The Return to Legal Marxism

Lenin’s writings were being censored or confiscated all over Russia. The Okhrana was well aware that behind the pseudonym “N. Lenin” was hidden “a well-known representative of the RSDRP,” Vladimir Ulianov. They knew that Lenin was the author of numerous subversive pamphlets, that he was living in Finland with a German passport, and that he did not own a house. They did not know Krupskaya’s name. Tightening police surveillance meant that Lenin would have great difficulty publishing inside Russia, but that the pseudonymous “V. Ilin” would not.²

In the summer of 1907 Lenin began editing his collected works under the title Za 12 let (After twelve years) in three volumes. Kamenev duly signed a contract with the Zerno publishing house in St. Petersburg to this end. Included in the collection was What Is to Be Done? (with some polemical footnotes left out). Volume one contained more than four hundred pages of Lenin’s writings from 1895 to 1905. No sooner did it appear than the Committee on Press Affairs condemned it for advocating an armed uprising and ordered the book confiscated from all bookstores. Threatened with arrest, Lenin opted to emigrate.³

Lenin also produced a second edition of his legal Marxist study of the 1890s The Development of Capitalism in Russia. In this case more lenient censorship conditions enabled him to be less Aesopian than in the first edition; “scholars” now became “Marxists,” “supporters of labor” became “socialists,” and a “new theory” became “Marxism.” In exile, of course, Lenin could be even more explicit; in a March 1908 article on Marx he wrote that the 1905 experience showed the need for a “civil war” in Russia as a means to “expropriate the expropriators.” But inside Russia Lenin’s works were still being confiscated by the police in their raids on RSDRP bookstores.⁴

In June 1908 Lenin launched his attack on Bogdanov’s philosophy, ostensibly because Bogdanov had violated their agreement to remain neutral in philosophical matters. Bogdanov’s writings and teaching attracted an increasing number of young Russian Marxists, drawn to the philosophy of Mach and the science fiction of Mars, as well as the writings of Marx. The Bolshevik turn to collectivism demanded an authoritarian response, felt Lenin, but one which could reach readers inside Russia. The answer was to attack Bogdanov’s philosophy. But from the point of view of Bogdanov and his supporters, what had begun was a “struggle against Leninism.”⁵

Bogdanov and the Philosophy of Collectivism

Bogdanov, like Lenin, had emigrated from Russia and was involved in the political and financial legacies of 1905. Arrested as a member of the St. Petersburg soviet in December 1905, he had spent six months in jail where he completed the writing of the third volume of his magnum opus, Empiriomonism. In it Bogdanov completed what he thought to be a synthesis of the ideas of Marx and Mach.⁶

According to Bogdanov, Marx’s view that social existence determined man’s consciousness was essentially correct. But Bogdanov believed that biological and social necessity drove men toward cooperation and harmony, not class conflict. Like Mach, he argued that knowledge was derived from experience. Each individual had a unique set of experiences which led to knowledge. Society absorbed individual experiences through “collective synchronization” among individuals. More than Marx, Bogdanov recognized that certain elements in the superstructure of society, notably technology and ideology, could have dramatic effects on the economic substructure, the means of production, and even the physical and natural world within which man lived. For Bogdanov, science and tools (in which he included knowledge and language) enabled man to act upon nature.

Bogdanov saw society divided into two main classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat. He also described a technical intelligentsia of scientists, engineers, and managers that could cooperate with the proletariat in using technology, as well as revolution, to create a utopian future society. The telephone, the loudspeaker, the film projector, and the machine shop were as much weapons of revolution as the bayonet and the machine gun. The key to a proletarian future would be the ideology of the technical and scientific intelligentsia, which would use its universal knowledge (tektology, Bogdanov called it) to organize human experience mathematically toward a better future. The world of all men is a product of their experience and therefore subject to manipulation and even control.

In Empiriomonism, Bogdanov wrote that all truth was relative, not absolute. Truth was an “organizing form of human experience.” In stark contrast to the orthodox scientism of Lenin and Plekhanov, Bogdanov argued that “Marxism denies the unconditional objectivity of any kind of truth, or any eternal truths.” Marxism was useful myth, a way of organizing collective experience into socialist ideology, but not the only way, and not the absolutely true way. Experience was the sum of energies of individuals. Progress meant the gradual selection of those classes with the most energy to do useful work, notably the proletariat. Since knowledge was a means of organizing labor, the technical intelligentsia—the Krasins of this world—had a crucial role to play. Like Lenin, Bogdanov held a vanguard theory of political organization of the masses’ collective experience, but his vanguard was the technical intelligentsia, not necessarily the party.⁷

Bogdanov was also interested in reaching the masses through imaginative literature that was both Aesopian and utopian, a science fiction that could pass the censor and reach the literate. In November 1907 he published his first such work, the novel Red Star. The novel emerged from the European science fiction tradition of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, the Russian utopianism of Vladimir Odoevsky’s The Year 4338 (1830), and the Aesopian language of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863). In Campanella’s City of the Sun, the Solarians usually lived at least one hundred years, some to age two hundred, because of a “secret, marvelous art by which they can renew their bodies painlessly every seven years.”⁸ Bogdanov, too, imagined a future world of scientific triumph which would overcome the limits of aging and death.

