Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms) [1st ed. 2023] 3031402383, 9783031402388

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution

Maria Chehonadskih

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms Series Editors

Marcello Musto York University Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver University of Bristol Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

Maria Chehonadskih

Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution

Maria Chehonadskih Department of Modern Languages and Cultures Queen Mary University of London London, UK

ISSN 2524-7123     ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-031-40238-8    ISBN 978-3-031-40239-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40239-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Historic Images / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To those who are forced to flee and to those who are forced to stay

Acknowledgements

This book would not have come about without the most generous intellectual, emotional and institutional support from friends and colleagues in the UK and internationally. It was originally born out of countless formal and informal discussions and debates within the walls of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, where I was a PhD student between 2013 and 2017. I am thankful to the whole CRMEP community. I am indebted to my supervisor, Peter Osborne, who raised the stakes of my PhD project very significantly, and whose theorisation of construction and expression has been crucial for the development of this book in its post-PhD phase. I also want to thank Étienne Balibar, who prompted me to reflect on the dilemmas of proletarian culture within the context of ‘the disappearance of the proletariat’ after the Russian Civil War. These reflections decisively improved Chap. 4 of this book. It was a privilege and great honour to receive a Max Hayward Visiting Fellowship at St Antony’s College in 2019, where more than half of this book was written. Intellectual exchanges with colleagues at the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre and in the wider University of Oxford community considerably improved the clarity and structure of this project. I am immensely grateful to the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre and personally to Roy Allison, who made the case for extending my stay at St Antony’s due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The extension helped me to complete this book in spite of the stress of lockdowns and the academic job crisis. The circumstances of the pandemic and the Russian war in Ukraine prevented me from carrying out my planned archival research in Russia. I nevertheless managed to make a brief visit to the vii

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Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) in Moscow in 2018, as well as to the Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso in Rome in 2019. Simona Luciani was kind, generous and supportive in helping me navigate the scattered files containing Bogdanov’s documents in the Foundation’s historical archives. This book extensively draws on Bogdanov’s correspondence held at the Foundation’s archive. I am grateful to many institutions and people who supported the development of this research through numerous invitations and conference projects. I thank Katrin Klingan and her team at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin for inviting me to present various aspects of this research between 2017 and 2022 in a curatorial setting that facilitated conversations and encounters with a number of great thinkers, scientists, artists and poets. Kerstin Stakemeier’s seminars, talks and conferences at the Academy of Visual Arts in Nuremberg, structured around conversations on radical empiricism and Bogdanov, made for a truly fascinating dialogue on issues that conceptually shaped this research project. Jodi Dean’s invitations to present within the framework of the Radical Critical Theory Circle in Croatia and Greece have been intellectually stimulating, politically intense and resonant with the most urgent problems of today. I am also grateful for Jinyi Chu’s invitation to present my research within the Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies programme of public talks at Yale University and to Orsan Senalp, whose conference on the legacies of Bogdanov at the University of Hull was full of lively debates and interesting cross-disciplinary interventions. I thank Emanuel Almborg, Anton Vidokle, Arseny Zhilyaev, Keti Chukhrov, Artemy Magun, Josefine Wikström and Luisa Corna for facilitating my participation in their events and projects in the UK, Russia, Sweden, the US and elsewhere. The last years spent researching and producing this book coincided with multiple crises. I could only mentally survive and continue to write thanks to collective care and love. I am most grateful to Alexei Penzin, whose stubborn commitment to philosophy and thought carried us through my precarious employment and the crisis at his own university, as well as the pandemic and the Russian war in Ukraine. We made this intellectual and existential journey together. Illuminating philosophical conversations with Andrés Sáenz de Sicilia, Lucie Mercier, Stefano Pippa, Svenja Bromberg and Steve Hayward were as crucial for my PhD project as for this book. Danny Hayward not only improved the style and the language of the manuscript but also greatly contributed to sharpening its thesis and accentuating important conceptual problems. I am deeply

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grateful to Robert Chandler for providing his translation drafts of Chevengur and allowing me to discuss his translation in depth. The criticism and enormously helpful bibliographical and conceptual comments of Evgeni Pavlov, John Biggart and Andrew Bevan helped to substantially improve Chaps. 2, 3 and 4. I greatly enjoyed my conversations with Boris Groys about Bogdanov, Platonov and the artistic avant-garde, both in email exchanges and during meetings at various conferences, in particular for Boris’s subtle philosophical scepticism. I also want to express my gratitude for his personal support and encouragement. It is thanks to pre-war conversations with Nikita Kadan about the scars in the archives of the artistic avant-garde left by Stalinism and Russian cultural imperialism that I encountered Rodchenko’s GULAG photography, which otherwise I would have had no strength to look at or comprehend. Long conversations about cybernetics, political epistemologies and Soviet theory with Emanuel Almborg, Olga Goriunova and Matthew Fuller during our phone calls, meals and walks, as well as the hospitality of their homes, and indeed their care and support on all fronts, were existentially important for the production of this book. The love and support of my sister and mother, despite their close proximity to the Russia-Ukraine border, where other urgencies and anxieties occupy both bodies and minds, were felt every single day and made miracles. The solidarity, comradeship and friendship of Ilya Budraitskis, Rebecca Carson, Simon Pirani, Jodi Dean, Steve Edwards, Craig Brandist, Marina Vishmidt, Amir Sayfullin, Miri Davidson, Nikolaus Perneczky and Sophie Carapetian were another reason why I remain solid and sane both in theory and in practice.

A Note on Transliteration and Translation

Transliteration of Russian proper names and book titles follows the Library of Congress transliteration system: without diacritics, indication of a soft sign and with exceptions for established and well-known names such as Mayakovsky, Shklovsky, Tretyakov and Gorky. Alternative transliterations may appear in quotations from secondary sources and in some translated articles. Unless otherwise noted, translations from Russian primary and secondary sources are my own.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Strategic  Unity of Marxism and Empiricism 19 2.1 Empirio-Marxism and Revolution 19 2.2 Ontological Environmentalism as an Epistemic Problem 29 2.3 Elementality and Organisation 40 2.4 Labour Causality 49 3 The  Science of Organisation 61 3.1 The Organisational Point of View and Tektology 61 3.2 Translating Reproduction into Biophysical Cooperation 68 3.3 The Even Distribution of People, Things and Ideas 82 4 Proletarian Monism 95 4.1 Proletkult and Productivism 95 4.2 Socialisation of Knowledge and the Project of a Proletarian Encyclopaedia101 4.3 Proletkult: Proletarian Culture Without a Proletariat109 4.4 Proletarian Monism and Life-Building121

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5 Structures  Take to the Streets133 5.1 The Communist Expression of Material Structures133 5.2 The Organisation of Things, People and Ideas143 5.3 The Structure of Sensibility149 5.4 The Punctum of Labour158 6 The  Encyclopaedia of Poor Life in Platonov’s Proletarian Literature171 6.1 The Encyclopaedic Functioning of Constancy, Narrative and Language in Platonov171 6.2 Class: Others, Mistakable, Half-Kulaks, Doubject and Other Class Creatures184 6.3 Dual Being and Two Organs of Thought193 6.4 Labouring Being, Poor Life and Veshchestvo of Existence205 6.5 Struggle with the Void: Toská and Communism217 7 Postscript227 Bibliography237 Index263

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

History does not have dead ends. There are only gaps. (Yuri Tynyanov)1

In 1924, the formalist literary critic Yuri Tynyanov defined his historical period as a gap, a waiting room of history, in which forces of inertia cease to determine life. It was, he argued, a period in which the prevailing groupings of words and things were beginning to come apart. As someone compelled to live through this interim period, Tynyanov considered it to be a kind of dead end—a form of crisis in which one gets hopelessly stuck and cannot find a way out. ‘It is difficult to reason about the things, finished poems and even more so about the books of the gap. It is far easier to discuss poets who go through the gap’.2 It is easier because such poets and books jump over the gap as if it was a puddle. They prestidigitate with the existing constellations of words and things, producing lucid and well-­ written work, but ‘[i]t is not artistic “successes” and “well written things” that we value during the period of the gap’.3 The perfection of schematic thought is unable to articulate the new attitudes and tendencies that will 1  Yuri Tynyanov, ‘Promezhutok’ [Gap], in Formalnyi metod. Antologiia russkogo modernizma, ed. by S. Oushakine, 3 vols (Moscow, Yekaterinburg: Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2016), vol. I, pp. 632–662 (p. 633). 2  Ibid., p. 634. 3  Ibid., p. 662.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Chehonadskih, Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40239-5_1

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define what is to come after the gap. This is the time for the crystallisation of new ‘constructive principles’ through mistakes and retreats, the appeal to marginal traditions and forms, and the creation of imperfect and rough experiments. It is hard to account for and discuss the books of the gap because unlike well-written works, they ‘do not leave sufficiently impressive static “traces” behind’ and ‘stand out so much among the phenomena of the previous literature that [they do] not fit into a “textbook”’.4 In other words, the writings of the gap have a formative and constitutive role because they break from the previous automatisms of thinking, but they have a complicated relationship with the existing canon. This complicated relationship does not amount to a reflective rejection of the canon, however. Tynyanov rightly assumed that ‘every innovator works for inertia, every revolution is produced for the canon’.5 The history of early Soviet thought ultimately boils down to the consolidation of the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism and the subsequent emergence of dialectical materialism of a Stalinist type. The rough experiments of the marginalised traditions that twist what has been received as the ‘official’ revolutionary and Marxist canon hide in pamphlets, journals and books that nobody reads. An accidental encounter with them often serves as a tool to tell a story about something else. On the rare occasions when these marginalia have happened to be both published and translated, the impression that they produce is often one of disappointment. They find only a few followers, who in any case tend to interpret such deviations within the framework of the official Marxism-Leninism—whether as brutal confrontation with, submission to, or sophisticated dance around it. This book mostly ignores that official canon and deliberately looks behind the geopolitically structured account of knowledge and power after the October Revolution. Its main focus is instead a strongly defined and explicitly articulated constellation of ideas that decisively diverges from Marxism-Leninism and that corresponds to the time of the gap prior to the October Revolution when conflicting epistemic arrangements were still in a process of experimental development. This arrangement brings into a synthetic unity both empiricism and Marxism, the philosophy of science and political economy, 4  Yuri Tynyanov, ‘Literaturnyi Fakt’ [The Literary Fact], in Formalnyi metod. Antologiia russkogo modernizma, ed. by S.  Oushakine, 3 vols (Moscow, Yekaterinburg: Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2016), vol. I, pp. 663–680 (p. 667). 5  Yuri Tynyanov, ‘Promezhutok’ [Gap], p. 633.

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and environmentalism and the theory of culture. The epistemic construction passed through its initial stages of rough experimentation, now traceable only in marginal and insignificant publications; left its mark on all existing political tendencies, from Populists and Mensheviks to Socialist-­ Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks; conquered the minds of workers during the First Russian Revolution; mutated into what Tynyanov calls ‘the imperialism of the constructive principle’;6 and was finally assimilated to the theories and practices of the new proletarian and artistic intelligentsia after the October Revolution. Vanishing in the late 1920s, it survived only as a scarecrow associated with the name Alexander Bogdanov, one of the main protagonists of this book. To appreciate the novelty and influence of Bogdanov’s Empirio-­ Marxism and organisational theory, to account for the scope of assimilation of this theory across various political tendencies and artistic platforms, and to explain why the very scale of its reception prevented the canonisation of the epistemic alternative that Bogdanov represented—this involves thinking beyond what did and did not survive Stalin’s purges. The synthesis of empiricism and Marxism and the various ‘isms’ associated with it during the First Russian Revolution is indeed no longer representative of Marxism either internationally or regionally. This is largely due to the nature of its constructive principle, which has all the elements of what I am calling, after Tynyanov, the writings of the gap. One of the most representative and only recently translated examples of the tendency is Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism,7 a work written in the style and mode of exposition of a classical philosophical treatise, and which might be appreciated today by the philosophers of the analytical tradition—on one condition. The revolutionary agitation, polemical tone and Marxist conclusions of the book are part and parcel of Bogdanov’s argumentation, which covers everything that is expected from the philosophical treatise, in particular the resolution of the body-mind problem from the standpoint of monism and contemporary science. But why would a Marxist care about body-mind dualism? Bogdanov thought that the non-hierarchical and horizontal mutualism of organisms, forms and processes not only represented a scientifically correct understanding of biology, physics and materialism but also that this represented a new entry point into the understanding of politics and  Yuri Tynyanov, ‘Literaturnyi Fakt’ [The Literary Fact], p. 676.  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1–3, trans. David G. Rowley (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2020). 6 7

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society. This, albeit translated into contemporary terminology, is the crux of what Empiriomonism had to say. The present book undertakes this translation in detail. It is a translation because Bogdanov’s links and jumps between ontological claims, scientific theories and sociological observations are very often very risky and difficult to follow. Obscured by its antiquated terminology, the form of the treatise contradicts the political urgency of the statement that Bogdanov is making. This is what makes Empiriomonism an avant-gardist experiment ranging across the domains of philosophy, politics and science. After the publication of his book, Bogdanov continued his experiment by writing academic articles, pamphlets for a working-class audience, science fiction and journalism. Empiriomonism did not find much appreciation outside its immediate context—and not only because of its obscurities of expression. Philosophy had not been seen as a topic of political debate, and such questions seemed to exist at a distance from the revolutionary struggle and party politics. The question of philosophy and politics, weaponised by Lenin in his response to Empiriomonism in 1909, received international attention only when he became the head of the new revolutionary government. Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) turned out to be an authoritative work only after its second edition in 1920. Allying Bogdanov with Berkeley, Locke and Hume, Lenin misinterprets how the author of Empiriomonism understands materialism. Lenin framed Bogdanov’s position within a classical empiricist discourse. Placing him on the idealist side of privileging mind over matter, Lenin presented Empiriomonism as a work that is concerned primarily with the problem of sensual experience.8 The attack had an enormous ideological effect. It has been argued that reactionary and non-Marxist philosophy should not pollute Marxist method. The growing influence and importance of Hegelianism for the European Marxist scene meant that this method was defined in terms of dialectics. Hegelians sided with Lenin and excommunicated empiricism from Marxism on the grounds of its non-dialectical character and positivism. Empiricism, in whatever historical version and whatever historical form, became the philosophical enemy number one of Marxism. For Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch, empiricism epitomises the capitalist reliance on quantitative calculability, empirical facts, common-sense notions 8  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy’, in Collected Works of Lenin, trans. and ed. A. Fineberg, C. Dutt, 45 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960–1977), vol. XIV, pp. 17–388 (pp. 226–232).

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and rationalisation. 9 The late Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, who dedicated his last work solely to the actuality of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and dialectics, directly compared Bogdanov’s concept of organisation with technocratic models of planned economy based on calculability and rationalism.10 While Lukács and Korsch did not refer to Bogdanov’s works, Ilyenkov, a native speaker of Russian, rests his arguments mostly on Bogdanov’s science fiction novels Red Star and Engineer Menni, alongside indirect quotations and references to the works of other authors, including Lenin himself. Apart from this very briefly formulated thesis, whose truncation is likely due to his inability to criticise the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus openly, Ilyenkov’s generic critique of empiricism reproduces fabricated myths about Bogdanov’s work and politics. There are, for example, allusions to the ‘disastrous’ 1920s experiments with a planned economy that were based on Bogdanov’s economic theory. The critique of this theory formed the basis of Stalin’s attacks against Bukharin. Why these experiments were disastrous, especially in light of the fact that the end of Bukharin’s influence coincided with the beginning of Stalin’s collectivization policy, Ilyenkov does not explain. 11 To this should be added a completely falsified identification of Bogdanov with the group of so-called God-Builders.12 The writer Maxim Gorky coined the notion of god-­ building in his novella The Confession (1908). The story presents the autobiography of a pilgrim who travels across the country and seeks the meaning of life. A monastic training leads the protagonist to a critique of 9  On the reception of Lenin’s work and Empiriomonism see my review of Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism in: Maria Chehonadskih, ‘Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Books 1-3, by Alexander Bogdanov’, Rethinking Marxism 34, 1 (2022), 116–124. On the debates about the Marxist method as opposed to positivism see: Maria Chehonadskih, ‘Reformulation of Knowledge: Epistemological Reading of Soviet Marxism in the post-Soviet Times’, Studies in East European Thought 74 (2022), 75–91 (pp. 77–85). 10  Evald Ilyenkov, Leninskaia dialektika i metafizika pozitivizma [Lenin’s Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism] (Moscow: Izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1980), pp.  85–88. The book is available in English at: Evald Ilyenkov, Lenin’s Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism, https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/ index.htm [Accessed 12 February 2023]. 11  Evald Ilyenkov, Leninskaia dialektica i metafizika pozitivizma [Lenin’s Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism], p. 58; pp. 72–78. Ilyenkov refers to his theory of equilibrium and also misrepresents it. For our discussion of the theory of equilibrium in Bogdanov and Bukharin, see Chap. 3 of the present book. 12  Ibid., pp. 16–17.

