The Philosophy of Living Experience Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Sébastien Budgen (Paris) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London) volume 111 Bogdanov Library Editors Evgeni V. Pavlov (Metropolitan State University of Denver) David G. Rowley (University of Wisconsin-Platteville) volume 8 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/boli The Philosophy of Living Experience Popular Outlines By Alexander Bogdanov Translated, Edited and Introduced by David G. Rowley leiden | boston This book is an English translation of Alexander Bogdanov’s book, entitled (in Russian) Filosofia zhivogo opyta: Materializm, empiriokrititsizm, dialekticheski materializm, empiriomonizm, nauka budushchego. Populiarnye ocherki, third edition, Petrograd and Moscow, 1923. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bogdanov, A. (Aleksandr), 1873-1928. [Filosofiia zhivogo opyta. English] The philosophy of living experience popular outlines / by Alexander Bogdanov ; translated, edited and introduced by David G. Rowley. pages cm. – (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570-1522 ; volume 111) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-23190-0 (hardback : acid-free paper) – ISBN 978-90-04-30646-2 (e-book) 1. Philosophy. 2. Philosophy and religion. I. Title. B99.R92B6413 2016 197–dc23 2015031025 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1570-1522 isbn 978-90-04-23190-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-30646-2 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Editor’s Introduction vii Introduction 1 1 What is Philosophy? Who Needs It andWhy? 1 2 What Came before Philosophy? 14 3 How Did Philosophy and Science Become Distinguished from Religion? 29 1 What is Materialism? 42 2 Materialism of the AncientWorld 65 3 ModernMaterialism 95 4 Empiriocriticism 131 5 Dialectical Materialism 163 6 Empiriomonism 201 1 Labour Causality 201 2 Elements of Experience 206 3 Objectivity 211 4 Sociomorphism 219 5 Substitution 221 6 The Picture of the World 232 Conclusion: The Science of the Future 236 Appendix: From Religious to Scientific Monism 249 Bibliography 263 Name Index 265 Editor’s Introduction When Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky (1873–1928) joined the under- ground Social-Democratic movement, he, like most other Russian revolution- aries, adopted pseudonyms to conceal his real identity from the authorities. For party activities andpropaganda, he variously usedVerner,Maksimov, Riadovoy, and others, but for his legally published works on economics, philosophy, sci- ence, and literature, he chose the name A. Bogdanov, taken from the middle name of his wife, Natalya Bogdanovna Malinovskaia (née Korsak). ‘Bogdanov’ is howhe is nowknown, just as Vladimir IlichUlianov is ‘Lenin’, LevDavidovich Bronstein is ‘Trotsky’, etc. Bogdanov helped create the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social-Demo- cratic Labour Party (rsdlp). He published influential works on political econ- omy, historical materialism, philosophy, organisational science, and prolet- arian culture. His two science-fiction novels depicting socialism and social revolution on Mars were bestsellers. He inspired and led (from 1918 to 1920) the ‘Proletarian Culture’ movement, a nationwide network of local working- class cultural groups. He was a founder and member of the Presidium of the Socialist (later Communist) Academy; he was a member of the Institute of Sci- entific Philosophy attached toMoscow State University; and he taught courses at a number of other universities. Finally, Bogdanov was named the director of Russia’s first institute for blood transfusion, to which he dedicated the last two years of his life. Yet, despite this remarkable career, Bogdanov is the least well-known of Russia’s Social-Democratic leaders and theorists. For most of the Soviet period, he was known in the Soviet Union only as a heretic from Marxism. Even before 1917, G.V. Plekhanov, later designated ‘the father of Russian Marxism’, denounced Bogdanov as an idealist and refused to call him ‘comrade’. Lenin, who had called a truce in philosophy so that the two could work together during the Revolution of 1905, publicly broke with Bogdanov in 1908 by publishing Materialism and Empiriocriticism in which he anathematised Bogdanov’s philosophy as un-Marxian. Until the end of his life, Lenin continued actively to oppose ‘Bogdanovism’, and, because of Lenin’s prestige, even Communists who were influenced by