Aside from having a linguistic relationship to the name Marx, the planet Mars had long been the object of speculation and imagination. Was there life on the red planet? Percival Lowell’s popular Mars and Its Canals (1906) suggested the possibility that the markings on the planet’s surface visible through telescopes might be of human origin. Bogdanov went further, imagining a socialist society on Mars in which the problems of overpopulation and aging were controlled through euthanasia; clinical death rooms were provided for those tired of life, yet life could be prolonged through blood transfusion. Young blood extended old age through medical science.⁹

Red Star takes the literary form of a manuscript by a Martian named Leonid that has been discovered by a Dr. N. Verner, one of Bogdanov’s pseudonyms. Leonid, at 26, is an old party worker who had “joined the revolution under the banner of duty and sacrifice.” His girlfriend Anna believes in the sanctity of the “proletarian ethic” and supports the armed uprising planned by a young conspirator code-named Menni. Leonid considers the proletarian ethic a useful aid, but rejects the planned uprising because of insufficient preparation.¹⁰

Menni and other party comrades have invented a rocket fueled by “minus matter” (electrons?). Menni introduces Leonid to a group of Martians at his apartment, and they travel by rocket to Mars, complete with oxygen supplies, a computer, and zero gravity. The Martians have learned by experience that the collective is more important than the individual. Their science, art, and architecture are all anonymous, created by common labor, so that “names from the past are only the useless ballast of human memory.” Martian books articulate a “proletarian philosophy of nature” in which war, slavery, class struggle, and the riddle of death have been surmounted. Giant canals constructed by the previous capitalist society have been taken over by striking workers. Factories are clean and comfortable, vegetables are grown hydroponically underground, muzak fills the air, and time charts indicate the control, distribution, and output of workers. The economy is run by computers and uses no money. Machines have enabled workers to achieve the two-hour day. The idea of individual property no longer exists, and the result is “complete communism.”¹¹

Most striking is Bogdanov’s notion of voluntary death and collective immortality. Hospitals feature rooms for suicides to finish their days in peace and quiet, while the middle-aged are renewed through periodic blood transfusions. Youth is restored to the aging, and “the blood of one man continues to live in the organism of another.” In the Martian world, blood transfusion has become a means to collectivism, eliminating the psychology of individualism which persists on earth.¹²

Thus Bogdanov imagined in Red Star a brave new world of collectivism that was scientifically advanced, rationally organized and computerized, wise and energetic. It is a world of leisure time, humming machines, and mutual aid and affection. In the end the Martians decide to colonize other planets. On Earth a revolution breaks out but fails for lack of peasant support. The “forces of reaction” organize a “parliamentary comedy” and use violence and terror to suppress the revolution. Despair sets in. Yet the novel ends with the possibility of another revolution. Glorious individual sacrifices are not in vain, and Mars becomes a model future collectivist society.¹³

As an allegory of 1905 and a collectivist utopia, Bogdanov’s book greatly upset Lenin. But Krasin and the other Bolsheviks were especially taken by this imaginative vision of a technological and revolutionary future. Red Star was an example of a new kind of party literature, science fiction, which could outline socialism in a fictional and Aesopian way, reaching more readers inside Russia. But for Lenin such a medium threatened to revise the teachings of Marx and erode his own authority. This threat became more obvious when the other Bolsheviks rediscovered the teachings of Ernst Mach.¹⁴

Bogdanov had long been familiar with Mach’s empiriocriticism, his relativist and sensationalist approach to science. But in 1906 Mach’s writings became even more popular in Russia, and in 1907 Bogdanov edited a new translation of Mach’s classic work The Analysis of Sensations,¹⁵ Bogdanov’s introduction on “What the Russian reader should look for in Mach” also appeared in the widely read German socialist journal Neue Zeit and set off a storm of controversy. “It is very definitely to be regretted,” wrote a Russian admirer to Mach, “that Mr. Bogdanov has taken so much trouble to write such a completely unsuitable preface to your work. Why this agitation handbill? What has Karl Marx and the ‘revolutionary proletariat’ to do with your Analysis?”¹⁶

In November 1907 N. V. Volsky (Valentinov) wrote Mach and asked him what he thought of Bogdanov’s point that “the principles of Mach’s realist philosophy coincide with the basic point of Marx’s sociological conception.” Was Dietzgen an important influence on Marx and Engels? On Mach himself? Would Mach be willing to help the “Russian empiriocritics” in their struggle against Lenin and other “anti-Machists”?¹⁷

Mach responded that, yes, he had read Dietzgen on the recommendation of his friend Friedrich Adler, but that the teachings of Marx and Engels were always “completely foreign to my work.” Mach portrayed himself as a social democrat, but not a Marxist, “a physicist who seeks a point of view beyond his specialty.”¹⁸

Bogdanov argued that a Russian Marxist could, in fact, learn a great deal from Mach. His positivism provided a useful weapon against idealism and religion, indeed against all metaphysical authority in philosophy and science. His philosophical writings could pass the Russian censorship with little scrutiny. But revising Marxism along Machist lines would also deepen differences within the RSDRP. As the German translator noted, “the very serious tactical differences of ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘Mensheviks’ will be sharpened by the completely independent question, in our eyes, of whether Marxism is in accord with Spinoza and Holbach or Mach and Avenarius as an epistemology.”¹⁹

The German translator was not aware that Ernst Mach’s teachings would further widen the gap between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. No sooner had Lenin arrived in Geneva than he was confronted with an outpouring of party literature reflecting Bogdanov’s collectivism. Bogdanov wrote an article for Raduga on the philosophy of the proletariat in which he called for an extension of Dietzgen’s ideas “to organize humanity for infinite progress and joyous conquest of life.” He also alluded to Leninist “orthodoxy” as one of the “opportunist tendencies in philosophy.”²⁰

Lenin was most disturbed by the appearance in January 1908 of another Bogdanov project, Essays on the Philosophy of Marxism. Mach and Avenarius, argued Bazarov, were really more Marxist than Plekhanov in stressing that the very existence of the external world was a materialist hypothesis. Marx and Engels were scientific; Plekhanov was scholastic. Other essays argued against a pessimistic and deterministic interpretation of Marx in favor of optimism and action. Marxism, like modern experimental science, worked with hypotheses and data; ideas shaped all experience, rather than merely reflecting external reality.²¹

