Aileen Kelly

Empiriocriticism:abolshevikphilosophy?
In:Cahiersdumonderusseetsovitique.Vol.22N1.Janvier-Mars1981.pp.89-118.

Rsum AileenKelly,L'empiriocriticisme:unephilosophiebolchevique? Aucoursdelapremiredcenniedecesicle,ungroupedethoriciensbolchevikseutrecoursl'empiriocriticismed'Avenarius etdeMachpourtayerunenouvelleconceptionphilosophiquedumarxisme.Engnralleshistoriensfontpeudecasdecette tentativeetlaconsidrentcommeunbrefpisodedel'histoiredupartibolchevik.Cetarticleseproposed'tudiersasignification danslecadrelargidelapsychologiecollectivedel'intelligentsiaradicalerusseolevolontarismetaitdifficilementconciliable aveclaprdilectionpourlesphilosophiesdterministesdel'histoire.Onpeutconsidrerlemouvementempiriocriticistecomme unederniretentativedesynthsedeceslmentsexaminsdupointdevuedesmembresdel'intelligentsia.Onanalyseleurs critsetlespolmiquesqu'ilsprovoqurent,entenantcomptedelalumirequ'ilsontjetesurlapsychologiesocialede l'intelligentsia radicale russe et sur le rle que ses aspirations subjectives ont jou dans la formulation de ses objectifs historiques. Abstract AileenKelly,Empiriocriticism:aBolshevikphilosophy? InthefirstdecadeofthiscenturyagroupofBolsheviktheoristsattemptedtoconstructanewphilosophicalbasisformarxismwith theaidoftheempiriocriticismofAvenariusandMach.Theirattemptisusuallytreatedbyhistoriansasmerelyabriefepisodein Bolshevikpartyhistory.Thisarticleexaminesitssignificancewithinthewiderframeworkofthecollectivepsychologyofthe Russianradicalintelligentsia,inwhichvoluntarismwasuneasilyreconciledwithapredilectionfordeterministicphilosophiesof history.Theempiriocriticistmovementcanbeseenasafinalattemptonthepartofthemembersoftheintelligentsiatoachievea synthesisoftheseelementsintheiroutlook.Theirwritingsandtheensuingpolemicsareexaminedwithparticularregardtothe lightwhichtheyshedonthesocialpsychologyoftheRussianradicalintelligentsiaandonthepartplayedbyitssubjective aspirationsintheformulationofitshistoricalgoals.

Citercedocument/Citethisdocument: KellyAileen.Empiriocriticism:abolshevikphilosophy?.In:Cahiersdumonderusseetsovitique.Vol.22N1.Janvier-Mars 1981.pp.89-118. doi : 10.3406/cmr.1981.1906 http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/cmr_0008-0160_1981_num_22_1_1906

DEBAT

A I LEEN

KELLY

EMPIRIOCRITICISM : A BOLSHEVIK PHILOSOPHY?

Russian marxism produced two revisionist movements at the turn of the century: the neo-kantian and the empiriocriticist. The first of these had an important influence on the theory of Russian liberalism and the philosophical, religious and literary movements of the period. It has consequently received much more attention from historians than the attempt by a group of bolsheviks to synthesise marxism with the philosophy of empiriocriticism; this was a much more isolated and nar rowly delimited movement both in its intellectual and its political influence. Historians tend to regard its major claim to interest as the fact that it caused Lenin to write his only philosophical work; and it is seen as less significant in its brief existence than in its rapid demise, which is often quoted as an instance of Lenin's ability to bring party recal citrants to heel.1 But the empiriocriticist movement takes on a very different signif icance when approached from the perspective of the sociology of knowle dge. It represents a point of crisis in the history of the Russian intel ligentsia, at which the fundamental conflicts and dilemmas of Russian radical thought emerge with particular clarity. The goal of the move ment can be summarised as the attainment of an integral view of the world, centred on the ideal of an integral personality. These two concepts have a long history in Russian radical thought. Their origins lie in the acute sense of alienation among Russia's intellectual elite which produced its intelligentsia and made the millenarian concept of "wholeness" irresist ibly attractive to it. Russian populism was strongly influenced by the romantic and idealist vision of the harmonious, integral personality which would succeed the divided men of the present. But the intelligentsia were "integral" equally visions drawn of the to eschatological world; and many visions of the of conflicts progress,between all-embracing, radical movements arose from the difficulty of reconciing the ideal of an integral personality with the search for an integral world view. The more comprehensive the explanation of reality, the more determinist it was and the less place it gave to the ethical dimension essential to the "whole" personality. It was this conflict which gave rise to neo-kantian revision ism, which was a revolt in the name of the "integral personality" against the "integral world view" offered by marxism. With the help of Cahiers du Monde russe et sovitique, XXII (i), janv.-mars i8i, pp. 89-118.

CO

AILEEN KELLY

kantian criticism its proponents asserted the autonomy of the sphere of ethics and of subjective ideals. They ultimately found it impossible to synthesise their neo-kantianism with marxism and moved to idealist positions in philosophy.2 The empiriocriticist movement addressed itself to the same problem, seeking to succeed where the neo-kantians had failed: to reconcile the demands of the integral personality with marxism as an integral world view. Seen in this light, the movement represents the last attempt by the Russian radical intelligentsia to construct an ideology which would resolve a fundamental conflict in its view of the world and of man. Two aspects of the movement will be examined: firstly, its significance and its achievements as an attempt to reconcile the two traditionally conflicting goals of the radical intelligentsia; and secondly, the discussion among the members of the movement and its critics, in the years after 1905, of the intelligentsia's collective psychology, the relation of its sub jective aspirations to objective social goals and the social and political implications of this relationship.

The empiriocriticist movement in Russian marxism, while wider and more diffuse than that of the neo-kantians, also embraced a number of the most prominent marxist intellectuals of the time. Its principal theoreticians were A. A. Bogdanov (pseud, of A. A. Malinovskii 18731928), 3 V. A. Bazarov (pseud, of V. A. Rudnev 1874-1939)4 who were principally concerned with the construction of a marxist ethic; and A. V. Lunacharskii (1875-1933),5 who together with Maxim Gor'kii and others, expounded a new socialist "religion". The only two prominent members of the movement who did not join the bolshevik faction after the Russian social democrat party split in 1903 were P. S. Iushkevich (1873-1944?) and N. Valentinov (pseud, of N. V. Volskii 1878).7 Memoirs by members of the group reveal a close similarity between the initial motivation of their movement and that of the neo-kantian revisionists. They had been drawn to marxism in the 1890's above all because it offered what every generation of the radical intelligentsia had sought: "not merely views, but one integral world view",8 which could answer all questions. In Valentinov's words, the "economic factor" of which they made much play in their polemics was "a sort of magic carpet bearing us across the gloomy sea of inequality, of deprivation, of exploitat ion, onto the blue shore of the future system".9 For Bogdanov, marxism was not only a new faith, but also the liberating negation of an old one which had narrowed and stifled the personality the mechanistic mater ialism which had long been a dominant strand in Russian radical thought.10 Lunacharskii, who describes his adoption of marxism as an "ecstatic conversion", emphasises that for his generation marxism was not merely an economic theory; it was "a synthesising philosophy which harmoniously united the ideal and practice, crowning in a realistic and revolutionary way the immense [...] aspirations of Marx's teachers, the great German idealists".11 He draws a parallel between the effect of

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

91

marxism on his generation and the effect of left hegelian philosophy on the first generation of the intelligentsia at the beginning of the 1840's. The comparison is apt: the left hegelian "philosophy of the act" had been a voluntarist philosophy of progress, an "integral view of the world" entered on the self-realisation of man as an integral personality. Lunacharskii with the others in his group believed that marxism offered a similarly satisfying synthesis of voluntarist and determinist elements in its view of reality. They saw this conviction echoed by one of the leaders of Russian marxism when in 1902 Lenin published his pamphlet What is to be done? with its call for a disciplined elite to lead the revolut ion:"Give us an organisation and we will overturn Russia!" They werebecame but inspired increasingly by the "turbulent aware thatvoluntarism"12 it was irreconcilable of Lenin's with the pamphlet, official party philosophy as formulated by G. Plekhanov, the founder and chief ideologist of Russian social democracy. In his book On the question of the development of the monist view of history (K voprosu 0 razvitii monisticheskogo vzgliada na istoriiu), and in numerous articles, Plekhanov interpreted the doctrine of the primacy of being over consciousness in the spirit of Engels' mechanistic mater ialism, according to which consciousness was historically and causally a product of matter, which Plekhanov defined as "that which, acting on our sense organs, gives rise to certain sensations in us". Matter is consequently "an aggregate of things-in-themselves, inasmuch as these things are the source of our sensations".13 The materialists' thing-initself differs from the kantian noumen in that it is not in principle unknowa ble the forms and relations of phenomena are "symbols" which correspond precisely to the forms and relations of things-in-themselves; through this symbolic correspondence we may understand the action of matter on us and act on it in turn. Consciousness for Plekhanov is merely a mirror reflecting the objective world whose laws and relations are independent of it, although these laws may be used to man's advant age. Freedom is thus, to echo Engels' definition, the consciousness of necessity. "Human reason can triumph over blind inevitability only by apprehending its inner laws".14 For the group of young voluntarists Plekhanov's doctrine of the primacy of matter over consciousness failed to come to grips with "the great and subtle problems of philosophy".15 In its total denial of the role of subjective ideals as movers of history, it had made no advance on the mechanistic materialism of the eighteenth century. "For us, Valentinov writes, socialism was expressed in the verbs 'sollen' , 'wiinschen'. For Plekhanov it was a ... historical inevitability": its triumph would come through economic laws immanent in society, independently of the will of socialists, whose role was reduced, in Valentinov's words, to that of the fifth spoke in a wheel. "In one's youth, when one has a great deal of energy, the role of a fifth spoke is especially galling."16 Thus, the new voluntarist revolt against the orthodoxy represented by Plekhanov began (as the neo-kantian revolt had done) as a demand for the reassessment of the relation of objective historical laws to sub jective goals and values. Its proponents were well aware of the resem blance: Lunacharskii describes an occasion in Kiev in 1808 when he read