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formal and dogmatic religiosity, and after a series of adventures, he finds himself in a factory where workers teach him that actual spirituality is located not in the heavens but in workerist collectivism. Gorky identifies the collective will of the people with god-building and opposes it to the god-seeking of the main protagonist. Along with Anatoly Lunacharsky, he promoted this concept as a political tool for a secular version of the theology of liberation, applicable to a religious and predominantly peasant country. The notion had overtones of Nietzscheanism and the Feuerbachian religion of humanity.13 Bogdanov was never a part of their group, and he received the label of God-Builder only thanks to Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, who in turn invented this identity because Bogdanov was a friend of Gorky and Lunacharsky. The persistence with which this symbolic link between the name Alexander Bogdanov and the words totalitarianism, brute empiricism and God-building has been asserted is another reason for the marginalisation of the tradition he actually represented. What is known about Bogdanov is mediated through Lenin.14 While the question of God-Builders is not relevant, it would be a great exaggeration to say that Bogdanov’s philosophy is immune to the problems of empiricist technocracy. The question is whether this fact cancels his legacy in its entirety. If it does, then according to the same logic, one needs to reject Lukácsian publications for their hidden Stalinism and the entire Ilyenkovian legacy for its overtures towards Leninism with a human face. When somebody cancels a tradition or legacy, this is often done due to distaste and political intolerance. Each specific case meets a frontier beyond which the degree of tolerance ends. A few preliminary remarks in this respect should be made with regard to Bogdanov’s second major work, Tektology, and the accusations of Stalinism and a totalitarian

 See: Maxim Gorky, The Confession, trans. by Rose Strunsky (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1916); and Barry P. Scherr, ‘God-Building or God-Seeking? Gorky’s Confession as Confession’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 44/3 (2000), 448–469. About Nietzscheism in the revolutionary movement see: Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 14  See an extensive literature review, which critiques these myths in Alla Iurevna Morozova, Neleninskii bolshevizm A.  A. Bogdanova i “Vperedovtsev”. Idei, Alternativy, Praktika [The Non-Leninist Bolshevism of Alexander Bogdanov and the Forward Group. Ideas, Alternatives, Practice] (Moscow and St Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2019), pp. 5–41. 13

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conception of science that this book often evokes.15 In Tektology, Bogdanov was looking for the clarity and systematicity of a universal science. He claims that if capitalism proliferates the contradictory worldviews of classes, specialisations and disciplinary boundaries, socialism should produce one universal language underpinning the science of organisation or tektology—a language that could explain every entity and being from the point of view of system formation, development and decay.16 Bogdanov even argued that post-revolutionary proletarian culture has to develop a new international proletarian language, understandable across the globe, and thought that English was a perfect candidate for this role.17 Yet the formation of a universal language is not the prerogative of a linguist or a philosopher. Any kind of language is the product of communication, exchange and assimilation. The universal language can replace national language only if cultural and national borders cease to exist. The free movement of people and things enforces cultural interactions, skill sharing and the cooperation of labour.18 In this sense, the science of organisation is the formulation of a transnational language that reflects the unification of globality on the level of epistemology. Tektology is essentially a post-­ revolutionary socialist project.19 We thus encounter here an oscillation between the transnational and metalanguage. Mutual understanding demands a formalisation that would organise knowledge into the most universal form. In response to the critique of his paper on scientific methods, presented at The Communist Academy in 1927, Bogdanov stressed that dogmatism derives not from his universal method but from the inexact usage of concepts. Only the 15  Alexander Bogdanov, Tektology. Book 1, trans. by A. Kartashov, V. Kelle, P. Bystrov (Hull: Centre for Systems Studies Press, 1996). For the comparisons with Stalinism, see, for example, Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NBL, 1977), pp. 137–162. 16  Alexander Bogdanov, Elementy proletarskoi kultury v razvitii rabochego klassa. Lektsii prochitannye v Moskovskom proletkulte vesnoi 1919 goda [The Elements of Proletarian Culture in the Development of the Working Class. Lectures Delivered at Moscow Proletkult in Spring 1919] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, Vserossiiskii Soviet Proletkulta, 1920). 17   See: Alexander Bogdanov, ‘Proletarskaia kultura i mezhdunarodnyi iazyk (Tezisy doklada)’ [Proletarian Culture and International Language (Proceedings of a Paper)], in O proletarskoi kulture (1904–1924) (Moscow: Kniga, 1925), pp. 328–332. 18  Alexander Bogdanov, Tektologiia. Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka [Tektology. The Universal Organisational Science], (Moscow: LENAND, 2019), pp. 345–348. 19  Bogdanov’s prefaces to Tektology address the collective and transnational status of Tektology: Alexander Bogdanov, Tektology. Book 1, pp. I-XVII.

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development of a single scientific apparatus can bring about the universal validity of theory. A proper debate does not mean the abolition of differences in opinion but the destruction of fetishism and ideological dogmas. The possibility for discussion proper begins only when fetishism in words and actions is eliminated. Universal validity brings about mutual understanding and consensus on this basis.20 Form lags behind content when science cannot master its own language. Bogdanov wants to nail words to things; if things escape representation, then they must be emptied of qualities and reduced to the most basic set of relations. The correspondence between things and representations is what Tektology wants to achieve. This desire haunts the revolutionaries—one might say that it stalks after each political tendency, from the Bogdanovites to the Leninists.21 The achievement of absolute correspondence between form and content troubles both the pre-revolutionary and the post-revolutionary Stalin. The adjustment of form to its content amounts to a total awareness, one which denotes the transparency of knowing and the ability to act ahead of time according to a plan and the laws of historical development.22 Summarising the results of his own activity in 1951, Stalin claimed that the Soviet power conquered economic laws by cognizing them. It brought about a correspondence between the relations of production and the productive forces in just the same way as the bourgeoisie did, in order to transition from the

20  Bogdanov’s paper, a discussion of the paper and his response were printed in the journal of The Communist Academy: Alexander Bogdanov, ‘Predely nauchnosti rassuzhdeniia’ [The Limits of Scientific Reasoning], Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, 21 (1927), pp. 243–90. On universal validity as a tool for consensus decision-making as opposed to the dictatorship of the majority or tyranny of the minority see also: Alexander Bogdanov, Elementy proletarskoi kultury v razvitii rabochego klassa. Lektsii prochitannye v Moskovskom proletkulte vesnoi 1919 goda [The Elements of Proletarian Culture in the Development of the Working Class. Lectures Delivered at Moscow Proletkult in Spring 1919], pp. 77–81. 21  I approached Lenin’s concept of the conscious worker from this perspective in: Maria Chehonadskih, ‘The Comrades of the Past: The Soviet Enlightenment Between Negation and Affirmation’, Crisis and Critique, 4, 2 (2017), pp. 86–105. 22  See: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, ‘Concerning the Question of the Strategy and Tactics of the Russian Communists’, in Collected Works of Stalin, 13 vols (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952–1955), vol. V, pp. 163–183, and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, ‘Anarchism or Socialism?’, in Collected Works of Stalin, 13 vols (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952–1955), vol. I, pp. 297–391. For the Stalinist concept of awareness see: Alexei Penzin, ‘Stalin Beyond Stalin: A Paradoxical Hypothesis of Communism by Alexandre Kojève and Boris Groys’, Crisis and Critique 3/1, (2016), 301–340.

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feudal to the capitalist mode of production.23 Dialectical materialism aims to serve the sciences as a universal methodology for the analysis of any system. The very establishment of the abstract abstraction that can guide research and practice correlates with the post-revolutionary obsession of affirming, once and for all, the final and only system of thought beyond which one finds only pure negation—essentially, the end of economy and its laws. Yet this is where the similarity between the science of organisation and dialectical materialism ends. If the Stalinist perspective eliminates contradictions and establishes correspondences, Tektology wants to achieve the same result by means of a kind of translation machine. Bogdanov finds a code of organisation common to all domains, but his science of organisation ignores differences not because the magic of dialectics makes them cease to exist but because differences are not important for the task of his conceptual description. In order to achieve universal validity, Tektology subordinates the individual of a specific domain to the operability of generic principles. Once this formalisation is completed, the local domains become a subject of study for the specific disciplines, but thanks to this, the disciplines as we know them cease to exist. Bogdanov openly declares his system as an alternative to dialectical materialism and dialectics. He arrives at a more complicated type of formalisation. Bogdanov accuses dialectics of epistemological voluntarism: the thesis is randomly confirmed in any chosen object without scientific justification. The science of organisation serves a different task. Tektological formalism explores relational and composite structures of self-organising systems. If dialectical laws are buried in being and the movement of development has only one predestined trajectory—to communism—Tektology knows that organisation has contingent and multidirected vectors of development. Systems not only progress, they also regress and decay. This decay is not seen as a contradiction which is to be overcome and sublated. It can coexist with progress and stagnation. Dialectical materialism is lineal and flat. It has no topology or volume. It treats the environment as a container of inner drives that follow a predictable pattern of transformation. Tektology considers what articulates parts and wholes and how they interact and mutually act on each other. Thinking in terms of parts and wholes,

23  Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), pp. 49–50.

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degrees and intensities, is different to thinking in terms of phases and successions.24 While this book examines the problem of totalisation in the project of universal science by exploring the dark spots in Bogdanov’s theory, the epistemic construction of Empiriomonism and Tektology, in our view, cannot be reduced to Stalinism. 25 Bogdanov’s epistemic alternative increasingly commands attention as an early precursor to cybernetics, environmental philosophy and ecological theory, and it deserves a rigorous re-examination on this basis alone.26 Just as we translate Empiriomonism into a language more familiar to contemporary readers, so too do we discover in Bogdanov’s Tektology the environmental concepts of dynamic equilibrium, biophysical cooperation, mutualism and even distribution. Bogdanov and his followers test them in the fields of medicine, political economy and political practice. We will see that these tests are not always successful; moreover, some of them exemplify the dark spots of Bogdanov’s theory, but nonetheless, in many instances, they by no means prove a complete failure, especially if one considers that the analysis of the climate and ecological crises stands to gain from the incorporation of political and Marxist perspectives. In the same way, the present book is interested in the synthesis of Marxism and Empiricism because it delineates a form of thinking that is difficult to understand without considering the striking coexistence of incompatible philosophical systems in many pre- and post-revolutionary theories. In reality, so-called orthodox Marxism is not orthodox at all. Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism followed Plekhanov and his disciples, who created a fusion of two systems on the basis of Engels’s dialectics of nature: they reconcile evolutionism and the mechanistic cosmology of the materialist philosophies of the eighteenth century and

24  See: Alexander Bogdanov, Tektologiia. Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka [Tektology. The Universal Organisational Science], pp. 554–567. 25  On the divergence of Bogdanov from Stalin also see: Ilmari Susiluoto, The Origins and Development of Systems Thinking in the Soviet Union: Political and Philosophical Controversies from Bogdanov and Bukharin to Present-day Re-evaluations (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1982), pp. 141–157. 26  See: Kenneth M. Stokes, The Paradigm Lost: Cultural and Systems Theoretical Critique of Political Economy (London and New  York: M.  E. Sharpe, 1995) and Mckenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso Books, 2015).

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

formulate the importance for Marxism of both Hegel and Spinoza.27 A synthesis of this type raises the question of what can be adopted for the revolutionary project and why. Despite the fact that this reconciliation of Hegel and Spinoza suffers from simplifications and exemplifies the notorious ‘diamat’, it nevertheless prepared the ground for intellectual discussions about the importance of both Spinoza and Hegel for materialism. Soviet thought constantly reveals the speculative will to reduce conflicting philosophical models to a common denominator. This has to do with the revolutionary rupture with the past. Soviet theory thought of itself as a beginning of the new. Instead of asking how to criticise capitalist society, it questioned what society should do beyond capitalist history. Even though capitalism was not eliminated immediately after the revolution, this logic of the beyond determined the projects of universal science and, as we shall also see, of the encyclopaedia in philosophy, art and politics. After the October Revolution, Bogdanov’s theory underwent a process of canonisation. His ideas were melded with the political practice of Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural Enlightenment Organisations), the organisation which he founded. The concepts he developed became slogans, political statements and artistic principles. However, with all of the above in mind, one has to ask, why was the dissemination of Bogdanov’s theoretical tendency so strong after the October Revolution? One immediate answer could be that this theory simply offered a novel way of understanding art and cultural politics, one which granted autonomy from the party to the proletariat and allowed it to decide on its own terms how to organise life and culture after the revolution. The proletarian power, channelled through the new organisation of Proletkult, immediately attracted leftist artists and cultural workers. Bogdanov’s influence on the artistic avant-­ garde was particularly striking, and it is acknowledged by many art theorists and art historians. However, this acknowledgement, with a few exceptions, relates to the influence of Proletkult rather than to the substantial conceptual analysis of Bogdanov’s theoretical constructions and

 Georgi Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, trans. Progress Publishers, 5 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), vol. III; Abram Moiseevich Deborin, Vvedenie v filosofiiu dialekticheskogo materializma [Introduction to the Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism] (Moscow: URSS, 2012). 27

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their entry into the discourses of the artistic avant-garde. 28 Yet even his influence on Proletkult is sometimes used in the case against Bogdanov. Art historical narrative regards Proletkult as the main source for the theory of art in production, but both tendencies are associated with technocracy and Stalinism. It appears as if the initial formalist experiments of the artistic avant-garde, for instance, in Constructivism, have been polluted by this dangerous political influence.29 Benjamin Buchloh reproduces a similar account of constructivism’s decline after the transition from its so-called laboratory period to productivist art. This decline is explained as a deviation from an expanded modernist aesthetics—one which ‘did not depart much further from the modernist framework of bourgeois aesthetics than the point of establishing models of epistemological and semiotic critique’—in the direction of Soviet utilitarianism and totalitarian Stalinism.30 Yve Alain Bois goes even further. He acknowledges the superior value of the critical modernist tradition as opposed to the total instrumentalisation of art. In other words, the ‘bright side’ of the Soviet avant-garde conforms to the standards of European modernist epistemologies, while everything that diverges from it signifies the utilitarian aesthetics of Stalinism.31 The Westernisation of Constructivism was already a point of disagreement amongst constructivists and productivists themselves. Kristin Romberg recovers a debate between the constructivists, on the one hand, and the artist El Lissitzky and the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, on the other. In 1922, Lissitzky and Ehrenburg published their famous trilingual journal Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet in Berlin. The central claim of the journal was that there existed an affinity between Constructivism and Western art movements. The theorist of productivism, Boris Arvatov, protested, maintaining that the Proletarian revolution was the basic condition which allowed art to move from the stage of modernist formalism to 28  The classic Russian source is Anatolii Ilich Mazaev, Kontseptsiia proizvodstvennogo iskusstva 20-kh godov [The Conception of Production Art] (Moscow: Nauka, 1975). An informative overview of Bogdanov’s and Proletkult’s art theory in relation to productivist art can be found in: Maria Zalambani, L’Arte Nella Produzione. Avanguardia e rivoluzione nella Russia sovietica degli anni ’20. (Ravenna: Pleiadi, Longo Editore (Collana da Franco Mollia), 1998). A recent work of Kristin Romberg offers a deep examination of this influence on Aleksei Gan: Kristin Romberg, Gan’s Constructivism. Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018). 29  See, for example: Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 73–108. 30  Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October, 30, Autumn (1984), 82–119 (p. 94; pp. 109–110). 31  Yve-Alain Bois, ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’, Art in America 76, 4, April (1988), pp. 161–181.

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

constructivism. The theorist of constructivism, Alexei Gan, echoed this view, insisting that ‘constructivism had arisen independently of Western influence and was contingent on communist ideology’.32 We can now see that this Westernisation has yet further consequences because it produces a disciplinary art-historical understanding of the Soviet avant-garde that suits the globalised narrative of art history with its historical, regional and national niches—with ‘Western’ modernist art as the chief guide to the archive shelves. The opposite tendency, nativism, is a danger that invests the legacy of another protagonist of this book, the writer Andrei Platonov, who has been persistently detached from the Marxist tradition and left avant-garde discourses. Instead, there have been attempts to analyse theoretical aspects of Platonov’s oeuvre by connecting his writings with various philosophical traditions, from phenomenology and existentialism to Russian Cosmism and religious philosophy.33 There are several reasons for this. Platonov did not belong to any specific artistic group or literary journal but was a political activist of working-class origin sympathetic to Proletkult. He also critically engaged in the avant-garde debates about literature and production.34 This background has been obscured because many of his theoretical essays remained unpublished until very recently, even in Russian. The severe party-minded criticism of his works in the 1930s has contributed to Platonov’s gradual oblivion. His main novels were first published abroad, and Cold War battles over his legacy continue to create difficulties in reception. The research into Platonov’s work carried out in dissident intellectual circles was rather one-sided, often ideologically motivated and 32  Kristin Romberg, Gan’s Constructivism. Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism, p. 125. 33  The Soviet philosopher Semenova compared the religious ideas of Russian Cosmism with Platonov’s concept of death and memory: Svetlana Semenova, ‘V usilii k budushchemy vremeni (filosofiia A. Platonova)’ [In Effort of Future Time (Philosophy of Andrei Platonov)], Literaturnaia Gruziia, 11 (1979), pp. 104–121. Following Semenova’s work, many scholars have developed similar comparisons. See, for example: Alexei Teskey, Platonov and Fyodorov: The influence of Christian Philosophy On a Soviet writer (Amersham: Avebury, 1982). For the phenomenological and existentialist reading see, for example: Leonid Karasev, Dvizhenie po sklonu v sochineniiakh A.  Platonova [Downhill Travel in Andrei Platonov’s Work] (Moscow: RGGY, 2002), pp. 38–69; and Natalia Poltavtseva, ‘The Husserlian, the Cosmicist and the Pushkinian in Platonov’, Essays in Poetics. Essays in Poetics. The Journal of the British Neo-Formalist Corcle. Platonov Special Issue in Two Volumes, 2, 27 (2001), 97–113. 34  On this see my article: Maria Chehonadskih, ‘The Naked Truth of Fact: Andrei Platonov on the Margins of Factography’, Stalin Era Intellectuals: Culture and Stalinism, ed. by Vesa Oittinen and Elina Viljanen (Routledge, 2023), pp. 74–89.