Lunacharsky praised Walt Whitman for his “optimistic atheism” and called for a new “proletarian culture.” The authoritarian dualism of bourgeoisie and proletariat under capitalism must give way to the collectivist monism of the proletariat. Under a new culture of “religious atheism” the proletariat would say its joyful “Yes!” to life; individual belief in a god would be replaced by collectivist religious myth, following the example of Dietzgen’s religion of socialism and Sorel’s “social myth” of the general strike. Socialist philosophy would not distinguish between spirit and matter, ideas and experience. “Consciousness does not sit off to one side in a corner, mysteriously reflecting reality,” mused Lunacharsky, “but is itself a living reality.”²²

Lunacharsky also indicated the parallel between proletarian culture and syndicalist myth, while criticizing Sorel himself:

Georges Sorel says: “The general strike may not happen, and even probably will never happen, but one must support its idea in the minds of the proletariat as a social myth, as the leading clarifying idea, so that one constantly tries to attain that degree of violence which our comprehension suggests.” A very nasty idea. Since the social revolution is identical with the general strike, both function as myths.²³

Despite criticizing Sorel, Lunacharsky believed that a “god-building” myth could create a proletarian culture after the revolution. God, after all, was merely “humanity in its highest potential.” “We ideologues are raised up by waves from a proletarian sea,” and the function of ideology was to provide collectivist myth for the masses.²⁴

In the same collection Bogdanov decried the idols and fetishes of bourgeois philosophy, which had found their way into Plekhanov’s thinking. Bogdanov’s empiriomonism was better suited than Plekhanov’s narrow Marxist orthodoxy to harness proletarian energy to the needs of a technical industrial society. Ideas and language are not mere reflections of class interest, but useful tools. Plekhanov made materialism itself into a fetish, an idol, a faith. But matter is not a thing-in-itself distinguished from spirit; it is part of a single monist continuum running from experience to consciousness. Matter is experience, known to us only through our sensations of the world. The world is not external and determined; it can be transformed by consciousness and technology, “the victory of people’s social labor over nature by means of machine production.”²⁵

Bogdanov and his colleagues were calling for nothing less than a major revision of Marxism along the lines suggested by modern science, especially the empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius. Bogdanov was more than a Machist. But he shared Mach’s view that the world is our sensations and experiences, and that knowledge and hypothesis act upon that world as much as external and material forces. In Aesopian translation, the ideas of the radical, technical intelligentsia can effect a revolution better than either party orthodoxy or proletarian spontaneity. The key to a revolutionary future was collectivist myth, not individual authority—Bolshevik theory, not Leninist dogma.

Bogdanov pointed out that Mach’s thought involved both relativist epistemology and a radical destruction of the very notion of self. Indeed, the attack on individualism linked Mach and Marx more than any supposed epistemological agreement or disagreement on how we know the world. In his book Keys to a School of Philosophy (1908), Bogdanov attacked Plekhanov’s materialism as “childishly naive” and espoused the relativity of truth. Proletarian ideology derived from science and technology through the “labor process,” yet truth changes over time, as well as from one individual to another. The trick was to create an ideology for Man, not individual men. “The first and basic characteristic of Mach’s analysis of experience, “ concluded Bogdanov, “is the destructive criticism of the individualist idea that experience belongs to the same subject or ‘I.’” For the “I” or self constantly changes, dies, is reborn as a complex of memories, moods, and feelings. Marx and Engels had not created a proletarian philosophy; however, the radical collectivist antiindividualism of Mach and Bogdanov would do so.²⁶

Bogdanov’s attempt to modernize Marx also threatened Lenin’s authority over Bolshevism. Many other Bolsheviks were increasingly attracted to Bogdanov’s philosophy. Gorky considered Bogdanov “the most interesting and perhaps the most significant philosopher in Europe”; Shuliatikov called Bogdanov’s ideas “epoch making” in their radical critique of the “cult of the autonomous person” and “individualism.” Young Bolsheviks in jail inside Russia, such as Nikolai Bukharin and Ya. M. Sverdlov, were also immersed in Mach and Bogdanov as prison reading. “Lunacharsky is right,” Gorky wrote Bogdanov in March 1908, “when he says that ‘Lenin does not understand Bolshevism.’ “²⁷

Emigration further widened the gap between Bogdanov and Lenin. For one thing, Friedrich Adler and Ernst Untermann were popularizing the ideas of Mach and Dietzgen to criticze atomism in physics and absolutism in epistemology. They supported a monism linking matter and mind, rejecting the old Kantian dualism. For another, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky in March 1908 brought out a Geneva émigré journal, Zagranichnaia gazeta (Foreign gazette), which published Lenin’s articles but was not under Lenin’s control. In its pages Lunacharsky praised Gorky for avoiding “narrow Marxism” and “crude materialism” in favor of “scientific socialism in its religious significance” and Bogdanov argued that “a theory—any theory, true or false—exists only in the consciousness of people.”²⁸

The internecine quarrel between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks was not lost on the Mensheviks. Like Plekhanov, they pointed out the connection between Bolshevism and Machism, “a world view without a world.” Unnamed Bolshevik philosophers were denying the existence of objective truth in favor of a reactionary world view. “Bolshevik tactics and practices create unconscious Machists and idealists,” charged A. M. Deborin.²⁹