92

AILEEN KELLY

a paper on the role of subjective values as movers of progress. N. Berdiaev (one of the leaders of the neo-kantian group) was in the audience, and in the ensuing discussion it became clear that they were both asking the same question, which Lunacharskii puts in Berdiaev's formulation: "For Marx, socialism is a sociological inevitability: but does it follow from this that it is a good? [...] can one prove that socialism is the highest possible ideal of our time without regard to the interests of particular classes and independently of the question of its inevitable arrival?"17 Both groups believed that in treating subjective goals and values as mere epiphenomena, reflections of material processes, marxism was in contradiction with men's instinctive convictions, and that its claim to offer an all-embracing interpretation of the world could be justified only when its economic doctrines were supplemented by a satisfactory epistemology. But at this point the two groups radically diverged; while the neo-kantians sought to replace an unsatisfactory monism by a consistent dualism, separating the realms of fact and value, their rivals saw this as a step back to "bourgeois" idealism; indeed their main crit icism of Plekhanov's philosophy was that the concept of matter as thingin-itself was dangerously close to the idealist concept of substance. A truly marxist philosophy would have to be consistently monist, and in their view Marx himself had indicated the direction which it should take, in his Theses on Feuerbach, in particular in the first Thesis, where he had written: "The chief defect of all existing materialism that of Feuerbach included is that the thing [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt] or of contemp lation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by ideal ism but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such..."18 To the new revisionists, Marx's intentions were clear: marxism as social practice must be allied to a new activist form of cognition which would transcend the one-sidedness of idealism and materialism alike. As Bogdanov put it, Marx had indicated in the Theses how collectivist practice would create new social forms; the task of a marxist philosophy was, by using Marx's view of the sociality of cognition as its guiding principle, to sketch out the corresponding conceptual forms, the "collec tivist philosophy of the proletariat".19 But they would not have to break entirely new ground: the direction of the new epistemology had, they believed, already been outlined in the neo-positivism developed inde pendently in Prague and Vienna by the scientist Ernst Mach and in Zurich by the philosopher Richard Avenarius, who had given it the name of empiriocriticism. The new philosophy (which owed much to the empiricism of Berkeley

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

93

and Hume) was at the height of its popularity in the iSgo's when Avenarius was professor of philosophy at the university of Zurich. Its aim was to construct a monistic view of the world. It rejected, as not being a datum of experience, the distinction made by all dualistic systems between subject and object, the inner and the outer world, the thing and its impression. Experienced reality, Avenarius taught, was a homo geneous world, in which the self, conceived as the central nervous system, was coordinated with the environment as the "central part" to its counterp art, both being components of reality in an identical sense. Similarly, Mach held that the world of experience, including both physical processes (bodies) and psychical processes (thoughts and impressions) were combinat ions of one and the same primary material or "elements": the world (and the human ego) is neither mind nor matter but a complex of elements known to us only through our sense experience. Both Avenarius and Mach (who was much influenced by Darwin) interpreted the cognitive process in terms of a biological voluntarism, as a process of adaptation to the environment arising from the struggle for survival. The more "economically" thought systmatises and communicates the data of experience, the more perfect is man's orienta tion in this straggle. The principle of economy of thought demanded the rejection of classical materialist concepts of laws and causality, as metaphysical assumptions with no basis in experience. Matter was merely a mental symbol standing for "a relatively stable complex of sensational elements"20 and the categories of cause and purpose were replaced by the functional concept of the permanence of certain connect ions. According to Mach, laws did not denote the underlying relations of realities, but were methods of orientation in the flow of experience; their role being to select and order its components, they changed in accordance with the practical demands of the struggle for survival. Both thinkers propounded an ethical monism, rejecting the autonomy of the sphere of the sollen in relation to the sein, on the grounds that no such opposition is given in experience; ethical problems fall within the sphere of science and can be solved by its methods. This attempt to return to a "natural" view of the world, stripped of scientific and philosophical prejudices, bears some resemblance to the biological voluntarism of Nietzsche, but differs from it in its anti-individ ualism and its emphasis on cooperation and the cumulative nature of experience. Survival is seen as attained through cooperation, aided by the communication of experiences which are stored in science. It is not individual consciousness but the universal contents of consciousness and their continuity that are important: in Mach's words "the ego must be given up".21 The doctrines of Avenarius and Mach began to arouse interest among Russian marxists in the mid-1890's; the university of Zurich, where Avenarius taught, had long been a centre for Russians studying abroad, and in particular for young radicals in exile. The suspicion of meta physics traditional among the intelligentsia predisposed these young men to the doctrines of Avenarius, and some of them became his most enthusiastic students.22 Among these was Lunacharskii, who studied in Zurich in 1895. A number of commentaries on empiriocriticism and

94

AILEEN KELLY

translations of individual works appeared in Russia at the turn of the century;23 one of the most active popularisers of the new philosophy was Bogdanov, who wrote the introduction to the Russian edition of Mach's most influential work, The analysis of sensations. In the view of the group which began to form around Bogdanov and Lunacharskii, the doctrines of Avenarius and Mach were singularly suited, in their monism and voluntarism, to serve as a support for the Theses on Feuerbach and a framework for the new philosophy of the proletariat. Firstly, empiriocriticism seemed to have demonstrated that a monist approach to knowledge was an essential premiss for the goal of marxism: the unification of endeavours in man's battle with nature. Mach taught that all dualism was a hidden form of fetishism, rooted in primitive animism; and Bogdanov in particular gave much emphasis to Mach's demonstration of the way in which the fetishes inherent in current philo sophical conceptions of causality, matter and force, hindered man's understanding of the world. Matter and ideas could be defined only in their relation to man's activity in society; materialism and idealism, by making absolutes of one or the other, effected an artificial break in expe rience. Here "machism" (as empiriocriticism was sometimes called) echoed marxism: Bogdanov pointed out that if Marx in the Theses had only obliquely referred to the fetishism inherent in the classic materialist concept of matter, in the first chapter of Capital he had shown fetishism to be characteristic of capitalist relations where the objects of human activity become subjects and men are degraded to the status of objects: the products of man's labour become his master, just as in religion the products of man's brain acquire authority over him. The revolutionary destruction of fetishism in practical life must be accompanied by the destruction of its intellectual counterparts.24 Secondly, empiriocriticism's approach to knowledge as the organisa tion of experience seemed to correspond closely to the dynamism of the approach to reality as social practice outlined in the Theses namely, Marx's "collectivist method"26 as Bogdanov called it, of ordering the data of experience from the viewpoint of mankind engaged in a battle with nature. It seemed to provide an appropriate epistemological basis for the revolutionary voluntarism of the last Thesis: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. Our task is to change it."26 Bogdanov was generally regarded as the leading philosopher of the group;27 with two exceptions the empiriosymbolism of Iushkevich28 and the godbuilding (bogostroitel'stvo) of Lunacharskii and Gor'kii, the other empiriocriticists did not attempt to construct independent systems of their own. The survey of the movement which follows will be concerned with its dominant characteristics, and not with individual contributions to it. Thus reference will principally be made to the writings of three of its most representative and prominent members: Bogdanov, Lunacharskii and Bazarov. In his work Empiriomonism and other books and articles, Bogdanov propounded a modification of empiriocriticism, which he considered insufficiently monist to be the basis of a "proletarian philosophy".

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

95

He saw the concept of a functional link between conditions and the condi tioned as a watered-down version of "fetishistic" conceptions of causality, and proposed a concept of causality based on the energeticism of Wilhelm Ostwald, who like Mach was a critic of the mechanical interpretation of physical phenomena and who substituted the notion of energy for that of "ultimate" particles like atoms or molecules. Cause and effect, according to Bogdanov, should be conceived as a sum of energy in suc cessive phases. This monistic view of causality was appropriate for the proletariat, the principle of the conservation and transformation of energy being the "ideological essence" of machine technology. For what he saw as the "dualistic" distinction between two types of experience, the physical and the mental, each being regarded as irreducible to the other, he substituted another distinction (also more in line, in his view, with proletarian practice in production) between two phases or types of organi sation: individually organised experience (of practical validity only for the individual), and socially organised experience (in harmony with the accumulated experience of society at a given time).29 Finally, Bogdanov believed that the empiriocriticists had too passive a view of the role of cognition in relation to reality, maintaining like the materialists that its task was to orientate itself in the world rather than to change it; Marx, as the Theses revealed, had been the first to understand that the role of cognition must be active and organising: in the dynamic process of man's battle with nature, to understand the world was eo ipso to change it. Armed with the theories of Avenarius and Mach and the Theses on Feuerbach the empiriocriticists launched an attack on Plekhanov's pos tulate of an objective suprahistorical truth, summarised in a phrase which they frequently quoted against him: "no fate will move us from the correct point of view which has finally been revealed."30 They pointed out that this was the standpoint of "contemplative", unhistorical materialism described by Marx in the Theses as unable to rise to an understanding of the dynamics of man's social relations, because it saw the cognitive process as the description or reflection of a world forever given.31 Marx had explicitly refuted it in the second Thesis: "The question whether objective [gegenstndliche] truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. [...] The dispute over the reality or nonreality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question."32 One of the most telling attacks on Plekhanov and his followers was made by Bazarov in 1908 in a contribution to a empiriocriticist sympo sium on marxist theory. By a judicious use of texts, including not only the Theses, but also Marx's criticism of Bruno Bauer in the Nachlass, and his analysis (in The Holy Family) of the concept of substance as a meta physical illusion, Bazarov foreshadowed many later critics in demonstrati ng that the "reflection" theory of cognition, with its opposition of subject and object, was an inverted form of idealist dualism: its proponents believed that "There is only one way whereby the materialist-meta-

