there, while leading workers’ study circles, that they took up a serious study of Marxism and began to identify themselves as historical materialists.
The two friends worked closely together for the next decade and a half. Bazarov edited Bogdanov’s first work, Kratkii kurs ekonomicheskoi nauki, and Bogdanov edited Bazarov’s translation of Marx’s Capital. They were both committed to seeking a modern, scientific foundation for historical materialism, and to this end they adopted the radical empiricism of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. They joined the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party at its inception, and in the era of the Revolution of 1905 they contributed to the Social-Democratic press, defending Bolshevism and criticising the neo-Kantian Russian Marxist revisionists.
Their political collaboration came to an end during the period of counter-revolution following the suppression of the Revolution of 1905. Bogdanov emigrated to Europe, broke with Lenin, and engaged in factional politics, even as he was developing the idea that cultural revolution was a necessary prerequisite for socialism. Meanwhile, Bazarov remained a Bolshevik and stayed in Russia, carrying on propagandistic and educational work with workers in St. Petersburg. He was arrested in 1911 and exiled to Siberia for three years. Bazarov continued to follow Bogdanov’s work, adopting his theory of cultural revolution and applying the principles of tektology to problems of economic development.
Bazarov was in Petrograd in 1917, and, following the February Revolution, he worked in the economic section of the Petrograd Soviet. At the same time, he contributed to Maxim Gorky’s journal, Novaia Zhizn’, and joined with like-minded activists in attempting to unify Russia’s revolutionary and democratic forces and overcome the Bolshevik-Menshevik divide. He left the Bolshevik fraction in the summer of 1917 and, after the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, he became active in the left-Menshevik fraction, the RSDRP-Internationalists.
Despite his opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power, Bazarov supported the new Soviet government, and in 1921 he began work as an economist for Gosplan – the government organ responsible for economic planning – and applied tektological concepts and mathematical models to economic planning. Bazarov believed that a planned economy could achieve unprecedented growth, but when Stalin called on the development of a Five-Year Plan for the economy in 1928, Bazarov was one of a group of former Menshevik economists within Gosplan who argued that the goals of the First Five-Year Plan were too ambitious and could not be realised. In the summer of 1930, those economists – including Bazarov – were arrested and charged with forming an underground Menshevik organisation that sought to ‘wreck’ Soviet industry by setting unnecessarily low targets. In a public show trial, most of the accused economists confessed their guilt. Bazarov, however, was tried in secret (probably because he would not confess) and imprisoned. After his release, he lived in Moscow until his death in 1939.
The most complete coverage of Bazarov in English is by Naum Jasny.40
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In A.A. Bogdanov, the Soviet Union has lost one of the greatest revolutionary figures and thinkers of the last three decades.
Possessing an extraordinary power of organisational thought as well as an incomparable gift as a populariser, A. Bogdanov educated several generations of Marxists. His youthful work, Kratkii kurs ekonomicheskoi nauki41 – rigorously steadfast in the spirit of Marx’s teachings and striking in the architectural symmetry of its design and the crystal clarity of its exposition – immediately brought general attention to the young author and became the essential handbook of every worker or student embarking on the study of Marxism. Kratkii kurs underwent nine editions before the Revolution of 1917 and has been repeatedly republished in the Soviet period.
A. Bogdanov did not work on economics within the four walls of his study but in living communication with the revolutionary workers among whom he carried on propaganda. Kratkii kurs consisted of the lectures that Bogdanov gave over the course of several years to secret workers’ organisations in the city of Tula, which he revised and adapted to the conditions of censorship of that time. The needs of the worker-students not only determined the author’s external manner of exposition, but they also had a huge influence on the responsive propagandist’s own internal development. The worker-students posed more and more questions and compelled him to consider certain aspects of the Marxian idea ever more deeply, boldly, and independently. Already in these years it became clear to Bogdanov that the theory and practice of Marxism must not be limited to a revolutionary critique of the economic contradictions of the society that existed, but that Marxism signified the initiation of a new social consciousness and a new culture in the broadest sense of the word.
Bogdanov began to fix his attention predominantly on general questions of worldview.
The more clearly he became aware of the universality of the socialist revolution that was being born in the contemporary workers’ movement, the more persistently he raised the question of what the world that would be renewed by this all-embracing revolution would look like. What kind of ‘organisation of things, people, and ideas’ did the Marxian worldview aim at? Marx and his closest comrades-in-arms had not succeeded in illuminating all aspects of this problem, and Bogdanov made this his life’s work. This is how he himself described his first steps directed toward the construction of a picture of the world in the spirit of Marxian historical materialism:
At the time when life, in the form of comrade-workers, prompted me to become familiar with Marx’s historical materialism, I was occupied principally with the natural sciences and was an enthusiastic supporter of the worldview that could be designated as the ‘materialism of natural scientists’. This somewhat primitive philosophy was once, for good reason, the ideological banner of strict democrats – the ‘nihilists’. There was a great deal of distinctive radicalism in it and a great deal that was kindred to all ‘extreme’ ideologies.
Attempting to arrive at a strict monism in cognition, this worldview constructs its picture of the world entirely out of one material – out of ‘matter’ as the object of physical sciences. The whole content of the world and the essence of all experience – both physical and psychical – is formed by matter conceived in the form of atoms in their various combinations and continuous movement. The invariable laws of the movement of matter in space and time are the ultimate instantiation of all explanations that are possible …
But the social materialism of Marx made demands on my worldview that the old materialism could not satisfy. And, meanwhile, these were demands whose validity could not be denied and which, in addition, completely correspond to the objective and monist tendency of the old materialism itself, except that those demands took that tendency even further. It was necessary to cognise one’s own cognition, to explain one’s own worldview. And, according to the idea of Marxism, it was possible and obligatory to do this on the ground of social-genetic investigation. It was obvious that the fundamental concepts of the old materialism – both ‘matter’ and ‘invariable laws’ – were worked out in the course of the social development of humanity, and it was necessary to find the ‘material basis’ for those concepts as ‘ideological forms’. But since the ‘material basis’ has the property of changing as society develops, it became clear that all given ideological forms can have only historically-transient and not objectively-suprahistorical meaning; they can be ‘truth for their times’ (objective truth, but only within a certain era) and in no way ‘truth for eternity’ (‘objective’ in the absolute meaning of the word).
pp. 268–269 in this volume
In his book, Osnovnye elementy istoricheskogo vzgliada na prirodu, published in 1899, Bogdanov provided the first outline of the resolution of the task set down in the passage just cited.
Already in this work, notwithstanding an insufficient development of a number of important details, Bogdanov presented his worldview fully formed in general and as a whole. A series of further works published immediately after and completed in the three volumes of Empiriomonism (1906) provided no more than a development and expansion of the philosophical ideas that were formulated in Osnovnye elementy.