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written in non-academic forms, with no quotations or bibliography. Some interpreters set aside Platonov’s communist ideas and Proletkult background in order to purify his profile as an imaginary predecessor of the later Soviet dissidents. Yet another problem is that the first late-Soviet editions were partly rewritten, impressionistically proofread, and scrubbed clean of some of their political allusions by their editors. Therefore, intellectuals with anti-Soviet political views removed speculations about communism, while scholars working in official publishing houses deleted ‘anarchists’ and ‘Trotskyist’ elements.35 It is acknowledged today that the religious background of Platonov’s ideas is enormously exaggerated. For instance, Elena Kulikova demonstrated that the theosophical and religious interpretations of the writer’s ideas came from the Russian right-wing émigré milieu.36 Studies of Platonov that situate themselves in the context of Russian religious philosophy, and of Russian Cosmism in particular, are numerous. However, this comparison encounters a problem in the atheism of Platonov, and it is more than difficult to apply his political views to the tradition of the Orthodox Church. On the other hand, apart from general remarks made to support the idea that Platonov’s work represents a continuation of the religious philosophical tradition, no scholar has attempted to provide any specific, undogmatic understanding of Platonov’s alleged religiosity and mysticism, of a kind that might help to define his ideas and political views. Platonov’s works today are considered in the context of a larger narrative of modernist literature. Almost all of Platonov’s writings depict the open and empty spaces of the steppe and desert. Fredric Jameson compares this devastated nature with the representation in Western modernist literature of the nineteenth century of what he calls the ‘catastrophe of modernity’: the smashing to pieces of the traditional social structures that resulted in the world’s transformation into rough matter. The primary components of rough matter have to be formed into new organisations, as 35  See: Natalia Kornienko, ‘Nasledie A.  Platonova  – ispytanie dlia filologicheskoi nauki’ [Andrei Platonov’s Legacy – An Ordeal for Philology], Strana filosofov Andreia Platonova: problemy tvorchestva, vol. 4 (2000), 117–137. 36  Elena Kulikova, Interpretatsiia tvorchestva Andreia Platonova v sovremennom angloiazychnom literaturovedenii [Interpretation of Andrei Platonov’s Work in Anglophone Literary Studies] (Moscow: MGUP imeni Ivana Fedorova, 2013). See also Viugin’s remark about the overexaggerated religiosity of Platonov in: Valerii Iurevich Viugin, Andrei Platonov: Poetika Zagadki [Andrei Platonov: The Poetics of Enigma] (Saint Petersburg: RKhGI, 2004), pp. 309–310.

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15

was the case in industrial capitalism. Modernisation and the break with nature open up into a brief moment of naked being and vegetative life, which will then be quickly covered over by the accumulating layers of capitalist culture.37 Likewise, Slavoj Žižek theorises the end of capitalism in Platonov as the catastrophism of modernity, pointing to the apocalyptic theme of the ‘end of history’ in early avant-garde discourses.38 It is not surprising that, apart from the political ontology of nature, Jameson and Žižek are also occupied with Platonov’s notions of longing (tóska) and desire (for communism), which unlike in Russian existentialist theories acquire a psychoanalytic colouration.39 Along with Žižek, Jonathan Flatley also treats this boredom with nature and archaic Russian life, as well as the desire for communism and comradeship, from the perspective of Lacanian theory.40 However, sometimes the will to discover similarities between Platonov and Lacan provokes misinterpretations: where Platonov writes about necessity and need, researchers often see desire, and where he writes about longing (tóska), they see the Lacanian ‘lack’ and melancholic feeling of loss. Even if Jameson writes from the position of the Western reader of the 1990s—the reader whose experience of urban life has led him to forget the vegetative life—such a treatment seems to miss a similar experience of ‘naked being’ that persists in the capitalist present, in the form of wars and immigration, privatisation and the expropriation of land. There is nothing sublime in Platonov’s ‘naked being’. It rather points to the distribution of poverty in the village—a condition that for Platonov applies equally both to social and natural phenomena. The immanence of poverty, the poor life, 37  Fredric Jameson, ‘Utopia, Modernism and Death’, in The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 73–128 (pp. 81–86). 38  Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 6–15. 39  Fredric Jameson, ‘Utopia, Modernism and Death’, pp. 91–113; Slavoj Žižek, ‘Sexuality in the Posthuman Age’, Stasis, 4, 1 (2016), 54–69. 40  Jonathan Flatley, ‘Andrei Platonov’s Revolutionary Melancholia: Friendship and Toska in Chevengur’, in Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 158–90. These themes are also developed in relation to sex, gender and post-revolutionary melancholy by: Artemy Magun, ‘Otritsatelnaia revoliutsiia Andreia Platonova’ [Negative Revolution of Andrei Platonov], Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 106 (2010), 65–95 (pp. 65–66); Igor Chubarov, ‘Die ‘literarischen’ Maschinen Andrej Platonovs, in Maschinentheorien/Theoriemaschinen, ed. by Hg. H-C. Von Herrmann and W. Velminsk (Berlin: Lang, Peter, Gmbh, 2012), pp. 83–96; Aaron Schuster, ‘Sex and Anti-Sex. The Monstrous Modern Couple’, Cabinet, 51, Fall (2013), pp. 41–47.

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to use Platonov’s own term, and its political agency are what is at stake here. In comparison with the 1990s, the negative nature of Platonov also reveals itself in the problem of climate change, and, what is more, Platonov already predicts this in the 1920s and 1930s. This aspect of the work has been brought to attention only recently by McKenzie Wark, who acknowledges Platonov and Bogdanov’s proximity and tries to build a theory of the Anthropocene on the basis of their materialism.41A similar materialist perspective characterises Oxana Timofeeva’s study on animality and nature. She places at the centre of the analysis Platonov’s concept of poor life, which she uses to discuss the revolutionary agency of the non-human actors who appear in the writer’s prose.42 Timofeeva is the only scholar who pays attention to this concept, and it provides her with a powerful tool for shifting the discussion from the existential to the materialist mode. This book treats Platonov as a figure of transition and of another gap—this one at the close of the experimental phase of the 1920s and the beginning of the dark epoch of Stalinism. Within this gap, Platonov’s writings behave in an astonishingly illuminating, inventive and sharply critical way. Escaping both of the traps of the 1920s that we associated with Bogdanov’s theory, he continues to write, think and construct his own encyclopaedia for the proletariat into the 1930s, at a time when most creativity had been wiped out under the political and existential pressures of Stalinism. At this point, a brief detour through the methodological tools and operative concepts of this book is necessary. It embraces philosophy, science, political theory, Marxism, art history and literature. This methodological decision confronts the traditional genre of the monographic overview of the work of an individual author. The book approaches Bogdanov from the backdoor of the anonymous, collective, unfinished, multidirectional and mutually dependent. Therefore, in the pages of the present book, the reader will have brief encounters with the workers Vadim 41  Mckenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Wark’s is definitely an interesting attempt to bring this fact to light, but her narrative mutates into popular intellectual history, in which the discourses of contemporary climate science, feminist materialism and Deleuzo-Guattarian molecular politics are variously intermixed. Wark also often relies on historical myths and inaccurate exposition of concepts. See the detailed critique of Wark in our review of ‘Molecular Red’: Maria Chehonadskih, ‘The Anthropocene in 90 Minutes’, Mute (2015) http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/anthropocene-90-minutes [Accessed 18 January 2023]. 42  Oxana Timofeeva, History of Animals: an Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012).

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Tronin and Nikifor Vilonov, the Bolsheviks Anatoly Lunacharsky, Ivan Stepanov and Nikolai Bukharin, and the proletkultists Yuri Milonov, Maria Smit and Fedor Kalinin. The biologist Boris Kozo-Polyansky and the notorious agronomist Trofim Lysenko will orient our discussion on epigenetics, Lamarkism and the Bogdanovian concept of biophysical cooperation. The theorists Alexei Gan, Boris Arvatov, Nikolai Tarabukin and Viktor Shklovsky help us to articulate the problem of construction and expression, while the artists and writers Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Sergei Tretiakov and Andrei Platonov will be seen debating the problems of perspective and experience, habit and needs, scale and social totality. The very situation of the revolution and the post-­ revolutionary society dictates collective and laboratory forms of writing, practising and presenting. If Platonov is detached from the context of the avant-garde art and Proletkult, it becomes impossible to understand his method and form of writing. The history of a single, solitary writer may suffer from serious misinterpretations if it attempts to subordinate the object of study to imposed models or systems. This approach is often applied to Soviet theory and philosophy. Scholarly accounts of distinguished dissidents, ‘creative’ exceptionalities or advanced theories often declare them to coincide with such and such modern or contemporary systems and assume a particular methodological attitude: the historical context of Soviet theory is treated as a lake out of whose dark and muddy waters a researcher may or may not get a very good fish. This leads to two equally dissatisfying models. It means that revolution produces the same theoretical results as those that occur in non-revolutionary times and contexts. It also means that Soviet post-revolutionary thought is interesting only if it helps to illustrate established philosophical ideas. This book is a philosophical investigation that attempts to penetrate the logic of formalism and empiricism in post-revolutionary theory. The argument of this book rests on the systematic reading of philosophical, theoretical and historical texts. The main part of Bogdanov’s legacy has not been republished since the 1920s, while the history and theoretical development of discussions within the Proletkult and related art groups is poorly researched and almost completely ignored. This book reconstructs these developments through the materials available in published journals, pamphlets and essay collections, as well as through archival documents. Moreover, there is no official history of pre- and post-revolutionary Bogdanovism. Similar to Trotsky, but much earlier, Bogdanov was

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removed from the official history of the party, and in the Soviet narrative he appears as an eccentric scientist or positivist. The book recovers Bogdanov’s canon and follows its adventures and digressions across the domains of philosophy, science, politics and art after the October Revolution. Chapter 2 investigates the strategic unity of Marxism and Empiricism in Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism in relation to the historical and theoretical contexts of this work. Chapter 3 focuses on Tektology and the application of tektological concepts across environmental theory, biology, medicine, political economy and politics. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the theories of proletarian culture and socialisation of knowledge in the practices of Proletkult and Productivism. Chapter 5 traces the dissemination of Bogdanov’s problematic across various artistic platforms, bringing to the fore the key conceptual pair of structure and expression proposed by Constructivism. Chapter 6 is a systematic reading of Platonov’s prose, journalism and essays that embraces his literary writings of the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter examines the conceptual core of Platonov’s proletarian encyclopaedia and identifies the key concepts that it produces. The exposition of the concepts corresponds to the logic of encyclopaedia entries. Each chapter loosely refers to the domain of philosophy, science, politics, art and literature. In this sense, the book may be read as a collection of separate entries into these domains or, systematically, as a series of unfolding interventions into various aspects of epistemological transformation after the October Revolution. The book does not propose a strictly historicist reading of knowledge transformation in this period. On the contrary, it aims to reactivate the epistemological line in the Soviet tradition that has been buried under the geological layers of history, the fragments of which from time to time have been excavated in order to support particular statements, trends or ideological propositions. This book crosses disciplines, genres of writing and ways of doing philosophy. The experimental logic of Bogdanov’s project demands both a historical and immanent reading. There can be no other systematic approach to the scattered archives of Soviet theory. And this means that the shape of the ship constructed by this tradition was unknown even to its creators, whose writings were produced in a context of urgency, of spontaneous reaction to post-revolutionary events, debates and social demands. The ship can be assembled only retrospectively because it did not exist as a ready-made construction during the first decades of the Soviet experiment. Such a relation to history allows us to reactivate the Soviet archive from the perspective of today.

CHAPTER 2

Strategic Unity of Marxism and Empiricism

2.1   Empirio-Marxism and Revolution If for the empiriocriticist the experience of all fellow human beings is of equal value—something I have previously designated as a certain cognitive ‘democracy’—then for the empiriomonist this experience is moreover the result of the collectively organised work of all people, of a kind of cognitive ‘socialism’. Alexander Bogdanov (1905–1906)1

In 1893, a mechanic from Nizhny Novgorod travels to Zurich on the cheapest trains to study with Professor Richard Avenarius. Vadim Tronin was about thirty years old and had learned about Avenarius and empiriocriticism in an underground study circle for factory workers led by local socialists. This study circle was his only education and Russian his only language. A few years later, Tronin is fluent in German and is Avinarius’s favourite student. In 1895, a nineteen-year-old revolutionary with an aristocratic background joins Tronin in Zurich, also to study with Avenarius. His name is Anatoly Lunacharsky, and after the October Revolution, he will be known as the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the physicist Ernst Mach receives hundreds of letters from his Russian followers and students, and his  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, trans. David G. Rowley (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2020), p. 291. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Chehonadskih, Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40239-5_2

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textbooks and popular scientific works are taught in Russian schools and universities. But despite the widespread academic popularity of Mach and empiriocriticism, Machism becomes synonymous with the heretical tendencies of non-orthodox Marxism and of revolutionaries in general. A Ukrainian supporter of the Narodniks, Vladimir Lesevich; the Mensheviks Pavel Yushkevich and Nikolai Valentinov; the notorious group of Bolsheviks Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Bazarov and Alexander Bogdanov—all were labelled ‘Machists’.2 Amongst Mach’s Russian correspondents was Valentinov. Valentinov’s letter to Mach asks whether he accepts that his views are compatible with the teachings of Marx and Engels. ‘There is a lively theoretical debate within our ranks on this subject’, writes Valentinov.3 Mach replied that although he knew who Marx and Engel were and is a sympathiser of the social-democratic movement, sociological research fell outside of his remit.4 This dry enthusiasm did not prevent Valentinov from coming to very optimistic conclusions about the philosophical and political alliance of empiriocriticism and Marxism. Armed with quotations from Marx and Mach, Valentinov proves their kinship. If not in letter then in spirit, he argues, Mach follows the maxim that ‘being determines consciousness’ in his socio-economic theory of cognition and scientific development. What Marx did for the social sciences, Mach developed for physics and epistemology.5 The interest in empiricism among the pre-revolutionary Marxists of the Russian Empire corresponds to the positivist orientation of the Second International, according to which Marx’s negative attitude to contemplative philosophical discourse has to be understood as a claim to reliance on the methods of the empirical sciences. Marxists praised holistic methods and proposed to unmask the philosophical justification of individualism and dualism by developing a conception of experience as a homogeneous 2  See: Daniela Steila, Scienza e rivoluzione. La recezione dell’empiriocriticismo nella cultura russa (1877–1910) (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1996), pp.  53–73; p.  196. In her account of Tronin’s life, Steila relies on Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich’s reminiscences of his years in Switzerland: Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, ‘Zhenevskie Vospominaniia’ [Geneva Memories], Pod Znamenem Marksizma, 1 (1929), 18–46 (pp. 29–34). 3  Valentinov published this letter and Mach’s response in his pamphlet: Nikolai Valentinov, E.  Makh i Marksizm [Ernst Mach and Marxism] (Moscow: Sotrudnik provintsii, 1908), pp. 5–18 (p. 5). 4  Ibid., p. 13. 5  Ibid., pp. 19–34.

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field of collective praxis.6 If Marxism is to become a science and if the theory of socialism is to be scientific, it should not ignore the achievements of contemporary physics. The discovery of modern science that energy and the play of forces constitute objects came into contradiction with the concept of solid matter found in the old materialism of Plekhanov’s school. Marxism needs a theory of knowledge that can formulate new scientific facts in Marxist terms, and this is exactly what empiriocriticism can provide it with.7 Above all, the scientificity of positivism was a weapon in the fight against the authoritarianism of tsarism and the conservatism of the Orthodox Church. Such allies of positivism as the feminist Alexandra Kollontai demonstrated the relativity, historicity and socio-biological origin of norms and morality by engaging with Simmel, Nietzsche, Bazarov, Lunacharsky and Bogdanov.8 Kollontai was also politically close to Bogdanov’s group. In 1910 she was a lecturer at the Bologna School for working-class activists that was organised by Bogdanov. 9 What we shall term Empirio-Marxism cuts across political currents, class backgrounds and professional occupations. Empiriocriticism originated a few peculiar species: Lunacharsky and Gorky’s god-building—a synthesis of Marxist-grounded collectivism with the Nietzschean critique

6   See: Nikolai Valentinov, Filosofskie postroeniia marksizma [The Philosophical Constructions of Marxism] (Moscow: Tipografiia V.  M. Sablina, 1908); Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, Prikliucheniia odnoi filosofskoi shkoly [The Adventures of One Philosophical School] (Moscow: URSS, 2012). The main empiriocritical works were: Richard Avenarius, Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag (R. Reisland), 1888); and Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, trans. C. M. Williams and S. Waterlow (New York: Dover Publications, 1959). 7  Nikolai Valentinov, Filosofskie postroeniia marksizma [The Philosophical Constructs of Marxism], p. 209. On the concept of energy in the German philosophy of science and the reception of energeticism in the Russian context see: Kenneth M. Stokes, Paradigm Lost: A Cultural and Systems Theoretical Critique of Political Economy (London and New  York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 115–139; 169–177. 8  See: Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai, ‘Problema nravstvennosti s pozitivnoi tochki zreniia’ [The Problem of Morality from the Positive Point of View], Obrazovanie, 9 (1906), 77–107. In English see: Alexandra Kollontai, Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle: Love and the New Morality, trans. by Alix Holt (Bristol: Falling Water Press, 1972). 9  On her intellectual and political relation to Bogdanov’s group Vpered see: Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 67–72.

