On Mon, Dec 22, 2025 at 04:28 PM, Jim Farmelant wrote: > > Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
Recently read a bit of The Other Bolsheviks ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/projects/the-other-bolsheviks ) and found it enlightening. Excerpt from chapter seven ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/the-other-bolsheviks/section/8edfef40-b0df-4fda-8c67-61dedcc34fd6#ch7 ) , entitled Mind Over Matter. Gorky was scathing about Lenin. ******************** The Other Bolsheviks ******************** Lenin and His Critics, 1904–1914 by Robert C. Williams "Focusing on the thought and activities of A. A. Vogdanov, A. V. Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, and V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, this political and intellectual history of Bolshevism before 1914 shows that Lenin by no means dominated or controlled his own fraction of the Russian Social Democratic Worker's Party, as his famous essay What Is to Be Done? (1902) implies. Rather, Lenin and his rival, Alexander Bogdanov, struggled to persuade divided and fissiparous revolutionary exiles to accept their respective ideals of rigid party authority and Marxist orthodoxy, on the one hand, or collectivist and syndicalist manipulation of the masses, on the other." Lenin and Plekhanov against Machism George Plekhanov, the pope of Russian Marxism, led the attack on Bogdanov’s collectivism in 1908, and Lenin was an eager imitator. As early as 1901 Lenin had declared himself a “definite opponent of both Hume’s scepticism and Kant’s idealism.” Yet when Plekhanov attacked Mach and Avenarius at a party congress in 1905, Lenin treated him with sarcasm and levity. Without being able to show that Vpered wants to “criticize” Marx, Plekhanov brings into earshot Mach and Avenarius. I am definitely puzzled about what relations these two writers (toward whom I have not the slightest sympathy) have to the question of social revolution. They have written about the individual and social organization of experience, or something of this sort, but truly have not thought much about the democratic dictatorship. Has Plekhanov learned that Parvus has become a supporter of Mach and Avenarius? (Laughter.) Or maybe Plekhanov has come to the point where he needs for a target Mach and Avenarius, not the village or the city. For Lenin, the 1905 revolution meant that philosophy was far less important than militant politics. Bogdanov was a necessary Bolshevik ally, and Plekhanov a Menshevik enemy. In 1908 the situation was reversed. Bogdanov had become an enemy, and Plekhanov an ally, in a philosophical struggle to control Bolshevism. 32 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_32 ) For many Russian Marxists, collectivism was threatening because of its scepticism toward all metaphysical truths and orthodoxies. Plekhanov as early as July 1905 pointed out the link between eighteenth-century scepticism and Bogdanov, noting that “the views of Mach and Avenarius represent only the latest variation on Hume’s philosophy.” Another essay dedicated to Plekhanov in 1906 attacked Bogdanov and Lunacharsky for creating “idealism under a Marxist flag” and went on to defend the “absolute reality of the external world.” Collectivism was derided as a “complete muddle” ( putanitsa ). 33 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_33 ) But collectivism was rooted in a broader contemporary trend in European thought, often characterized as “modernism.” Modernism encompassed neo-Kantian idealism, religious symbolism, impressionism, intuitionism, and other points of view that seemed to threaten the absolute verities of nineteenth-century thought. The Catholic church was especially concerned with the modernist breakdown of old values. In September 1907 Pope Pius X issued his encyclical Pascendi Gregis attacking all modernism as theological heresy. Agnosticism leads to atheism, pronounced the Pope, even if disguised as fideism, a surrogate belief. Church teachings are not relatively, but absolutely, true. The modernists assert the primacy of individual experience, but “given this doctrine of experience united with that of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true.” Scripture is the sacred word of God, not myth or text; the church is God’s authority in the world, not an expression of collective experience. Modernism is nothing less than a “synthesis of all the heresies,” and church authority must censor it out of existence. 34 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_34 ) The revision of orthodoxy was thus as much a problem for the Church in 1908 as for the Marxists. Lenin proclaimed that the heresy laid down in Bogdanov’s Essays on Marxism was “not Marxism”; it only sharpened the differences among the Bolsheviks and made a battle over philosophy “absolutely inevitable.” Breaking off relations with Bogdanov in the spring of 1908, Lenin wrote an article entitled “Marxism and Revisionism” in which he made it plain that the enemy was not only philosophical idealism and “neo-Humeian, neo-Berkeleyan revisionism” but also political syndicalism. “Even that ‘revisionism of the left,’ which has appeared now in the Latin countries as ‘revolutionary syndicalism,’ is also attracted to Marxism, ‘correcting’ it; Labriola in Italy and Lagardelle in France label themselves in Marx’s ranks, falsely interpreting what Marx really meant.” 