Bogdanov’s philosophical works did not meet the same unanimous recognition in Russian Social Democracy that his work on political economy enjoyed. It is true that Lenin, who was in Siberia when Osnovnye elementy was published, responded very positively to the book and recommended it warmly to his co-exiles. But, on the other hand, Plekhanov, who at that time was held in very high esteem as an authority on philosophy by the great majority of Russian revolutionary Marxists, immediately pointed out the fundamental differences between his own understanding of Marx’s theory and Bogdanov’s interpretation of historical materialism. And since Bogdanov continued to develop his conception of Marxism in print with great persistence, Plekhanov entered into a polemic with him that took on increasingly harsh forms.42
In the first years of the twentieth century, when differences appeared in Russian Social Democracy that quickly led to the organisational division of the party into two fractions, Bogdanov adhered to the fraction of Bolsheviks led by Lenin and immediately became one of its most influential figures. Lenin, regardless of all the bitterness of the political struggle with Plekhanov and his Menshevik supporters, continued to relate to Plekhanov as a student to a teacher in the realm of theory (and especially of philosophical theory), and he took Plekhanov’s side in the latter’s philosophical feud with Bogdanov. However, as long as Bogdanov remained a close comrade-in-arms with Lenin in the arena of revolutionary practice and while he – to use the expression of M.N. Pokrovskii – played the role of ‘vice-leader’ of Bolshevism, the theoretical disagreement between leader and vice-leader did not become embittered, did not break out into the open, and was manifested only in facetious altercations in private conversations.
This modus vivendi changed fundamentally in the second half of the first decade of the twentieth century – in the era of reaction that arrived after the revolution of 1905–06 – when Bogdanov fell out with Lenin on a great number of political questions and became the leader of a separate grouping within the Bolshevik fraction.
Starting from that moment, Lenin thought it necessary to completely dissociate himself from all Russian Social Democrats who did not accept his views entirely and fully, to dissociate himself not only in the realm of politics but also in the realm of philosophical theory. In 1909, in his famous work, Materialism and Empirio-criticism,43 Lenin came out with harsh criticism against all Marxists who understood historical materialism differently from Plekhanov, and the sharpest of this criticism was aimed most of all against Bogdanov.44
The polemics of the second decade of the twentieth century led to more distinct contrasting of the various philosophical positions within our revolutionary Marxism, but it did not arouse a further in-depth development of them. Among them, Bogdanov arrived at the conviction in those years that purely philosophical arguments were pointless and that, in any event, the very pretensions of ‘philosophy’ were illusory at their foundation. Previously, ‘philosophy’ had been for him only a temporary surrogate for exact science, and, proposing that science – at the level of development that it had attained – was still incapable of constructing a whole, monistic picture of the world, he acknowledged the necessity of anticipating future scientific conclusions in the form of philosophical ‘hypotheses’. Now, in evaluating the soundness even of this temporary service of philosophy, he was filled with ever greater scepticism.
Along with this, the conviction was born in him and grew stronger that at the present time it was fully possible to embark on the construction of a monistic science and to develop methods of scientific cognition that possessed universal meaning. Bogdanov dedicated all his powers to this grandiose problem, and it was no longer necessary for him to divide his energy between theoretical work and practical political struggle. In 1911–12, on the basis of a great number of considerations that I cannot touch on here, he once and for all gave up active participation in party activity. The lessons of the amazing events of the great Revolution of 1917–18 did not cause him to waver; indeed, on the contrary, they merely strengthened his resolve. The result of the intense work in this final and especially productive period of Bogdanov’s life was Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka [Universal Organisational Science] or Tektologiia [Tektology]45 – a work that was extremely original, mature, and, if it may be put this way, very appropriate to the characteristics of A. Bogdanov’s creative talents.
In this article I will not undertake to provide any kind of detailed presentation of Bogdanov’s views, and, by the same token, I do not intend to subject to any kind of critical evaluation the polemics through which Bogdanov forged his worldview. My intentions are much more modest. I want only to cursorily point out to the reader the main theoretical positions that Bogdanov successively defended.
One can note three basic stages in the development of Bogdanovian theory: ‘an historical view on nature’, ‘empiriomonism’, and ‘tektology’.
To begin, I will dwell for a moment on the first stage, on Osnovnye elementy istoricheskogo vzgliada na prirodu. I provided above a citation in which the frame of mind in which Bogdanov embarked on this work is evident. In light of Marxian historical materialism he became aware of the limitedness of the static ‘materialism of natural scientists’ that he had shared up until then.
But what does it mean to replace the static view of nature with an historical view? It means, first and foremost, to reject the interpretation of nature as the totality of unchanging ‘things’ that are sharply distinguished from one another. It means to consider nature as a continuous flow of transformations in which one can single out not static ‘things’ but only relatively stable ‘forms of movement’ that are in a process of continuous interaction with the environment that surrounds them.
Further, the historical nature and the dynamism of this view of nature are not compatible with categorical distinctions in the methods of construction of the separate sciences. A dynamic interconnectedness among all the phenomena of nature signifies not only monism of the object of cognition but of the methods of cognition as well.
The regularity of the processes of nature finds it most precise and rigorous formulation in a mechanics based on the ‘axioms’ or ‘laws of movement’ (Axiomata sive leges motus) established by Isaac Newton: (1) the law of inertia; (2) the law of direct proportionality between a change in the amount of movement and the magnitude of effective force; and (3) the law of the equality of action and reaction. Analysing these basic principles of classical mechanics, Bogdanov posed two questions: (1) are not Newton’s ‘axioms’ partial applications of universal principles that are applicable not only to mechanical movement but also to all processes of inorganic and organic nature in general? And (2) may they not be viewed as three stages of the discovery of a single and universal foundation of regularity in cognition, a foundation of the causal interconnectedness of phenomena?
Bogdanov answered ‘yes’ to both these questions. The law of inertia in a generalised form says ‘if in a given system of external actions the form of a process is unchanging, then, in order for it to change, a new external action is necessary’. More succinctly: ‘any change comes from the outside’. Thus, the maintenance of a body not under the influence of any forces (that is at rest or is moving uniformly in a straight line) is a partial case of the application of the universal principle of cognition that contradicts absolute freedom, such as ‘the capability to begin a series of actions from within oneself’.
The second foundation of Newtonian mechanics is generalised in the ‘law of specific action’: ‘identical forms of processes under identical actions undergo identical changes’.
