Avenarius e Mach Empirico Criticismo Serria Bolchevique Citado Em 1925 Suprareal

7/27/2019 Avenarius e Mach Empirico Criticismo Serria Bolchevique Citado Em 1925 Suprareal

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Aileen Kelly

Empiriocriticism : a bolshevik philosophy ?In: Cahiers du monde russe et sovitique. Vol. 22 N1. Janvier-Mars 1981. pp. 89-118.

Rsum

Aileen Kelly, L'empiriocriticisme : une philosophie bolchevique ?

Au cours de la premire dcennie de ce sicle, un groupe de thoriciens bolcheviks eut recours l'empiriocriticisme d'Avenarius

et de Mach pour tayer une nouvelle conception philosophique du marxisme. En gnral les historiens font peu de cas de cette

tentative et la considrent comme un bref pisode de l'histoire du parti bolchevik. Cet article se propose d'tudier sa signification

dans le cadre largi de la psychologie collective de l'intelligentsia radicale russe o le volontarisme tait difficilement conciliable

avec la prdilection pour les philosophies dterministes de l'histoire. On peut considrer le mouvement empiriocriticiste comme

une dernire tentative de synthse de ces lments examins du point de vue des membres de l'intelligentsia. On analyse leurs

crits et les polmiques qu'ils provoqurent, en tenant compte de la lumire qu'ils ont jete sur la psychologie sociale de

l'intelligentsia radicale russe et sur le rle que ses aspirations subjectives ont jou dans la formulation de ses objectifs

historiques.

Abstract

Aileen Kelly, Empiriocriticism: a Bolshevik philosophy?

In the first decade of this century a group of Bolshevik theorists attempted to construct a new philosophical basis for marxism with

the aid of the empiriocriticism of Avenarius and Mach. Their attempt is usually treated by historians as merely a brief episode inBolshevik party history. This article examines its significance within the wider framework of the collective psychology of the

Russian radical intelligentsia, in which voluntarism was uneasily reconciled with a predilection for deterministic philosophies of

history. The empiriocriticist movement can be seen as a final attempt on the part of the members of the intelligentsia to achieve a

synthesis of these elements in their outlook. Their writings and the ensuing polemics are examined with particular regard to the

light which they shed on the social psychology of the Russian radical intelligentsia and on the part played by its subjective

aspirations in the formulation of its historical goals.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :Kelly Aileen. Empiriocriticism : a bolshevik philosophy ?. In: Cahiers du monde russe et sovitique. Vol. 22 N1. 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
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/author/auteur_cmr_28http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/cmr.1981.1906http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/cmr_0008-0160_1981_num_22_1_1906http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/cmr_0008-0160_1981_num_22_1_1906http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/cmr.1981.1906http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/author/auteur_cmr_28


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DEBAT

A I LEEN KELLYEMPIRIOCRITICISM

A BOLSHEVIK PHILOSOPHY?

Russian marxism produced two revisionist movements at the turnof the century: the neo-kantian and the empiriocriticist. The first ofthese had an important influence on the theory of Russian liberalism andthe philosophical, religious and literary movements of the period. Ithas consequently received much more attention from historians thanthe attempt by a group of bolsheviks to synthesise marxism with thephilosophy of empiriocriticism; this was a much more isolated and narrowly delimited movement both in its intellectual and its politicalinfluence. Historians tend to regard its major claim to interest as thefact that it caused Lenin to write his only philosophical work; and it isseen as less significant in its brief existence than in its rapid demise, whichis often quoted as an instance of Lenin's ability to bring party recalcitrants to heel.1But the empiriocriticist movement takes on a very different significance when approached from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge. It represents a point of crisis in the history of the Russian intelligentsia, at which the fundamental conflicts and dilemmas of Russianradical thought emerge with particular clarity. The goal of the movement can be summarised as the attainment of an integral view of theworld, centred on the ideal of an integral personality. These two conceptshave a long history in Russian radical thought. Their origins lie in theacute sense of alienation among Russia's intellectual elite which producedits intelligentsia and made the millenarian concept of "wholeness" irresistiblyttractive to it. Russian populism was strongly influenced by theromantic and idealist vision of the harmonious, integral personality whichwould succeed the divided men of the present. But the intelligentsiawere equally drawn to eschatological visions of progress, all-embracing,integral" visions of the world; and many of the conflicts between radicalmovements arose from the difficulty of reconciing the ideal of an integralpersonality with the search for an integral world view. The morecomprehensive the explanation of reality, the more determinist it wasand the less place it gave to the ethical dimension essential to the "whole"personality. It was this conflict which gave rise to neo-kantian revisionism,hich 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), anv.-mars i8i, pp . 89-118.