AILEEN KELLY

physician can humble the creative pretensions of this unsympathetic 'subjective' substance 'objective' substance: supraexperiential by subordinating nature". it to another, Yet Marx sympathetic, in the Theses, with his monist conception of reality as human practice, "was infinitely far removed from this naive "either-or".33 Bogdanov argued that Plekhanov's "thing-in-itself" was a fetish characteristic of "authoritarian social relations" and of "bourgeois individualism" which distinguished between experience, seen as neces sarily individual and subjective, and objective reality which caused it but was outside its bounds.34 He pointed out that this naive dualism led Plekhanov and his followers to misinterpret Marx's statement in his Critique of political economy that "social being determines the social consciousness of man". They took "being" to be external to consciousn ess, whereas, as the Theses on Feuerbach showed, Marx believed that economic factors were inseparable from consciousness: they were the labour relations of men, not the physical relations of bodies, and labour was a conscious activity: "Social being and social consciousness [...] are identical".35 This perception of Marx's fundamental activism was unique at a period when Marx was generally held to be an economist who offered a scientific demonstration of the inevitable breakdown of capitalism; with few of Marx's early writings available, Engels' later works were the source of the marxist interpretation of materialism. It was nearly two decades before the early writings of Marx, showing him to be far removed from the mechanistic determinism preached by Engels, began to be generally known. But the empiriocriticists' understanding of what Marx meant by "social practice" was severely distorted by the fact that they knew nothing of the conception of the dialectic which Marx had elaborated in his early writings on alienation. Like Plekhanov, they identified Marx's view of the dialectic with the mechanistic formulation given by Engels in the AntiDuhring and the Dialectics of nature. It is to these works that Bogdanov referred when he launched an attack on the dia lectic, arguing that the triadic system of development through contra dictions was a relic of idealist thought, and had meaning only in the world of abstract logic;36 he substituted a formulation of dialectical conflict based on the biological evolutionism of Avenarius and Mach, as "an organisational process proceeding by means of contradictions, or, what is the same thing, by a conflict between various tendencies",37 some leading to a loss, others to a gain of energy, the resolution of conflict being marked by a restoration of equilibrium. As such, dialectical conflict was only one of the forms taken by the battle for survival. The world whole, including human society, consisted of "endless rows of complexes [...] at different stages of organisation";38 the criterion of progress in human society was thus the same as that in the animal and organic world: "an increase in the organisation of complexes".39 In the human species this could be defined as an increase in the harmony and quality of experience. In this light he sees the phenomena of capitalism and class war as representing a state of disorganisation in which individ ually and socially organised experiences were at odds with each other. With the end of class war the boundaries between physical and mental

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

97

experience would be effaced. Men were moving towards a unified experience as the content of a unified cognition. The social and legal forms and moral norms which developed in this process were, like biologi cal forms, adaptations in the battle for survival, subject to the law of selection, their fate being determined by the extent to which the net gain in vital energy in the production process (measured by "the growth in energy of the mental apparatus of the members of society")40 outweighed the loss incurred by the disturbance of the existing equilibrium.41 In the words of Lunacharskii (who saw Bogdanov as the foremost marxist philosopher of his time) "science", in the form of empiriocriti cism, had, by replacing the dialectic with a biological voluntarism, once and for all refuted what, in the words of Croce, he called "the subjective category of inevitability".42 It had shown that there existed no certain laws, only hypotheses, probabilities: the proposition that progress is an immanent law of nature was a metaphysical, and therefore a meaningless one. The initial dependence of labour on the environment "does not limit its liberty ]...] but merely places external impedi ments on it. The thirst for life this is the free principle in the organism, and in so far as it can, it processes its environment in its own way."43 In believing that this biological voluntarism represented a marxist philosophy the empiriocriticists were much mistaken; their voluntarism came from a very different philosophical stable from that of Marx. Ironically, it was closer to the vulgarised Darwinism of Engels (whose mechanistic determinism by applying dialectic to nature divorced it from the mediation of human consciousness), than the voluntarism of Marx, which, as the early Manuscripts show, was rooted in Hegel's cate gories and in the hegelian dialectic with its view of the world as selfestrangement of Spirit. For Engels, matter was the source of the evolu tion of consciousness; in Marx's materialist version of Hegel's metaphysics, man was the conscious creator of the world. In Marx's dialectic, though man satisfies his needs through contact with nature, the process whereby the gap between being and consciousness was to be closed was a historical one, brought about not by mechanistic responses of the organism to material stimuli but by the conscious shaping of historical conditions, in the course of which man in the act of satisfying his needs dialectically creates both new needs and new possibilities of satisfying them. Empiriocriticism was thus theoretically incompatible with marxism a poor qualification for the role envisaged for it by the aspiring "philo sophers of the proletariat". But it was designed to fulfil a need that was emotional as much as intellectual. Its proponents had an immediate practical goal: to sustain and increase the intelligentsia's revolutionary enthusiasm by allowing it to justify and defend its voluntarism, tradi tionally expressed in the ideal of the integral personality, against the encroachments of the "integral world view" of orthodox marxism. In this area, too, its achievements were minimal; but the attempt and the reactions which it provoked among the opponents of empiriocriticism,

98

AILEEN KELLY

shed much light on the psychology of the marxist intelligentsia and the degree of its self-awareness in the years immediately following the 1905 revolution.

In the years before 1905, the empiriocriticists had concentrated their attacks on what they saw as the theoretical defects of the official philo sophy. After the 1905 revolution, the emphasis in the movement changed: the new philosophy was advanced above all as a solution to a moral crisis among the marxist intelligentsia. For many of them the events of 1905 marked the end of a long honeymoon with marxism. The outbreaks which began the revolution owed nothing to marxist propa ganda, and the party which Lenin had confidently predicted would turn Russia upside down had been as much surprised by events as the other political parties. The revolutionary intelligentsia's sense of its impotence and its lack of contact with the masses was sharpened during the sub sequent reaction, when the revolutionary parties found it difficult to rally mass support. The result was the intensification of factional squabbles within the social-democratic party, and an increase in selfquestioning among its members as to the party's goals and the relation of intellectuals to the mass movement. In the view of the empiriocritic ists this was the crisis whose seeds they had discerned several years previously.. In 1910 P. Iushkevich characterised it as follows: "Marxism [...] is sick [...] from a broad and liberating idea and doctrine it is becoming in the hands of narrow-minded people the instrument of ideological enslavement [...] its spring of theoretical creativity has dried up, its internal differences of opinion have taken on the character of intellectual slaughter [...] As though possessed by the spirit of mutual destruction [...] we are ready to tear out each other's throats on any pretext: for a paragraph of the regulations on organisation, for a point in the agrarian pro gramme, for a philosophical disagreement, for a difference in the evaluation of some political group, or for a crime such as that of drinking tea with the Kadet-philistines. Around every disputable trifle a rapid process of crystallisation begins. Bolsheviks, mensheviks, partyites, rabochesyezdovites, boycottists, antiboycottists, materialists, machists, then otzovists, ultimatists, liqui dators [...], potresovites, and so on, endlessly [...] In sum, an endless marking of time, an atmosphere permeated with hatred and enmity."44 Iushkevich argued that the party theoreticians had failed to under stand that these destructive polemics had ceased to interest the mass of the marxist intelligentsia, who yearned for a socialism imbued with a constructive spirit, an enthusiasm and faith comparable to that which had inspired the great religions. A similar diagnosis was made in a flurry of books and articles, includ ing two symposia in which the empiriocriticists offered their doctrines as

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

99

a remedy for the prevailing malaise. In a preface to the symposium Essays on the philosophy of marxism (Ocherki po filosofii marksizma) the seven contributors stated that, although their theoretical positions were far from identical, they were united in seeing socialism as concerned not merely with material reforms, but also with the "higher demands of the human spirit"46: and while they had no intention of defecting to the idealist camp, they had ceased to find a response to these demands in orthodox marxism. The central theme of the symposium is that historical determinism, narrowly interpreted by the party theorists, had destroyed the revolutionary enthusiasm of socialism and turned its poetry into dull prose. Allegiance to "one-sided" doctrines which ignored the moral and emotional demands of the personality had led among the more idealistic of the revolutionaries to a painful sense of an inner split and, among the less highly motivated, to an unattractive "philistinism". Lunacharskii treats this problem at length in the symposium and in his book Religion and socialism (Religiia i sotsializm). He asserts "if our materialists are confident and active [...] it is in spite of their material ism and not because of it".46 To be consistent, a marxist of Plekhanov's school had to discard such sentiments as love of humanity and hatred of oppression as "merely froth, merely unmaterial and unnecessary reflections of a materially inevitable process"; his role was "simply, prosaically to do the work foreordained by history: may what the prophe ts have spoken come to pass".47 Lunacharskii argued that what had been regarded as the strength of marxism, namely, its claim to be "scientific", was its main weakness. Deducing social goals from an objective analysis of the laws of social development, it dismissed subjective ideals and values as epiphenomena. But it was a psychological fact that man was an evaluating as well as a cognizing creature, and that his actions flowed from these two attributes allied in "the fulness of the human attitude to the world".48 Marxism precluded itself from offering answers to the questions which most tormented man: "how and for what shall I live?"49 The empiriocriticists argued that by demanding suppression of vital instincts and feelings, Plekhanov's "fetish" of the thing-in-itself was no less destructive in its effect on the personality than the fetishes erected by religious and metaphysical systems. Lunacharskii characterised his orthodox opponents as the spiritual descendants of Bazarov, the "nihil ist" hero of Turgenev's Fathers and children (Otsy i dti), a narrow rationalist who claimed to base his actions uniquely on scientific prin ciples, uninfluenced by moral or aesthetic impulses, feelings or ideals; and he pointed out that Marx himself had criticised eighteenth-century materialism in this respect for the one-sidedness of its mechanistic view of the movement of matter: this movement was also "striving, vital spirit, tension".50 There was only one way in which the moral and emot ional demands of the personality could be reconciled with "scientific socialism": through the empiriocriticists' approach which, by postulat ing the equal reality of the physical and the mental, made marxism both "a science and a practical philosophy, a synthesis of inevitability and the ideal".51 Within the framework of empiriocriticism the rebel philosophers