Bogdanov developed the law of the equality of action and reaction in the following formula, which has general significance: ‘when two processes interact, the change of the form of movement characteristic of one of them is accompanied by an equal and opposite change of the form of the other. Replacing two processes with one process in its entire external environment – i.e. the totality of the processes acting on it – we arrive at this formula: every change of the form of a process is accompanied by equal and opposite changes in its external environment’. That is, as a result of interaction, a given ‘form of a process’ acquires exactly as much as the environment that surrounds it loses, and vice versa. We thus see that this proposition, in essence, is nothing other than the ‘law of the conservation of energy’.
The law of inertia provides the least developed and, moreover, negative formulation of the principle of causality: ex nihilo nihil fit, without external influence one or another balanced forms of a process cannot change. In the vestments of Newton’s second law, causality becomes more meaningful and definite. It obtains here a positive distinctness, but only qualitatively: identical causes in the presence of other equal conditions produce identical effects. The law of conservation of energy is the third and highest stage. It establishes not only a qualitative, but also a quantitative specificity of the causal connection of phenomena: the measurability and commensurability of cause and effect.
Thus, the substance of causality in contemporary cognition is exposed in a series of propositions that can be arranged according to levels of growing complexity, such that each higher formulation includes the lower level and at the same time substantially enriches it. This means that causality is not at all an elementary ‘category of pure reason’ that is invariably inherent in everyone’s cognition as Kant asserted. Just the opposite, there is every reason to think that causality, like all other ideological categories and forms, takes shape gradually in the process of historical development, and at each given level of this development causality has a content that responds to the social relationships of the era that are, in turn, determined by the level of material productive forces.
In this way a new task arises: to illuminate from the point of view of historical materialism the origin and development of the basic categories of cognition and the scientific structures that are built with their help, along with metaphysical and religious structures and, in general, the whole sum of ideological forms.
The resolution of this task was basically outlined already by Bogdanov in the book Poznanie s istoricheskoi tochki zreniia [Cognition from an Historical Point of View]46 (1901) and elaborated in detail in a great many subsequent works.
But let us return to Osnovnye elementy. The law of the conservation of energy – an expanded form of the law of causality – is identically applicable to all processes; it permits us to establish a quantitative measure of all qualitative changes observable in the world, but it tells us nothing about the direction in which these qualitative changes occur. What are the outcomes of the historical process? Are they expressed in the predominant preservation of some forms and disappearance of others or do we see a kaleidoscopic play of transformations without any kind of clearly expressed tendencies of development in a definite direction?
It is well known that such tendencies do exist among living forms. Biological species develop in definite directions, and in the theory of ‘natural selection’ contemporary science reveals the mechanism that regulates this development. One must ask if there is not an analogous universal regulator also in the development of social forms of human life when definite tendencies of development are manifested no less sharply than in biology and the speed of change of forms is even more significant? And, from another perspective, different ‘forms of movement’ of inorganic nature reveal far from an identical capacity to resist the destructive actions of the external environment, and, as a result, one can expect a kind of ‘survival’ of the most adapted forms here as well.
Subjecting the conditions of development of various spheres of life to analysis, Bogdanov showed which modifications acquire the principle of ‘selection’ when applied to the individual psyche, to social forms, to technology, etc. The law of selection comes into force everywhere that ‘with an equal expenditure of energy one form of life produces changes in its external environment that are more favourable to its preservation and more useful for itself than another form does’. And since this prerequisite is present in almost every bit of life, and since the formula that has just been adduced is also broadly applicable with very small changes to inorganic nature, then the ‘law of selection’ turns out to be really universal.
Enough has been said to characterise the basic aspiration of Bogdanov’s theoretical thought in the work under consideration in the following way: it is the extension of the most precise and most developed methods of the separate sciences into neighbouring realms by introducing corresponding modifications into these proven tools of cognition. As a result, a cognitive apparatus is obtained that is reduced to internal unity, that is whole, and that is also universal – a monistic methodology of cognition.
But all this is purely the scientific – or at least a science-like – theoretical-cognitive side of the concept under examination. What is its ‘philosophical’ content in the proper use of the word? How did Bogdanov conceive of the correlation between ‘thought’ and ‘being’, between ‘cognition’ and the ‘world’ as it is ‘in itself’? In Osnovnye elementy this problem is touched on only in passing. Developing a consistently energetical point of view applicable to all phenomena and processes of the external and internal world alike, Bogdanov stipulated that energy could not at all be thought of as some kind of ‘unchanging essence’ or ‘substance’ of any being. He conceived of the very concept of substance as a legacy of the era of static thinking. ‘If the word “energy” could impart any kind of meaning’, he wrote, ‘then it is exclusively that this term expresses the commensurability of all the changes that occur in nature, the reduction of them to one quantitative measure’. This is exactly the meaning of the proposition ‘energy is uniform and eternal’. ‘Heat, light, electricity, mechanical movement, etc. … are only different means by which human consciousness perceives energy’. But since ‘energy is manifested only in changes and in nothing more, since it is measured only by means of them, and since it is only known through them, then it is obvious that for cognition energy is absolutely the same as the changes that occur in nature’.
What is energy ‘in itself’? Osnovnye elementy does not give a completely precise answer, but from the context it is clear that the very posing of such a question seems to the author to be false and unnecessary and leads thought into the blind alley of empty metaphysical abstractions.
Before long, however, Bogdanov had to take up this ‘philosophical’ problem in earnest, since it was precisely along this line that all the bitterness of his polemic with Plekhanov and the Plekhanovites – and subsequently with Lenin – was directed.
As is well known, Plekhanov asserted that it is impossible to be a materialist and not recognise a ‘substance’ that is hidden behind the flow of the phenomena that we observe, and that matter is just such a substance. He agreed with Kant that we do not have immediate knowledge of either substance or ‘things-in-themselves’ but only their ‘appearances’, but, contrary to Kant, he thought that a certain indirect knowledge of a thing-in-itself was attainable. To be more precise, the point here was not about knowledge but about a certain hypothetical assumption that although it did not yield to factual verification, nevertheless was absolutely necessary to us for the substantiation of the objectivity of our science. That is, according to Plekhanov, any realist – and even more a materialist – must admit that any change that we immediately observe in experience completely corresponds to a specific change in the world of ‘things-in-themselves’. And, in addition, changes in this hypothetical realm are independent of our knowledge of ‘being’ and are primary, while changes in what we are aware of in our experience are secondary; the first are causes, the second are effects. ‘The thing-in-itself, or matter, acts on our organs of feeling and cause sensation in us’ – this is the brief formula in which Plekhanov summarised his understanding of the materialist point of view.
