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Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticisms’ which, published in Russian in 1909, was not translated into
German and English until 1927. 877 In the period when stalinism was really coming into its own, claiming to be
the ideological completion of ‘Leninism’, Lenin’s book was exalted in the Komintern as a ‘deepening of
Marxism’ on the philosophical level. 878 It was even considered to be the philosophical basis of the ‘Leninism’
now being celebrated in the Komintern. 879
Lenin’s book was a circumstantial and polemical work. In the Russian social democratic party, in both
Menshevik and bolshevik factions, around 1904, there had grown up a lively interest in the theories of the
Austrian physicist Ernst Mach and the Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius. 880 This current was defined as
‘empirio-monism’. Against the background of a dizzying growth in the physical sciences, and strongly
influenced by epistemological reflection about science itself, the current was looking for a ‘monist’ synthesis of
the most recent developments in knowledge. It was also an ‘empirio-criticism’ that rejected the old dualist
conceptions which separated the object and the subject of knowledge. It sought to go beyond positivism and
empiricism by building a ‘subjectivist’ theory of knowledge. Empirio-criticism was part of the philosophical
trend towards a ‘return to Kant’, a trend which impregnated the revisionist and Austro-Marxist tendencies (see
chapter 2) opposed by Marxism. It reduced the world to a system of objects elaborated through the sensations of
the subjective psyche. There was not a dialectical inter-action between object and subject, but an identity, even a
fusion between matter and spirit. By only bringing out the ‘subjective’ side of knowledge, and by seeing
‘personal mediation’ as the source of this knowledge, empirio-criticism presented itself as a form of
individualism which turned social existence into an abstraction. By making the physical world an immediate,
empirical, and immutable order, it ignored the fact that the world is in perpetual transformation. By stopping at
the ‘intersubjective’ world of mental elements, it ‘refuted’ materialism. With Mach, the propagation of an
‘epistemological’ doubt about the reality of material objects led to a form of idealism, corresponding to the
general tendency in the bourgeois world towards a vague scientific ‘mysticism’. On the other hand, with
Avenarius, idealism was accompanied by a biological materialism, according to which the influence of the
external milieu on the subject could be reduced to changes in cerebral matter and the neurological system. As
such empirio-criticism corresponded to a crisis in the theory of science and in the capitalist world in general, one
which had indirect repercussions in the marxist camp itself. Hence the political stakes involved.
Within the RSDLP, and especially in the bolshevik fraction, there was a whole tendency, represented principally
by Bazarov, Lunacharsky and Bogdanov, which defended, within the party and even externally, the empiriocritical
conceptions of Mach and Avenarius, with the aim of ‘going beyond’ Marx’s limitations. 881 With
877 Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14 (Moscow, 1962).
878 Between 1924 and 1926 Stalin published The Principles of Leninism and The Foundations of Leninism, which posed the
bases of ‘socialism in one country’. This theory, which represented an abandonment of the principles of internationalism,
was made official by the Russian party at its 14 th Congress (April 1925) and in the Komintern at the 5 th Plenum of its
Enlarged Executive (April 1925).
879 See Marxism and Philosophy by Karl Korsch. The exaltation of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ philosophy was begun in 1924 by
A. Deborin, who became a member of the Praesidium of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences in 1935. See his book (in
German): Lenin – der Kämpfende Materialist (Frankfurt am Main: Makol Verlag, 1971).
880 The term ‘Empirio-Criticism’ was used for the first time by the Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius (1843-1896), in the
book: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Leipzig, 1888, and 1907-1908). Ernst Mach (1838-1916) was one of the main sources of
contemporary neo-positivism, known as ‘logical positivism’ or the Vienna Circle (Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Franck, Otto
Neurath, Hans Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick, Ludwig Wittgenstein et alii), based on formal logic. Mach had published in
1905 (Leipzig) his famous book: Erkenntnis und Irrtum. Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung.
881 Bogdanov and his brother-in-law Anatoli Lunacharsky were at the head of the left bolshevik faction which in 1907 called
for a boycott of the Duma. Eliminated from the leadership of the bolshevik party, it regrouped in 1909 around the periodical
Vperiod. Cf. the detailed biographies of Bogdanov – nom de plume of Aleksandr Malinovski – and Lunacharsky, in
G. Haupt and J.-J. Marie, Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders (Cornell University Press,
1974). [For the political collaboration/antogonism Bogdanov/Lenin, see: Sarapov (Julii), Lenin i Bogdanov. Ot
sotrudnicestva k protivostojaniju (Moscow: IRI RAN, 1998).]
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