100

AILEEN KELLY

developed an ideal of the "new man" of the future, an "integral person ality" who would not suffer from the divisions of their own "epoch of contradictions".52 Progress, they emphasised, was an increase both in the quantity and harmony of experience. For Lunacharskii the ideal is "a personality harmonious in all its desires [...] a society of such people".63 He sets the concept of wholeness in a dialectical triad: bourgeois materialism had been the destructive antithesis of idealism: "The proletariat needs a harmonious synthesis [...] that will assimilate and destroy [them]."64 In their ideal of the integral man the empiriocriticists were (as the neo-kantian revisionists had been) strongly influenced by Nietzsche.65 Lunacharskii describes his ethical position as "aesthetic amoralism", based on a nietzschian voluntarism and on contemporary aesthetic theory, which shared the common principle of "fulness of life". He supports his aesthetic voluntarism with a physiological explanation of ethics derived from Avenarius: all organisms share the "thirst for life", a striving for the most intense experiences in the greatest possible quant ity. All ethical impulses may thus be subsumed under the principle of "the greatest possible flowering of the life of the genus", which Lunac harskii proposes as the basis of "a general science of evaluation".66 The empiriocriticists reject "kantian" ethics, centred on the concepts of duty and self-denial, as irreconcilable with the goal of harmony. Bogdanov sees legal and ethical norms as "fetishes",67 and in an essay in the symposium Studies for a realistic world view (Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzreniia). Bazarov points out that empiriocriticism has invalidated the normative ethics of the past by showing that cognition presents men not with obligatory laws but with heuristic norms, elabor atedaccording to the demands of the struggle for survival and the principle of the harmonisation of life. "The psychology of a free man cannot be reconciled with any form of leadership. That man is not free who is afraid of himself, who does not dare to acknowledge that each of his sensations is in principle of equal value, [and who does not] seek in them, in the testimony of direct feeling, the norms of his life. The demand for an absolute non-empirical norm [...] is psychological slavery."58 Following Nietzsche, Bazarov denies that altruism and self-sacrifice, traditionally conceived, are virtues; like Nietzche's Superman, the new socialist man will use others as instruments in his creative battle with nature, and will expect others to use him in the same way. For Kant, Bazarov asserts, the personality must be divided in order to be virtuous: this leads to the absurd conclusion that those who experience no conflict between duty and pleasure and do good from inclination, cannot be vir tuous. The psychology behind the categorical imperative was one regrettably widespread in Russian society; it was represented by the phenomenon of the "repentant noblemen" and the heroes of Dostoevskii, for whom torment and suffering, duality and division were "the pearl of creation". To the principle of obligation Bazarov opposes the heuristic principle of the "harmonisation of life": the search for norms which

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

ioi

would permit man to include in his life all attainable pleasures. As distinct from the dionysian apotheosis of instinct, this goal would demand a conscious and critical evaluation of experience by one criterion that of harmony, defined as "a general feeling of heightened sensation, of fulness of life, of spiritual uplift".59 Their enthusiasm for the morality of the Superman has led the empiriocriticists to be called "nietzschian marxists";60 somewhat misleadingly, inasmuch as they were unanimously opposed to the individualism which was central to Nietzsche's ideal. They all endorsed the collectivist emphasis of empiriocriticism and stressed that their voluntarism was anti-individualist. Bazarov asserted that "the recognition of the per sonality as an absolute principle has always been and will always be alien to the proletariat";61 while Lunacharskii observed that individualism was characteristic of social decadence: "For a true socialist reality is the genus, mankind."62 They conceived of the Superman in collectivist terms, as the class of the proletariat, asserting that it was through the harmonising of individual with collective experience in the creativity of the class that the individual attained his integrality. In the words of Lunacharskii: "[man] is a part, and without the corresponding whole has no meaning."63

To sum up: in their revolt against official marxist philosophy the empiriocriticists were seeking to resolve a tension endemic in the outlook of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, between voluntarism and the search for absolutes. Their rebellion followed a pattern very similar to that of the neo-kantian revisionists: a criticism of the one-sidedness of marxist determinism as constricting and distorting the personality, followed by the demand for a rvaluation of ideals and values from the standpoint of the aspirations of the "integral man", whose harmony and self-fulfilment (conceived in terms strongly influenced by the aesthetic amoralism of Nietzsche) were set up as the goal of history. However, while the neo-kantians held that the ideal of individual wholeness entailed an ethical individualism incompatible with marxism as a collectivist philosophy of progress, the empiriocriticists believed that their task was to synthesise the ideal of the whole and harmonious individual with the marxist vision of mankind as collectively moving to one single, unitary view of reality. For them the ideal of the integral personality was inseparable from an integral view of the world. The author of the Intro duction to the symposium Studies for a realistic world view put it as follows: "the fullest and strongest life is life that is integral and harmon ious: this means that the most perfect and powerful cognition must be unitary and harmonious; this means that truth is monist." The same writer attacks the "subjectivist sociology" through which the Russian populists had sought to defend the interests of the "integral personality" against the demands of universals and absolutes. They had

102

AILEEN KELLY

suffered from eclecticism, "the professional illness of the intelligentsia": "Eclecticism is a sign of weakness, an expression of a pitiful, unharmonious life."64 Curiously, Bogdanov, who had been the most enthusiastic of the empiriocriticists in welcoming marxism as the liberating "negation of the absolute objectivity of any truth whatsoever, the negation of all eternal truths", nonetheless frequently emphasises that the "vital" tendency of all cognition is "towards a harmoniously integral system": in the future philosophy of the proletariat everything, "from the most primitive cosmic complex of elements to artistic creativity, that [...] highest and most mysterious form of organising activity, will be [...] explained and harmoniously united by the conclusions of the formalised, organised experience of mankind".66 In this apparent inconsistency he is directly following Avenarius and Mach. Their dmystification of knowledge, their attacks on the "fetishes" of dogmas and laws were only the means for achieving what they saw as the goal of human reason, the construction of a unitary vision of the world as a basis for the unification of all endeavours of thought and action. As Mach asserted, by reducing the material world to a complex of identical elements, "we may reason ably hope to build a unified monistic structure [...] and thus to get rid of the distressing confusions of dualism".67 The tool for this task was philosophy which, being the only discipline concerned with all areas of human experience, could, they believed, integrate all the data of the sciences into one harmonious whole. This concern to eliminate the "distressing effects" of the divisions of consciousness led both thinkers into contradiction with their own empiricism. As their critics have pointed out, their assertion that the goal of reason is a unitary world view is not a deduction from experience but an a priori assumption, a metaphysical hypothesis designed to satisfy man's need to overcome his sense of an inner split.68 Whatever its psychological justification, the view, stressed by Avenarius more than Mach, that knowledge is moving in a continuous progression towards one all-embracing synthesis, was in direct contradiction with the radical reaction against dogmas and absolutes which had led both to emphasise the relative, provisional and exclusively methodological significance of scientific laws. This paradoxical combination of "nihilism" and faith undoubtedly accounts for the overwhelming attraction which empiriocriticism had for its Russian adherents; but as a result they were caught in a vicious circle. Their revolt against marxist determinism had been a defence of the personality with its subjective goals and values in the face of objective historical laws; but they were not individualists. Together with Mach they believed that "the ego must be given up". The integrality, creativ ity and even the free will which they defend against abstract norms and sanctions are themselves lodged in an abstraction: the collective. It is true that Lunacharskii admits that in the contemporary world "the reconciliation of the ideal of fulness of life for myself and maximum benefit to the genus is not always possible";69 but he believes that this is due to the distorting effect of capitalist society which suppresses the genus instinct and leads the individual to see his own urge for wholeness

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

103

as being opposed to the interests of the collective. In the socialist society "the personal and the genus instinct [will] fuse; [...] the individual will value himself as a moment in the great Ufe of the genus"70 ... Bogdanov sees the ego as a temporary "adaptation" designed to cope with the di sharmony between individually and socially organised experience. When this conflict is resolved, the ego win disappear.71 Thus, the promethean revolt of the marxist Superman comes to a very tame conclusion; his pioneering egotism is expressed in absolute obedience to universal moral norms; according to Lunacharskii the individual increases his strength tenfold by denying himself in the name of the genus. "Classes and nations are, as it were, moduses of all-human society [...] individuals are moduses, living expressions of their classes, receiving their spiritual make up from them and determined in general [...] by their fate."72 The omnipotent marxist voluntarist exists, but only as an ideal abstraction: the empiriocriticists have gone full circle, to arrive back at that thing-in-itself from which they had once retreated in indignant revolt. Real men were merely the predicates of an abstraction as much beyond experience as Plekhanov's "thing-in-itself": "The individual is merely a particular expression of the essence of mankind".73 A new god had been set up: all that remained was to found a new cult. This was done in the theory of godbuilding; an offshoot of empiriocriticism, it exposes at its most candid and naive the thirst for faith which inspired the "Godbuilding" marxist rebels. (bogostroitel'stvo) was developed by Lunacharskii in conjunction with Maxim Gor'kii, who expounded it in literary form in his novel Confession {Ispove, 1908). Lunacharskii elaborated it in his book Religion and socialism, and in a number of articles. In his book he attributes the scepticism and apathy prevailing among revolutionaries to the fact that the movement was not satisfying the "human need" to feel oneself part of a great whole, to transcend the limits of one's individuality by fusing with an "infinite life force". This need was especially sharply felt in conditions of disorientation and social pess imism such as those prevailing after 1905; and it could be satisfied only by religion "a conception and sense of the world which resolves the contradiction between the ideal and reality", and which provided faith in the future by positing "a higher force kindred to the individual, close to him, on which he can place his hopes".74 "[Religion] will unite the romantic, self-sacrificing, religiously supra-individual practice of social democracy with its philosophy, which has attempted in its stern modesty to give itself a dry and calculating exterior, with no small loss to its cause."75 Lunacharskii's new proletarian religion is anthropocentric: "the genus, the collective, is the centre; the personality revolves round it but feels itself deeply united with it".76 Its prophets include Fichte, whose voluntarism Lunacharskii defines as a "collectivist" philosophy in which the individual is the instrument for "the manifestation of the pure ego in the aggregate of rational beings"77 (he attributes the initial inspiration

104

AILEEN KELLY

for his religion to his enthusiasm for the idealism of Fichte and Schelling, to which, ironically, he had been introduced by Plekhanov in 1895). 78 Another prophet is Nietzsche, whose concept of "love of the distant ones" in The joyous science is interpreted by Lunacharskii as a call to worship the "supra-individual beings" who express the essence of mankind.79 The true "father" of the new religion was Feuerbach with his teaching that man must reappropriate his alienated essence, which he had pro jected onto fictitious deities. He sees Feuerbach's anthropotheism as having been developed by Marx, "the last prophet to issue from the bowels of Israel",80 whose religion of progress taught that redemption was to be attained through the organised battle of the human genus with nature. Progress is the eschatology of the new religion: the sense of being a link in the unfolding drama of history will generate "religious" emotion and enthusiasm. Its reward is immortality: in the adoration of his infinite potential man breaks through the bounds of his finite isolated life; by fusing his subjective desires with the objective progress of the proletariat he will gain immortality in the genus. "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer" ... Lunacharskii's exhortation "Let us adore the potential of mankind, our potential and represent it in an aureole of glory, the more strongly to love it"81 has an embarrassingly hollow ring, as have the saccharine ecstasies of Gor'kii's novel, in which a cripple is cured through the collective will of the "people-god " . Their preaching has the manufactured enthusiasm and false cheerfulness of scoutmasters whipping up support for an unpopular but necessary chore: Lunacharskii frequently expresses the conviction that in the current social crisis only the enthusiasm produced by his religion can provide the strength and motivation needed for the victory of socialism.

