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Bogdanov, the social process was reduced to the biological process of the organism adapting to the environment,
and the relations of production were reduced to the purely technical aspects of the organisation of labour 882 – a
thesis which in some ways prefigured the stalinist view. 883 At the same time, by affirming that social life is in all
its manifestations a conscious psychic life”, that “social existence and social consciousness are identical in the
exact sense of the word”, Bogdanov denied the marxist thesis that consciousness only reflects social life more or
less, that it lags behind it, and that material social existence develops independently of the social consciousness
of humanity. 884 The implications of Bogdanov’s view were that social classes were always conscious of the
social relations presiding over their activity in production, and thus that the revolutionary consciousness of the
proletariat – which in Marxist theory is alone capable of seeing social reality clearly – was no different from the
consciousness of other, non-proletarian social strata. In this sense, Bogdanov was simply reflecting his old
populist conceptions, which Bolshevism had always fought against. Under the cover of ‘empirio-criticism’,
Bogdanov’s theories opened the door to a mechanistic, fatalistic conception of the revolutionary process as well
as to idealist voluntarism on the political level. It was no accident that Bogdanov and his partisans, no doubt
underestimating the extent of the defeat of the revolution in 1905, formed between 1907 and 1909 the Otzovist
(‘Recallist’) fraction which called for the resignation of the socialist deputies. Allied with the ‘Ultimatist’
fraction, it demanded the abandonment of all legal activity. In the atmosphere of ideological disarray born out of
the defeat, certain bolshevik intellectuals, like Lunacharsky, who was close to Bogdanov, advocated the creation
of a new ‘socialist religion’ and tried to reconcile Marxism and religion. Known as the ‘God-builders’, this
tendency expressed a philosophical idealism accompanied by voluntarism on the political level. The Otzovist,
Ultimatist and God-building currents formed a unity in the bolshevik party, and seemed to put into question its
Marxist philosophical and political foundations.
Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism can only be understood in this precise historical context, a
period of defeat and disorientation. Lenin, as he admitted to Gorky, did not consider himself particularly
competent in philosophical matters. 885 He wanted to write, not a treatise in materialist philosophy, but a work of
political polemic. The struggle against the theories of Mach (‘Machism’) and Avenarius and against Bogdanov’s
empirio-criticism was seen as a party struggle, because “The struggle between parties in philosophy” reflected
“in the last instance, the tendencies and ideologies of enemy classes in contemporary society”. 886 Hence Lenin’s
tendency to simplify philosophical problems, and to assimilate any struggle against idealism with the struggle
against religion. What he calls the fight against “fideism” in his book was in fact a fight against the religious
tendencies expressed by Lunacharsky. It should be stressed that there was no attempt here to edify a ‘Leninist
philosophy’ – this would have been unthinkable in the bolshevik party of the time. Like the other Marxists of his
day, Lenin considered the theories of Mach and Bogdanov to be a private matter in the RSDLP and the bolshevik
fraction. This ‘philosophical quarrel’, he thought, should not “become a factional issue”. With his great sense of
the organisation, Lenin judged it necessary “to guard against the indispensable practical work of the party
suffering in any way’. 887
Vladimir Bazarov was the nom de plume of V. A. Rudnev (1874-1940), and had been a bolshevik from 1904 until early
1917, when he became involved in an attempt to regroup the anti-war Russian socialists and overcome their old factional
divisions into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
882 D. Lecourt, in : A. Bogdanov, La science, l’art et la classe ouvrière (Paris: Maspéro, 1977), pp. 9-41 [Introduction and
texts by Bogdanov].
883 Ibid., p. 28.
884 Quoted by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticis,‘Philosophical Notebooks’ [Collected Works, Vol. 38, Moscow,
1967).
885 Letter from Lenin (Geneva) to Gorky (Capri), 25 Feb. 1908, from V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 13, 4 th English
Edition (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), 1972, pp. 448-54.
886 Lenin, op. cit.
887 Letter from Lenin to Gorky, 24 th March 1908, from: V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 34, 4 th English Edition,
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), pp. 388-90.
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