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of morality and the Feuerbachian religion of humanity;10 empiriosymbolism—Yushkevich’s variation on logical positivism;11 and the empiriomonism of Bogdanov—a kind of philosophical environmentalism. Nikolai Valentinov recalls that even the extravagant symbolist poet and writer Andrei Bely aimed to combine symbolism and Marxism.12 What cubism was for art, empiriocriticism was for philosophy: a pre-revolutionary avant-­ garde in theory and a philosophical ‘ism’, a Black Square of the 1905 Revolution and its theory. What Empirio-Marxists wrote mainly resembles philosophical essayism, the popular exposition of scientific theories and polemical journalism directed either against Plekhanov’s school or the new idealism and religious renaissance.13 The doctrine of god-building emerges in this context as an alternative ‘socialist’ approach to religion against the Orthodox church and religious philosophy. Lunacharsky and Gorky attempted to answer the question of how socialists are to engage with the predominantly religious peasant population.14 Lunacharsky also wrote a number of 10  Gorky initially discusses the notion of god-building in his novella The Confession: Maxim Gorky, The Confession, trans. by Rose Strunsky (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1916). For a theoretical account see: Maxim Gorky, ‘Razrushenie lichnosti’ [The Destruction of Personality], in Ocherki Filosofii kollektivizma (St Petersburg: Znanie, 1909), pp. 351–403. See also: Anatoly Vasilevich Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm [Religion and Socialism], 2 volumes (St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1908–1911). About Nietzscheism see: Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 11   Pavel Yushkevich, ‘Sovremennaia energetika s tochki zreniia empiriosimvolizma’ [Contemporary Energetics from the Point of View of Empiriosymbolism] in Ocherki po filosofii marksizma (Moscow: Zerno, 1910), pp. 162–214. 12  Nikolai Valentinov, Dva goda s simvolistami [Two Years with the Symbolists], ed. by Gleb Struve (Stanford: Stanford University, 1969), pp. 48–49. 13  Empirio-Marxists published three collections of their programmatic articles. The first one united Bolsheviks and was directed against religious philosophy and metaphysics. It first appeared in 1904: Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzreniia [The Essays on the Realist Worldview] (St Petesburg: Izdanie S. Dorovatovskago and A. Charushnikova, 1904). The second volume united both Bolshevik and Menshevik philosophers and was directed against Plekhanov and the orthodoxy in Marxism. The first edition came out in 1908: Ocherki po filosofii marksizma [Essay on the Philosophy of Marxism], 2nd edn (Moscow: Zerno, 1910). The last collective manifesto brought together articles by Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gorky and Bazarov on the problem of collectivism: Ocherki Filosofii kollektivizma [The Essays on the Philosophy of Collectivism] (St Petersburg: Znanie, 1909). 14  In this vein Lunacharsky defended Gorky’s The Confession: Anatoly Lunacharsky, ‘Dvadtsat tretii sbornik ‘Znaniia” [Twenty-Third Issue of Znanie], in Literaturnyi raspad, vol. 2 (St Petersburg: EOS, 1909), pp. 84–119 (pp. 88–98).

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introductory articles, popularising empiriocriticism for a Russian audience.15 With a background in natural sciences and medicine, Bogdanov was the author who worked the most consistently towards a new Marxist philosophy of science, but he can hardly be described as a professional philosopher either. Bogdanov was a student of natural sciences at Moscow University and a graduate of medicine at the University of Kharkiv (Ukraine). The biography of Bogdanov is typical of many Marxist activists of that time. He was born in 1873  in Sokółka, Grodno province (now Poland), and was the child of a teacher, Malinovsky. Like many other Bolsheviks, he took a pen name for the sake of his conspiratorial activities. Bogdanov was expelled from Moscow University after his arrest for activist-­related activities and was exiled first to Tula (Central Russia) in 1894 and then to Vologda (Northwest Russia) in 1901. In Tula, Bogdanov led a Marxist study circle for the local factory workers, together with other exiled activists and future members of the Bolshevik party. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and was expelled in 1910 from the central committee of the party due to his conflict with Lenin. During the First Russian Revolution in 1905, Bogdanov was a representative of the party in the executive committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. He also coordinated with Lenin and Krasin underground armed groups. These groups were involved in the so-called ‘expropriations’, the armed robberies of state banks to fund the revolutionary activities of the Bolsheviks during the First Russian Revolution. Bogdanov was a leader of the Vpered fraction of the Bolshevik Party from 1909 to 1911. He organised a proletarian university for Russian working-class activists in Capri and Bologna between 1909 and 1910. In 1917, along with Lunacharsky, he established Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural-Enlightenment Organisations) and was a principal theoretician of the movement. In 1920, Leninists pushed out Bogdanov from the Proletkult’s Central Committee, provoking his resignation in 1921. After this episode, Bogdanov leaves politics

15  It includes a summary of Avenarius’s Kritik der reinen Erfahrung: Anatoly Vasilevich Lunacharsky, R. Avenarius: Kritika chistogo opyta, v populiarnom izlozhenii A. Lunacharskogo – Novaia teoriia pozitivnogo idealizma (Holzapfel. panideal). Kriticheskoe izlozhenie A. Lunacharskogo [Richard Avenarius: Critique of Pure Experience in a Popular Outline of Anatoly Lunacharsky. New Theory of Positive Idealism (Holzapfel. panideal). Critical Outline of Anatoly Lunacharsky] (Moscow: Izdanie S.  Dorovatovskago and A. Charyshnikova, 1905).

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and dedicates his life to science. He died after an unsuccessful blood-­ transfusion experiment in 1928. 16 Bogdanov very often presented his philosophical ideas in pamphlets and textbooks. Such a popular exposition of philosophy was common among Russian revolutionary circles. It was a specific genre designed for working-class activists. However, the popular style of exposition was dictated not only by Enlightenment ideas. Valentinov recalls: Ever since I was a student, I had a desire to write a philosophical book in which I wanted to replace the materialist epistemology of Marxism with critical realism, with the empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius. I firmly rejected philosophical materialism advocated by Plekhanov and accepted by the party. But I had a lack of financial means to write such a book. In order to earn money, one had to write in newspapers, magazines and compile popular pamphlets. With the burden of various party and political affairs, as it was during the 1905–1908 period, there was no time left for serious philosophical work.17

Not surprisingly, Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism, a philosophical manifesto of Empirio-Marxism, was completed in Kresty Prison.18 Empiriomonism lacks many necessary academic references, which Bogdanov could not obtain in prison; it misuses Kantian terminology, as he was not able to consult with Kant’s works and cited him from memory; it mixes agitation with philosophical argumentation to deliver the most convincing attempt to unify Marx and Mach. In the introduction to the third volume of Empiriomonism Bogdanov writes:

16  See the biography of Bogdanov: James D.  White, Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2018). 17  Nikolai Valentinov, Dva goda s simvolistami [Two Years with the Symbolists], p. 52. 18  Neizvestnyi Bogdanov [The Unknown Bogdanov], ed. N. S. Antonova, N. V. Drozdova, 3 vols (Moscow: IZ “AIRO – XX”, 1995), vol. I, p. 22. Empiriomonism is a collection of essays, some of which first appeared as separate articles in a leading philosophical journal Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii (Problems of Philosophy and Psychology) in 1903 and 1904. Empiriomonism has been published in three volumes between 1904 and 1906. The third volume was written in prison. On the history of the publication of Empiriomonism see an introduction to the English translation of Empiriomonism: David G.  Rowley, ‘Editor’s Introduction on Text and Translation’ in Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, trans. David G. Rowley (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2020), pp. VII–IX. See also: James D. White, Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov, pp. 145–174.

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It is difficult for whomever lives in a whirlwind of events to find the place, time, or mood for calm and objective philosophical analysis. I, personally, for the last one-and-a half to two years found that even with the greatest efforts I was not able to undertake systematically any of the work that is subjectively-necessary for me until imprisonment by His Majesty gave me the leisure time for it. But in prison many sources became inaccessible to me, and it is very probable that as a result there are major flaws in the present work that in other circumstances could have been avoided19

Empiriomonism crystallises the philosophical avant-gardism of the revolutionary 1905, ‘a picture of the world from the organizational point of view… the process of formation, struggle and interaction of the complexes and systems of different types and stages of organisation’, as Bogdanov later defines Empiriomonism.20 This is the time when philosophy was a matter of not academic rigour but political urgency. If Valentinov argued that Marxism needs its own theory of knowledge, which would order and systematise scientific, philosophical, aesthetical and all other special fields of knowledge according to the Marxist worldview,21 for Plekhanov, the politics of philosophy consisted in taking sides in a millennia-long struggle of ‘philosophical materialism’ with idealism, dating back to Democritus and culminating in the writings of Marx and Engels. However, he shared Valentinov’s concerns: socialism cannot be reduced to economic theory. Philosophy serves science as a method and a socialist ‘world outlook’. In fact, there is a triadic reciprocity between philosophy, socialism and science: the latter could arrive at the correct results, namely socialism, only if it followed the rules of the materialist method because the materialist method was in itself grounded in socialist principles.22 The question was how theory could serve socialism and how science might be reformulated in Marxist terms. The answer was that science has to question empirical facts by means of philosophy, while philosophy has to be placed in a historical context in order to overcome its metaphysical and idealist remnants. Bogdanov  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, pp. 267–268.  Neizvestnyi Bogdanov [The Unknown Bogdanov], vol. I, p. 20. 21  Nikolai Valentinov, Filosofskie postroeniia marksizma [Philosophical Constructions of Marxism], pp. 20–23. 22  Georgi Plekhanov, ‘Fundamental Problems of Marxism’, in Selected Philosophical Works, trans. Progress Publishers, 5 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), vol. III, pp. 117–83 (pp. 117; 129–34). 19 20

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shares this epistemic programme, but what fascinates him in empiriocriticism is the discovery that every organism resembles a system: the fact that a body inhabits a particular environment, which in itself is an environment for something else or a composite structure of the infinitely smaller and infinitely bigger life processes. However extravagant the fusion of Marx and Mach may have seemed, it did not alienate the party base from Bogdanov. On the contrary, workers were enthusiastic followers of empiriomonism. Between 1908 and 1913, Bogdanov received a number of letters from the proletarian activists of the Bolshevik party. A worker from Kyiv was most of all tormented by the Kantian thing-in-itself, and he was curious to hear how Bogdanov’s own understanding of objectivity differed from that of Plekhanov and Lenin.23 Three more letters arrived, two of them from Russian prisons. All correspondents expressed their full support for Bogdanov against Plekhanov.24 A prisoner signing their name as Genkin promised to side with the camp of Machists and assured Bogdanov that Plekhanovists were a closed chapter in Marxist philosophy. But this was not a complimentary letter. Genkin asked comrade Bogdanov to respond to the serious and substantial criticisms he received at the hands of various factions.25 Mechanic Nikifor Vilonov, a principle organiser of the Capri Party School, tried to explain what actually makes Bogdanov’s philosophy attractive for the working class. He wrote from Capri in 1909 that The cradle of modern philosophy is the factory and that is why the truths you have formulated will only find their place there. And it is easy for us to learn philosophy because the verification of its discoveries lies in our activity. For this very reason you do not have to worry about the ashes of Kant, Hegel and all those with whom comrade Plekhanov is so well acquainted […] The existence of this world is conditioned by the existence of railway 23  Pogosians, N.  Letter to Alexander Bogdanov. 11 Dec. 1908–11. June 1913? Fondo Bogdanov, Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso (FLLB), Series 2, fas. 3, doc 14. 24  See: Petrov, A. Letter to Alexander Bogdanov. 11 December 1908. Fondo Bogdanov, FLLB, serie 2, fas. 3, doc 1; Unidentified addresser. Letter to A. A. Bogdanov. 3 October 1911. Fondo Bogdanov, FLLB, serie 2, fas. 3, doc 2; Genkin, I.  Letter to Alexander Bogdanov. 21 November ? Fondo Bogdanov, FLLB, serie 2, fas. 3, doc 11. 25  This includes justified accusations of panpsychism, demands to clarify his theory of psychophysical parallelism and to explain how exactly energy is applicable to psychical phenomena and society: Genkin, I. Letter to Alexander Bogdanov. 21 November ? Fondo Bogdanov, FLLB, serie 2, fas. 3, doc 11, pp. 3–4. Genkin touched upon the core problems of Bogdanov’s empiriomonism; this chapter will provide reflections on the questions this prisoner raised.

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tracks and sleepers, water pumps and stations. But the railway tracks tell us about the experience of tens of thousands of workers in the metallurgical industry. By building stations and making sleepers, do not we connect with the new streams of energy spilled on forests, rivers and fields in the form of woodcutters, carpenters, peasants, etc […]. I do not know, comrade, whether I am presenting here correctly those truths, which I have learned in your books and explained in life examples. Such a philosophy must be effectively called the philosophy of workers and it will certainly become one, for the only class that needs it and needs it for its own existence. It is a philosophy for the proletariat.26

This is not simply a rhetorical gesture against Plekhanov’s orthodoxy and in favour of the revolutionary radicalism of Bogdanov. Vilonov asserted Machian environmentalism as a point of departure—the situation of a homo faber amongst things and processes, the transformation of being into the construction site—and it was this that made him see in Bogdanov’s empiriomonism the philosophy of the workers. In the Bolshevik party circles, Vilonov was designated a ‘worker-­ philosopher’. A party militant with an exceptionally heroic attitude to activism, Vilonov’s life ended in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium in 1910. He was twenty-seven years old. Gorky recalls: Vilonov was a worker and a Bolshevik. He was imprisoned several times. Around 1906, somewhere in the Urals, the jailers beat him up, and throwing him into a cell, poured heavily salted water over the naked and wounded man. For eight days he bathed in brine, lying on the dirty and cold asphalt. This ruined his mighty health.27

Written in 1927 for Pravda, Gorky’s memoir cited above completely excludes the influence of Bogdanov on Vilonov. A principle organiser of the Capri School, Vilonov overcame the factional opposition of Lenin to the school, illegally brought over Russian working-class students to Capri, 26  Vilonov N.  E. Letter to Alexander Bogdanov. 21 February 1909. Fondo Bogdanov, FLLB, serie 1, fas. 2, doc. 2, pp. 1–3. This letter was translated into Italian and published in: N. E. Vilonov a A. A. Bogdanov [prima dell 21 febbrario 1909], in Gor’kij-Bogdanov e la scuola di Capri. Una corrispondenza inedita (1908–1911), ed. by Jutta Scherrer e Daniela Steila (Rome: Carocci editore, 2017), pp. 340–344 (pp. 340–342). 27  Maxim Gorky, ‘Mikhail Vilonov’ in Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols, anonymous editors (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1949–1955), vol. XVII, pp. 82–91 (p. 83).

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and put so much energy into the administration of the process that stress and exhaustion prevented him from participating actively in the school. A conspiracy against the school initiated by Lenin led to a split within the Capri students. Vilonov suddenly sided with the Leninists and left Capri to join Lenin’s alternative school in Paris. The actual reason for the conflict remains unknown, but thereafter Vilonov, who had propagated empiriomonism as the philosophy of the party, continued to distance himself from Bogdanov.28 Focusing on Bogdanov’s seminal work Empiriomonism, the present chapter problematises a striking convergence of empiricism and Marxism in his philosophy. If the old materialism of Plekhanov was still preoccupied with the problems of individual consciousness and the simple body-mind correlation,29 empiriomonism broke with the idea of the hierarchical subordination of matter to mind or mind to matter. Bogdanov’s philosophy establishes the monist plane of environment as a field of organisational and disorganisational processes. We shall see how this new epistemological grid transforms such familiar concepts as labour and practice, spontaneity and organisation, reflection and environment. The synthesis of Marx and Mach allows Bogdanov to understand the physics of relations as the process of organisation of things and the people. How things organise the human world and how the human world organises things—in short, who organises what—is the main question of Empiriomonism and of our investigation.

28  See the detailed article on Vilonov in Capri: Jutta Scherrer, ‘Un ‘philosophe-ouvrier’ russe: N.  E. Vilonov’, Le Mouvement social, 111 (1980), 165–187. During Soviet times, Vilonov’s name had been associated with the victory of Lenin over Bogdanov. A number of Russian cities named a street after Vilonov. For the semi-fictional Soviet narrativisation of Vilonov’s life see: Igor Mikhailovich Shakinko, Podpolnaia klichka Mikhail [His Clandestine Nickname was Mikhail] (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-Uralskoe knizhnoe izdatelstvo, 1970). 29   See, for example, Georgi Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, trans. Progress Publishers, 5 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), vol. III. About Plekhanov’s epistemology see: Daniela Steila, Genesis and Development of Plekhanov’s Theory of Knowledge. A Marxist Between Anthropological Materialism and Physiology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).