In a campaign which began in 1904 and reached its climax in 1909, the orthodox Russian marxists attacked the empiriocriticist heresy on two grounds: its theoretical defects and its social significance. The first category of criticism, which includes one of the sacred texts of Russian marxism, is both better known and much less interesting than the second, and requires only a brief summary here. Liubov' The first published attack on empiriocriticism was an article by Aksel'rod, written in 1904, apparently at the request of Lenin.88 A faithful pupil of Plekhanov, Aksel'rod maintained that the essence of materialism lies in the doctrine of the primacy of being over consciousness; the latter being causally dependent on the former, its task is to reflect and adapt to the objective reality which exists outside it and independ ently of it. By conceiving of the physical world as experience, empirio criticism was asserting that nature had no existence outside consciousn ess: it was thus a form of subjective idealism verging on solipsism, and irreconcilable with a marxist vision of the world. Of the subsequent attacks on the heresy the principal ones were a lengthy refutation of Bogdanov by Plekhanov published in 1908,83 and Lenin's work of 1909, Materialism and empiriocriticism. Both are no

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

105

more than a restatement of the principal theses of Plekhanov's work. On the question of the development of the monist view of history, accompan ied by vicious attacks on the personal integrity of their opponents. Lenin's famous work is remarkably unoriginal. Its central thesis, that "consciousness reflects being which is independent of it",84 is supported by copious quotations from Engels (in particular his AntiDilhring and Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy) . He does point to the incompatibility between Marx's view of history and the biological voluntarism of empiriocriticism, but his work is remarkable above all for what one critic has described as Lenin's "inability to under stand the nature of philosophical worry";85 its crude and contemptuous tone expresses throughout the conviction that all philosophical problems can be solved by the application of a dose of common sense. The argument which he most frequently uses is starkly simple: all doctrines which do not regard matter as primary and spirit as secondary belong to the category of "subjective idealism" and lead inescapably to "the purest solipsism".86 This crude reductionism makes short work of philosophical subtlety: Avenarius' proposition that the natural scientist cannot abstract himself (i.e. his thinking consciousness), from his picture of the world, is interpreted by Lenin as the denial of something "not doubted by any man who is to any degree educated or healthy", namely, that "the world existed when there could be no life, no sensations [...] on it".87 In his conclusion Lenin defines the role of empiriocriticism in the class war. He reminds his readers of the party nature (partiinos) of truth: behind the "gnoseological agnosticism" of empiriocriticism there lurks the ideology of a class hostile to the proletariat. Contemporary professors of philosophy are the "scientific henchmen" of theologians, and empiriocriticism is "totally" reactionary:88 "[its] objective, class role can be entirely summed up as subservience to the fideists in their battle against materialism in general and historical materialism in particular".89 This definition of the class significance of empiriocriticism raises an obvious question: why did a philosophy so antagonistic to the class interests of the proletariat find its main defendants among the leading bolshevik theorists? Lenin devotes no more than four lines in his long work to this embarrassing question. It is, he writes, "the misfortune" of the Russian "machists" that they "put their trust in reactionary professors of philosophy".90 Having done so, they slid down a slippery slope. If Lenin found it politic to attribute the popularity of empiriocriticism among his followers to an intellectual aberration which could be remedied by repentance and a return to the fold, the menshevik theorists had no reasons for refraining from a closer examination of the "class" significance of the heresy on their own doorstep. In the words of Liubov' Aksel'rod, if it was not outstanding in its philosophical content, it had "conspicuous historical significance".91 The mensheviks were at one with the empiriocriticists themselves in seeing the movement as the expression of a crisis in the relations between the Russian intelligentsia and the revolutionary movement; but their interpretation of the crisis was very different.

I06

AILEEN KELLY

The menshevik analyses of the social significance of empiriocriticism in Russia are closely connected with their opposition to the bolsheviks on the issue of the "liquidation" of the party. After 1905 Lenin envisaged the next phase of the revolution in terms of a proletarian and peasant rising, and he continued to preach the view (which had led to his break with the mensheviks) that the revolution must have strong leadership in the form of a secret organisation consisting of a small vanguard of disciplined, professional revolutionaries. The mensheviks on the other hand believed that Russia was still in the "bourgeois democratic" phase of revolution, which had not been completed in 1905 because the liberal parties had been insufficiently strong to seize power; and although most of them believed that in the conditions of repression illegal party com mittees had to continue to exist, they called for the party to devote most of its energies to the creation of a mass proletarian party on the western model, to replace the existing party of underground conspirators out of touch with the everyday interests and activities of the masses. From 1908 Lenin bitterly "liquidators" who were attacked striving the for leading the total proponents disbandingof ofthis the view existing as party and wished to confine social-democrat politics to legally permitted trade union activities. The "liquidators" on the other hand saw in Lenin's attitude the same "jacobin" mistrust of the spontaneous mass movement as had led to the split in the party in 1903. One of the leading figures among them, A. N. Potresov, repeatedly pointed out that as yet there existed in Russia only the embryo of a party in the marxist sense. Its development was frustrated by the continued and unnatural hegemony of the intelligentsia over the mass movement, which it was using as "an instrument on which to play its heroic symphony"; instead of the party consolidating the proletarian movement, the latter was serving to consol idatethe party, as an apparatus in the hands of the intelligentsia.92 Potresov's conclusions were seen as too extreme by many in his own faction; but his approach reflected a general interest among menshevik theoreticians in the social and political significance of contemporary movements of ideas among the intelligentsia. This led them to seek to interpret empiriocriticism as part of a general movement rooted in the character of the intelligentsia as a whole. In three articles published in 1909 and entitled On the so-called religious seekings in Russia (O tak nazyvaemvkh religioznykh iskaniiakh v Rossii),83 Plekhanov pointed to the similarities between Lunacharskii's "godbuilding" and the religious revival among the intelligentsia at the turn of the century, which had been closely connected with the first revisionist movement in Russian marxism. Lunacharskii's ideology represented a phenomenon recurrent among the radical intelligentsia but especially evident after 1905 a loss of faith in the triumph of a collective social ideal and a resurgence of individualism, expressed in introspection and a search for the "meaning of life"; an attempt to find a religious solution for their anxiety about the fate of their personalities in an alien world. Lunacharskii was "a typical Russian intelligent, one of the most impressionable kind".94 Though he claimed to speak for the proletariat, he had nothing in common with it; his new god had been created "for the improvement, edification and encouragement of the languishing intelligenty" ,9b

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

107

Plekhanov offers no real analysis of the causes of the crisis among the intelligentsia, nor any conclusions as to the latter's future in the revolu tionary movement. But other menshevik theorists, with Potresov most prominent among them, believed that the time had come for the marxist intelligentsia, in the interests of social democracy, to take stock of itself, examine its subjective goals in relation to the "objective" mass move ment, and decide whether to identify with the mass movement or to preserve its "intelligentsia" values by reneging from marxism. This is the theme of a collection of articles by ten leading menshevik theorists (including Potresov, Dan, Martov and L. Aksel'rod) published in 1909 and entitled On the boundary (Na mbezhe).96 The authors attempt a general interpretation from a marxist point of view of the religious, literary and philosophical movements in Russia from the turn of the century, focusing on the pessimistic sense of the rift between the individual and society which they see as common to them all, a symptom of the decadence of the bourgeois elements of society. F. Dan sees the individu alism of all the religious and philosophical movements of the time as representing "the impotent revolt of 'the personality' against 'the environment' which it could not [...] control",97 and he analyses this revolt among the radical intelligentsia after 1905. The reality of the revolution had been in sharp contradiction with the intelligentsia's rosy hopes. The "people" had not played the role expected of it; it had not leapt over the obstacles which historical reality had placed in its way. Instead of a triumphant march into the kingdom of freedom, there had ensued a protracted and inglorious phase of class war, in the course of which the specific class characteristics and aspirations of the proletariat emerged more clearly, causing "a dissonance in the common 'radical' music".98 Notes were sounded from the depths which found no intel lectual or emotional response among the intelligentsia. The poetry of lofty ideals was replaced by the prose of material class interests, and by mundane antlike labours which required neither heroes nor leaders, but cooperation, patience and technical skill. The radical intelligentsia's characteristic voluntarism and individualism, previously channelled into a heroic vision of socialism, began to assert itself in a sense of affinity with other less radical sections of society; wide ranks of the intelligentsia experienced a thirst for spiritual liberation from a traditional cause which was now revealed as an alien one, and began to search for a faith more specifically their own. As this could not be a proletarian faith, it could only be a bourgeois one; the "bourgeois rebirth of the intelligen tsia's psyche",99 taking place at a time of reaction, found expression not in constructive work for the goals of bourgeois democracy, but in social apathy and religious mysticism, or in the impotent pretence of vitality: the cult of strength and the preaching of hedonistic ethics in much of contemporary literature and philosophy. This phenomenon was not wholly negative; it was the sign of the "inevitable liquidation" of the intelligentsia's hegemony over the social movement; some would join the ranks of the liberals, others would follow those who had already fused with the proletariat and been "ideologically reborn in their innermost depths".100 Dan did not explicitly refer to empiriocriticism as an illustration of