35 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_35 ) The key to attacking Bogdanov, however, was not to confront the syndicalist politics he shared with so many other Bolsheviks, but to criticize his philosophy. Plekhanov led the attack on Bogdanov and Machism but was not supported by Karl Kautsky. In response to Plekhanov’s complaint that “our German comrades are turning more and more away from Marxist materialism,” Kautsky wrote that Machism was a “serious socialist point of view.” “From what I know about Mach,” wrote Kautsky, “he must be taken seriously.” Thus daunted, Plekhanov launched his attack in the pages of Russian, not German, journals in the spring of 1908. 36 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_36 ) In an article entitled “Basic Questions of Marxism,” Plekhanov argued that Marxist materialism was an entire world view that should not be revised by “bourgeois ideologues,” among whom he included Kant, Mach, Avenarius, and Dietzgen. Materialism was the correct world view, idealism the false one. “To be,” wrote Plekhanov, “does not mean to exist in the mind. In this respect the philosophy of Feuerbach is much clearer than the philosophy of Joseph Dietzgen.” Neither parliamentary reformists nor syndicalists understood Marxism, and any revision of Marxism resembled the very modernist heresies condemned so recently by Pius X. “Until now,” wrote Plekhanov, “there were no attempts to ‘supplement’ Marx by a Thomas Aquinas. But there is nothing impossible about the fact that, despite the recent papal encyclical against the modernists, the Catholic world at one time pulled from its midst a thinker capable of this theoretical heroic act.” 37 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_37 ) Having equated revisionism with heresy, Plekhanov went on to attack Bogdanov directly in an article entitled “Militant Materialism.” In it Plekhanov excommunicated Bogdanov as a lapsed comrade, an empiriomonist who, with Labriola and Lunacharsky, had tried to smuggle syndicalism into Russia “in the guise of a weapon ‘suitable for orthodox Marxists.’ “ Mach stood in the tradition of English scepticism and agnosticism, a descendant of Hume and Bishop Berkeley, a tradition that could end only in idealism, not materialism. The world was no mere product of mind and experience; it existed outside the self. 38 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_38 ) Further, Plekhanov polemicized, Bogdanov was really quite ignorant in matters of philosophy. Otherwise he would know that his idol Mach stood “on the same point of view as the eighteenth-century idealist Berkeley.” Matter is not experience or idea, but thing-in-itself. “So, for example, you, Mr. Bogdanov, exist first ‘as yourself and second as perceived by, say, Mr. Lunacharsky, who considers you a deep thinker.” Either a Marxist or a Machist, there was no middle ground for Plekhanov. “Machism,” he concluded, “is only Berkeleyanism made over and embellished in the light of ‘twentieth-century natural science’ “ and a contemporary variant of “subjective idealism.” 39 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_39 ) Plekhanov was thus the Menshevik point man in the attack on Bogdanov’s philosophy and Bolshevism, apparently at the request of Paul Axelrod. According to Plekhanov, Axelrod “practically forced me to start a polemic with Bogdanov.” Yet by December 1908 Plekhanov had drifted away from the Mensheviks to ally himself with a renegade Bolshevik, Lenin, who sought to use Plekhanov’s philosophical attack on Bogdanov in order to destroy Bogdanov politically. The result was Materialism and Empiriocriticism. 40 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_40 ) Materialism and Empiriocriticism Between May 16 and June 10, 1908, Lenin resided at 21 Tavistock Street in London. For much of the time he worked in the British Museum, collecting notes for a future philosophical polemic against Bogdanov. He also pursued illegal work as usual, especially efforts to get help from the International Socialist Bureau in freeing those arrested for cashing Tiflis Ex notes. But his primary interest was literary. He pored through the works of Hume and Berkeley, Mach and Avenarius, and modern German philosophers, such as Wilhelm Wundt and Kuno Fischer. He devoured the pragmatism of William James, the energetics of Wilhelm Ostwald, the scientific essays of J. J. Thompson and J. B. Stallo. 41 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_41 ) The first fruit of this activity was a polemical list of ten questions sent by Lenin to I. F. Dubrovinsky in Geneva. On May 28 Dubrovinsky confronted Bogdanov with the list at a public lecture: Does the lecturer acknowledge that the philosophy of Marxism is dialectical materialism? If he does not, why has he never analysed Engels’s countless statements on this subject? Is the lecturer aware that Petzoldt in his latest book has classed a number of Mach’s disciples among the idealists? Does the lecturer confirm the fact that Machism has nothing in common with Bolshevism? And so on. Lenin had escalated his conflict with Bogdanov from private disagreement to public warfare. 