In 1908 Lenin was the only Bolshevik leader to join Plekhanov and the Mensheviks in condemning Bogdanov’s collectivism. Kamenev wrote Bogdanov in May 1908, praising the “revolutionary proletarian character” of his philosophy, even while asking him to join Lenin in condemning “our philosophical opponents.” Bogdanov, writing in the name of the Bolshevik Center, noted that Bolshevism as an organization was now almost completely destroyed, scattered by emigration and exile, badly in need of funds. He urged party unity, discipline, and democracy by not recalling the Duma fraction, even if that meant abandoning the hope of direct action in the streets. He even agreed to maintain silence about Taratuta and the Schmidt inheritance.³⁰

By autumn 1908 Bogdanov was the virtual leader of Bolshevism in exile. “The more I read your books and understand your thoughts,” wrote Gorky, “the more revolutionary they appear.” Gorky called Bogdanov “the greatest organizer of today’s ideas.” Kamenev was also supportive: “Even in 1905 I supported, foolishly or not, the revolutionary-proletarian character of the new philosophy in Marxism, understanding by ‘new philosophy’ that stream in it which you represent. I have said this in print and I will continue to stand my ground; even now I will always be ready to defend it in any way.” Kamenev praised Bogdanov as the creator of a new philosophy and a “proletarian revolution.” Bogdanov’s empiriomonism, added Volsky (Valentinov), was real Marxist science, in contrast to Plekhanov’s dogma; Bogdanov “strikes the hardest blow at militant individualism, showing the complete insubstantiality of the latter in the theory of consciousness.” Shuliatikov too felt that Bogdanov had “opened a new era in the history of philosophy” with his collectivism. The individual should be replaced by the collective, in politics as well as in philosophy; “the centralization of organizational functions does not mean replacing many organizers with one.”³¹

Bogdanov’s collectivism provided a center around which the veterans of 1905 Bolshevism could rally. In thought, as in politics, the myth of the collective was to counterbalance the authority of the individual. As Lenin well knew, this alluded not only to bourgeois philosophy, but to Leninist politics. Bolshevism was threatening to become Bogdanovism.

Lenin and Plekhanov against Machism

George Plekhanov, the pope of Russian Marxism, led the attack on Bogdanov’s collectivism in 1908, and Lenin was an eager imitator. As early as 1901 Lenin had declared himself a “definite opponent of both Hume’s scepticism and Kant’s idealism.” Yet when Plekhanov attacked Mach and Avenarius at a party congress in 1905, Lenin treated him with sarcasm and levity.

Without being able to show that Vpered wants to “criticize” Marx, Plekhanov brings into earshot Mach and Avenarius. I am definitely puzzled about what relations these two writers (toward whom I have not the slightest sympathy) have to the question of social revolution. They have written about the individual and social organization of experience, or something of this sort, but truly have not thought much about the democratic dictatorship. Has Plekhanov learned that Parvus has become a supporter of Mach and Avenarius? (Laughter.) Or maybe Plekhanov has come to the point where he needs for a target Mach and Avenarius, not the village or the city.

For Lenin, the 1905 revolution meant that philosophy was far less important than militant politics. Bogdanov was a necessary Bolshevik ally, and Plekhanov a Menshevik enemy. In 1908 the situation was reversed. Bogdanov had become an enemy, and Plekhanov an ally, in a philosophical struggle to control Bolshevism.³²

For many Russian Marxists, collectivism was threatening because of its scepticism toward all metaphysical truths and orthodoxies. Plekhanov as early as July 1905 pointed out the link between eighteenth-century scepticism and Bogdanov, noting that “the views of Mach and Avenarius represent only the latest variation on Hume’s philosophy.” Another essay dedicated to Plekhanov in 1906 attacked Bogdanov and Lunacharsky for creating “idealism under a Marxist flag” and went on to defend the “absolute reality of the external world.” Collectivism was derided as a “complete muddle” (putanitsa).³³

But collectivism was rooted in a broader contemporary trend in European thought, often characterized as “modernism.” Modernism encompassed neo-Kantian idealism, religious symbolism, impressionism, intuitionism, and other points of view that seemed to threaten the absolute verities of nineteenth-century thought. The Catholic church was especially concerned with the modernist breakdown of old values. In September 1907 Pope Pius X issued his encyclical Pascendi Gregis attacking all modernism as theological heresy. Agnosticism leads to atheism, pronounced the Pope, even if disguised as fideism, a surrogate belief. Church teachings are not relatively, but absolutely, true. The modernists assert the primacy of individual experience, but “given this doctrine of experience united with that of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true.” Scripture is the sacred word of God, not myth or text; the church is God’s authority in the world, not an expression of collective experience. Modernism is nothing less than a “synthesis of all the heresies,” and church authority must censor it out of existence.³⁴

The revision of orthodoxy was thus as much a problem for the Church in 1908 as for the Marxists. Lenin proclaimed that the heresy laid down in Bogdanov’s Essays on Marxism was “not Marxism”; it only sharpened the differences among the Bolsheviks and made a battle over philosophy “absolutely inevitable.” Breaking off relations with Bogdanov in the spring of 1908, Lenin wrote an article entitled “Marxism and Revisionism” in which he made it plain that the enemy was not only philosophical idealism and “neo-Humeian, neo-Berkeleyan revisionism” but also political syndicalism. “Even that ‘revisionism of the left,’ which has appeared now in the Latin countries as ‘revolutionary syndicalism,’ is also attracted to Marxism, ‘correcting’ it; Labriola in Italy and Lagardelle in France label themselves in Marx’s ranks, falsely interpreting what Marx really meant.”³⁵ The key to attacking Bogdanov, however, was not to confront the syndicalist politics he shared with so many other Bolsheviks, but to criticize his philosophy.