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CO AILEEN KELLYkantian criticism its proponents asserted the autonomy of the sphereof ethics and of subjective ideals. They ultimately found it impossibleto synthesise their neo-kantianism with marxism and moved to idealistpositions in philosophy.2

The empiriocriticist movement addressed itself to the same problem,seeking to succeed where the neo-kantians had failed: to reconcile thedemands of the integral personality with marxism as an integral worldview. Seen in this light, the movement represents the last attempt bythe Russian radical intelligentsia to construct an ideology which wouldresolve a fundamental conflict in its view of the world and of man.Two aspects of the movement will be examined: firstly, its significanceand its achievements as an attempt to reconcile the two traditionallyconflicting goals of the radical intelligentsia; and secondly, the discussionamong the members of the movement and its critics, in the years after1905, of the intelligentsia's collective psychology, the relation of its subjective aspirations to objective social goals and the social and politicalimplications of this relationship.

The empiriocriticist movement in Russian marxism, while wider andmore diffuse than that of the neo-kantians, also embraced a number ofthe most prominent marxist intellectuals of the time. Its principaltheoreticians were A. A. Bogdanov (pseud, of A. A. Malinovskii 1873-1928), 3 V. A. Bazarov (pseud, of V. A. Rudnev 1874-1939)4 who wereprincipally concerned with the construction of a marxist ethic; andA. V. Lunacharskii (1875-1933),5 who together with Maxim Gor'kii andothers, expounded a new socialist "religion". The only two prominentmembers of the movement who did not join the bolshevik faction afterthe Russian social democrat party split in 1903 were P. S. Iushkevich(1873-1944?) and N. Valentinov (pseud, of N. V. Volskii 1878- ).7Memoirs by members of the group reveal a close similarity betweenthe initial motivation of their movement and that of the neo-kantianrevisionists. They had been drawn to marxism in the 1890's above allbecause it offered what every generation of the radical intelligentsia hadsought: "not merely views, but one integral world view",8 which couldanswer all questions. In Valentinov's words, the "economic factor" ofwhich they made much play in their polemics was "a sort of magic carpetbearing us across the gloomy sea of inequality, of deprivation, of exploitation,nto the blue shore of the future system".9 For Bogdanov, marxismwas not only a new faith, but also the liberating negation of an old onewhich had narrowed and stifled the personality the mechanistic materialism which had long been a dominant strand in Russian radicalthought.10 Lunacharskii, who describes his adoption of marxism as an"ecstatic conversion", emphasises that for his generation marxism wasnot merely an economic theory; it was "a synthesising philosophy whichharmoniously united the ideal and practice, crowning in a realistic andrevolutionary way the immense [...] aspirations of Marx's teachers, thegreat German idealists".11 He draws a parallel between the effect of


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 91marxism on his generation and the effect of left hegelian philosophy onthe first generation of the intelligentsia at the beginning of the 1840's.The comparison is apt: the left hegelian "philosophy of the act" had beena voluntarist philosophy of progress, an "integral view of the world"entered on the self-realisation of man as an integral personality. Luna-charskii with the others in his group believed that marxism offered asimilarly satisfying synthesis of voluntarist and determinist elementsin its view of reality. They saw this conviction echoed by one of theleaders of Russian marxism when in 1902 Lenin published his pamphletWhat is to be done? with its call for a disciplined elite to lead the revolution: Give us an organisation and we will overturn Russia!" Theywere inspired by the "turbulent voluntarism"12 of Lenin's pamphlet,ut became increasingly aware that it was irreconcilable with the officialparty philosophy as formulated by G. Plekhanov, the founder and chiefideologist of Russian social democracy.