Bogdanov tended to downplay or even conceal it. A thorough study of Bogdanov’s influence on Soviet economics and philosophy has yet to be written.1 1 A valuable survey of this issue is presented in Biggart 1998, ‘The Rehabilitation of Bogdanov’. A discussion of Bogdanov’s influence is also to be found in Gloveli 2003. viii editor’s introduction In the West, Bogdanov has been known for the works that seem to diverge themost from historical materialism. English speakers can read his novels, Red Star and EngineerMenni, a few of his poems,2 an explication of The Philosophy of Living Experience,3 parts of Tektology: Universal Organizational Science,4 and The Struggle for Viability5 (about his experiments in blood transfusion) – all works that seem to locate him outside of the mainstream of Marxism. His novels are mostly read in the context of Russian science fiction; K.M. Jensen considers The Philosophy of Living Experience to have gone ‘beyond Marx’; Tektology is famous as a pioneering work in systems theory; and Bogdanov’s involvement in blood transfusion is sometimes interpreted as an escape from politics.6 Indeed, it has been suggested that Bogdanov’s death in 1928, when he exchanged blood with a patient suffering from malaria, was suicide out of despair at the direction in which he thought the Soviet Union was head- ing.7 Moreover, Bogdanov was a voracious reader of contemporary works that dealt with the philosophy of science or that attempted to create system- atic, scientific accounts of the world. These included Richard Avenarius’s em- piriocriticism and Ernst Mach’s neutral monism, a radical empiricism that dissolved the distinction between the psychical and the physical, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Herbert Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy that ap- plied the principle of evolution to biology, psychology, sociology, and moral- ity, Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionism, founded on materialist monism and Ger- man idealism, Wilhelm Ostwald’s energetics, a universal monism which posited energy as the only reality and which held that evolutionary advance occurs when organisms become increasingly efficient in the use of energy, and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which proposed that evolution is not mechanistic but creative – based on a ‘vital impulse’ (élan vital).8 That many 2 Both novels and a poem ‘A Martian Stranded on Earth’ are included in Bogdanov 1984. 3 Jensen 1978. 4 Bogdanov 1980 and 1996. 5 Bogdanov 2001. 6 Two recent books do take Bogdanov’s Marxism seriously. Nikolai Krementsov shows how Marxism, literature, and science ‘intertwined, interacted, and mutually reinforced one an- other’ in Bogdanov‘s work (Krementsov 2011, p. 5), while McKenzie Wark considers how Bogdanov’s Marxism is relevant to the contemporary world (Wark 2015). 7 Loren R. Graham strongly implies this in his afterword to Red Star (Bogdanov 1984, p. 252). Krementsov discounts it (2011, ch. 6). 8 Rewarding discussions of influences on Bogdanov includeWhite 1998, Adams 1989, Krement- sov 2011, and Gloveli 2003. editor’s introduction ix of these ideas found expression in Bogdanov’s works has also been taken as evidence of his going ‘beyond Marx’. Nevertheless, despite misconceptions in both the Soviet Union and the West, Bogdanov was a sincere and consistent historical materialist throughout his life. He believed that his work in economics, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, and organisational science was consistent with, supplemented, and advanced the thought of Karl Marx. The Philosophy of Living Experience was written between 1910 and 1911, a critical point of transition in Bogdanov’s political and intellectual career, and it will therefore be useful to review the political and philosophical developments at the centre of which The Philosophy of Living Experience stands. Bogdanov, the son of a school teacher, received his secondary education in Tula, studiednatural sciences as anundergraduate at theUniversity ofMoscow, and earned a graduate degree in psychiatric medicine from the University of Kharkov in 1899.9 Bogdanov was also active in the revolutionary underground. He was arrested and exiled twice in the 1890s for anti-regime activities, the second time for social propaganda inworkers’ study circles. It was in the course of teaching economics to workers’ groups that he read Das Kapital, became a Social Democrat, and wrote his first book, A Short Course in Economic