As is evident from the preceding, Bogdanov did not share this point of view. He developed his understanding of the connection between ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ more thoroughly in a series of philosophical studies published from 1904–06 under the general title Empiriomonism (three volumes). The author of Empiriomonism did not see the necessity of assuming that the evidence of our feelings gives us distorted, or, as Plekhanov put it, ‘hieroglyphic’ representation of the real qualities of things. And the very idea of the division of the world into two (noumena and phenomena), breaking it down into ‘external’ realities and their reflection ‘in us’, seemed to Bogdanov to be internally inconsistent and contradictory. In reality we see, touch, and, in general, perceive qualities of ‘things’ not ‘in us’ but outside us, outside our body, in those very points of space where those very things that we perceive are located. The localisation of sensation ‘in us’ is not given in experience but in theory and, moreover, unsuccessful theory. In the opinion of Bogdanov, the failure of this theory was revealed by R. Avenarius in his theory of ‘introjection’ in a completely convincing way. Along with Avenarius and Mach, Bogdanov considered that the most acceptable and at the same time the simplest point of view was ‘naïve realism’, which held that objective realities, or, at least, their simplest composite parts – their elements – existed ‘in themselves’ exactly as we perceive them, whereby in one combination – in one interrelationship – complexes of these elements form a physical body, and in another interrelationship they form the phenomena of our consciousness.
This is not yet ‘empirio-monism’. In this starting point, Bogdanov’s philosophy is not fundamentally distinguishable from ‘empirio-criticism’. But already the subsequent step of ‘empiriocriticism’ – its understanding of the link between physiological and psychical processes – compelled Bogdanov to introduce his own monistic correction, in the light of which the entire problem acquired an essentially new and extremely original approach.
Empiriocriticists were satisfied by the establishment of a functional relationship between processes in the central nervous system (Avenarius’s system ‘C’) and the psychical ‘experiences’ that correspond to them without determining – and not considering it necessary to determine – the form of this functional relationship. Avenarius stated only that it was impermissible to think of it as a causal relationship. This position definitely did not satisfy Bogdanov. In his opinion, it was acceptable to be satisfied by a purely formal mathematical concept of a function only to the level of abstract analysis that deals only with magnitudes – only with quantitative correlations – independently of exactly what realities these correlations applied to. If the investigation touches on real elements and complexes of elements, then the interaction of these elements and complexes must have a real and not a formally-mathematical nature. But causality in the given case does not decide the question. According to Bogdanov, the mistake of the empiriocriticists consisted in that they came to a stop at the parallelism of the psychical and physiological series – i.e. in the final analysis, at a dualistic conception – instead of taking a monistic point of view that considers the physical and the psychical as two forms of the perception of the same real process.
Let us recall that Bogdanov defines any ‘experience’ – any psychical process – as a specific organised complex of elements that are, in themselves, neutral – neither physical nor psychical – but that form the bricks, so to speak, from which all the phenomena of our world – both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ – are constructed. When a psychical complex that is experienced by a given individual comes up against the psyche of another individual – i.e. with ‘elements’ that are organised differently – a real interaction according to the law of causality occurs between these two complexes. The first complex produces a change in the second and leaves its imprint on it; the first ‘is reflected’, so to speak, in the second. But since the organisation of the first and the organisation of the second complex are different, the reflection is essentially different from the reflected. The physiological process that is immediately connected with the act of consciousness is just such a distorted reflection of the psychical process in another psyche. We do not perceive the experiences of other people directly; we do not perceive them as they themselves flow in in actuality but only indirectly, in the form of changes of the organism that ‘correspond’ to them, and, guided by our own experience, we only mentally substitute psychical processes in place of these physiological processes. ‘Universal substitution’ follows from this as the necessary basis of communication among conscious individuals.
Why do we immediately perceive the external phenomena of inorganic nature as they are, while the psyche of someone else, acting on us, gives a ‘reflection’ that does not correspond to the original? This is because the psyche is an organisation (complicated and adapted to the needs of the individual) of the same primary complexes that, in their immediately given disconnectedness, form the content of the external world. ‘Immediate complexes’ thus enter into the flow of psychical experiences as a whole. As regards the psyche of another person – presenting in its complexity the formation of the same kind of order as our own psyche – has a different form of organisation from ours, since it is an adaptation to the needs of a different individual with a different heredity and with a different historical fate. Therefore, the immediate entry of one psyche into another or the mutual interpenetration of two psyches is impossible – the action of one on the other is realisable only through an indirect route in the form of indirect imprints that are the immediately perceivable physiological correlates of the experiences of others.
Thus, in contrast to the materialism of Plekhanov-Lenin, ‘empiriomonism’ does not recognise a transcendent boundary between the world as it exists in itself and our cognition of the world. Being ‘in itself’ and being ‘for us’ are identical in their basic elements and in their simplest combinations. We perceive the real, actual qualities of things and not a reflection of them, not more or less distorted copies of them. But in our consciousness, ‘immediate complexes’ appear in new interrelationships among themselves, organised into a complex unity, answering the specific peculiarities of a given individual. We call this ‘individually organised experience’ our psyche.
The interactions between different psyches, communication between people, according to Bogdanov, is by means of ‘universal substitution’, i.e. by substituting the psychical complexes that we know from personal experience for the physical changes that we immediately observe in the organisms of other people. In thus denying that the consciousness of a given individual can directly perceive the experiences of other conscious beings, empiriomonism nevertheless does not tear the kind of chasm between individual consciousnesses that has been postulated by idealistic philosophy since the time of Leibniz’s monadology. According to Leibniz, no real action of one monad on another is possible, since monads are absolutely enclosed in themselves and ‘have no windows’ through which to communicate with one another. According to Bogdanov, cognition of the psyche of another person, although mediated, is, at the same time, a completely real interaction, and the more accurately it reproduces its object, the closer the organisation of the perceiving psyche is to the organisation of perceived psyche. If the organisations of both psyches were completely identical, then there would be space for fully equivalent cognition of the experiences of other people. Consequently, the nature of the distinction here is relative-empirical and not absolute-metaphysical. The more harmoniously society is constructed, the more homogenous the fundamental orientations of the individuals that compose it and the deeper, the more many-sided, and the more precise the mutual understanding of people. In an ideally harmonious society where there is no basis for fundamentally different organisation of individual experience, the boundaries between the consciousnesses of different people will be completely overcome in practice and the so-called ‘Du-Problem’ will cease to exist.
It obviously follows from the preceding that, from the point of view of empiriomonism, human consciousness is connected with the ‘external’ physical world more closely and with a more intimate link than with the consciousness of surrounding people. Physical phenomena are perceived in their immediate, authentic reality; psychical phenomena are perceived only through an indirect route. And this is the reality, if one means by ‘physical world’ what Bogdanov calls ‘immediate complexes’, i.e. material processes. The latter are simpler combinations of the same elements of which psychical life is made; in the action of cognition they enter into the content of the psyche as its constitutive parts.