In his book On the question of the development of the monist view ofhistory (K voprosu 0 razvitii monisticheskogo vzgliada na istoriiu), andin numerous articles, Plekhanov interpreted the doctrine of the primacyof being over consciousness in the spirit of Engels' mechanistic materialism, according to which consciousness was historically and causallya product of matter, which Plekhanov defined as "that which, actingon our sense organs, gives rise to certain sensations in us". Matter isconsequently "an aggregate of things-in-themselves, inasmuch as thesethings are the source of our sensations".13 The materialists' thing-in-itself differs from the kantian noumen in that it is not in principle unknowablethe forms and relations of phenomena are "symbols" whichcorrespond precisely to the forms and relations of things-in-themselves;through this symbolic correspondence we may understand the action ofmatter on us and act on it in turn. Consciousness for Plekhanov ismerely a mirror reflecting the objective world whose laws and relationsare independent of it, although these laws may be used to man's advantage. Freedom is thus, to echo Engels' definition, the consciousness ofnecessity. "Human reason can triumph over blind inevitability onlyby apprehending its inner laws".14For the group of young voluntarists Plekhanov's doctrine of theprimacy of matter over consciousness failed to come to grips with "thegreat and subtle problems of philosophy".15 In its total denial of therole of subjective ideals as movers of history, it had made no advanceon the mechanistic materialism of the eighteenth century. "For us,Valentinov writes, socialism was expressed in the verbs 'sollen' 'wiin-schen'. For Plekhanov it was a ... historical inevitability": its triumphwould come through economic laws immanent in society, independentlyof 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 agreat deal of energy, the role of a fifth spoke is especially galling."16Thus, the new voluntarist revolt against the orthodoxy representedby Plekhanov began (as the neo-kantian revolt had done) as a demandfor the reassessment of the relation of objective historical laws to subjective goals and values. Its proponents were well aware of the resemblance: Lunacharskii describes an occasion in Kiev in 1808 when he read


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92 AILEEN KELLYa paper on the role of subjective values as movers of progress. N. Ber-diaev (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 askingthe same question, which Lunacharskii puts in Berdiaev's formulation:

"For Marx, socialism is a sociological inevitability: but does itfollow from this that it is a good? [...] can one prove that socialismis the highest possible ideal of our time without regard to theinterests of particular classes and independently of the questionof its inevitable arrival?"17Both groups believed that in treating subjective goals and values asmere epiphenomena, reflections of material processes, marxism was incontradiction with men's instinctive convictions, and that its claim tooffer an all-embracing interpretation of the world could be justified only

when its economic doctrines were supplemented by a satisfactory epis-temology. But at this point the two groups radically diverged; whilethe neo-kantians sought to replace an unsatisfactory monism by aconsistent dualism, separating the realms of fact and value, their rivalssaw this as a step back to "bourgeois" idealism; indeed their main criticism of Plekhanov's philosophy was that the concept of matter as thing-in-itself was dangerously close to the idealist concept of substance.A truly marxist philosophy would have to be consistently monist, andin their view Marx himself had indicated the direction which it shouldtake, in his Theses on Feuerbach, in particular in the first Thesis, wherehe had written:"The chief defect of all existing materialism that of Feuerbachincluded s that the thing [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness,is conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt] or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity,practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the activeside, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not knowreal, sensuous activity as such..."18

To the new revisionists, Marx's intentions were clear: marxism associal practice must be allied to a new activist form of cognition whichwould transcend the one-sidedness of idealism and materialism alike.As Bogdanov put it, Marx had indicated in the Theses how collectivistpractice would create new social forms; the task of a marxist philosophywas, by using Marx's view of the sociality of cognition as its guidingprinciple, to sketch out the corresponding conceptual forms, the "collectivist hilosophy of the proletariat".19 But they would not have to breakentirely new ground: the direction of the new epistemology had, theybelieved, already been outlined in the neo-positivism developed independently in Prague and Vienna by the scientist Ernst Mach and inZurich by the philosopher Richard Avenarius, who had given it the nameof empiriocriticism.The new philosophy (which owed much to the empiricism of Berkeley