I08

AILEEN KELLY

this process, but two other contributors to the collection, Martov and Aksel'rod, did. Martov, after an interpretation similar to Dan's of the crisis among the intelligentsia, concludes with an analysis of the theory of godbuilding as an expression of the intelligentsia's traditional volun tarism. Lunacharskii's precept "By faith [...] alone will you be saved; by faith alone will you rise above the 'everyday level' of the contemporary class battle" is, he asserts, couched in the language of a demagogue: "It is the formula of a movement in which the shepherd and the sheep, the leader and the led, are sharply differentiated and opposed; in which there exist two truths the esoteric and the exoteric; in which the ideologue utters lies because the masses are not in a state to accommodate the truth."101 According to Martov, Lunacharskii's "religion of the social myth", like all intelligentsia utopianism, represented a view of the relationship between the leaders and the masses which, though incompatible with marxist ideology, had entered Russian social democracy largely because of the "immaturity" of social conditions in the country. The new rel igion was an attempt to sanction and reconstruct relations already con demned by history namely, the doctrine of "the hegemony of the 'intelligentsia' in the social movement, with its 'aristocratic' position in relation to the masses". But he confidently predicts its failure: in the proletarian movement of tomorrow there would be no place for sec tarianism or jacobinism as "relics of the past".102 There is no such optimism in Liubov' Aksel'rod's analysis. Her first attack on empiriocriticism had been written at the request of Lenin. Now, however, she points out that it is no coincidence that the majority of the bolshevik theorists are empiriocriticists bolshevism is "penetrated through and through with the method of thought of empiriocriticist philosophy".103 It shared the latter's two fundamental characteristics: a voluntarism which reflected a "boundless subjective arbitrariness",104 and a rigid dogmatism. Empiriocriticism's theory of the identity of the physical and the mental, by allowing no clear boundary in principle between subjective and objective truth, gave no firm criteria for distin guishing between reality on the one hand and Utopian illusions on the other; it encouraged the "machist romantic" to ignore the objective limits on his will. On the other hand, empiriocriticism was immovably dogmatic; in a view of the world in which the principles of cause and effect were understood as functional relations coordinated by consciousn ess, there was no real place for the concepts of historical process or development in time. The task of science was reduced to establishing an adequate "picture" of the world, the fundamentaUy conservative task of describing "that which is".lob She argued that bolshevism expressed the same paradoxical combi nation of boundless voluntarism and rigid dogmatism. Its theoretical basis was the view of the relation of consciousness to spontaneity express ed by Lenin in his pamphlet What is to be done?, the view that the role of the critically thinking marxist intelligentsia was to lead the sponta neousworking class masses. However, the theory of the omnipotence of

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

109

the conscious individual which was used to justify the dictatorship of the social-democrat intellectuals over the masses was based on illusion: the masses followed "conscious" individuals only when there was intel lectual contact between them namely, when the masses themselves had attained a high level of consciousness. Otherwise, in order to attract the masses, the conscious individual was forced to adapt to their instincts, using the methods of the demagogue to arouse their "unformed revo lutionary passions".106 The bolsheviks' relationship with the masses was that of the hero and the crowd. But the more bolshevism departed from marxist principles and tactics, the more dogmatically rigid it became regarding the ultimate goals of revolution. It discarded the concept of process essential to marxism, the view of the development of revolutionary consciousness in historical stages which involved tactical compromises and alliances; instead it preached uncompromising isolationism, the immediate and simultaneous realisation of the social-democrat "pr ogramme minimum" expressed in schematic form, in simple slogans designed to inflame mass passions. In sum, according to Aksel'rod, empiriocriticism was ideally suited to those lacking bourgeois" or romantic in a sense Utopians. of historical In process, its mixture whether ofthey dogmatism be "peaceful and "vulgar empiricism" it was what its proponents claimed it to be the theoretical counterpart to bolshevik practice.107

Liubov' Aksel'rod's analysis, though suffering from a liberal use of the jargon of marxist polemics, is the most interesting of the contributions to the debate on empiriocriticism 's significance as an intelligentsia ideology. It was the fate of the empiriocriticists that their claim to be the theorists of bolshevik practice was taken seriously only by the mensheviks. But in the last analysis the strongest support for their claim (and for Aksel' rod'sinterpretation of it) may be seen to have come from Lenin himself. For what is most significant in his reaction to empiriocriticism is not what he wrote against it, but when he chose to attack it and why. Lenin's initial reaction to the attempt to marry empiriocriticism with social democracy was no less extreme than Plekhanov's. Valentinov, who took on himself the task of acquainting him with the theories of Avenarius and Mach in 1904, relates that Lenin was driven to "frenzy" by his attempt to defend their theories. Agreeing with Plekhanov that "Marx and Engels had said all that needs to be said", he asserted that "to revisionism there is only one reply: hit it in the teeth (v mordu)".10* But for five years he refrained from making this reply in public at least, breaking his silence on this subject only in 1909. His reasons were very practical ones: the main philosopher of the movement, Bogdanov, was essential to him in the battle to establish the hegemony of his faction in the social-democrat party. Bogdanov's decision to join the bolshevik faction in 1904 was a windfall for Lenin; he had an impressive intellectual reputation and a wide network of literary and political contacts (includ ing Gor'kii) in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He soon became editor of the bolshevik organ Vpered and Lenin's right-hand man in the organisation

110

AILEEN KELLY

of the new group and in particular of its finances. With Lenin and Krasin he formed a secret group controlling large sums of money obtained by questionable methods, mainly by what was euphemistically known as "expropriation": bank robberies with violence. It was in the interests of this fruitful collaboration that, as Lenin wrote to Gor'kii on 25 Febru ary 1908: "In the summer and autumn of 1904 we finally came to an under standing with Bogdanov and concluded as bolsheviks a tacit alliance which tacitly excluded philosophy as being a neutral area. This alliance [...] gave us the possibility of carrying out jointly in the Revolution [of 1905] that tactic of revolutionary social democracy (= bolshevism) which according to my deepest conviction was the only correct one."109 According to V. Bonch-Bruevich, then a close associate of Lenin, the latter called all the bolsheviks together after Bogdanov had joined the party and told them that, while they were not to agree with Bogdanov's views, they must refrain from all polemics with him on the subject, so that all their energies could be turned to immediate questions of strategy and tactics in the revolutionary battle.110 In a conversation with Bonch-Bruevich, Plekhanov described Lenin's cooption of Bogdanov as the sheer opportunism of a man who like a character in Gogol's play The inspector general (Revizor) "picks up every thing he finds on the road: you never know, it may come in handy".111 Bonch-Bruevich's reply, apparently without intended irony, was a classic example of the same approach: he explained that the bolsheviks were not prepared to attack Bogdanov in print, but would welcome any public refutation of his views which the mensheviks might care to make. Plekhanov's taunts against the heretic in his camp eventually stung Lenin into a public reply at the Party Congress known by the bolsheviks as the third (the mensheviks repudiated its legality) in April 1905. Referring to attempts by Plekhanov to drag the names of Avenarius and Mach into inner-party polemics, he blandly asserts: "I positively cannot understand what relation these writers, towards whom I do not feel the slightest sympathy, have to the question of social revolution."112 By 1907 however, Lenin's alliance with Bogdanov had began to dis integrate. Bogdanov became (as did Lunacharskii) a leader of the ultra left wing, the otzovist or ultimatist group of the bolsheviks, which opposed Lenin on the issue of social-democrat participation in the Duma. In addition, the bolshevik policy of expropriations which he directed together with Krasin (who was closely connected with some of the empiriocriticists) began to be an embarrassment to Lenin. It had begun to attract undesirable publicity for the social-democrats and in 1908 the party's central committee condemned it and ordered an investigation into expropriations. Lenin managed to stifle this, but in August 1908 the bolshevik centre replaced Bogdanov and Krasin by a new financial commission. By mid-1908 Lenin had ousted Bogdanov from the editorial board of Proletarii, the bolshevik mouthpiece which had succeeded Vpered, and on 23 February 1909 the bolshevik centre in a secret vote

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

hi

condemned Bogdanov and Krasin for misappropriating party funds and expelled them from the faction. The public break came in June 1909 at a meeting of the bolshevik centre which denounced otzovism and ultimatism, expelled Bogdanov and Lunacharskii, and in a special resolution condemned godbuilding as "a movement implying a breach with the very foundations of marxism".113 In the first issue of Proletarii in early 1908 Lenin had reiterated the view that questions of philosophy were a matter of individual opinion, but the secret condemnation of Bogdanov in February 1909 was followed by a public attack on his philosophical views in Proletarii, and in March, Materialism and empiriocriticism, which Lenin had been preparing for nearly a year, appeared. In his correspondence with Gor'kii, Lenin presents his decision publicly to attack the empiriocriticists as the result of a final loss of patience with their public utterances. In his letter to Gor'kii of 25 February 1908 he asserts that the publication by Bogdanov and others of Essays in the philosophy of marxism (Ocherki po filosofii marksizma) had "greatly exacerbated disagreements of long standing among the bolsheviks on philosophical problems". The preaching of variations of agnosticism, idealism, religious atheism and so on was "going too far. Of course we rank and file marxists are not well read in philosophy, but why would we suffer such indignity, why should we be offered this sort of stuff as marxist philosophy! ";114 and in a letter of 24 March 1908, announcing his intention to launch a public attack on empiriocriticism, he writes: "You must and will of course understand that, if a party man has come to the conviction that certain propaganda is deeply wrong and harmful, he is in duty bound to speak out against it. I would not have started the row were I not absolutely convinced [...] that [Essays in the philosophy of marxism ] is ridiculous, harmful, philistine and obscurantist from beginning to end".116 This protest is unconvincing. It is true that 1908 saw an increase in empiriocriticist publications, but their first symposium had appeared in 1904 and there had since been no significant change in their theories. What had changed was that Bogdanov had ceased to be useful in Lenin's political strategy; while on the other hand an attack on Bogdanov and his allies would be tactically useful in Lenin's battle with his main enemy the mensheviks. As he asserts in his letter to Gor'kii of 24 March 1908, far from weakening the bolsheviks, as Gor'kii feared, a break with Bogdanov would strengthen them, as the mensheviks would no longer be able to attack them on theoretical grounds and would have to restrict their polemics to questions of practical poUtics, where they were no match for their opponents. In its timing, Lenin's attack on empiriocriticism seems a particularly skilful application of what Aksel'rod had called "vulgar empiricism". To emphasise the "partiinost" of all philosophy four years after he had stated the "irrelevance" of empiriocriticism to social revolution was a volte-face difficult to reconcile with the reigning orthodoxy expressed in Plekhanov's phrase "no fate win move us from the correct point of view