Plekhanov led the attack on Bogdanov and Machism but was not supported by Karl Kautsky. In response to Plekhanov’s complaint that “our German comrades are turning more and more away from Marxist materialism,” Kautsky wrote that Machism was a “serious socialist point of view.” “From what I know about Mach,” wrote Kautsky, “he must be taken seriously.” Thus daunted, Plekhanov launched his attack in the pages of Russian, not German, journals in the spring of 1908.³⁶

In an article entitled “Basic Questions of Marxism,” Plekhanov argued that Marxist materialism was an entire world view that should not be revised by “bourgeois ideologues,” among whom he included Kant, Mach, Avenarius, and Dietzgen. Materialism was the correct world view, idealism the false one. “To be,” wrote Plekhanov, “does not mean to exist in the mind. In this respect the philosophy of Feuerbach is much clearer than the philosophy of Joseph Dietzgen.” Neither parliamentary reformists nor syndicalists understood Marxism, and any revision of Marxism resembled the very modernist heresies condemned so recently by Pius X. “Until now,” wrote Plekhanov, “there were no attempts to ‘supplement’ Marx by a Thomas Aquinas. But there is nothing impossible about the fact that, despite the recent papal encyclical against the modernists, the Catholic world at one time pulled from its midst a thinker capable of this theoretical heroic act.”³⁷

Having equated revisionism with heresy, Plekhanov went on to attack Bogdanov directly in an article entitled “Militant Materialism.” In it Plekhanov excommunicated Bogdanov as a lapsed comrade, an empiriomonist who, with Labriola and Lunacharsky, had tried to smuggle syndicalism into Russia “in the guise of a weapon ‘suitable for orthodox Marxists.’ “ Mach stood in the tradition of English scepticism and agnosticism, a descendant of Hume and Bishop Berkeley, a tradition that could end only in idealism, not materialism. The world was no mere product of mind and experience; it existed outside the self.³⁸

Further, Plekhanov polemicized, Bogdanov was really quite ignorant in matters of philosophy. Otherwise he would know that his idol Mach stood “on the same point of view as the eighteenth-century idealist Berkeley.” Matter is not experience or idea, but thing-in-itself. “So, for example, you, Mr. Bogdanov, exist first ‘as yourself and second as perceived by, say, Mr. Lunacharsky, who considers you a deep thinker.” Either a Marxist or a Machist, there was no middle ground for Plekhanov. “Machism,” he concluded, “is only Berkeleyanism made over and embellished in the light of ‘twentieth-century natural science’ “ and a contemporary variant of “subjective idealism.”³⁹

Plekhanov was thus the Menshevik point man in the attack on Bogdanov’s philosophy and Bolshevism, apparently at the request of Paul Axelrod. According to Plekhanov, Axelrod “practically forced me to start a polemic with Bogdanov.” Yet by December 1908 Plekhanov had drifted away from the Mensheviks to ally himself with a renegade Bolshevik, Lenin, who sought to use Plekhanov’s philosophical attack on Bogdanov in order to destroy Bogdanov politically. The result was Materialism and Empiriocriticism.⁴⁰

Materialism and Empiriocriticism

Between May 16 and June 10, 1908, Lenin resided at 21 Tavistock Street in London. For much of the time he worked in the British Museum, collecting notes for a future philosophical polemic against Bogdanov. He also pursued illegal work as usual, especially efforts to get help from the International Socialist Bureau in freeing those arrested for cashing Tiflis Ex notes. But his primary interest was literary. He pored through the works of Hume and Berkeley, Mach and Avenarius, and modern German philosophers, such as Wilhelm Wundt and Kuno Fischer. He devoured the pragmatism of William James, the energetics of Wilhelm Ostwald, the scientific essays of J. J. Thompson and J. B. Stallo.⁴¹

The first fruit of this activity was a polemical list of ten questions sent by Lenin to I. F. Dubrovinsky in Geneva. On May 28 Dubrovinsky confronted Bogdanov with the list at a public lecture: Does the lecturer acknowledge that the philosophy of Marxism is dialectical materialism? If he does not, why has he never analysed Engels’s countless statements on this subject? Is the lecturer aware that Petzoldt in his latest book has classed a number of Mach’s disciples among the idealists? Does the lecturer confirm the fact that Machism has nothing in common with Bolshevism? And so on. Lenin had escalated his conflict with Bogdanov from private disagreement to public warfare.⁴²

Yet Lenin’s isolation was such that it was not easy to find a publisher for his polemic. His dentist friend P. G. Dauge was a supporter of Dietzgen and Bogdanov and refused to publish Lenin’s book. In July 1908 Lenin fumed that there was now a “schism with Bogdanov” over his philosophical views that was worse than that between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. “I will leave the fraction as soon as the ‘left’ line and real ‘boycottism’ take over,” he threatened. Lenin was ill now and in need of a publisher. He was reduced to asking his sisters in Moscow to find him one.⁴³

“It is important that the book come out soon,” Lenin wrote his sister Anna in August. “For me there are not only literary but also serious political circumstances connected with its publication.” The problem was Bogdanov: “a complete break and war are now worse than with the Mensheviks.” In September he sent Anna back to Moscow from Geneva with the request that she find a publisher as soon as possible. She approached the Zerno house of L. O. Krumbügel, a twenty-eight-year-old Social Revolutionary with a wealthy father. But Krumbügel thought the book would merit only a small edition, and wanted to think it over.⁴⁴

By late October Lenin had completed his manuscript and again asked Anna Elizarova to get him a contract. He agreed to tone down his language to please the censor, using “fideism” instead of “priestism,” for example, to mollify the church. She approached Skvortsov about using Gorky’s Znanie house, but Gorky was busy publishing Bogdanov’s works. She also tried Bonch-Bruevich, but he was in debt and could not promise any royalties. As of December 1, 1908, Lenin still could not find a publisher and was increasingly frustrated.⁴⁵