But a completely different correlation results if by ‘physical world’ one means the picture of the world that is drawn by natural science. Science unifies the immediate complexes of the external world by means of the complex interconnectedness of the regularities of nature that has universal meaning. This ‘social validity’ or ‘objectivity’ of the physical world of science is the product of the collective organisation of experience. Bogdanov demonstrates that it is only on the basis of cognitive collaboration among people that such universal forms of the scientific picture of the world as abstract, evenly flowing time and ‘isotropic’ endless space can emerge. In our psychical ‘individually organised experience’, the flow of time is fantastically variable and space is finite and heterogeneous. In the process of the social organisation of experience, all other scientific concepts and laws of nature are also established. ‘Laws’, Bogdanov writes,
do not belong to the sphere of experience – to the sphere of immediate experiences – at all. Laws are the result of the cognitive processing of experience. Laws are not given in experience but are created by thought as a means of organising experience in order to harmoniously reconcile it into an orderly unity. Laws are cognitive abstractions, and physical laws no more possess physical qualities than psychological laws possess psychical qualities. One cannot relate them to one or the other series of experience, and therefore if they themselves form a socially-organised system, it does not follow that there is a realm of experience that is socially organised and embraced by them … The difference between the physical and psychical orders boils down to the difference between experience that is socially organised and experience that is organised individually.
p. 28
Thus, the empiriomonistic picture of the world unfolds before us like a staircase of forms of organisation that are continuously becoming more complex: the gradation of immediate complexes from the almost complete chaos of some astral nebula to the orderly unity of millions of elements in a cell of living tissue, the historical development of individually organised experience from the elementary perceptions of simple organisms to the infinitely differentiated psyches of contemporary civilised human beings, and, finally, the socially organised experience of monistic science that completes the edifice.
In the final synthesis of ‘socially organised experience’, the contraposition of ‘physical’ and ‘psychical’ loses its meaning. Experience that is organised individually enters the system of experience that is organised socially as an inseparable part and ceases to constitute a special world for cognition. What is ‘psychical’ disappears in the unifying forms that are created by cognition for ‘the physical’, but what is physical also ceases to be ‘physical’ as soon as it no longer has the continual antithesis of the psychical. An integrated world of experience appears as the content of an integrated cognition. This is empiriomonism.
The empiriomonist conception, the basic architectural lines of which we have cursorily traced here, was richly illustrated by the author by a great many applications in the most varied realms of our cognition. These illustrations were frequently very important to an understanding of the basic ideas of the author, but unfortunately we are not able to touch on them. We note only that in this period Bogdanov’s social-historical analysis of the origin and development of ideologies was the most perfected of his theoretical works.
Empiriomonism was not cast by the author in a strictly orderly philosophical system. We do not get exhaustive answers to a great many theoretical-cognitive questions. Thus, for example, according to Bogdanov, the social validity of forms of scientific cognition is genetically created by the collective organisation of experience; does this also mean that logically the concept ‘universal validity’ or ‘objectivity’ is equivalent in its very content to social organisation? And further, as we have just seen, Bogdanov did not relate scientific laws either to the realm of the physical or to the realm of the psychical. The temptation might arise from this of declaring forms of social organisation of experience to be a special sphere of being – the being of the ‘logical’, let us say. Formally, such an attempt to inject Husserlianism into empiriomonism is easily feasible, except, of course, that it would contradict the frame of mind of the author of empiriomonism at its root.
A.A. Bogdanov absolutely consciously declined to theoretically-cognitively polish the philosophical propositions that he defended. As we have already noted above, philosophy never had self-sufficient value for Bogdanov. Like Engels, he saw in philosophical constructions only hypothetically conditional anticipation of scientific constructions. The significance of philosophy, as far as he was concerned, was exclusively to play a purely auxiliary role – the role of a temporary tool that clears the ground for scientific work. It is therefore completely understandable why Bogdanov did not see any need to spend years imparting a form to his philosophical propositions that would be correct and irreproachable in the eyes of professional philosophers.
It is curious to note that G.V. Plekhanov – Bogdanov’s main theoretical opponent, who apparently proceeded from a completely different evaluation of philosophy – worried even less about the theoretical-cognitive consistency of his constructions. The very word ‘epistemology’ put him in a sarcastic mood and in private conversations he often called this venerable discipline ‘gnusiology’.47 In order to show the kind of sovereign contempt he had for epistemology and how he abused it in his philosophical works, it is sufficient to recall the following episode. Defining the ‘thing-in-itself’ or ‘matter’ as ‘that which, acting on our organs of sensation causes sensations in us’, Plekhanov, in his earlier articles, objected to the Kantian theory of cognition that considers space and time to be ‘subjective forms of our contemplation’. (Thus, for example, on page 172 of Kritika nashikh kritikov [Critique of Our Critics]48 we read, ‘Likewise, he [Kant] also badly contradicts himself in regard to the problem of time. The thing-in-itself can obviously only act upon us in time, but meanwhile Kant considers time to be a subjective form of our contemplation’.)
Plekhanov subsequently adopted the Kantian interpretation of space and time as subjective forms and only supplemented it with his hypothetical thesis that these forms of consciousness ‘correspond’ to certain ‘forms or relationships of real things themselves’, but he did not think about how to consistently adapt the bases of his philosophy to this new point of view – for example, to replace the causal connection between things and sensations (which is obviously impossible in light of the subjectivity of space and time) with any other correlation. Plekhanov presented his readers and admirers with a radical change of his epistemological conception – the transition from an immanent to a transcendent theory of cognition in the form of a purely editorial correction of the formulations that he had used up until then but whose ‘inconvenience’ had gradually become clear to him.
Thus, neither Bogdanov nor the most prominent of his opponents had a particular taste for a deep, purely philosophical theoretical-cognitive elaboration of the views that they defended. Meanwhile, Bogdanov’s scornful attitude toward epistemological ‘scholasticism’ was, as we have seen, a completely deliberate and thought-out conclusion from his view of philosophy as the totality of hypotheses that anticipated scientific theories.
What is the difference between philosophical ‘anticipations’ and the foundations of one or another theory that are really scientific? Philosophy formulates its propositions in such a way that they cannot be either proven or disproven by experience, while, just the opposite, scientific theories are always subject to empirical verification. The task of philosophy is to theoretically connect a series of principles in a logically faultless system; the task of science is to subordinate one or another unexamined realm of nature to the power of the human collective in practice.