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2.2  Ontological Environmentalism as an Epistemic Problem [H]ow does a collection becomes a system? Gilles Deleuze (1953)30

The primal scene of empiricism is the madness of mind. An empiricist finds in the depth of the mind, in the initial flow of perceptions and the Brownian movement of images, delirium and madness. ‘The mind has been given a collection, not a system’, yet the initial drift through the imaginary geography of the bonded impressions gradually becomes a system.31 What empiricism questions is not so much the origin, the madness as such, but the miraculous transformation of the random collection of things into the system of orders and relations. The problematic of empiricism, as Deleuze has demonstrated, is the liberation of mind from itself in the divergence of the rule of representation from the rule of nature.32 Empiriocritical philosophising unfolds in that very primal scene. ‘On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego’, confesses Ernst Mach.33 The central proposition is this: the elementary sensations of space, time, colour, form and size in psychical reality belong to physical bodies as attributes. The ‘ultimate component parts’ of what appears as the ‘substance-concepts’—body and ego—are elements, indifferent to the psychophysical distinction. Attributes are to the body what sensations are to the mind. The only difference between the outer and inner processes is that they are connected and related to each other in a different way.34 For Richard Avenarius, this difference of connectivity in itself articulates not identity but the duality of the so-called dependent and independent series of experience, according to Bogdanov, a classical dualism of the independent outer world, ‘distinct’ and free of contingency and the inner world, where connections depend

30  Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity. An essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. by Constantin V.  Boundas (New York, Colombia University Press, 1991), p. 22. 31  Ibid., pp. 83–84. 32  Ibid., pp. 26–31. 33  Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, p. 30, f. 1. 34  Ibid., pp. 5–14.

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on the incidentally changing conditions and states of an organism.35 Yet while the explanation of the difference of connectivity does not remove the obstacle of dualism encountered by classical metaphysics, a new problem now emerges: what appears as the solidity of subject and object is in fact a composite structure with two distinct types of connectivity. Empiriocriticism posits not an abstract subject contained in a material substratum but the concatenation of the elements, indifferent to the subject-­ object distinction. This physics of elementary relations or the problem of the structuration of elements into series, complexes and systems replaces the concept of solid matter. The operation of empiriocriticism, therefore, reverses what Hume and classical empiricism have achieved. It is the atomism of nature or the primary elementality, not human nature, that becomes a problem. Hume studies the effects of nature on human nature. As for nature as such, it is the projection of thought-determinations onto external objects.36 Empiriocriticism establishes that subject and object relate to each other on many levels as a composite structure relates to the parts and the parts to the elements. What is given in perception is not a problem of essence and appearance but the problem of point of view: ‘A color is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colors, upon temperature, upon spaces, and so forth. When we consider, however, its dependence upon retina… it is a psychological object, a sensation’.37 Nothing is illusory and everything has its own truth, ‘the pencil dipped in water is optically crooked; but it is tactually and metrically straight’.38 The pencil is conditioned by place and position. If there are multiple points of view, this perspective exceeds the location of consciousness and subjectivity. One complex of elements is reflected in another complex—an affect in a consciousness on the side of experience or an organ in an organism on the side of life. It is a transmission of information, the influence of one complex of elements on another. What on the side of the subject develops as a faculty of perception appears on the side of its environment as a physical property. Everything relates and everything is relative. A body does not exist without its environment:  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, pp. 11–18.  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 4–5, p. 113. See also: Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity. An essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, pp. 26–27. 37  Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, p. 17. 38  Ibid., p. 10. 35 36

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all processes functionally depend on the position of bodies in time and space.39 Bogdanov’s empiriomonism departs from the theory of functional dependency, which he understands as a complex system of mutual influences and interactions between various processes on the side of life and on the side of experience. He observes the disposition of the interconnected elements in space. He asks how elements form series, complexes and systems and what allows them to develop and decay. Empiriomonism is an ontology of environment that unfolds in an inductive manner, from the explanation of a simple interaction on the level of elements and complexes to the understanding of social systems. When one complex is reflected in other complexes, information does not directly pass from the influencing to the influenced complex but involves a structural regrouping, which Bogdanov generalises as follows: ‘if complex A is directly or indirectly reflected in complex B, then complex A is reproduced in complex B not in its direct form but in the form of a definite series of changes in complex B, changes that are connected with the content and structure of the first complex by a functional dependency’.40 On the level of a composite structure of subject, it implies that the physical is not a container for the psychical but its otherness.41 A subject-to-subject relation—the communication of two psychical complexes—from the point of view of experience is a subject-to-object relation, since what is perceived appears as an object of perception in the perceiving complex. But taken objectively—from the point of view of vital processes—it is an object-to-object relation: an interaction of two bodies. Further, these bodies are part of the broader network of complexes, which appear in perception as an external environment. Taken as such, the environment is neutral from the perspective of the  Ibid., p. 90.   Functional dependency (funktsionalnaia zavisimost) is a principle concept in Empiriomonism. Rowley translates it as functional correlation. Here and elsewhere we correct his translation: Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, p.  92. See in the original: Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm: Stati po filosofii [Empiriomonism. Articles on Philosophy] (Moscow: Knizhnyi klub knigovek, 2014), p. 105. 41  In the original text Bogdanov uses the word inobytie, otherness: Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm: Stati po filosofii [Empiriomonism. Articles on Philosophy], p. 167. As a technical term of Russian philosophy inobytie refers to a Hegelian Anderssein translated as the ‘other form of being’ in English: Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, p. 149. 39 40

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subject-object distinction. It is this ‘as such’ that Bogdanov aims to discuss and define: The concept of ‘environment’ has meaning only in contrast with what it is that has that ‘environment’—in this case, a vital process. If we view a vital process as a complex of immediate experiences, then the ‘environment’ is everything that is not a part of that complex. But if it is indeed by means of that ‘environment’ that some vital processes are ‘reflected’ in others, then the ‘environment’ must be the sum total of elements that do not enter into the organised complexes of experiences—the sum total of unorganised elements, a chaos of elements in the precise meaning of that word. The ‘environment’ is what presents itself to us in perception and cognition as the ‘inorganic world’.42

The living and its milieu are a relative environmental structure. The medium of environment as such can be treated in the absolute terms as the chaos of elements. The functional dependency of the psychical and the psychical appears to demonstrate the parallelism of life and experience. Such, however, should not be confused with the geometrical idea of parallelism and with ‘the parallelism of isotropic lines or planes’.43 What makes this parallelism non-­ geometric is the heterogeneity of elements, which may defer qualitatively: In reality, the physical ‘body’ or ‘process’ is formed through the organic merging of different series of experience—series that are different precisely in their elements. The visual, tactile, and acoustic series are united in a complex called the ‘human body’, and the basis of this unification is precisely the parallelism of these series, i.e. the specific correspondence between the elements of one and the elements of the other two series. The difference between the series themselves is not quantitative but qualitative, i.e. their elements are completely incompatible with one another, but on the basis of mutual parallelism they all are united around one (usually the tactile) series in the whole complex with which cognition operates.44

What synchronises this mutual parallelism is an organising series, a subordination of all the component parts to the unifying structure. Sensing and  Ibid., pp. 93–94.  Ibid., p. 36. 44  Ibid., p. 37. 42 43

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responding to what is being sensed not only allows us to perceive bodies as a whole but also to organise our experience and social life. On a more complex level, the sense of touch or the tactile series play an organising role in the production of labour tools and materials,45 while on the level of social systems, it is ideology that organises technical forms. The main coordination assembles disparate elements, series and groupings into a specific system. One way to understand Bogdanov’s methodological parallelism is through the static table of correspondences, not logical relations but analogies, established by means of scientific imagination. That is to say, if there is an affect, there must be a parallel universe for the physiological process. On another level, it appears as a multi-layered structure. When a person raises their hand, the billions of infinitely bigger and infinitely smaller component parts of the complex ‘hand’ on the both sides of the psychophysical spectrum reflect this movement with a synchronicity akin to that of an orchestra. The chief organiser of this orchestra is organisation as such, an inner mechanism that replaces the divine power of God to link body and mind. The organising principle or the main coordination brings to unity the orchestra of series at work. However, Bogdanov’s organisation is not a static table, even if Bogdanov the scientist appears precisely as the chief organiser of the taxonomies of the psychophysical parallelism. Organisation implies change and transformation of what has been reflected in the reflecting. Thus, the psychophysical parallelism is also subordinated to the logic of causality. Bogdanov explains that development does not contradict parallelism. The doctrine of evolutionism introduced the developmental understanding of life by setting the static table of life forms in motion and revealing that the parallelism of functions, attributes and forms can be understood from the perspective of genesis and causality.46 Empiriomonism establishes a spacio-­ temporal causality of a successive development.  Ibid., p. 11.  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, pp. 141–144. The classical evolutionary theory that, in a voluntarist manner, distributes specific qualities across species and classes differs from the premodern imaginary encyclopaedias and tables only because it discovers the temporality of forms. The exemplary form of such reasoning is Lamarck’s discovery of the origin of thinking in the sea: ‘[B]ecause a primitive cortex appeared in fish, the first of the vertebrate orders, he assumed that ideas and thought began in the sea’. Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 54. 45 46

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The functional dependency expresses a certain asymmetry between the psychical and the physical. The physical is the otherness, the Anderssein of the psychical. It is somewhat of a proto-structuralist and semi-dialectical logic, which contradicts the conceptual grid of parallelism. It implies that there is no absolute ‘parallelness’ in Bogdanov’s parallelism. The synchronicity of a system in itself composes a diachronic relation.47 The psychical and the physical relate to each other as a G clef relates to an F clef in the written notation. Two hands play the piano with a varying degree of synchronicity. A polyphony with two or more than two lines of independent melody. Bogdanov admits that some psychical groupings have no link to the physiological apparatus. For instance, in such cases as somnambulism and epilepsy, the body acts independently of the mind. The parallelism between the psychical and physical series in this state is simply missing. The sudden diminuendos of the left hand do not correspond to the accelerated tempo and vigorous staccato of the right hand. The left hand stops playing, while the right hand continues on its own. According to Bogdanov, the missing link indicates that some feelings and affects function outside of immediate psychical experience. They form isolated or grouped unities of elements detached from the main psychical coordination. Such groupings are what we call the unconscious, which does not find expression in the main psychic coordination. Thus, consciousness and the unconscious, from this point of view, express different degrees of intensity.48 Further, the intensities of two groupings with opposite directions neutralise and annihilate each other. It is this interference of intensities that produces breaks and gaps in the continuity of the psychophysical series. The unconscious is itself such a gap, an interval in the chain of associative causality, and yet it manifests itself in the net of psychophysical concatenations. This is because there are no absolute breaks in the web of life. Breaks are only special cases of continuity. The broken link in the chain of the psychic associative causality does not necessarily destroy the 47  This contradiction and inconsistency in Bogdanov’s theory has been analysed in detail in Nikolai Valentinov, Filosofskie postroeniia marksizma [Philosophical Constructions of Marxism], pp. 279–282. Bogdanov draws on Fechner and Mach’s understanding of functional relation and causality, but unlike Bogdanov, both made a strong case for the impossibility of unifying parallelism and causality. See: Michael Heidelberger, ‘Functional Relations and Causality in Fechner and Mach’, Philosophical Psychology, 23-2 (2010), 163–172. See also: Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, pp. 83–101. 48  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, pp. 52–65.

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chain, it can still have an indirect connection in memory. If the break is not relative, but absolute, the series forms independent coordination—examples of which are multiple personality disorder and somnambulism, which our consciousness cannot control.49 The break occurs when a strong nodal point emerges. This is what separates, differentiates and individuates: In this net, it is as if there are ‘nodal points’ (my expression)—places where elements are connected with one another more closely and densely (Mach’s formulation). These places are called the human ‘I’ […] Subsequently the connection is broken, and the complex disappears from the system of [lived] experience of the given being; then it can appear in it again, perhaps in a changed form, etc. But, as Mach emphasises, in every case this or that complex nevertheless does not cease to exist; if it disappears from the ‘consciousness’ of one or another individual, it appears in other combinations, perhaps in a connection with another ‘nodal point’, with another ‘I’.50

The distributive logic of elements and series affirms the power of life to reproduce by means of integration, repetition, reflection and sewing. The focus of this investigation is not the agency of sensing subject and not the power of mind that allows to assemble random impressions into the system of orders and relations, but the power of life and nature to facilitate such assembling. We shall understand his concept of reflection in a similar way. Let’s discuss this first in relation to subject-object relation. The word ‘reflection’ (otrazhenie) allows Bogdanov to make a polemical intervention into the heated Marxist debate at the time. It is clear that the argument tackles Plekhanov’s simple correlation of matter and thinking in reflection. In Plekhanov, thinking appears as the highest state of self-moving matter, and reflection (otrazhenie) of the objective world in thinking is identical to the procedure of translation of the matter’s influences—knowledge of sensations—into representations. Lenin joined this discussion later in 1909. His reflection theory establishes a relation of correspondence between representations and things, thus returning to the pre-Kantian discussions on

 Ibid., pp. 113–119.  Ibid., p.  281; Translation is modified. See: Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm: Stati po filosofii [Empiriomonism. Articles on Philosophy], p. 310. 49 50

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sensations as images of things.51 Bogdanov admits that the causality of mutual influence does not correspond to the classical theory of reflection,52 yet empiriomonism propagates universalist epistemology, which demands that we embrace existing conceptual apparatuses. Bogdanov is committed to the common use of words, even if such an adjustment obscures his own intentions. This is because new words create a separate system of thought, not a universal epistemic foundation that critiques and clarifies existing systems. Bogdanov sees reflection as the chain of feedbacks and interchanges in the structure of experience and life. ‘Reflection is determined by the reflected and the reflecting’.53 This is indeed very distant from a passive process of receiving and translating information. A given complex can also reflect itself by reflecting other complexes. It means that reflection somehow turns on itself and influences itself. The reflected reflects reflection. This concept brings Bogdanov into a rather close proximity with Lev Vygotsky, who a few years later developed a similar theory of reflection through a polemical confrontation with Pavlov’s reflexology and the orthodox understanding of reflection. Vygotsky claims that mental process is the reflection of the reflection of stimuli: at first, the object affects the subject, next affect affects a body of the subject, and finally the subject reflects the state of affection. Therefore, consciousness is a ‘correlative activity of the human body with itself’. 54 A Leninist type of simple reflection appears to Vygotsky as causa effectum, where cause A is equal to an affect B, and the affect B that causes a new affect C is equal to B. Vygotsky notes that only in the realm of nature can reaction be equal to stimulation. Thus, the ability to relate reactions to oneself or autostimulation is an 51  See: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy’, in Collected Works of Lenin, trans. and ed. A. Fineberg, C. Dutt, 45 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960–1977), vol. XIV, pp.  17–388 (pp.  98–100; 232–238). About Lenin’s theory of reflection and ‘epistemological’ debates between Lenin and Bogdanov see: Daniela Steila, Scienza e rivoluzione. La recezione dell’empiriocriticismo nella cultura russa (1877–1910), pp. 223–58. 52  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, p. 93, f. 31. 53  By analogy to the signifier and the signified, the more appropriate translation for the reflecting (otrazhaushchii) in this proposition would have been the ‘reflectifier’. The proposition appears in a letter of Bogdanov to Bazarov. See: Bogdanov, A.  Letter to Vladimir Bazarov. 21 Jun. 1911. Fondo Bogdanov, FLLB, Series 2, fas. 1, doc 3, p. 8. 54   Lev Vygotsky, ‘Mind, Consciousness, the Unconscious’, in The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, trans. by R. Van Der Veer, R. W. Rieber, J. Wollock, 6 vols (New York, London: Plenum Press, 1987–99), vol. III, pp. 109–21 (p. 46).

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ontological marker of the human as opposed to the animal, and of culture as opposed to nature.55 Yet Bogdanov’s system disrespects any kind of border that philosophy creates in order to protect the dominion of culture or to guard the sovereignty of the individual body from the invasion of such outsiders as nature. The ontological machine of reflection cuts across kingdoms, classes, families and species because objects differ only in degree of organisation, while the fabric of their making remains the same: a single neutral elementality composes all complexes. Bogdanov does not address a human faculty of self-reflexivity. Reflection is a generic mechanism of mutual influence and functional dependency. It can be disclosed in any living being that can receive stimulation: [A]ny organism with a complex nervous system developed from one undifferentiated cell, so that it is necessary to seek in the life of this embryonic cell the starting point of all the unfolding richness of associative combinations. In a word, one must acknowledge it to be most likely that organised living protein is the physical expression (or ‘reflection’) of immediate experiences of a psychical nature—of course, the more elementary the experiences, the more elementary the organisation of this living protein in every given case.56

Everything senses because something that is alive cannot originate in something that is dead.57 The strict borderlines between organic and inorganic, the dead and the living must be reconsidered at least tentatively. The main difficulty of Bogdanov’s empiriomonism consists in the twofold exposition. In the first instance, we are dealing with the epistemic question of mind-body correlation. The transportation of the problem of reflection into the realm of nature appears as an objectification of the subjective, but Bogdanov claims that the discovery of the rudimentary form of psychic structure in cells should not be understood in these terms: ‘My 55  Lev Vygotsky, ‘The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation’, in The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, trans. by R. Van Der Veer, R. W. Rieber and J. Wollock, 6 vols (New York, London: Plenum Press, 1987–99), vol. III, pp. 233–343 (pp. 274–75). 56  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, p. 152. 57  I borrowed the proposition ‘everything senses’ from Skrbina’s assessment of what she terms ‘pansensism’, a broad definition of sense experience as a form of recognition, awareness and reaction to stimuli beyond human faculties. This should be distinguished from a strictly speaking panpsychist outlook. According to Skrbina, ‘[Mach] holds that all things in themselves are sensations’. See: David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 20, p. 130.