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 93and Hume) was at the height of its popularity in the iSgo's when Avena-rius was professor of philosophy at the university of Zurich. Its aim wasto construct a monistic view of the world. It rejected, as not being adatum of experience, the distinction made by all dualistic systemsbetween subject and object, the inner and the outer world, the thing andits impression. Experienced reality, Avenarius taught, was a homogeneous world, in which the self, conceived as the central nervous system,was coordinated with the environment as the "central part" to its counterpart,oth 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 combinationsf one and the same primary material or "elements": the world(and the human ego) is neither mind nor matter but a complex of elementsknown 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 strugglefor survival. The more "economically" thought systmatises andcommunicates the data of experience, the more perfect is man's orientationn this straggle. The principle of economy of thought demandedthe rejection of classical materialist concepts of laws and causality, asmetaphysical assumptions with no basis in experience. Matter wasmerely a mental symbol standing for "a relatively stable complex ofsensational elements"20 and the categories of cause and purpose werereplaced by the functional concept of the permanence of certain connections. According to Mach, laws did not denote the underlying relationsof realities, but were methods of orientation in the flow of experience;their role being to select and order its components, they changed inaccordance with the practical demands of the struggle for survival.Both thinkers propounded an ethical monism, rejecting the autonomyof the sphere of the sollen in relation to the sein, on the grounds that nosuch opposition is given in experience; ethical problems fall within thesphere of science and can be solved by its methods.This attempt to return to a "natural" view of the world, stripped ofscientific and philosophical prejudices, bears some resemblance to thebiological voluntarism of Nietzsche, but differs from it in its anti-individualismnd its emphasis on cooperation and the cumulative nature ofexperience. Survival is seen as attained through cooperation, aided bythe communication of experiences which are stored in science. It is notindividual consciousness but the universal contents of consciousness andtheir continuity that are important: in Mach's words "the ego must begiven up".21The doctrines of Avenarius and Mach began to arouse interest amongRussian marxists in the mid-1890's; the university of Zurich, whereAvenarius taught, had long been a centre for Russians studying abroad,and in particular for young radicals in exile. The suspicion of metaphysics traditional among the intelligentsia predisposed these youngmen to the doctrines of Avenarius, and some of them became his mostenthusiastic students.22 Among these was Lunacharskii, who studiedin Zurich in 1895. A number of commentaries on empiriocriticism and


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94 AILEEN KELLYtranslations of individual works appeared in Russia at the turn of thecentury;23 one of the most active popularisers of the new philosophy wasBogdanov, who wrote the introduction to the Russian edition of Mach'smost influential work, The analysis of sensations. In the view of thegroup which began to form around Bogdanov and Lunacharskii, thedoctrines of Avenarius and Mach were singularly suited, in their monismand voluntarism, to serve as a support for the Theses on Feuerbach anda framework for the new philosophy of the proletariat.Firstly, empiriocriticism seemed to have demonstrated that a monistapproach to knowledge was an essential premiss for the goal of marxism:the unification of endeavours in man's battle with nature. Mach taughtthat all dualism was a hidden form of fetishism, rooted in primitiveanimism; and Bogdanov in particular gave much emphasis to Mach'sdemonstration of the way in which the fetishes inherent in current philosophical conceptions of causality, matter and force, hindered man'sunderstanding of the world. Matter and ideas could be defined only intheir relation to man's activity in society; materialism and idealism, bymaking absolutes of one or the other, effected an artificial break in experience. Here "machism" (as empiriocriticism was sometimes called)echoed marxism: Bogdanov pointed out that if Marx in the Theses hadonly obliquely referred to the fetishism inherent in the classic materialistconcept of matter, in the first chapter of Capital he had shown fetishismto be characteristic of capitalist relations where the objects of humanactivity become subjects and men are degraded to the status of objects:the products of man's labour become his master, just as in religion theproducts of man's brain acquire authority over him. The revolutionarydestruction of fetishism in practical life must be accompanied by thedestruction of its intellectual counterparts.24Secondly, empiriocriticism's approach to knowledge as the organisationf experience seemed to correspond closely to the dynamism of theapproach to reality as social practice outlined in the Theses namely,Marx's "collectivist method"26 as Bogdanov called it, of ordering the dataof experience from the viewpoint of mankind engaged in a battle withnature. It seemed to provide an appropriate epistemological basis forthe revolutionary voluntarism of the last Thesis: "The philosophershave only interpreted the world in various ways. Our task is to changeit."26Bogdanov was generally regarded as the leading philosopher of thegroup;27 with two exceptions he empiriosymbolism of Iushkevich28and the godbuilding (bogostroitel'stvo) of Lunacharskii and Gor'kii, theother empiriocriticists did not attempt to construct independent systemsof their own.The survey of the movement which follows will be concerned with itsdominant characteristics, and not with individual contributions to it.Thus reference will principally be made to the writings of three of itsmost representative and prominent members: Bogdanov, Lunacharskiiand Bazarov.In his work Empiriomonism and other books and articles, Bogdanovpropounded a modification of empiriocriticism, which he consideredinsufficiently monist to be the basis of a "proletarian philosophy".