Approaching ‘empiriomonism’ with this criterion, we find that the part of it that is purely philosophical and not subject to practical verification is the theory of ‘immediate complexes’ and their connection with our experience – with subjective or ‘individually-organised’ experience on the one hand and with objective or socially-organised experience on the other. This aspect of the philosophy of empiriomonism cannot be transformed into science. In the debate with his opponents, Bogdanov could not appeal to actual reality and was forced to limit himself to purely logical argumentation. He proved that his immanent realism is the simplest and most cognitively expedient of all the conceptions of materialism that had been conceived of and that specifically it agreed better with Marx’s social theory than the transcendental materialism of Plekhanov. Just the opposite – according to Plekhanov, Lenin, and other philosophical opponents of Bogdanov – in order not to fall into a contradiction, matter could only be thought of as a transcendental being, and any immanent theory of cognition inevitably led to idealism, to ‘solipsism’, and was absolutely inconsistent with Marxism. The problem of thought and being in this approach is not scientific but purely philosophical, and both resolutions of the problem can be disputed only from the point of view of the inner consistency of their separate elements, but cannot be proven or disproven by confronting them with the facts of experience.
But in empiriomonism there is also another scientific side. This is the theory of the unity of the elements of experience, an attempt to reduce the differences that are observed in experience to different forms of organisation of similar elements and on this basis to construct a monistic methodology that embraces not only all spheres of cognition but also all forms of people’s practical activity. It is in the posing of this latter problem that empiriomonism reveals its scientific aspect; it is here that it is a real philosophical anticipation of scientific theory, i.e. a theory that is subject to empirical verification.
The further he advanced in working out the problems contained within in the broad bounds of ‘empiriomonism’, the more exclusively Bogdanov’s attention was fixed on the part of these problems that were scientific and operative in practice and the more it seemed to him that the philosophical debates about being and thinking were fruitless and ‘scholastical’. As has already been pointed out, in the course of the last fifteen years of his life, Bogdanov entirely ceased to occupy himself with philosophy and devoted all his powers to working on the scientific mission to which empiriomonism had led him. The result of these efforts was an attempt to construct a ‘universal organisational science’ or ‘tektology’, i.e. a science that reveals and systematises all the basic principles that have a place in the ‘organisation of things, people, and ideas’.
The concept of organisation lies at the basis of tektology. All sorts of ‘actions-reactions’ can be elements of organisation, beginning with such complex processes as the psychophysiological efforts of people who work consciously and systematically and ending with the simplest quanta of physical energy in the vibrations of light.
No matter what elements have joined together in an organised interrelationship, the basic content of that interrelationship is always the same: ‘organisation’ was the term Bogdanov gave to a combination of elements that created more significant aggregate activity or, what is the same thing, more significant resistance to external actions than the arithmetical sum of ‘actions-reactions’ of all the elements taken separately. Consequently, in an organised complex the whole is more than the arithmetical sum of its parts. If the whole is less than the sum of its parts, then we have a process not of organisation but of disorganisation. Finally, if a whole is precisely equal to the sum of its components, then we have a neutral complex. In practice, neutral complexes are the result of an equilibrium between organising and disorganising processes. And since there is a countless multitude of actions-reactions chaotically colliding with one another, the odds of obtaining an organising or a disorganising effect as a result are approximately equal, and so neutral complexes – or, more precisely, systems of dynamic equilibrium close to neutral – are a very common phenomenon in the world of our experience. Mathematics in which the whole is always equal to the sum of its parts turns out from this point of view to be a ‘tektology of neutral complexes’.
Mathematics is applicable without particular reservations or explanations to a neutral complex – and only to neutral complexes; however, even here its truth is proven not with complete precision but only approximately: a dynamic equilibrium is never precise but is always a succession of insignificant deviations from a neutral level to one side or the other. Consequently, even in the realm of neutral complexes, 2 + 2 is never exactly equal to 4, but usually is very close to that magnitude. This does not mean, however, that the method of mathematical analysis is not applicable where there are pronounced processes of disorganisation or organisation. To the extent that we are in need of precise quantitative accounting in all spheres of our cognition and practice, mathematics is universally applicable, and now tektology, in establishing a unity of methods in the most varied realms of theory and practice, broadly expands the field of application of mathematics. But, in the great majority of cases, in order to apply mathematical analysis it is now necessary to abstract oneself from the specifically qualitative peculiarities of elements and complexes that manifest themselves as organising or disorganising phases. As objects of mathematics, elements and complexes are non-qualitative, and are always in themselves equal ‘magnitudes’. Mathematics is an extremely powerful theoretical tool for any organising activity, even though the essence of organisation, as such, is not expressible mathematically, and in attempting to formulate it in mathematical terms we arrive at an absurdity: ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, etc.
In Tektologiia, Bogdanov formulated the interrelationships and regularities that are inherent in all aspects of an organisation and consequently have universal cognitive value, but I will not undertake a systematic exposition of the content of universal organisational science. It would of course not be very difficult to extract from Bogdanov’s works the concepts that he takes as the basis of his construction and the definitions that he provides, to blend them with the logical links that unify them, and thereby to demonstrate the system of tektological categories to the reader. But such a dogmatic formulation of the bases of tektology at the current level of its development would not be a real ‘systematisation’ of it at all. In reality, to provide a systematic valuation of tektological principles would mean to prove that, speaking mathematically, they are ‘necessary and sufficient’ for attaining that goal for which the author advanced them. In other words, it is necessary to prove, on the one hand, that each principle formulated by Bogdanov in Tektologiia has universal-organisational significance and, on the other hand, that only the principles stated by Bogdanov can pretend to universal application. It is obviously impossible to resolve such a task by means of abstract logical analysis of concepts. For this, massive concrete-critical work is necessary: it is necessary to test in reality whether or not tektological formulas are applicable to the main spheres of human knowledge and human practice. And only after such a comprehensive verification would it be possible to construct an exposition of universal organisational science that is ‘systematic’, in the strict meaning of the word.
I will limit myself, therefore, to a pair of illustrations that provide a conception not so much of the content of tektology as a special discipline as much as the methodology of tektological investigation.
The fundamental task of tektology is to smash the scholastic insularity of the specialised sciences, to connect separate, partial methods through the unity of a universal methodology of cognition. It is natural that the elaboration of tektology must run into huge resistance from contemporary scientists who are thoroughly imbued with the psychology of scientific specialisation. In order to critically evaluate the possibility of applying one or another generalising method in various scientific disciplines, it is necessary to have sufficient knowledge in all those disciplines. Meanwhile, at the present time a huge majority of scientists are narrow specialists who have neither the ability nor the desire to broaden their scientific horizon beyond the bounds of the specialty they have chosen. In such a situation, tektology’s practical critique is seldom encountered, and aspirations for a monistic methodology are denied or, more accurately, discredited a priori. Such scientists point, for example, to the fact that the boundaries that have been established by contemporary faculties between scientific disciplines are not accidental but rest on profound fundamental differences: realms of knowledge such as social science, psychology, biology, and physics are so qualitatively distinctive that there can be no talk of any scientific unification of their methods and all attempts in this direction can be based only on amateur, scientifically impermissible ‘superficial analogies’.