42 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_42 ) Yet Lenin’s isolation was such that it was not easy to find a publisher for his polemic. His dentist friend P. G. Dauge was a supporter of Dietzgen and Bogdanov and refused to publish Lenin’s book. In July 1908 Lenin fumed that there was now a “schism with Bogdanov” over his philosophical views that was worse than that between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. “I will leave the fraction as soon as the ‘left’ line and real ‘boycottism’ take over,” he threatened. Lenin was ill now and in need of a publisher. He was reduced to asking his sisters in Moscow to find him one. 43 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_43 ) “It is important that the book come out soon,” Lenin wrote his sister Anna in August. “For me there are not only literary but also serious political circumstances connected with its publication.” The problem was Bogdanov: “a complete break and war are now worse than with the Mensheviks.” In September he sent Anna back to Moscow from Geneva with the request that she find a publisher as soon as possible. She approached the Zerno house of L. O. Krumbügel, a twenty-eight-year-old Social Revolutionary with a wealthy father. But Krumbügel thought the book would merit only a small edition, and wanted to think it over. 44 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_44 ) By late October Lenin had completed his manuscript and again asked Anna Elizarova to get him a contract. He agreed to tone down his language to please the censor, using “fideism” instead of “priestism,” for example, to mollify the church. She approached Skvortsov about using Gorky’s Znanie house, but Gorky was busy publishing Bogdanov’s works. She also tried Bonch-Bruevich, but he was in debt and could not promise any royalties. As of December 1, 1908, Lenin still could not find a publisher and was increasingly frustrated. 45 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_45 ) Gorky was determined not to help Lenin. “With regard to publishing Lenin’s book,” he wrote K. P. Piatnitsky, “I am against it because I know the author. He is a clever fellow, a wonderful man, but he is a fighter who scoffs at gentlemanly conduct. Let Znanie edit his book and he will say: what fools, meaning Bogdanov, myself, Bazarov, Lunacharsky. The argument between Lenin and Plekhanov on one side and Bogdanov, Bazarov, and Co. on the other is very important and deep. The first two, differing on tactical questions, both believe in and advocate historical fatalism; the opposing side teaches philosophical activity. For me it is clear on whose side truth lies.” 46 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_46 ) In December 1908, Lenin moved from Geneva to Paris, and finally obtained a contract from Krumbügel and the Zerno house. Three thousand copies would be printed, and Lenin would receive royalties and fifty free copies. Anna signed the contract, and Lenin agreed to tone down his acerbic comments on Bazarov and Bogdanov. By February 1909 Lenin had received corrected galley proofs from Moscow and returned them. In the meantime polemics with Bogdanov had intensified, and Lenin was running short on funds. 47 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_47 ) In March 1909 the censorship struck again in St. Petersburg. The Senate Criminal Cassation Division ordered a new edition of Marx’s Communist Manifesto seized and destroyed, along with a new edition of Marx’s letters to Kügelman with an introduction by Lenin. St. Petersburg officials even proposed that criminal proceedings be launched against Lenin and his sister, but admitted that “the names, surnames, occupations, and places of residence of these people are unknown.” To be safe, Lenin agreed to have the manuscript printed on the presses of Russia’s most reactionary publishing house, controlled by the powerful A. S. Suvorin. Krumbügel had cleverly made this arrangement in the full knowledge that books printed by Suvorin were not subject to normal censorship review. Lenin’s attack on Bogdanov was to be printed by what was virtually an arm of the Russian government. 48 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_48 ) Lenin still insisted that nothing should be toned down about “Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Co.,” who were “dishonorable Machists” and “enemies of Marxism in philosophy.” He continually demanded that Anna hurry up the publication. It was “devilishly important” that the book come out as soon as possible, he wrote Anna in early April 1909. With the aid of Krumbügel and L. S. Peres, another Bolshevik, the final corrections were negotiated and Materialism and Empiriocriticism appeared in the middle of May in an edition of two thousand copies at a price of two rubles, sixty kopeks, rather high-priced by standards of the day. At that price, wrote Gorky, “who will read it?” 49 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_49 ) Lenin was pleased with the book, which he found well edited but expensive. The other Bolsheviks were not. Gorky found in it “the sound of a hooligan” yelling “I am the best Marxist of all,” and concluded that Lenin was a publicist, not a philosopher, an “individualist” and a “hopeless case.” Gorky wrote Bogdanov that he, not Lenin, represented true Bolshevism, adding that “as far as Lenin is concerned, you are right: he thinks like a priest.” 50 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_50 ) Friedrich Adler was equally dismayed. “Lenin has written a large book of 450 pages against Machism,” he wrote his father, “in which he carefully attacks me, but without really disturbing me at all. He is capable only of petty arguments, since he does not really understand the question. Still, the book is a remarkable achievement. In about a year he has gone through the entire literature, of which he previously had no idea, and then has been able to make criticisms.” 51 ( https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/232c5f45-ef5f-4d63-97d8-4b1a5c443f18/section/ed4184bb-54c9-4446-bd19-b2adee454cfa#ch7fn_51 ) What was the content of Lenin’s Aesopian polemic against Bolshevik collectivism? Orthodoxy against Science <SNIP> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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