Gorky was determined not to help Lenin. “With regard to publishing Lenin’s book,” he wrote K. P. Piatnitsky, “I am against it because I know the author. He is a clever fellow, a wonderful man, but he is a fighter who scoffs at gentlemanly conduct. Let Znanie edit his book and he will say: what fools, meaning Bogdanov, myself, Bazarov, Lunacharsky. The argument between Lenin and Plekhanov on one side and Bogdanov, Bazarov, and Co. on the other is very important and deep. The first two, differing on tactical questions, both believe in and advocate historical fatalism; the opposing side teaches philosophical activity. For me it is clear on whose side truth lies.”⁴⁶

In December 1908, Lenin moved from Geneva to Paris, and finally obtained a contract from Krumbügel and the Zerno house. Three thousand copies would be printed, and Lenin would receive royalties and fifty free copies. Anna signed the contract, and Lenin agreed to tone down his acerbic comments on Bazarov and Bogdanov. By February 1909 Lenin had received corrected galley proofs from Moscow and returned them. In the meantime polemics with Bogdanov had intensified, and Lenin was running short on funds.⁴⁷

In March 1909 the censorship struck again in St. Petersburg. The Senate Criminal Cassation Division ordered a new edition of Marx’s Communist Manifesto seized and destroyed, along with a new edition of Marx’s letters to Kügelman with an introduction by Lenin. St. Petersburg officials even proposed that criminal proceedings be launched against Lenin and his sister, but admitted that “the names, surnames, occupations, and places of residence of these people are unknown.” To be safe, Lenin agreed to have the manuscript printed on the presses of Russia’s most reactionary publishing house, controlled by the powerful A. S. Suvorin. Krumbügel had cleverly made this arrangement in the full knowledge that books printed by Suvorin were not subject to normal censorship review. Lenin’s attack on Bogdanov was to be printed by what was virtually an arm of the Russian government.⁴⁸

Lenin still insisted that nothing should be toned down about “Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Co.,” who were “dishonorable Machists” and “enemies of Marxism in philosophy.” He continually demanded that Anna hurry up the publication. It was “devilishly important” that the book come out as soon as possible, he wrote Anna in early April 1909. With the aid of Krumbügel and L. S. Peres, another Bolshevik, the final corrections were negotiated and Materialism and Empiriocriticism appeared in the middle of May in an edition of two thousand copies at a price of two rubles, sixty kopeks, rather high-priced by standards of the day. At that price, wrote Gorky, “who will read it?”⁴⁹

Lenin was pleased with the book, which he found well edited but expensive. The other Bolsheviks were not. Gorky found in it “the sound of a hooligan” yelling “I am the best Marxist of all,” and concluded that Lenin was a publicist, not a philosopher, an “individualist” and a “hopeless case.” Gorky wrote Bogdanov that he, not Lenin, represented true Bolshevism, adding that “as far as Lenin is concerned, you are right: he thinks like a priest.”⁵⁰

Friedrich Adler was equally dismayed. “Lenin has written a large book of 450 pages against Machism,” he wrote his father, “in which he carefully attacks me, but without really disturbing me at all. He is capable only of petty arguments, since he does not really understand the question. Still, the book is a remarkable achievement. In about a year he has gone through the entire literature, of which he previously had no idea, and then has been able to make criticisms.”⁵¹

What was the content of Lenin’s Aesopian polemic against Bolshevik collectivism?

Orthodoxy against Science

Lenin’s book was a ringing defense of orthodox Marxism, as articulated by Plekhanov, against Bolshevik collectivism, as articulated by Bogdanov, Gorky, and Lunacharsky. Philosophically, it defended materialism against idealism; politically, it tried to link Bogdanov’s philosophy with the Mensheviks, without mentioning the syndicalist politics that actually linked Bogdanov with the Bolsheviks. Like Plekhanov, Lenin attacked Bogdanov’s empiriomonism; unlike Plekhanov, Lenin did not attack syndicalism. But he did employ the tried and true Aesopian techniques of legal Marxism.

Lenin admitted at the outset that Machism was merely a “synonym for ‘empirio-critics,’” which in turn was “a muddle, a mixture of materialism and idealism.” His main target was Bogdanov, who had “abandoned the materialist standpoint” and “condemned himself to confusion and idealist aberrations.” Machism, in turn, led into the swamp of fideism, the substitution of belief for reason. Philosophy was Aesopian politics, and Lenin noted that philosophers must be judged not by the labels they give themselves, but by “how they settle fundamental theoretical questions, by their associates, by what they are teaching and by what they have taught their disciples and followers.” Bogdanov had simply created new names for the ideas of Hume, Berkeley, and Mach, and was guilty by association of any consequences.⁵²

Lenin’s political opponents thus appear in disguise throughout the book. Sorel is not a syndicalist, but a “notorious muddler.” Viktor Chernov is not a Socialist Revolutionary, but a “principled literary opponent.” Friedrich Adler is not an Austrian socialist, but a “German Machist would-be Marxist.” Lunacharsky says “shameful things” using words with “special meanings.” Lenin, understanding that special meaning, wanted cooperation “while there is still ground for a fight on comradely lines.” Philosophy is a partisan struggle between materialism and idealism, an extension of the world of politics into the world of ideas in which there can be no neutrality.⁵³

In this context, then, Machism was an “incredibly muddled, confused, and reactionary” philosophy based on scepticism that tried to refute materialism. Following Plekhanov, Lenin traced the thought of Mach and Bogdanov back to Hume and Berkeley. He decried the notion that matter might exist only in our sensations of the world. Machism was “a sheer plagiarism on Berkeley” that tried to eliminate the material world. Lenin’s response was simple: “The existence of matter does not depend on sensation. Matter is primary. Sensation, thought, consciousness are the supreme product of matter organized in a particular way. Such are the views of materialism in general, and of Marx and Engels in particular.”⁵⁴