It is curious that in this argumentation against the tektological project, one observes complete unanimity among bourgeois and a majority of communist scholars; tektology faces a united front. This forces me to dwell in a little more detail on how universal organisational science understands the ‘method of analogy’. One must admit that in the history of attempts to bring different sciences together, superficial analogies have played a really important role. Take, for example, the so-called ‘organic theory of society’ that enjoyed significant popularity among bourgeois scholars 30–40 years ago.49 This theory was based on extremely shaky analogies and was used for extremely reactionary goals. (One must consider Menenius Agrippa to have been its first proponent, provided the legend that attributes the famous fable to him is true.)50 But this approach to the problem directly contradicts the tektological approach. The basis for the convergence of the sciences in the ‘organic theory’ approach is that there is a qualitative similarity in the various realms of being. It goes without saying that this ‘similarity’, which is not precisely definable or quantifiable, can lead only to capricious dilettantish constructions. Just the opposite, from the point of view of tektology the transfer of a given method to a new realm is legitimate when and only when the organisational structure is identical in both cases, i.e. when there is complete uniformity of correlations between the elements of what is subject to investigation, although the elements can be very different qualitatively. Qualitative differences of elements must be taken into account only to the extent that they modify to one degree or another organisational interrelationships. In such an approach to the question, all talk of ignoring ‘qualitative specificity’ or of ‘superficial analogies’ disappears of its own accord. What we see is an attempt to broaden the application of methodology established in a great many classical sciences. Such, in particular, is the abstract-analytical method that is applied in political economy by classical economists and by Marx. Analysing the structure of exchange in commodity-producing society, Marx arrived at the conclusion that the correlation of value between commodities absolutely did not depend on ‘qualitative specificity’ of the commodities but was entirely determined by the quantity of ‘abstract’ socially-necessary labour expended on the production of any commodity. If such an operation is permissible – and for a Marxist there can be no doubt that it is permissible – then why is it not permissible to abstract from qualitative specificity and investigate the parallel dynamic interrelationships of two processes such as, for example, the dissolution of an alkali in acidified water and the absorption of merchandise in a market. There can only be one objection in principle: in the first case the unity of method is sanctioned by the centuries-old tradition of science, in the second case the attempt is made to unite what in all well-structured bourgeois universities from time immemorial has been spread across various departments. But this argument can hardly be particularly convincing for revolutionaries.
A completely different question is to what extent, from the point of view of the criteria of tektology itself, the merging of sciences indicated above is attainable in practice. In order to answer this, it is necessary to carry out a most thorough and detailed analysis of the complexes being compared. It is necessary first of all to determine to which of the types of equilibrium studied in physics and chemistry are related to the equilibrium of a commodity market. Investigation shows that this is a so-called dynamic equilibrium, which is also characteristic of a chemical reaction. It is further necessary to determine with which type of reaction (multi-molecular or mono-molecular) the structure of the absorption of commodities by the market is identical to, and many other questions touching on the interrelationships among elements. In conclusion, the question arises of whether the qualitative particularities of the elements (molecules in one case, commodity owners in the other) cause any modifications in the application of the theorems of probability theory to the dynamics of both processes? And only after such an exhaustive analysis has given a satisfactory result can we apply a formula to the study of the speed of market processes that depicts the dynamic regularity of a specific kind of chemical reaction.
This is not inference by analogy at all. A scholar who is not familiar with physics or chemistry but who is capable of mathematical analysis could have arrived at the very same formula by investigating market processes alone, since it proceeds with compulsory logical necessity from the identical organisational structure of both processes. Analogy does not give arguments to tektologists; it only stimulates them to pose problems and spares them the necessity of reinventing the wheel in those cases when exhaustive analysis of a given case shows that the problem is posed correctly.
In the example that I adduced, the question had to do with transferring from the realm of exact science into social science the kind of formula that permits one to detect the quantitative, algebraic regularity of the processes being studied. In the contemporary state of organisational science we are comparatively rarely able to apply tektological principles in practice with such precision and specificity. In the great majority of cases, Bogdanov provides not quantitative regularity but basic guidelines of thought. There is colossal orienting significance in such generalised guidelines, nevertheless, and I will explain this with an example. In physics and chemistry a major role is played by the so-called law of Henri Louis Le Chatelier,51 according to which an established system of organised equilibrium is resistant to actions that strive to destroy that equilibrium. Thus, for example, if you bring a magnet near a metallic loop, an inductive current will spring up in the latter that obstructs this movement. When the magnet moves away, the current springs up in the opposite direction. When the temperature of soil drops below zero, the freezing of water is held back by the escaping ‘latent warmth of melting’, and when snow thaws the warmth of melting is absorbed so that again the process is slowed. Bogdanov posed the question of whether Le Chatelier’s law had universal applicability, and there can be no doubt that the formulation is completely valid. In fact, it is natural to expect that the destruction of an equilibrium causes the additional resistance in all such cases when there is a ‘positive complex’, i.e. the kind of combinations of elements in which the effectiveness of the whole is greater than the sum of the effectiveness of its component parts. This consideration suggests that Le Chatelier’s Law must play no less an important role in biology, in sociology, and, in particular, in a planned economy than it plays in physics. Actually, it would not be difficult to show that a great many errors of judgement in the work of economic reconstruction in the Soviet Union were caused by ignoring the supplemental resistance of organisations that were being reconstructed.
In estimating the magnitude of the expenditures necessary for the restructuring of our economy and the effectiveness expected from these expenditures, we naively view all economic complexes as neutral. This results in a great many errors that could be avoided if the organisational problems were subjected to a more thorough analysis, and if the applicability of Le Chatelier’s law was not ignored in this analysis.
In conclusion, I will point out one tektological principle that has now become a lasting property of the planning methodology of Soviet economists. I have in mind the law of the chain of interrelationships between elements of an organised whole and the law of the minimum (the strength of the entire chain is determined by the strength of its weakest link; the speed of movement of a complex is determined by the speed of the slowest moving element, etc.). When A. Bogdanov first applied the law of the minimum to certain phenomena of our community, his attempt was harshly rebuffed; it seemed to the majority of our activists to be not only untenable but anti-revolutionary. ‘We are building our economic policy in such a way’, his critics wrote, ‘that the leading link was industry that developed with maximal speed, while Bogdanov wanted to hold us back to be level with the most backward link’. And only a small group of planning workers, with V.G. Groman52 in the lead, from the very beginning placed the principle of the chain of relationships and the law of the minimum at the basis of the methodology of the economic plan. In the Soviet Union at the present time there is not one economist or one important scientific worker who in drawing up economic perspectives could manage without the analysis of the ‘chain of relationships’ of phenomena and without the establishment of ‘limits’ (i.e. minimums).