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point of view is not panpsychism […] My point of view presents nature as an infinite series of complexes, broken down into the same elements as the elements of our experience, possessing the most varied degrees of organisation and “being reflected” in one another just as this occurs in our experience’.58 Historically speaking, science has always relied on the anthropomorphic transferral of human characteristics to non-human objects. This is because the substitution of one phenomenon for another one is a necessary element of cognition.59 The concept of ‘substitution’ comes from Max Müller’s study of metaphor. In his theory, it describes the means of transportation of concepts from the field of social activity into the field of natural phenomena, where they can be used for the description of the external world. Bogdanov applies Müller’s linguistic concept to the theory of knowledge and uses it as a tool to critically reassess the history of philosophy in terms of a gradual progression from anthropomorphism to monism through the development of scientific substitution.60 The principle of substitution mediates new scientific hypotheses and corrects former theories. Bogdanov reveals the traces of animistic substitution in the concept of ‘spirit’ that had originally been seen as the final cause of objects and things. Even if metaphysics abstracts the final cause from a personal quality, for example, in such propositions as ‘mind controls body’, the cause-effect relation remains anthropomorphic. In this way, Bogdanov understands the determinism of force, which also seeks a human agency behind the passive objects and things. Accordingly, by discovering consciousness behind a physiological process, panpsychism only further restores the ‘universal animism’. It is a Kantian thing-in-itself that liberates objectivity from anthropomorphism, yet the ‘divesting’ of the thing of sense perception and empirical content, simply hides the essence of things from the empirical self, thus reintroducing the dualism of essence and appearance by restricting a subjective capacity to know what is in-itself.61 Bogdanov consciously substitutes associative causality of the psychic structure for the unknown X qualities of objects, such as cell, which he assumes has a lesser degree of organisation but can nonetheless bring  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, p. 153.  Ibid., pp. 137–140. 60  See: Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, trans. D. G. Rowley (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 219–232. About Bogdanov’s interpretation of Max Müller see: Craig Brandist, The Dimensions of Hegemony (London: Brill, 2015), p. 45. 61  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, pp. 135–139. 58 59

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about complex bodies and objects. The minimal difference between Bogdanov’s substitution and panpsychism consists not just in distinguishing degrees of organisation along with mental or proto-mental forms corresponding to them, but in supporting a Machian view on the neutrality of the elements (which are neither psychic nor physical) and attributing to the psychophysical distinction a purely epistemic function.62 When science will be able to investigate the inner structure of the unknown X and its infinitely smaller component parts, the psychic substitution might be unnecessary. The proper way to address the logics of mutual influence in the continuity of life forms will be elaborated. As a positivist, Bogdanov does not make any ontological claims here but only critically reassesses the history of philosophy and proposes his own resolution of the subject-­ object dualism from the purely methodological perspective of substitution. There is, however, a second, ontological level of exposition, which Bogdanov, the positivist, does not want to acknowledge. The concept of environment formally functions as a medium for the composite structure of elementality. The heterogeneity of the environment only appears in perception as homogeneity and wholeness, but it can be further broken down into infinitely smaller elements. Conversely, the infinitely smaller elements of the inorganic world appear in human perception as a pure indifference, but as a ‘monist tendency’ they can be regarded as the same complexes of elements at their lowest level of organisation.63 Homogeneity exists in the relations between elements but not in the elements themselves. The organisational interconnectedness between elements is an imposition of a monist point of view onto the otherwise heterogeneous, self-organising flow of elementality. We are dealing with the onto-­ epistemological duplet here. It is an environmentalist ontology that hides behind a purely epistemic problem of knowledge and cognition. The discovery that everything senses goes together with the acknowledgement that everything self-organises out of sensing and influencing.

62  On the difference between panpsychism and so-called neutral monism, whose main representatives were Ernst Mach and Bertrand Russell, see: Leopold Stubenberg, ‘Neutral Monism and Panpsychism’, in Panpsychism. Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Godenhard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla (Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 349–368. 63  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, pp. 94–98.

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2.3   Elementality and Organisation I can feel Communism welling up inside me… An elemental force. Should I implement a policy to stop it, or not? Andrei Platonov (1926–1928)64

What exists in a hidden form in Empiriomonism becomes more apparent in Bogdanov’s later works, which precede his transition from philosophy to the scientific theory of organisation during the period of the First World War: a journey from theory of knowledge to the environment as such culminates in the discovery of organisation beneath all forms. In his post-­ empiriomonist works, Bogdanov asserts this more clearly: ‘The universe presents itself to us as an endless flow of organising activity. The ether of electrical and light waves was probably that primeval universal environment from which matter with its forces—and later on also life— crystallised’.65 The empiriomonist point of view allows us to see the infinitely lesser degrees of organisation in relation to the infinitely greater systems of the composite structure. This epistemological approach envisions a scale with two axes, two extremities, and ultimately meets the two obstacles of less than nothing and bigger than anything66—the chaos of elements. Following Marx, Bogdanov insists on the unity of subject and object in practice.67 The physics of elemental compositions is an ontological atomism and the epistemic problem of social cognition. What can be known and said about the elemental forces of nature depends on the available scientific tools, the development of which, in turn, depends on a broader sphere of practical activities. The elementality is the given, but the elements are produced, the objectivity is organised. Yet the given is an irrational remainder, literally a chaos as opposed to organisation. Such a Marxist move towards practice would normally lead to the dismissal of the given. Georg Lukács admits the impossibility of uniting object and subject according to the principles of rationalism and empiricism. Such principles 64  Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, trans. R.  Chandler (unpublished manuscript drafts provided by the author, 2017–2022), p. 169. 65  Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, p. 232. 66  The image of infinitely smaller and infinitely bigger systems appears, for example, here: Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, Prikliucheniia odnoi filosofskoi shkoly [The Adventures of One Philosophical School] (Moskva: URSS, 2012), pp. 48–52. 67  Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, ‘Taina Nauki’ [The Enigma of Science], in Voprosy sotsializma (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), pp 391–410 (p. 392).

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unavoidably meet the ‘frontiers’ of the irrational, of what is perceived as lying outside the sensible and the empirical—in our case, Bogdanov’s chaos of elements. The question is how to bring this frontier to the rational forms conceived as the product of reason? The dialectical unity of subject and object, where an object is a product of the subject, or concrete objectivity (Vergegenständlichung), is posited at the level of relations between things, not things themselves.68 That is why, within a similar practice-­oriented procedure, empiriomonism still hits the wall of atomism. By delegating the problem of atoms to practice, Bogdanov does not leave the territory of the environment as such. As we have seen, the very conceptual grid of environment frames the problem in ontological terms: the infinitely lesser degrees of organisation are infinitely organisable if only practical reason could find out how to seize upon them. If posited as minimal and elemental, the infinitely rational possibilities to conquer this irrational barrier remain open. The Russian word stikhiinost is crucial for understanding Bogdanov’s atomism. Stikhiinost is what denotes a lesser or minimal organisation, the chaos of elements that the environment as such represents. The notion of stikhiinost is otherwise known in the Anglophone literature by the name of spontaneity and is opposed to organisation. The question of spontaneity and organisation enters the field of Marxist debates after the publication of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902) and articulates a set of principle contradictions between the economic trade unionist struggle, on the one hand, and the political, party-led intervention into what was seen before Lenin as the organic processes of class struggle, on the other.69 This couplet has continued to function in political theory as a Manichean dualism, a maximally simple operation of binary division: self-determination and the organicity of class struggle versus the artificial superstructure of the party that directs the development of the movement.70 The problem begins at the level of translation. The Russian word stikhiinost possesses in relation to spontaneity a distinct meaning and a distinct etymology. Spontaneity originates from the Latin spontaneitas and 68  See: Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971), pp. 119–49. 69  See: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘What is to be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement’, in Collected Works of Lenin, trans. by Joe Fineberg and George Hanna, 45 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960–1977), vol. V, pp. 347–529. 70  On this see: Artemy Magun, ‘Spontaneity and Revolution’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 116 (4) (2017), 815–833.

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translates two Aristotelian concepts, automatos and ekoúsios, self-­movement and a voluntary act. Spontaneitas becomes an important term for medieval and Renaissance discussions about free will and determinism, finally coming to designate an intrinsic principle of self-determination, the autonomous subject and freedom.71 Stikhiinost descends from the Greek words stoichos (a row), stoicheion (a thing in a row and an element) and stoicheia (literally ‘elementality’, or the simplest substances that shape the whole matter). In the New Testimony stoicheia refers to the force of nature, and in the Russian context, stoicheia is transformed into an abstract noun, stikhiinost, which embraces the entire variety of meanings from lack of control to a force and the negative power of nature. Another noun, stikhiia, denotes more closely the idea of an element and elementality and it means a natural event or a natural disaster.72 It is already here that one can observe a diametrically opposed meaning of spontaneity and stikhiinost: the former attributes to the subject autonomy and freedom from external forces, while the latter grants self-determination, power and agency to a pure force and objective processes. Above all, this objectivity of force has transformative potentiality, capacity and power that equally can be negative and affirmative.73 Lenin discusses stikhiinost in terms of involuntary and unconscious tendencies in class struggle that will remain unintentional until a conscious organisational force joins in.74 In this sense, stikhiinost is an affective and emotional reaction against injustice, experienced when the workers do not yet understand but nevertheless ‘sense the necessity for collective resistance’. However, such intuitive rejection is ‘more in the nature of

71  See: Marci Sgarbi, ‘Kant’s Concept of Spontaneity within the Tradition of Aristotelian Ethics’, Studia Kantiana 8 (2009), 121–139. 72  I consulted the rigorous study of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? by Lars Lih, which includes an extensive etymological analysis of stikhiinost: Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered. What is to be Done in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), pp. 617–627. 73  Lars Lih formulates this opposition in the following way: ‘“Spontaneity” seems like a plausible translation of stikhiinost because both words revolve around lack of control—but stikhiinost connotes the self’s lack of control over the world, while spontaneity connotes the world’s lack of control over the self’: Ibid., p. 620. 74  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘Aporos of the Profession De Foi’, in Collected Works of Lenin, trans. by Joe Fineberg and George Hanna, 45 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960–1977), vol. IV, pp. 286–296 (p. 290).

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outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle’.75 Stikhiinost may equally correspond to activities of a party if they rest on expectations that socialism will emerge of its own accord due to the objective teleology of the historical development. In other words, stikhiinost is also a synonym for objectivism. According to Lenin, subordination to stikhiinost is a constant attempt to catch up with whatever trend emerges.76 The use of stikhiinost immediately suggests that Lenin’s understanding of objectivity differs from that of the traditional Marxism of the period. Objective conditions, according to Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, are not an inert object that lies outside of a subject but a play of forces. The intervention into the given composition or the change of balance of forces assumes a specific act of theory: analysis and understanding of the given conjuncture. Lenin’s analysis of the preconditions for the October Revolution follows the same line of argument: the material body of forces, their concatenations and contradictions constitute what is known as history and objective development.77 This is of course very far from Lenin’s mechanistic presentation of materialism in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, where only mirroring constitutes a link between the independent object and the subject subordinated to it.78 Stikhiinost, as presented in What Is to Be Done?, introduces a new concept of force. Unlike the Plekhanovite Lenin of 1908, the 1902 Lenin is philosophically and politically closer to Bogdanov and, in many respects, crucial for understanding his elaboration of stikhiinost and organisation. Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin’s insistence on organisation relies on the necessity to protect the creativity of self-organisation from the iron clutches of discipline and control.79 She associates stikhiinost with

75  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘What is to be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement’, pp. 374–375. 76  Ibid., pp. 394–395. 77  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder’, in Collected Works of Lenin, trans. by Julius Katzer, 45 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960–1977), vol. XXXI, pp. 17–118. See also: Louis Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in For Marx, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 87–128. 78  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy’, pp. 17–388. 79  See: Roza Luxemburg, ‘Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy’, in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edit. by Peter Hudis and Kevin B.  Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), pp. 248–265.

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spontaneous improvisation and organisation with a pre-planned conspiracy.80 However, as has been pointed out above, stikhiinost is not an autonomy of subject from the external forces. Stikhiinost is a force in itself. It enters relations and constitutes organisation. To avoid further confusion, the old couple of spontaneity and organisation should actually be translated as elementality and organisation. The semantic, philosophical and political meaning of elementality significantly differs from that of spontaneity. Bogdanov carries out a predictable trick with elementality and organisation. He transports the activist use of the term to the field of his onto-­ epistemic problematic. We have observed this before in relation to the concepts of reflection and parallelism. According to Bogdanov, the environment is a battlefield of collective labour, in which human activity is opposed to the elemental resistance of nature.81 But if human activity implies the resistance of nature, then from the point of view of what resists, nature is in itself an activity. The relation is always reversal: ‘When two activities collide, each of them is resistance for the other’.82 The activity-­ resistance is a dual modality of both labour and nature: It had been previously assumed that resistances are completely devoid of the features of activities, that they are purely passive. They had been denominated as ‘inertia’. Inertia was attributed to materiality, namely to atoms. It had been assumed that since matter is not a ‘force’ in itself, it exerts resistance to the action of forces proportionally to the mass of its atoms. But the notion of pure inertia is defeated now. The atom has become not a passive substance but, on the contrary, a system of the fastest and most concentrated movements known in the universe. Matter has been reduced to ‘energy’, i.e. to action, to activity’.83

Labour transforms what has been organised at the lower level of elementality into the superior form of organisation. It is a classical variation on the theme of second nature: the reconfiguration of nature as cultural 80  Roza Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions’, in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edit. by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), pp. 168–199 (p. 198). 81  Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, pp. 202–203. 82   Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, ‘Taina Nauki’ [The Enigma of Science], pp 391–410 (p. 398). 83  Ibid.

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entity. Bogdanov affirms: ‘To see “energy” in the processes of nature means to look at them from the point of view of how humanity might exploit them in its labour’. The discovery of energy in science and its use in production lifts the struggle against stikhiinost to the new level of organisation. ‘The principle of energy is the ideal of the power of society over nature’.84 It is not that Bogdanov does not recognise that the exhaustion of natural resources is an immediate consequence of such a reconfiguration. At the centre of his two pre-revolutionary science fiction novels Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1912) is a narrative about an approaching environmental disaster on the planet Mars. In one of the novels, we are told that ecological disaster was about to be inflicted on the planet in the capitalist past (Engineer Menni), and in the other, Mars faces the same problem many centuries later, at which point the planet has already established a communist order (Red Star). In both cases, the exhaustion of natural resources due to extensive industrial production threatens life on the planet. Nonetheless, instead of questioning this model of industrialisation, communist Martians choose to colonise another planet in order to mine a radioactive substance, which fuels their interplanetary ships and other industries.85 Colonialist reason continues to conquer an irrational frontier. The destruction of nature literally appears as a telos of human history. The main protagonist of Engineer Menni dreams about the explosion of a dying galaxy triggered by its communist population. The power of a colossal explosion would transport to other galaxies missiles containing an archive of communist history. In order to relaunch the communist universe elsewhere, the communists must sacrifice themselves and their galaxy.86 Bogdanov does not allow himself to descend to the level of cosmological fantasies in his theoretical writings. This epistemic model shifts after the October Revolution. In 1918, he acknowledges that the limitless extraction of coal and oil will lead to environmental disaster and associates

 Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, p. 204.  See: Alexander Bogdanov, ‘Engineer Menni: A Novel of Fantasy’ in Red Star. The First Bolshevik Utopia, trans. by Charles Rougle (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 141–233; Alexander Bogdanov, ‘Red Star: A Utopia’ in Red Star. The First Bolshevik Utopia, trans. by Charles Rougle (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 17–140. 86  See: Alexander Bogdanov, ‘Engineer Menni: A Novel of Fantasy’, pp. 227–228. 84 85

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communist order with what, only much later, has become known as production based on renewable energy.87 To overcome the obstacle of atomism, Bogdanov makes two steps. Initially, he decomposes the atom further to discover a more fundamental process at work in the corpuscular structure—the activity-resistance. The next step is to deploy the principle of organisation: the concept of activity-­ resistance allows him to detect a degree of organisation in a given system, social or physical. What human action organises by means of labour, nature organises by its evolutionary processes. Organisation is the ‘junction of activities-resistances’: What exactly does humanity organise through their efforts? What does nature organise through its evolutionary processes? For all the variety of cases, one characteristic remains applicable everywhere: certain activities and resistances are organised.88

From here, it follows that elementality is a mode of organisation. The same mode of organisation characterises some social systems. Bogdanov claims that under capitalism, the whole is elemental, but the parts are highly organised.89 For instance, the industrial production is a highly organised structure, but the capitalist mode of production as a whole creates partial and isolated systems: the growing specialisation of labour, the differentiation of social classes and contradiction between the peasant, bourgeois and proletarian ‘worlds’.90 It is a distorted and imbalanced mode of organisation in which elementality takes over the social system. The physical concept of elementality and organisation collides here with the activist use because activity-resistance cuts across all realms and is applicable to anything. What organises simultaneously resists organisation and what resists simultaneously organises. 87  Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, ‘Kollektivisticheskii stroi’ [The Collectivist Order], in Voprosy sotsializma (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), pp 295–305 (pp. 296–298). First published in a pamphlet ‘The Questions of Socialism’ in 1918, this chapter later appeared in Alexander Bogdanov, Ivan Stepanov, Kurs Politicheskoi Ekonomii. Obshchaia teoriia kapitalizma. Kollektivisticheskii stroi [A Course of Political Economy. The General Theory of Capitalism. Collectivist Order], 2 vols (Moscow, Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1923), vol. II, part IV, 2d. ed., pp. 280–303. 88  Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, ‘Taina nauki’, pp 391–410 (p. 398). 89  Alexander Bogdanov, Novyi mir [The New World] (Moscow: Izdanie S. Dorovatovskogo i Charushnikova, 1905), p. 93. 90  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, pp. 40–43.