112

AILEEN KELLY

which has finally been revealed". Lenin might well have countered this with Engels' dictum (which he used frequently) that marxism was not a dogma but a guide to action. But this maxim, as expressed in his political practice, was not consistent with the reflective theory of cogni tion to which he paid lip-service in Materialism and empiriocriticism. It was far closer to the voluntarist view of truth propounded by the selfstyled bolshevik theorists, and expressed in Bogdanov's thesis: "Truth is by no means a simple copy of the facts, not a petty and exact represen tation of them; it is an instrument for domination over them."116 As we have seen, for the empiriocriticists the concept of laws had only a func tional significance as a method of orientation, changing in accordance with the practical demands of the collective battle for survival. Lenin's primary concern was with the survival and domination of the "collective" which in his view embodied the principle of progress the bolsheviks, and in securing this he showed a similar "functionalist" approach to marxist dogma, maintaining the domination of his group by a skilful combination of extreme flexibility, even arbitrariness, in his interpretation of historical laws, with an extreme dogmatism and authoritarianism in enforcing a given interpretation, once the choice had been made. As Aksel'rod had pointed out, his position on ultimate ends was rigidly dog matic, but these ends were expressed in terms so vague and schematic as not to hinder his freedom of orientation in the present. She might well have quoted the history of Lenin's relations with Bogdanov as an illustration of her thesis: ironically, it is the methods which Lenin used to defeat Bogdanov and his group which provide the most convincing support for their claim to be the philosophers of bolshevism. The question remains: why, if Lenin's political practice had more affinity with the theories of empiriocriticism than with the determinism of Plekhanov, was he so strongly opposed to the former; for contemporary accounts leave no doubt of his genuine loathing of them, however much expediency may have impeded its expression. Two reasons may be advanced: firstly, in his outlook and psychology, Lenin was very much in the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, for whose radical extreme the term "idealism" had for generations connoted all the forces which lent moral and practical support to Russian backwardness and despotism the impotent dreams of the superfluous men, liberal cant, and the social apathy of mystical and religious trends in literature. Lenin's idealism" hatred of fixed these on tendencies empiriocriticism was fanatical, by theand social-democrat the label of theorists "subjective is sufficient to explain his extreme reaction against it. Secondly, on the evidence of his later philosophical notebooks, his defence in 1909 of a mechanistic materialism so much at odds with his own political practice may be attributed to philosophical laziness. In his concern with practical politics he was prepared to take his philosophy at second hand from those who had more time to devote to it. His famous "discovery" of Hegel, recorded in his prulosophical notebooks of 1914-1916, shows that his first serious study of the sources of marxism had the same radical effect on him as the Theses on Feuerbach had on the empiriocriticists. The influence of Hegel's dialectic on Marx is a revelation to him: "One may not fully understand Marx's Capital, especially his first chapter, without

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

113

having studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Therefore no marxist has understood Marx for half a century!"117 Plekhanov's dualistic materialism is incompatible with Lenin's new understanding of the dialectic. He quotes Hegel: "it is wrong to see subjectivity and objectivity as a kind of stable and abstract opposition. They are both fully dialectical";118 he observes that "objective" idealism "in a zigzag fashion went right up to materialism and partly turned into it."119 He is severe on Plekhanov's critique of empiriocriticism, and other heresies; arguing that it was made "more from a vulgar materialist than from a dialectical materialist point of view";120 and asserts that "intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism".121 The advent of the revolution prevented Lenin from pursuing his philosophical investigations, but it is clear from the philosophical note books that well before it he had arrived at what had been the starting point of the first bolshevik revision of Marx: repudiation of the dualism of the "reflective" theory of cognition.

If Lenin had read Hegel five years earlier, he would not have written Materialism and empiriocriticism; but, given the role of tactical considera tions in determining his attitude to theory, it is idle to speculate whether the fate of the empiriocriticists in 1909 would have been much different. Their expulsion from the party ended the group's effective influence. They founded an opposition group called Vpered; but this had little influence. In August 1909 the group founded a party school in Capri where Gor'kii was living; they invited collaboration from the bolshevik centre, but the latter did not respond and by the end of 1909 succeeded in engineering a split in the school. Lenin's philosophical development had no effect whatever on the ultimate fate of those empiriocriticists who remained in Russia after the revolution: no doubt by then philosophical radicalism was too firmly associated with political indiscipline. Those who had fulsomely recanted, like Lunacharskii, were readmitted into the bolshevik fold.122 Bogdanov never recanted, but he took no part in public polemics. A doctor by profession, he became director of the Moscow Institute of Blood Transfusion, which he founded in 1926; he died as the result of infection from an experiment which he had performed on himself. Empiriocriticism had no defenders left in Russia when in 1938 it was officially credited with a new and sinister significance as a secret weapon of Hitler's Germany: it was enigmatically alleged in Pravda that by allying marxism with machism the Austrian marxists had betray ed the working class and prepared the ground for Hitler's annexation of Austria.123 The unqualified success of Lenin's defeat of empiriocriticism cannot be ascribed to mere pusillanimity on the part of its proponents. They were locked in a vicious circle in which defeat was forced on them by the demands of consistency with their own philosophical premisses. Unlike their revisionist predecessors, whose kantian dualism placed the ultimate criterion of truth in the individual consciousness, the empirioc riticists lodged it in the collective; when the latter, in the form of the

114

AILEEN KELLY

party, condemned them as bourgeois revisionists, they were trapped in a "catch 22" dilemma: the party demanded that they cease to be empiriocriticists; if they rejected that demand this would mean that they had ceased to be empiriocriticists. N. Valentinov, describing his own crisis of conscience in this respect, likens the plight of the group to that of the old bolsheviks condemned at the Moscow trials of 1936-1938 for deviation from the party line. Their public self-incrimination, incomprehensible to observers in the West, was not due to physical torture alone: "there was also something else there, something very complex, which caused them to 'confess', to regard as 'criminal' their deviation from the 'general Une'".124 To conclude: the empiriocriticist heresy, the controversy which it aroused and the manner of its defeat together shed considerable light on the psychology of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. The new philosophy had been presented as a final answer to the problem which had preoccupied successive generations of the intelligentsia: that of the conflict between its revolutionary voluntarism and its need for absol utes. The empiriocriticists claimed to have performed the miracle of synthesising marxism as an "integral world view" with a defence of the "integral personality". But this "synthesis" of voluntarism with determinism was not the answer to the intelligentsia's dreams of wholen ess;its most obvious function, as some of its critics pointed out, was to provide a philosophical justification of the dictatorship of an elite. It was the neatest of historical ironies that the heresy of the bolshevik theorists produced a ready-made defence of the authoritarianism which finally defeated them. Cambridge, 1980.

1. To my knowledge, only one scholar has attempted a detailed analysis of the empiriocriticist movement. See G. Kline, " 'Xietzschian marxism' in Russia", Boston College studies in philosophy, II (Boston/The Hague, 1969): 166-173; see also ch. iv (on 'godbuilding') of his Religious and anti-religious thought in Russia (Chicago, 1968). Kline's analysis, however, concentrates entirely on a secondary influence on the movement (that of Nietzsche), with no treatment of its philo sophical basis. References to the movement in works on Russian philosophy are very brief. See for example G. A. Wetter, Dialectical materialism. A historical and systematic survey of philosophy in the Soviet Union (trans, by P. Heath, London, 1958): 92-99. Bogdanov, the main philosopher of the movement, has received more attention, but his philosophy has generally been treated in isolation from the movement as a whole. See for example the study by D. Grille (n. 27). 2. The conflict between these two conceptions of 'integrality' in Russian radical thought is treated in ray doctoral dissertation Attitudes to the individual in Russian thought and literature, with special reference to the Vekhi controversy (Oxford, 1970); an interpretation of neo-kantian revisionism in this light is given on pp. 180-276. 3. Bogdanov's main works in the period under review were Iz psikhologii obshchestva (St. Petersburg, 1904); Empir iomonizm. Stai po filosofii (3 vols, Moscow, 1904-1906); Filosofiia zhivogo opyta (St. Petersburg, 191 2). He also contributed to the three main symposia of the movement: Ocherki realisticheskogo

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

115

mirovozzreniia (hereafter ORM) (St. Petersburg, 1904); Ocherki po filosofii marksizma (hereafter OFM) (St. Petersburg, 1908), and Ocherki filosofii kollektivizma (hereafter OFK) (St. Petersburg, 1909). After the movement disintegrated he continued to develop his philosophy in other works. 4. Bazarov's main writings appeared in the empiriocriticist symposia. 5. See A. Lunacharskii, Etiudy kriticheskie i polemicheskie (Moscow, 1905); Otkliki zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1906); Religiia i sotsializm (St. Petersburg, 1908); and articles in the movement's main symposia. 6. See P. Iushkevich, O materialisticheskom ponimanii istorii (St. Petersburg, 1907); Materializm i kriticheskii realizm (St. Petersburg, 1908); and Novye veianiia (St. Petersburg, 19 10). See also his article in OFK. 7. See N. Valentinov, Filosofskie postroeniia marksizma (Moscow, 1908), and E. Makh i marksizm (Moscow, 1908). 8. N. Valentinov, Vstrechi s Leninm (New York, 1953): 240. 9. Ibid.: 243. 10. A. Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm, op. cit., 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1905-1906) III: iii-v. 11. A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 8. 12. N. Valentinov, Vstrechi . . ., op. cit.: 242. 13. G. Plekhanov, Kritika nashikh kritikov, in G. Plekhanov, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1925-1927), 11: 137. 14. G. Plekhanov, voprosu 0 razvitii monisticheskogo vzgliada na istoriiu, in ibid., 7: 246. 15. N. Valentinov, Vstrechi . . ., op. cit.: 240. 16. Ibid.: 242, 243-244. 17. A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 13-14. 18. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected works in one volume (London, 1968): 28. For commentaries on the Theses by members of the movement see V. Bazarov, "Mistitsizm i realizm nashego vremeni", in OFM: 69-71; A. Bogdanov, Filosoftia zhivogo opyta, op. cit.: 125-127; A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 326-327. 19. A. Bogdanov, "Filosofiia sovremennogo estestvoznaniia", in OFK: 127. 20. E. Mach, The analysis of sensations and the relation of the physical to the psychical, transi, by C. M. Williams, revised and supplemented by S. Waterlow (London, 1914): 311. 21. Ibid.: 24. 22. See V. Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochineniia (3 vols, Moscow, 1959-1963) II: 349 ff and A. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia i vpechatleniia (Moscow, 1968): 19-20. 23. The first Russian populariser of empiriocriticism was V. Lesevich (Chto takoe nauchnaia filosofiia (St. Petersburg, 1891). In 1905 Lunacharskii published a popular version of Avenarius' most important work, Kritik der Reiner Entfahnmg: R. Avenarius, Kritika chistogo opyta v populiarnom izlozhenii A. Lunachar sko go (Moscow, 1905). By 1904, there was a considerable literature in Russian on empiriocriticism, and interest in it was widespread, particularly in socialist circles, where lectures and discussions were held on it. See V. Bonch-Bruevich, op. cit.: 353. 24. A. Bogdanov, Filosofiia zhivogo opyta, op. cit.: 70-85; and "Strana idolov i filosofiia marksizma", in OFM: 215-242; "Filosofiia . . . estestvoznaniia", art. cit.: 78-81. He points to the similarities between the voluntarism of the empiriocriticists and the thought of the socialist philosopher Joseph Dietzgen. 25. Ibid.: 138. 26. Karl Marx, op. cit.: 30. 27. For a detailed study of Bogdanov's philosophy, see the monograph by D. Grille, Lenins Rivale. Bogdanov und seine Philosophie. Abhandlungen des Bundesinstituts fur ostwissenschaftliche und Internationale Studien, Band XII (Koln, 1966). See also K. M. Jensen, " Beyond Marx and Mach ", Sovietica, 41 (Holland, 1978). 28. Iushkevich started out from a view of the world as a complex of sensations, but argued that, as the latter differed from individual to individual, reality was to be found only in their "common multiple". This constitutes the subject-matter of science, which endows it with simplifying symbols, namely laws and concepts. True reality lies in these "empirical symbols".