Lenin held to a simple copy theory of reality. The external world reflected by our mind “exists independently of our mind,” he wrote. Objective truth also existed outside the mind. Mach and Bogdanov had fallen into idealism, agnosticism, and relativism. “If truth is only an organizing form of human experience,” wrote Lenin, “then the teaching of, say, Catholicism is also true.” Relativism and solipcism led to religion; materialism was the basis of science. The word experience was thus “only a shield for idealist systems.”⁵⁵

How could Mach and Bogdanov believe that such verities as space and time do not exist, that they are simply mental ways of organizing experience? This was muddled idealism, a flirtation with religion, “a hash, a potpourri of contradictory and disconnected epistemological propositions.” Bogdanov’s idea that the self was a mere complex of experiences was a “complex of absurdities, fit only for deducing the immortality of the soul, or the idea of God.” Collectivism was a “reactionary muddle.”⁵⁶

To substitute the collective for the individual, wrote Lenin, was like “thinking that capitalism will vanish by replacing one capitalist by a joint stock company.” The Machists were also distorting the ideas of Dietzgen, a materialist who was occasionally “muddled,” but not an idealist. Scientists who argued that atoms did not exist, but were scientific hypotheses, were trying to replace materialism with idealism and agnosticism. Motion without matter was as unthinkable as a revolution without a proletariat.⁵⁷

Knowing nothing about modern physics, Lenin depended on the defense of atomism by Ludwig Boltzmann, the expert in statistical mechanics who attacked both Mach and Ostwald for their arguments that energy, not matter, was the principle substance of the physical world. Bogdanov’s reinterpretation of Mach was “only words, concealing an idealist philosophy.” The choice was Bolshevik materialism or Menshevik idealism; any middle ground was “contemptible, conciliatory quackery.” Lunacharsky’s idea of god building, a surrogate socialist religion, was also based on a denial of objective reality, agnosticism, and subjectivism. “The shameful things to which Lunacharsky has stooped are not exceptional; they are the product of empirio-criticism, both Russian and German.”⁵⁸

Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism was thus an attack on scientific relativism and philosophical sensationalism in the name of orthodox materialism. For the alert reader, it was also a political attack on Lenin’s rival Bogdanov, and, to a lesser extent, on Bogdanov’s supporters Lunacharsky and Gorky. In his review of Lenin’s book, Bogdanov accused his rival of basing his views on religious authority, the “fetishes of power.” The real criterion of truth, wrote Bogdanov, was not dogma but practice, not theory but experience. Absolute truth was an idealist fiction, a matter of faith, not scientific knowledge. It was Lenin (that is, his legal Marxist pseudonym V. Ilin) who supported idealism, clericalism, and priestism with his religious authority, not Bogdanov.⁵⁹

Bogdanov denied that he was a mere imitator of Mach and Avenarius. He was interested in an ideology that could organize mass experience— not Catholicism, as Lenin implied, but Marxism. The usefulness of an idea was not to be judged by “whether a majority or minority accepts it”, but by “whether it corresponds to collective labor’s demand for progress.” In other words, party policy should be decided by workers, not Bolsheviks or Mensheviks. Lenin did not understand Marx in the first place, and Lenin’s polemical methods reminded Bogdanov of his childhood Sunday school courses in the Orthodox church. Bogdanov noted that the Bolshevik Lenin had written What Is to Be Done?, but “I do not know what Russian Marxist faction V. Ilin belongs to.”⁶⁰

Bogdanov concluded that Lenin was merely a student of Plekhanov, and a mistaken one. His argument was from scripture, not experience. He had no real philosophy and no unity of thought. He was “apparently a very young philosopher, at least I have not seen his name before in the scholarly literature.” Lenin believed in a cult of the absolute; he wanted only to “sharpen and deepen the practical contradictions inside the left wing of Russian Marxism,” namely, Bolshevism. Marxism must reject absolute orthodoxy of any kind, including that of Marxism itself. Party unity could only be achieved through collective action.⁶¹

Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism thus served only to deepen the split between Lenin’s authority and Bogdanov’s collectivism. It was a political tract in the guise of a philosophical monograph; as such, it reflected a sharpening political quarrel within Bolshevism to which we must now turn.

The Bolshevik Center Schism: Paris against Geneva

Lenin’s attack on Bogdanov’s philosophy was part of a larger political struggle within the Bolshevik Center in 1909. The fifth conference of the RSDRP in Paris in January 1909 did little to unite the Bolsheviks, beyond condemning the “disorganizing opposition to central committee activity” by all fractions. The conference consisted of a tiny group of only sixteen voting delegates, which did not include Lenin, Bogdanov, or the police agent Ya. A. Zhitomirsky. But it did agree to condemn any attempt to liquidate underground activity, and to move its journal Sotsial Demokrat from Vilna to Paris.⁶²

As soon as the conference dispersed, Bogdanov attacked Lenin and the editorial board of Proletarii for creating an “anti-boycott center” that supported parliamentary activity and a policy of schism inside the Bolshevik Center. At a meeting of the editorial board with Lenin absent, Bogdanov succeeded in passing a resolution that Proletarii would remain neutral in matters of philosophy. In late February 1909 Lenin responded with an attack on “the swamp of god building and god seeking” (Lunacharsky) and began breaking off relations with Bogdanov entirely. Lenin succeeded in getting the editorial board to reverse itself and reject an article by Lunacharsky, further widening the split within Bolshevism. “The atmosphere here is very difficult,” wrote Lenin’s sister Maria Ulianova from Paris, “and Volodina’s [Lenin’s] predictions about a schism are coming true, if they have not already. The war against A. A. [Bogdanov] and Nik-cha [Krasin] has begun.”⁶³