But even the practical use of tektological methods is not always accompanied by a conscious recognition of them. It is often said, for example, that the principle of limits and a chain of relationships is something that is elementary and clear, that goes without saying, and that does not need any special organisational science to justify it. And this is said by the very same people who several years ago met this ‘self-evident’ idea of chain-like causality with indignant protests. Thus we see that the old story of Columbus’s egg remains forever new.
Down to the present, tektology has had considerably more opponents than supporters in our literature. A great many articles and a few thick books have been written against tektology. Nevertheless, there still has been no real, practical criticism of it. The failure of Bogdanov’s opponents consists in the fact that the majority of them are professional philosophers, i.e. people who are capable of working with abstractions but lack competence in the concrete fields of knowledge to which Bogdanov applied his principles. Meanwhile, tektology is absolutely invulnerable to abstract-philosophical criticism.
The first and principal philosophical accusation against Bogdanov is ‘idealism’, and various modifications of the old polemical articles by Plekhanov are usually used to prove the justice of this accusation. But after all, Plekhanov was denouncing the ideological essence of empiriomonism. The principles of universal organisational science are not tied to the philosophy of empiriomonism at all. The applicability of those principles depends in no way upon the model according to which the ‘thing-in-itself’ acts upon us – an empiriomonistic model, a Plekhanovite model, or any other. Tektology has to do only with the facts of experience and is absolutely uninterested in things-in-themselves.
Further, in recent years Bogdanov has frequently been reproached because his worldview is mechanistic and not dialectical. First and foremost, this is factually untrue. The basic mark of ‘dialectical-ness’ is considered, as is well known, to be the recognition of the idea that different realms of being have unique qualities that are not reducible to quantity. But the foundation of tektology – the idea of organisation – is exactly the recognition of such qualities. Besides that, from Bogdanov’s point of view mechanics itself is not ‘mechanistic’ but dialectical, since the same qualitative characteristics are characteristic as in the sphere of the processes of the simplest mechanical phenomena as in the sphere of the complex phenomena of individual or social life. The dialectical-ness of tektology appears with particular clarity in the theory of crises that according to Bogdanov have, yet again, universal significance.
But even if the accusation of mechanistic-ness were justified, it would not be enough to discredit tektological constructions – as is true of all operational-scientific constructions. Bogdanov repeatedly emphasised that the concepts of organisational science do not have the goal of ‘explaining’ phenomena but of preparing humankind for practical struggle, to help it ‘master’ nature. This is a substantial distinction.
The passively explanatory function of cognition is to place new facts under old, habitual general concepts that have been sanctioned for one reason or another. This calms the mind and facilitates a purely theoretical orientation for it, but in itself it still does not elevate the practical power of humanity over nature. For this latter goal more perfected cognitive instruments are necessary that provide not only a qualitative description but also quantitative measurement, and, in addition, that that allow one to predict the approach of an event being studied or to purposefully cause it. If a tool that successfully carries out this practical task does not correspond in form to the established and sanctioned model of any ‘philosophical’ theory – for example, appears mechanistic to a dialectician – then the simple statement of that fact is still not sufficient to critically destroy a scientific construction that one does not like. Critics must devise the kind of dialectical construction to replace the mechanistic construction that they do not like that would carry out the cognitively operative work of the latter and, moreover, carry it out better and not worse. Only then can critics hope for a successful performance. As far as the abstract philosophical reprimands that are conventionally given to scientists under the guise of criticism are concerned, they deserve only compassionate smiles.
The time has not yet come for an evaluation of the scientific legacy bequeathed to us by A. Bogdanov. That the legacy is huge is already clear to any impartial person. This is also admitted by the most thoughtful of Bogdanov’s theoretical opponents. In the speech that N.I. Bukharin53 gave at Bogdanov’s grave, he did not conceal his disagreements with the deceased in the least, but he emphasised that Communists will learn a great deal from him for a long time.
I end my essay with the hope that Bogdanov’s ideas will promote – among both his supporters and his critics – that serious and profound work of scientific thought without which it will be impossible either to adequately continue Bogdanov’s work or to introduce valid corrections into it.
Bazarov wrote this article in 1928 as a memorial to his life and work. However, because Bogdanov’s work had been declared ideologically anathema by the Soviet establishment, it could not be published at the time. The manuscript was discovered in the Central Party Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by a research assistant of Dr Georgii D. Gloveli, Professor of Theoretical Economics in the Higher School of Economics, National Research University (Russia), and it was published for the first time in 2002 (Bazarov 2002). This translation is of a version of the article that was further edited by Dr Gloveli, who kindly shared it with me.
Jasny 1972.
Bogdanov 1897.
Evgeni Pavlov covers this well. Pavlov 2017. [Trans.]
Lenin 1927.
Bazarov himself was criticised by Lenin in this work [trans.].
For the numerous editions and versions of this work consult Biggart 1998. For English translations see Gorelik 1980 and Dudley 1996.
Bogdanov 1901.
This is a play on words. In Russian, gnosiologiia (the cognate of ‘gnosiology’) is preferred to epistemologiia (the cognate of ‘epistemology’) to denote the philosophy of knowledge. ‘Gnusiologiia’, however, takes as its root, ‘gnus’, which is a generic term for blood-sucking insects like mosquitoes and horseflies [trans.].
Plekhanov 1906.
The most notable of these scholars was the English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) whose works were widely read in Russia in the late nineteenth century [trans.].
The Roman historian Livy wrote that when the plebeians protested their oppression by the patrician class by seceding from Rome in 493 B.C.E., the Senate sent former consul Agrippa Menenius Lanatus to convince them to return. Menenius told them a fable about how each part of the human body has its own role to play, and the body could no more do without a stomach than Rome could do without the patrician class. [trans.]
Le Chatelier’s Law states that if a chemical system in a state of dynamic equilibrium undergoes a change in the factors that determine it (concentration, temperature, or total pressure), the position of the equilibrium will move in order to minimise the change [trans.].
Vladimir Gustavovich Groman (1874–1940) was a Russian economist affiliated with the Menshevik fraction. He was a leading figure in Gosplan (the agency responsible for economic planning in the Soviet Union) in the 1920s, but because he argued that the targets for Stalin’s first five-year plan were unrealistic, he – along with Bazarov – was arrested and accused of counter-revolutionary activity. Groman publicly admitted his guilt, while Bazarov did not [trans.].
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888–1938) was a Marxist theorist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. At the time he gave this speech, Bukharin was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party, its highest policy-making organ. For a discussion of Bukharin’s relationship with Bogdanov and a translation of Bukharin’s speech, see Pavlov 2013 [trans.].