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The uncontrollable force of elementality is a negative positivity that above all designates conservative and static social systems. When a subject is fully subordinated to the flow of natural and social life, the world appears as a pre-given object, a thing-in-itself. The world is given as elementality.91 In other places, Bogdanov calls the lack of control over the world ‘elemental [stikhiinaia] inalterability’.92 This is because elementality expresses the obedience and submission to unquestioned rules, prejudices and habits. In the post-revolutionary article ‘Would It Be Tomorrow?’ he states: In the philistine mind, the deed of organisation is generally not a matter of science, but only of ‘art’ […] The organisations which the philistine inhabits—the family, the household, the state—have a traditional character, a structure that has been developed over the centuries. They were formed in an elemental [stikhiinyi] historical process and by an elemental [stikhiinyi] selection; scientific plannability did not participate in their creation. They also embody the organisational experience of humankind, but in the pre-­ scientific and non-critical form, in the form of custom, i.e. through the transmission of the habitual course of actions and thoughts from generation to generation.93

Elementality is a conservatism of normative behaviour, submission to the power of external forces pictured as nature, law or the market economy. The elementality in nature and society lacks plasticity of life and in fact is impoverished in its content. The ‘creativity of life’ emerges out of diversity and richness of experience, but when ‘the entire material of experience is reduced to a small number of the familiar associations of images, of the familiar emotions and actions’ there are no ‘conditions for the development of creativity’. And where ‘the entire psychic structure is based on a habit, there is also no need for changes’.94

 Alexander Bogdanov, Novyi mir [The New World], pp. 29–31.  Ibid., p. 64. 93  Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, ‘Zavtra li?’ [Would It Be Tomorrow?], in Voprosy sotsializma [The Questions of Socialism] (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), pp 305–321 (p. 311). The italics of Russian words are mine. 94  Alexander Bogdanov, Novyi mir [The New World], p. 16. 91 92

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The rigid elementality produces a poor number of variables. It arranges life according to the logic of passive repetitiveness, but the chaos of elements always involves the organising force of resistance. An active analytic and practical position modifies environment. Bogdanov insists that the post-revolutionary society has to work out a new type of social relations where it is not nature, laws or habits that master subject, but it is subject who masters them. The antithesis of elementality is not organisation, because organisation always implies elementality. The antithesis of elementality is plasticity. The organisation has to be based on ‘a maximum of life of society as a whole, which at the same time coincides with a maximum of life of its component parts and elements—persons’.95 Communism, according to Bogdanov, is the development of the plasticity of life.96 Elementality articulates a specific epistemological grid for the understanding of objectivity and intervention. A frequent use of the word stikhiinost in the political jargon of left-wing activism at that time communicates the rage of human action against the unbearable political reaction of the despotic fatum. The objective development is a fatalist view on history. Introducing into this discussion the register of Greek tragedy allows us to understand why the organicity of human life receives a label of rigidity and ideology. The discussion on elementality and organisation was limited to the question of a party-form only retrospectively. In fact, it exceeds this localisation and denotes superiority of constructivism over objectivism and human action over historical fatum. It implies that Luxemburg’s critique is relevant, but in the Lukácsian formulation. The conquering of the irrational frontier leads revolutionaries to a phantom of complete rationalisability of life.

 Ibid., p. 98.  Ibid., pp. 84–135. Bogdanov does not use the word communism in the pre-revolutionary writings due to the censorship, but even in the post-revolutionary publications, he prefers the term collectivism instead. What he means by the ‘new world’ in this publication implies his specific understanding of collectivism. We shall discuss what he means by collectivism in due course. 95 96

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2.4  Labour Causality Labour cannot ‘create’ anything at all. It has long been established that labour only transports and combines its objects. Alexander Bogdanov (1904)97

Elementality, or, put differently, atomism, is the ontological obstacle of empiriomonism. To overcome this obstacle, the problem of practice is added to the problem of the atom. Unlike in classical empiricism, for Bogdanov perception is a historically formed organisation of collective experience. The ideas of size, space, time and colour are mediated by a series of organising practical steps. A colour becomes an element of experience only after the operation of separation and the abstraction of the property of colour from an object. Perception of colour does not exist prior to the practical operation and appears rather as a pure indifference within the set of psychical and physical concatenations. This pure indifference, the chaos of elements, is only a starting point of organisation. In the wake of the rise of labour technics, 98 the sum of the elements grows, but their usage depends on technical and cognitive goals. The invention of the concept of the atom was determined by the development of the technics of splitting and crushing. The labouring subject appeals either to actions or the attributes of objects out of necessity. In machinery and manufacturing, labour uses particular sets of elements that differ from the elements used in mechanics or chemistry. Labour and cognition, practice and theory are inseparable.99 The dictum ‘I sense’ is substituted by the dictum ‘I labour’. Equally, what senses is not that ‘I’, but everything that is alive and labouring. 97  Alexander Bogdanov, Obmen i tekhnika [Exchange and Technics], in Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzreniia [The Essays on the Realist Worldview] (St Petersburg: Izdanie S. Dorovatovskago and A. Charushnikova, 1904), pp. 279–343 (p. 283). 98  Here and elsewhere we use the word technics in a German sense of Technik that derives from the Greek tekhne and refers to the art of material production. In the context of the nineteenth-century philosophy of technology, the discourse of Technik attributes to the new profession of the engineer the status of a creative inventor (a Techniker), who attains a high level of sophistication in engineering during the process of education (Bildung). See: Eric Schatzberg, ‘Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930’, Technology and Culture, 47, 3 (2006), 486–512 (pp. 494–501). This German meaning of technics fully applies to its Russian equivalent tekhnika. It refers to material and cultural skills, as well as to machinery. 99  Bogdanov admits that he borrowed this labour theory of an element from Vilonov: Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, pp. 207–211.

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Bogdanov understands labour as a practical and analytical operation of division and combination—junctions and disjunctions that make use of the elements of nature according to the needs of production. An element of experience is a product of labour, while labour’s use of the elements of experience corresponds to use value, on the grounds that such use emerges from a social need to distinguish and differentiate experience in order to develop production. Finally, the value of labour is the amount of energy spent in the process of an element’s ‘extraction’.100 As a result, it turns out that even before labour power enters any economic relations, the fact of ‘extraction’ of an element already implies economic properties. Either way, use value appears as an ontological principle of usefulness and value as an essentially vitalist quality. In other words, Bogdanov does not distinguish between the content of production and the economic forms of this content.101 The unity of action and cognition in the use value of labour appears as a monist plan of social development. Cognition begins with the simple generalisation of experience. Reflexive and instinctive human actions, such as the negotiation of obstacles, are the result of a long practical generalisation, first in the act of jumping and then in the concept of ‘obstacle’. Likewise, the repetitive rhythm of movements associated with labour and also reflexive reactions in the form of ‘labour shouts’ have contributed to the emergence of the first action verbs. The origin of the first words in shouts relates to the adaptation of a body to the process of labour. A primitive root of the first word signifies body movement and a number of words form a ‘technical rule’ that generalises the series of actions.102  Ibid., p. 209.  Together with the economist Skvortsov-Stepanov, Bogdanov wrote two volumes of an introduction to political economy. The work presents a similar interpretation of the value form. See: Alexander Bogdanov, Ivan Stepanov, Kurs Politicheskoi Ekonomii. Obshchaia teoriia kapitalizma. Kollektivisticheskii stroi [A Course of Political Economy. The General Theory of Capitalism. Collectivist Order], pp. 39–44. 102  Alexander Bogdanov, ‘Metody truda i metody poznaniia’ [The Methods of Labour and The Methods of Cognition], in Voprosy sotsializma [The Questions of Socialism] (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), pp 376–390 (pp. 377–381). See also: Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, p. 28. It seems that Bogdanov developed his concept of a ‘technical rule’ using the empirical observations of the philologist Max Müller. Müller claims that the first words expressed only one attribute of a thing, which means that language begins not from a concrete thing or a single act, whether this be a form of labour or a bodily motion in space, but from a general idea that reflects many acts and relations: Max F. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, And Co, 1880), p. 431. 100 101

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Bogdanov borrows this linguistic theory of ‘labour shouts’ from Ludwig Noiré, who claims that at the beginning of speech development man had ‘a limited store of sounds with which he accompanied his action, and which associated themselves with the objects produced or modified by the action. This is the period of the objective creation of language’.103 Polynesians, Noiré continues, ‘describe thinking as “talking in the stomach”’, i.e. as an internal process.104 Noiré approaches the problem of the labour-act from the perspective of the Schopenhauerian will to act,105 while Bogdanov reduces the origin of the action to the physiology of the body. He is interested in the technical side of the problem, namely, how language and labour proceed from the creation of technical rules and the description of events to arrive finally at processes of induction and deduction.106 Thus Bogdanov treats cognition as social adaptation to the environment through the mediation of action and labour. The syncretism of thinking and speech is typical of nineteenth-century philosophy of language. According to Ludwig Noiré, reason and language arise synchronously: ‘Ratio et oratio are one, they are related to each other like body and mind, the outer and the inner; they are distinguishable, but not separable’.107 Bogdanov goes even further. In his theory, the first signal systems, such as shouts, already involve a word and anticipate thinking. Therefore, thinking correlates to the Pavlovian second signal system. In the Soviet context, the reflexological concept of language, as well as the logocentric model of thinking, had been called into question by Lev Vygotsky. The verbalisation of thinking, or, better, the verbal vocalisation of thinking, ignores affective (non-verbal and non-vocal) expressions of thought. Furthermore, the synchronicity of thinking and speech liquidates the temporal delays between thinking and speaking.108 A philologist, Max Müller rejects the ‘interjectional’ origin of language: ‘Language begins 103  Ludwig Noiré, Max Müller and the Philosophy of Language (London: Longmans, Green, And Co, 1879), p. 100. 104  Ibid., p. 35. 105  See, for example: Ludwig Noiré, The Origin and Philosophy of Language (Chicago, London: The open Court Publishing Company, 1917), p. 44. 106  Alexander Bogdanov, ‘Metody truda i metody poznaniia’ [The Methods of Labour and The Methods of Cognition], pp. 376–390. 107  Ludwig Noiré, Max Müller and the Philosophy of Language, p. 17. Müller states similar ideas in Max F. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, p. 439. 108  Lev Vygotsky, ‘Thinking and Speech’, in The Collected Works of L.  S. Vygotsky, trans. N.  Minick, R.  W. Rieber and A.  S. Carton, 6 vols (New York, London: Plenum Press, 1987–99), vol. I, pp. 39–285.

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where interjections end’, he writes. ‘There is a huge difference between a word “to laugh” and the interjection “ha, ha!” If language’s origin is “interjectional”, then why did an animal’s faculty of uttering interjections never lead them to human speech?’109 The reflexological model of speech indeed fails to explain how labour shouts correspond to the concrete acoustic image of an action and subsequently integrate it with a more abstract concept of that action. The immediacy of the ‘labour shouts’ undergoes particular forms of mediation, together with the division and diversification of labour. A practical analysis and synthesis or the formation of technical rules establishes a historically determined understanding of natural phenomena; it also develops the use of labour tool and the relations of production. The elements of experience grow and acquire new complexity together with the development of labour activities. Bogdanov terms this process ‘labour causality’. The sequence of labour causality proceeds from spontaneous sociomorphism—that is, the ‘substitution’ of natural phenomena by anthropocentric motivations and actions, such as the animation of forests by wood goblins or the anthropologisation of lightening as the wrath of gods—to ‘authoritarian causality’, in which the division of labour first produces relations of domination and then the dualism of the mind and body. 110 In most of his works, Bogdanov dedicates a chapter or a section to the question of labour causality, always unfolding it through a long, hitherto sketchy sociological detour into history. The most representative analysis of authoritarianism appears in his early article Authoritarian Thinking (1903). Here Bogdanov focuses not solely on the problem of causality but on the analysis of ‘the elements of authority in social mind’111 in relation to the division of labour. In prehistoric societies, where the division of labour hardly exists, an individual psyche is able to reflect and reproduce the entire social experience. It undergoes what is in a sense a pre-­individual undifferentiated experience, one which coincides with a given collective. Differentiation of labour tasks gradually separates individual experience from the life of the collective. Division of labour places subjects within structures of proximity: family and work produce as their result the  Max F. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, p. 420.  Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, pp. 226–27. 111  Alexander Bogdanov, Avtoritarnoe myshlenie [Authoritarian Thinking], in Iz psikhologii obshchestva (Saint Petersburg: Pallada, 1906), pp. 110–183 (p. 111). 109 110

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‘fragmentation of personality’ and the one-sidedness of social experience.112 The whole no longer coincides with its parts, but most importantly, the whole from now on divides into two: into those parts which ‘distribute labour forces’ and organise the life of the community, and those parts which execute and play a subordinate role. The formation of the subject occurs through its acquisition of either an active or a passive function in society. The specialisation of the organising function leads to the gradual separation of organiser (organizator) and executer (ispolnitel)113 and results in an incurable antagonism between the dominating and the dominated. The organising and executing functions in labour crystallise special psychic tools of domination, subordination, antagonism and resistance that embody social relations.114 Sociologically, the proposition of ‘mind controls body’ corresponds to the separation of the organiser from the organising activity and it determines the development of authoritarian thinking. A soul appears as a body executor (ispolnitel) and the ruler as an active administrator (organizator) of a passive and dependent labourer.115 It would be fair to say, although Bogdanov does not conceptualise it in these terms, that the outer structure of this dualism had been transferred into the inner psychic structure and became a mental function.116 The entire history of humanity appears in Bogdanov’s sociological narrative as a devastating advance of authoritarianism: an ancient patriarchal head of community establishes feudal chains of subordination and dependency, models  Ibid., pp. 110–132.  The pair of the organiser (organizator) and the executor (ispolnitel) stresses active and subordinate roles in production. The Russian noun ispolnitel refers to a wage labourer who passively performs a given task or executes orders and commands without a right to make independent decisions. The same word is used for the musical performance and the executive branch of the government (ispolnitelnaia vlast). The semantic connotation of passivity and dependency of ispolnitel is missing in the analogous English verb ‘to execute’. 114  Ibid., pp. 129–136. 115  Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, pp. 205–206. 116  About the development of mental functions as a process of internalisation see: Lev Vygotsky, ‘The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions’, in The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, trans. and ed. by M. J. Hall and R. W. Rieber, 6 vols (New York, London: Plenum Press, 1987–99), vol. IV, pp. 131–148. We don’t know if Vygotsky was familiar with Bogdanov’s theory of executing and organising functions, but he states that the power-submission mechanisms originally derive from a social relation between boss and subordinate, and determine the development of mental forms. See: Lev Vygotsky, ‘Concrete Human Psychology. An Unpublished Manuscript by Vygotsky’, trans. by A.  A. Puzyrei. Soviet Psychology, 27, 2, (1989), 53–77. 112 113

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a monogamous nuclear family with the figure of the despotic father at its top, and generates slavery, serfdom, monarchism, militarism and bureaucracy.117 An expanded master-slave dialectic thus emerges [i]n the form of a soft matriarchy and a stern patriarchy; in the form of an oracle’s power clothed with religious secrets and a feudal power clothed with the force of arms; in the form of a system of slavery alien to all formalities and a system of waged labour full of cold formalism; in the form of meaninglessly stupefying Eastern despotism and the Western cultural power of a representative; in the form of paper-dry power of a bureaucrat over the general public and the moral power of an ideologist over his fellow citizens—in all these changing forms the authoritarian fragmentation of humanity retains the same basis: an experience of one person is clearly or vaguely recognised as fundamentally unequal from the experience of another person. The human dependency becomes one-sided. The active will is separated from the passive will.118