Il6

AILEEN KELLY

29. A. Bogdanov, "Filosofiia . . . estestvoznaniia", art. cit.: 83-87; Filosofiia zhivogo opyta, op. cit.: 267-274. 30. G. Plekhanov, " voprosu . . .", art. cit.: 222. Quoted among others by A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 343. 31. See the 8th and 9th Theses: "The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not understand sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in 'civil society'." "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx, op. cit.: 30. 32. Ibid.: 28. Lunacharskii pointed out that Plekhanov's rendering of this Thesis (in notes to his translation of Engels' Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy), conveyed the exact opposite of the meaning of the original, making it seem that Marx recognised the existence of the thing-in-itself. Plekhanov had written" man must show [. . .] that his thought does not stop on this side of phenomena". A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 343. Bazarov makes the same point in his essay, art. cit.: 70-71. 33. V. Bazarov, "K voprosu o filosofskikh osnovakh marksizma", in Pamiati Marksa (Moscow, 1908): 65, 73. See Lunacharskii's similar use of Marx's texts against the "thing-in-itself", Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 285-357. 34. A. Bogdanov, "Filosofiia . . . estestvoznaniia", art. cit.: 52-60. 35. A. Bogdanov, Iz psikhologii obshchestva, op. cit.: 57-58. 36. A. Bogdanov, Filosofiia zhivogo opyta, op. cit.: 216-266. 37. Ibid.: 217. 38. A. Bogdanov, Empir iomonizm, op. cit., Ill: 157. 39. Ibid., I: 181. 40. Ibid., Ill: 61. 41. Ibid., I: 47, III: 58-65; A. Bogdanov, Iz psikhologii obshchestva, op. cit.: 52-59; Filosofiia zhivogo opyta, op. cit.: 317. 42. A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 47. Like Bogdanov, he turns Marx into a machist, asserting that Marx conceives of the material and the ideal as merely "different stages of organization of the same element" (ibid.: 334). 43. Ibid.: 331. In his article "Ateizm", in OFM, he expresses himself more circumspectly, though also more obscurely: he describes the world as "a battle of liberties from which inevitability naturally arises as the result of the mutual restrictions imposed by phenomena": the future socialist society will accomplish "the destruction of the gulf between inevitability and freedom, through progress, through the perfecting of the species, at one and the same time deeply determined, material, and deeply spiritual, free." (135-136, 148). 44. P. Iushkevich, Stolpy filosofskoi ortodoksii (St. Petersburg, 1910): 5-6. 45. OFM: i. 46. A. Lunacharskii, "Ateizm", art. cit.: 160. 47. Ibid.: 125. 48. A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 10. 49. A. Lunacharskii, "Ateizm", art. cit.: 146. 50. A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 291. 51. A. Lunacharskii, "Ateizm", art. cit.: 147. 52. A. Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm, op. cit., I: 61. 53. A. Lunacharskii, "Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki", in ORM: 139. 54. A. Lunacharskii, "Ateizm", art. cit.: 160. 55. On this aspect of their thought see the article by G. Kline (n. 1). 56. R. Avenarius, Kritika chistogo opyta v populiarnom izlozhenii A. Lunacharskogo, op. cit. : 206; A. Lunacharskii, "Osnovy . . .", art. cit.: 122 ff; Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 10-11. 57. A. Bogdanov, "Strana idolov . . .", art. cit.: 215. 58. V. Bazarov, "Avtoritarnaia metafizika i avtonomnaia lichnos ", in ORM: 267. 59. Ibid.: 236, 246-247. See also the essay by S. Suvorov, "Osnovy filosofii zhizni", in ORM: 1-113; and Lunacharskii's attack on Kantian ethics in Otkliki zhizni, op. cit.: 91-92. 60. See G. Kline's article (n. 1). 61. V. Bazarov, Na dva fronta (St. Petersburg, 1910): 141. 62. A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 45.

empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy?

117

63. Ibid.: 105. 64. ORM: v, vi. 65. A. Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm, op. cit., Ill: iv-v. 66. A. Bogdanov, Filosoftia zhivogo opyta, op. cit.: 324. 67. E. Mach, op. cit.: 312. 68. See L. Kolakowski's assessment in his Positivist philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle, 4th ed. (London, 1972): 125-157. 69. A. Lunacharskii, "Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki", art. cit.: 137. 70. Ibid. 71. A. Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm, op. cit., I: 60-61. 72. A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 146. 73. Ibid.: 45. 74. Ibid.: 43. 75. A. Lunacharskii, "Ateizm", art. cit.: 159. 76. A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 395. 77. Ibid.: 255. 78. A. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia i vpechatleniia, op. cit.: 21. 79. A. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 131. 80. Ibid.: 189. 81. A. Lunacharskii, "Ateizm", art. cit.: 159. 82. L. Aksel'rod, "Novaia raznovidnos revizionizma", in L. Aksel'rod (pseud. Ortodoks), Filosofskie ocherki. Otvet filosofskim kritikm istoricheskogo materializma (St. Petersburg, 1906): 171-185. She asserts that Lenin had approached her a year and a half previously asking her to write an attack on Bogdanov's philo sophy {ibid.: 171). 83. G. Plekhanov, "Materialismus militans (Otvet g. Bogdanovu)", in G. Plekhanov, Sochineniia, op. cit., 17: 1-99. This was a reply to Bogdanov's "Otkrytoe pis'mo g. Plekhanovu", Voprosy zhizni, 7, 1907. 84. V. Lenin, Materializm i empir iokrititsizm, in V. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1958-1969), 18: 343. The only point on which Lenin differs with Plekhanov is with regard to the latter's view that man's representations of things and processes are not copies but symbols of the things-in-themselves. Lenin sees this as introducing "an unnecessary element of agnosticism" into materi alism (See ibid.: 244-251.) For an analysis of Lenin's philosophical views in general and Materialism and empiriocriticism in particular, see A. Panne , Lenin as philosopher. A critical examination of the philosophical bases of Leninism empiricism" (London, 1975), , in P. and A. Schilpp, R.S. Cohen, ed., "Dialectical The philosophy materialism of Rudolph and Carnap Carnap's (Illinois/ logical London, 1963): 99-158; G. Katkov, "Lenin as philosopher", in L. Schapiro and P. Reddaway, eds., Lenin. The man. The theorist. The leader (London, 1967): 71-86. 85. G. Katkov, art. cit.: 71. 86. V. Lenin, Materializm i empiriokrititsizm, op. cit.: 35-36. 87. Ibid.: 74. 88. Ibid.: 364. 89. Ibid.: 380. 90. Ibid.: 363. 91. L. Aksel'rod (Ortodoks), "Dva techeniia", in Na rubezhe. (K kharakteristike sovremennykh iskanii). Kriticheskii sbornik (St. Petersburg, 1909): 255. 92. A. Potresov, "Nashi zlokliucheniia", in A. Potresov, Posmertnyi sbornik proizvedenii (Paris, 1937): 160. See also the article "Neotiozhnaia zadacha", in ibid.: 173-178. 93. G. Plekhanov, "O tak nazyvaemykh religioznykh iskaniiakh v Rossii", Sovremennyi mir, 9, 1909: 186-216; 10, 1909: 164-200. 94. Ibid.: 185. 95. Ibid.: 195. 96. See above n. 91. The other contributors to the volume were A. Deborin, P. Maslov, V. L'vov, D. Koltsov, A. Martynov, and M. Nevedomskii. 97. F. Dan, "Geroi likvidatsii", in Na rubezhe, op. cit.: 83. 98. Ibid.: 113. 99. Ibid.: 114. 100. Ibid.

Il8

AILEEN KELLY

101. Iu. Martov, "Religiia i marksizm", in Na rubezhe, op. cit.: 35. 102. Ibid.: 37. 103. L. Aksel'rod, "Dva techeniia", art. cit.: 266. 104. Ibid.: 255. 105. Ibid.: 256. 106. Ibid.: 264. 107. Ibid.: 265-266. 108. N. Valentinov, Vstrechi..., op. cit.: 254. 109. V. Lenin, op. cit., 47: 142. no. V. Bonch-Bruevich, op. cit.: 355. in. Ibid.: 353. 112. V. Lenin, op. cit., 10: 134. 113. Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1927), VI: col. 595. 114. V. Lenin, op. cit., 47: 114. 115. Ibid.: 151. 116. A. Bogdanov, Filosofiia zhivogo opyta, op. cit.: 192. See also Lunacharskii's definition: "The truth is what in any given conditions gives the most results per unit of effort expended." (in Religiia i sotsializm, op. cit.: 344). 117. V. Lenin, op. cit., 29: 162. 118. Ibid.: 166. 119. Ibid.: 250. 120. Ibid.: 161. 121. Ibid.: 248. 122. See Lunacharskii's expressions of contrition at having been "enticed" by the "crafty and confused" philosophy of Avenarius and Mach, in A. Lunacharskii, Lenin i literaturovedenie (Moscow, 1934): 21-22. 123. Article of 24 Dec. 1938, quoted by N. Valentinov, Vstrechi..., op. cit.: 352-353124. Ibid.: 258 ff.