Science (warmly praised by Lenin upon its first publication in 1897).10 Bogdanov was nearing the end of his second exile in the summer of 1903 – the time of the divisive Second Congress of the rsdlp, at which Lenin and Martov split over organisational issues, and the terms ‘Bolshevik’ (Lenin’s supporters) and ‘Menshevik’ (Martov’s supporters) were coined. Bogdanov supported Lenin in this split, and as soon as he was freed from exile (January 1904), he travelled to Geneva where Lenin and other Social-Democratic leaders had taken up residence. In August 1904, he participated in the ‘Conference of the 22’, the founding conferenceof theBolshevik fraction, andhewas elected to theBureau 9 No book-length biography of Bogdanov has beenwritten in English. (Those who readGer- man should consult Grille 1966). The single most valuable book on Bogdanov is Biggart 1998. Not only is it an exhaustive bibliography of Bogdanov’s writings – books, pamph- lets, articles, letters – which can, itself, serve as the outline of a biography, biographical information can be found in two introductory essays, John Biggart, ‘The Rehabilitation of Bogdanov’, and Georgii Gloveli, ‘Bogdanov as Scientist and Utopian’, and in an appendix, ‘Bogdanov: A Biographical Chronicle’ by Peter Plyutto. An autobiography and a very brief biography can be found in Haupt 1974. 10 It became a classic, going through fifteen editions, the last one in 1924. One of the latest editions appears in an English translation (Bogdanov 1923). x editor’s introduction of Committees of the Majority – the Bolshevik leadership. Bogdanov returned to Russia during the 1905 Revolution. He wrote tactical leaflets about armed uprising; he edited the Bolsheviks’ two periodicals; he served on the Bolshevik bureau in St. Petersburg; and he was a delegate to the Third Party Congress in 1905, at which he was elected to the new Central Committee of the rsdlp. In the autumn, when the Revolution reached its height, Bogdanov was in St. Petersburg, deeply involved in party work and serving on the Executive Committee of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. In December he was arrested, along with the entire Executive Committee, when the Soviet was suppressed. He remained in prison until May 1906. At the same time, from the turn of the century through the Revolution of 1905, Bogdanov was elaborating a philosophy he called ‘empiriomonism’ – the application of Marxian historical materialism to empiriocriticism, the empir- icist philosophy of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. However, when he gathered together his articles onphilosophy andpublished themunder the title Empiriomonism,11 he was publicly criticised for ‘idealism’ by the Mensheviks – most notably by G.V. Plekhanov. Lenin also read Bogdanov’s work and disliked it intensely, but, in the interest of Bolshevik solidarity during the revolution, he kept his criticism private. In the aftermath of the revolution, however, Bogdanov and Lenin began to diverge. They took opposing positions on the question of elections to the Third Duma (the representative assembly forced from the tsar by the Revolu- tion of 1905). Initially, Bogdanov called for a boycott of the election (to protest against PrimeMinister Peter Stolypin’s arbitrary change to the election law giv- ing greater representation to the wealthy), while Lenin was in favour of using the Duma elections for propaganda purposes. In the end, Bogdanov accepted the Bolshevik majority and campaigned for Bolshevik candidates.12 Neverthe- less, a left Bolshevik faction emerged – with Bogdanov at its head – which Lenin opposed and continued to refer to as ‘boycotters’. The political differ- ence between Lenin and Bogdanov concerned the contemporary situation in Russia and the proper strategy for Social Democrats. Lenin felt that the revolu- tionarywave had receded. He saw the reaction in Russia as an obstacle that had to be endured for the time being, and he urged patient rebuilding of local party organisations, insisting on the full use of legal opportunities to advance the cause of Social Democracy. Bogdanov and the Left Bolsheviks refused to believe 11 Bogdanov 2003. The three volumes were originally published between 1904 and 1906. 12 In his autobiography, Bogdanov said: ‘I had advocated a boycott of the third Duma, but after the rejection of this line by the Party conference, I conducted an electoral campaign in the illegal workers’ paper Vpered, of which I was the editor’ (Haupt 1974, p. 287).