Authoritarianism penetrates cultural habits and interpersonal, especially gender and family, relations. It is mediating and mediated by other, non-­ authoritarian forms. In capitalist society, the dominant point of view of the bourgeoisie hypostasises the dualism of the organising and the executive (ispolnitelnaia) function, transforming it into the ideology of the market economy. The rule of exchange appears as a force that governs society. The essentialisation of the market, the subservience of society to the ‘natural law’ of the economy, produces ‘abstract causality-necessity’, which deepens the same schemata of ‘authoritarian causality’ in relation to the body and mind.119 The coexistence of various causalities in the capitalist system expresses the growing contradiction between the peasant, bourgeois and proletarian points of view. The capitalist mode of organisation articulates isolated and partial systems structured in such a way that the competing worldviews block the possibility for mutual understanding. Therefore, the proletariat must consciously understand the logic of labour causality in order to organise knowledge in agreement with its own class interests. The proletariat first of all has to overcome authoritarian causality, the split between organising and executing function in the ‘comradely cooperation’. If the  Alexander Bogdanov, Avtoritarnoe myshlenie [Authoritarian Thinking], pp. 110–132.  Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, ‘Novyi mir’ [The New World], p. 33. 119  Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, pp. 205–206. 117 118

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intellectuals by definition reproduce authoritarian causality in their party structures and everyday behaviour, industrial production universalises labour and tends to eliminate competition and individualistic leadership. Transition to machine-labour assumes the gradual intellectualisation of the relationship between worker and machine. From simple control of the machine, labour passes to an active and organising role, operating on the level of the structure of the machinery, solving technical problems and making organisational decisions. The worker becomes the operator of the machinery and the executive of machine operations.120 The final abolition of authoritarian causality happens under conditions of total automation in the collectivist social system when the worker becomes the ‘scientifically educated organiser’. For Bogdanov, the only presently existing prototype of such an ‘organiser-executor’ is the engineer.121 Bogdanov’s sensitivity to authoritarianism reflects his troubled experience within the Bolshevik party. For him, party dogmatism is just another aspect of the authoritarian causality of the bourgeois past. In order to destroy it, the proletariat must tackle any sort of fetishism, be it intellectual trends, religious beliefs, idolization of party leaders or the commodity form and private property. This leads Bogdanov to his abstract propositions concerning the collective mode of production. It is argued that when a person masters collective experience, authority and power automatically give way to competency and expertise. 122 Alienation and fetishism are undoubtedly reduced to the problem of ideology. Bogdanov defines ideology as ‘a system of the organising forms of production’123 and as an ‘organisational tool’: It is not uncommon that for its entire period of existence a gun never gets a chance to exterminate a single living being. It sometimes serves as a signal, sometimes just to facilitate innocent shooting at a target. But only those who see it as a weapon of destruction will be able to understand its struc120  Alexander Bogdanov, Elementy proletarskoi kultury v razvitii rabochego klassa. Lektsii prochitannye v Moskovskom proletkulte vesnoi 1919 goda [The Elements of Proletarian Culture in the Development of the Working Class. Lectures Delivered at Moscow Proletkult in Spring 1919] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, Vserossiiskii Sovet Proletkulta, 1920), pp. 33–42. 121  Ibid., pp. 37–39. 122  Ibid., pp. 52–59. 123   Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, ‘Programma kultury’ [The Programme of Culture], in Voprosy sotsializma (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), pp 321–335 (p. 324).

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ture, technical development and the connection of its parts. It is not uncommon that for the entire period of life a human sexual apparatus is left unused. Yet sometimes it has economic (prostitution, arranged marriage), political (diplomatic marriages) and other, even the most unexpected, perverted uses. However, it is possible to scientifically understand its structure, evolution, diseases and disorders, as well as to successfully maintain its hygiene and treat it, only from the point of view that it is, in fact, a reproduction apparatus. Similarly, it would not be possible to understand the structure and development of the ideological mechanism and systematically intervene in it, if one does not know that this mechanism is an organisational tool of the collective.124

An organisational tool is determined by what it organises; therefore, ideology does not emerge before the relations of production, yet it is not a ‘simple derivative’ either. Language and discourse, law and morals have previously been defined within Marxism as a superstructure, as the derivative formations, but in fact they embody a production process. The entirety of production is organised through speech and communication: language coordinates all exertions of labour and all tasks; customs, law and morality regulate and control social life.125 Ideology neither reflects nor expresses, it organises the relations of production. It is not by chance that we earlier compared Lukács with Bogdanov. Applying a different method, they share a Marxist idea of the unity of subject and object in practice, and for both of them, this unity is the standpoint of the proletariat. For the former, the proletariat is reified labour power and the subject of production, a commodity and a person. This subject-object position leads the proletariat to a self-comprehending and universal point of view that takes in the totality of capitalism.126 For the latter, the universal point of view of the proletariat relates to the collective capacity of industrial labour to eliminate the dualism between object and subject. In both cases, passivity within the structural position of objectification and subordination leads to the self-awareness of labour and the potential destruction of capitalism. Nevertheless, if the Lukácsian standpoint of the proletariat is equal to the self-consciousness of the capitalist totality, for Bogdanov the point of view of the proletariat is the collective

 Ibid., p. 326.  Ibid. 126  Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics, p. 168. 124 125

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worldview of humanity that constructs the totality out of partial and isolated capitalist systems. The narrative of labour causality in Bogdanov appears as a semi-­ Hegelian retroactive self-understanding of the proletarian point of view. Proletarian thinking, liberated from the dualism of organiser and executor, is the culmination of the development of labour causality. In the new forms of industrial production, it is able to obtain any material or product from any elemental force. This is because industrial production sets in motion a grandiose, ‘systematic’ conversion of energy: The chemical combination of coal and oxygen from the atmosphere is transformed into the heat of fire, heat into the pressure of steam, pressure into the motion of a piston, and the motion of a piston into the motion of a flywheel, belt-drives, and lathes. The motion of the lathes is transformed into various changes in the worker’s material, and all this results in a certain product […] By such means the forces of nature are transformed by the forces of the labouring collective; any one of them can become a technical source that can be applied to all the tasks that are set for labour. As sources of productive energy, they can substitute for and replace each other.127

The law of conservation and conversion of energy expresses the systemic transformation of forces, where a cause of phenomena is found in another quantitively equal phenomenon. This is a so-called new type of technical labour causality that according to Bogdanov must gradually replace the old authoritarian order.128 It is no longer a relation of subordination in which workers supplement machines but rather the becoming of a machinery in which both labour and nature exist in a horizontal relation of operational unity. Bogdanov’s technical labour causality is structured as machine. But the reversal is also true: the machinery is structured as organism. Yet it is not a fusion of human and machine but rather the conversion of technical and social spheres. 127  Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, p.  202. Translation was modified, see: Alexander Bogdanov, Filosofiia zhivogo opyta. Materializm, Empiriokrititsizm, Dialekticheskii materializm, Empiriomonizm. Populiarnye ocherki [The Philosophy of Living Experience. Materialism, Empiriocriticism, Dialectical Materialism, Empiriomonism. Popular Outlines], 3rd ed. (Petrograd: Izdatelstvo M.  I. Semenova, 1923), p. 223. 128  Ibid., pp.  223–224. It is translated as technological labour causality in: Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, p. 203.

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The demonstration of how the law of conservation and conversion of energy works in industrial production becomes possible because labour and natural forces appear from the established point of view as a property of system. Here, the schemata of energy conversion articulate the relationship between the natural and the artificial in a novel way. By means of labour, a given force of nature is transformed into a given effect by completely exhausting itself in it: ‘The effect exhausts the cause, or, what is the same, the effect is equal to the cause, just as in production the practical results—the sum total of useful and useless or harmful energy—exhaust the energy that is expended in production’.129 There are two ways to approach Bogdanov’s concept of new labour causality. We have already gestured towards a semi-Hegelian reading centred around the figure of labour and its transcending function. To vulgarise this Hegelianism further, the grandiose manipulation of the forces of nature in industrial production, as we have seen, must unavoidably exhaust natural resources. But a proto-structuralist reading is also possible: labour acts within the environment. Organisation does not transcend elementality but rather operates within it. Organisation is a transformation by means of mutual articulation. This is exactly how we should understand the new technical labour causality. The industrial metamorphosis of forces detaches elementality from a substantial form. The source of all those different qualities—heat, pressure and movement—is not a substance but a magnitude of energy, which is in itself only ‘a measure of the changes that one “thing” can excite in another “thing”’.130 The authoritarian causality knows the first mover and the essence of all things. Even if the chain of causality is too long and the hierarchical subordinations are too complicated to trace, a final cause brings them back under one roof. The new technical labour causality equates cause and effect since the application of a given force-resistance is equal to its effect. This new type of causality is a converted form of energy. Bogdanov discovers in energy a universal calculus that detects the state and function of a given self-organising system. The measure of energy is a ratio between expenditure and assimilation, the so-called vital-differential (zhizneraznost) within a system and in relation

 Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, p. 203.  Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, p. 327.

129 130

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to its environment.131 The functional dependency between the psychical and the physical expresses the same logic of conversion. The former is the Anderssein of the latter. Thus, the general equivalent of energy detects all organisational conversions, regional and global—serial, complex and on the level of systems. In Empiriomonism, Bogdanov carefully drew a map of this environmental geography. Ultimately, the system of empiriomonism is nothing other than an expression of the new technical labour causality. That it is why it is unavoidably semi-Hegelian as well as proto-­structuralist. Bogdanov might have imagined that the new labour causality grounded his system itself: the anonymous masses of labour would be his Napoleon and labour causality would come riding a horse.

131  Borrowed from Avenarius, the concept of Vitaldifferenz originally designates either the imbalance between the assimilation of energy from the environment and the transfer of energy to the environment, or the reversal disequilibrium between expenditure and nutrition within a system: Richard Avenarius, Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, pp. 71–88. Bogdanov turns vital-differential into the magnitude of energy. For instance, he thought that it might be possible to measure the intensity of the affective states in a psychic formation by calculating how such and such positive or negative emotional colouration changes a balance between assimilation and expenditure of energy in an organism: Alexander Bogdanov, Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Book 1-3, pp. 49–87.

CHAPTER 3

The Science of Organisation

3.1   The Organisational Point of View and Tektology Each science represents the collected, formalised and socialised, in a word, socially organised experience of humankind in a particular field of phenomena. Alexander Bogdanov (1918)1

As soon as the doctrine of empiriomonism was completed, Bogdanov conceived a new project of science, focusing on the study of organisational processes.2 The universal organisational science also known as tektology

1  Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, ‘Zavtra li?’ [Would It Be Tomorrow?], in Voprosy sotsializma [The Questions of Socialism] (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), pp 305–321 (p. 311). 2  Bogdanov, A. Letter to Vladimir Bazarov. 21 Jun. 1911. Fondo Bogdanov, FLLB, Series 2, fas. 1, doc 3, pp. 9–10.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Chehonadskih, Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40239-5_3

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became a three-volume book,3 an applied scientific method4 and a political platform for the promotion of proletarian culture and science. Both doctrines corresponded to the formation of Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural-­ Enlightenment Organisations). Tektology ‘is the completion of the cycle of sciences’.5 Unlike philosophy, this science offered not just an understanding of how ‘heterogeneous elements in nature, labour and thinking connect’, but a ‘practical mastery of all kinds of combinations’, including the theory of knowledge, which for tektology is ‘a special case of organisational practice’ and ‘the coordination of a special type of complexes’.6 That is why empiriomonism was the last possible philosophy, according to its author.7 Bogdanov clearly postulated a rupture between philosophy and organisational science in works both preceding Tektology and following its publication.8 Protecting his new science against the label of ‘Machism’, by the 1920s a synonym for anti-Marxism and reactionary political deviation, Bogdanov proclaimed that philosophical problems are

3  We have to note that the word ‘universal’ stands here for the Russian word vseobshchaia, which could equally be translated as ‘general’ or ‘all embracing’. Only the first part of ‘Tektology’ (Alexander Bogdanov, Tektology. Book 1, trans. by A.  Kartashov, V.  Kelle, P. Bystrov (Hull: Centre for Systems Studies Press, 1996), and the condensed version of this work (Alexander Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology. The General Science of Organization, trans. by George Gorelik (Seaside, California: Intersystems Publications, 1980) were translated into English. We refer to a recent Russian edition where necessary: Alexander Bogdanov, Tektologiia. Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka [Tektology. The Universal Organisational Science] (Moscow: LENAND, 2019). 4  In 1921 Bogdanov proposed his own theory of planned economy based on a tektological method: Alexander Bogdanov, ‘Organizatsionnaia nauka i khoziaistvennaia planomernost’ [Organisational Science and the Economic Plannability], in Ocherki vseobshchei organizatsionnoi nauki (Samara, Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo Samara, 1921), pp.  297–306. The abridged version of this text was published as an appendix to the English translation of Tektology, see: Alexander Bogdanov, Tektology. Book 1, pp. 300–307. 5  Ibid., p. 87. 6  Alexander Bogdanov, Tektologiia. Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka [Tektology. The Universal Organisational Science], p. 285. 7  Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines, trans. D. G. Rowley (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016), p. 226. 8  See, for example: Ibid., pp. 238–247; and: Alexander Bogdanov, ‘Ot filosofii k organizatsionnoi nauke’ [From Philosophy to Organisational Science], in Neizvestnyi Bogdanov [The Unknown Bogdanov], 3 vols, ed. N. S. Antonova, N. V. Drozdova (Moscow: IZ “AIRO – XX”, 1995), vol. I, pp. 110–119.

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not relevant for tektology.9 Yet it is unlikely that the rejection of philosophy was simply due to the campaign against empiriomonism and Machism led by Leninists since 1908.10 The abolitionism had been characteristic of the revolutionary avant-garde. Similarly to Lenin’s conception of the state and to the avant-garde’s problematisation of art, philosophy was to wither away, its demise accompanying a new epoch of the Soviets. This new epoch would exile the old practices of the ancien régime to the capitalist West, but Bogdanov did not believe in absolute raptures. His tektology only reformulates the basic tenets of empiriomonism in a non-­philosophical way.11 We wish to reverse the syntactic order in Bogdanov’s autonym for his new science: organisational science is the science of organisation if we aim to see what this new project does to the domains of knowledge, not what it is in itself. We underline the Hegelian meaning of this name—from the science of logic to the science of organisation—not simply to demonstrate how Bogdanov engages with the Hegelian method (this, as we shall see, constitutes an important but mainly polemical aspect of tektology), but to identify a distinctly postHegelian set of problems which Bogdanov here introduces. In particular, we will treat his attempt to secure the construction of his science of organisation using a whole range of conceptual innovations from physics, biology and the philosophy of technology as an entry point into the problem of universalism and formalism. We will trace how Bogdanov translates such concepts as individual and collective, reproduction and distribution, technics and labour power into the language of organisation and ask what kind of formalism this operation produces. The detachment of concepts from the original field and their appropriation for the tektological use often works in both directions: as an elaboration of the original disciplinary field and as an elaboration of a specifically 9  Bogdanov’s response to the critics of tektology often relies on postulating a rupture between philosophy and science. He stresses that tektology is an empirical science and it does not concern itself with such philosophical problems as body and mind, matter and the thingin-itself: Alexander Bogdanov, Tektologiia. Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka [Tektology. The Universal Organisational Science], pp. 582–608, esp. pp. 582–584. 10  On this campaign and the protection of tektology from the shadow of empiriomonism in the Soviet period see: Vadim Sadonsky, ‘From Empiriomonism to Tektology’, in Alexander Bogdanov and the Origin of System Thinking in Russia, ed. by John Biggart, Peter Dudley and Francis King (Ashgate Publishing Limited: Hants, 1998), pp. 43–54. 11  Kuzminykh, for example, supports a position that the epistemic basis of Tektology is philosophical: Natalya Kuzminykh, ‘Monist Philosophy as the Basis of Tektology’, in Alexander Bogdanov and the Origin of System Thinking in Russia, ed. by John Biggart, Peter Dudley and Francis King (Ashgate Publishing Limited: Hants, 1998), pp. 55–62.

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tektological problem. For instance, the application of a biological principle of conjugation to medicine serves as empirical evidence for the universality of organisational principles. Such manoeuvres lead Bogdanov to unexpected territories: to the tektological theory of blood transfusion, circulation and exchange, and to what can be defined retrospectively as a cybernetic understanding of the organism-machine relationship that guides a Marxist explanation of how living and artificial systems converge and arrange themselves into a mode of production. Let us begin with the problem of universalism and formalism. The ‘organisational point of view’ overcomes existing disciplinary boundaries between social and natural sciences by establishing a new meta-disciplinary organisational method.12 As a science, tektology takes all existing disciplines as a material for the analysis of organisational regularities and laws. In other words, tektology only transgresses disciplines as a method. This situates tektology both above and within disciplines. By moving across various fields of knowledge, it produces a new scientific model of generality. Acknowledging that many tendencies led to the formation of the universal organisational science, Bogdanov focuses on two forms of generality. A universal method, applicable to any phenomena characterises mathematics, the science of abstractions. Tektology departs from a similar type of formalisation and equally disrespects the particular and the concrete.13 ‘We would laugh at the person who connects the cobblestone, the dream and the telegraph signal together’, admits Bogdanov, yet it is ‘a combination of the same type and character’.14 Mathematics treats this or any other type of combination as quantity, but if one attempts to understand ‘organisedness’ as such, a quantitative generalisation would appear as a representative of only one type of a system. Mathematics establishes that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts (2+2=4). Biology defines the organism as the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts (2+2>4). There are also systems where the whole is lesser than its parts (2+24) nor in disorganised systems (2+24) or greater (2+2