In the spring of 1909, European socialism was deeply divided over the question of parliamentary participation and mass action. Kautsky opposed either strategy in favor of preparations for the day when the socialists would seize power. The Dutch socialists voted to expel dissidents of a syndicalist inclination from their party. Mach’s ideas were spreading through the writings of Friedrich Adler, who emphasized the importance of the experience of the general strike over Marxist theories; theories were not truths, but tools, and it was fruitless to waste time arguing about the meaning of Marx’s ideas. Kautsky, the leader of SPD orthodoxy, was interested in Mach and Dietzgen’s ideas; Plekhanov’s attack on them was wrong, he felt, at a time when the party needed clarity and unity in preparing for revolution. The Russians, noted Kautsky, would be much better off if they stopped arguing about Machism and Dietzgenism and considered philosophical views a “private matter.”⁶⁴

But Lenin could not be so tolerant, because the other Bolsheviks were drifting away. The young historian M. N. Pokrovsky left Paris for Geneva to work with Bogdanov, and criticized Lenin for underestimating the possibilities of revolution. Lenin paraphrased Pokrovsky: “Of course recallism is stupid, of course it’s syndicalism, but for moral considerations I, and probably Skvortsov too, shall be for Maximov [Bogdanov].” Even Krasin was drifting away from the Bolshevik Center.⁶⁵

Another potential deserter in Lenin’s mind was Stalin. “How do you like Bogdanov’s new book?” Stalin wrote in the spring of 1909. “In my view, some individual blunders of Ilich [Lenin] are significantly and correctly noted in it. He also notes correctly that Ilich’s materialism is in many ways different from Plekhanov’s, which in spite of the demands of logic (in the interests of diplomacy?) Ilich tries to bury.”⁶⁶

Lenin, Zinoviev, and Taratuta resisted Bogdanov’s attempt to convene a meeting of the Bolshevik Center in April because “certain members” had embarked on a “schismatic path.” As a result Bogdanov’s “Geneva circle of Bolsheviks” refused any longer to obey the Center, and began making contacts among other Bolshevik émigrés in various European cities. The “stinking squabble,” as Lenin called it, continued. “The Geneva group,” he charged, “announced its break with the Bolshevik Center and urged the Paris one to follow suit.” He also charged that Lunacharsky’s religion of socialism, his “god building,” was now anathema, and “party condemnation is necessary and obligatory.”⁶⁷

In June 1909 things came to a head in Paris. Labor radicalism was on the wane in France as well at the time. A strike of postal workers had recently failed to achieve any real gains, and the CGT was split over the issue of syndicalism and parliamentary participation. Sorel was moving away from syndicalism toward the royalism and nationalism of CharlesMaurras and Action Francaise.⁶⁸ In this grim atmosphere the Bolshevik Center, disguised as usual as the editorial board of Proletarii, convened.

The Paris meeting on June 21 through June 30, 1909, included twelve representatives of what was left of Bolshevism: nine members of the Bolshevik Center and three representatives of Russian party branches— M. P. Tomsky (St. Petersburg), V. M. Shuliatikov (Moscow), and N. A. Skrypnik (Urals). With Krupskaya as secretary, Lenin managed to place on the agenda a number of resolutions condemning the “recallism” and “god building” of Bogdanov and his circle. Lenin’s main object of attack was Bogdanov for his “destruction of organizational unity of the Bolshevik fraction”; the editorial board “disclaims any responsibility for all political measures taken by Comrade Bogdanov.” After days of fighting and arguing, Bogdanov wrote with a combination of sarcasm and weariness that “the battle ended yesterday very propitiously for me—I have been expelled from the Bolshevik Center.”⁶⁹

Lenin was supported in varying degrees by Zinoviev, Kamenev, Tomsky, and Rykov. The conference agreed to reduce Proletarii to a monthly journal, and to enter negotiations with Trotsky to establish a new organ of the RSDRP central committee, Pravda. Bogdanov, Krasin, Pokrovsky, and Shantser fired off a pamphlet indicting Lenin and the remnants of the Bolshevik Center for illegally expelling them. Many Bolsheviks left for Gorky’s home on Capri, where they established a workers’ school and continued their debate with Lenin. “The Bolshevik Center,” wrote Bogdanov in disgust, “has now become ideologically, materially, and organizationally the uncontrolled dictator of Bolshevik affairs.” Again, Lenin and Bogdanov parted ways.⁷⁰

The Paris Okhrana was well aware that Bolshevism was in crisis, and not entirely displeased. Bogdanov and Krasin, they reported, “having begun by criticizing Marx on philosophy, passed on to criticizing the Bolshevik Center, turning to recallism and ultimatism and finally, having seized a large part of the money stolen at Tiflis, began to agitate secretly against the Bolshevik Center in general and its individual members in particular.” Lenin wanted to “compel Bogdanov’s supporters either to separate completely or to stop agitating and submit to the majority, and to transfer to the Bolshevik Center the seized five-hundred-ruble notes and the school on the island of Capri.” The Okhrana mistakenly thought that Bogdanov would submit to a Leninist majority created for that purpose, but he did not. Instead he left for Capri to form a new Bolshevik Center.⁷¹

By the summer of 1909 Lenin and the other Bolsheviks were deeply divided over questions of money, politics, and philosophy. Lenin had succeeded in expelling Bogdanov and his followers in name only. They, too, had claims on the legitimacy of Bolshevism. Lenin had written a classic polemic defending Marxist orthodoxy; his opponents continued to make the mistake of treating Bolshevism as useful collectivist myth rather than orthodox truth. In Lenin’s philosophical crudity lay his political genius.