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 95He saw the concept of a functional link between conditions and the conditioned as a watered-down version of "fetishistic" conceptions of causality,and proposed a concept of causality based on the energeticism of WilhelmOstwald, who like Mach was a critic of the mechanical interpretationof physical phenomena and who substituted the notion of energy forthat of "ultimate" particles like atoms or molecules. Cause and effect,according to Bogdanov, should be conceived as a sum of energy in successive phases. This monistic view of causality was appropriate for theproletariat, the principle of the conservation and transformation ofenergy being the "ideological essence" of machine technology. For whathe saw as the "dualistic" distinction between two types of experience, thephysical and the mental, each being regarded as irreducible to the other,he substituted another distinction (also more in line, in his view, withproletarian practice in production) between two phases or types of organisation: individually organised experience (of practical validity only forthe individual), and socially organised experience (in harmony with theaccumulated experience of society at a given time).29Finally, Bogdanov believed that the empiriocriticists had too passivea view of the role of cognition in relation to reality, maintaining like thematerialists that its task was to orientate itself in the world rather than tochange it; Marx, as the Theses revealed, had been the first to understandthat the role of cognition must be active and organising: in the dynamicprocess of man's battle with nature, to understand the world was eo ipsoto change it.Armed with the theories of Avenarius and Mach and the Theses onFeuerbach the empiriocriticists launched an attack on Plekhanov's postulate of an objective suprahistorical truth, summarised in a phrase whichthey frequently quoted against him: "no fate will move us from the correctpoint of view which has finally been revealed."30 They pointed out thatthis was the standpoint of "contemplative", unhistorical materialismdescribed by Marx in the Theses as unable to rise to an understandingof the dynamics of man's social relations, because it saw the cognitiveprocess as the description or reflection of a world forever given.31 Marxhad explicitly refuted it in the second Thesis:

"The question whether objective [gegenstndliche] truth can beattributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but isa practical question. [...] The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purelyscholastic question."32One of the most telling attacks on Plekhanov and his followers wasmade by Bazarov in 1908 in a contribution to a empiriocriticist symposium n marxist theory. By a judicious use of texts, including not onlythe Theses, but also Marx's criticism of Bruno Bauer in the Nachlass, andhis analysis (in The Holy Family) of the concept of substance as a metaphysical illusion, Bazarov foreshadowed many later critics in demonstratinghat the "reflection" theory of cognition, with its opposition of subjectand object, was an inverted form of idealist dualism: its proponents

believed that "There is only one way whereby the materialist-meta-


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AILEEN KELLYphysician can humble the creative pretensions of this unsympathetic'subjective' substance: by subordinating it to another, sympathetic,objective' substance supraexperiential nature". Yet Marx in theTheses, with his monist conception of reality as human practice, "wasinfinitely far removed from this naive "either-or".33Bogdanov argued that Plekhanov's "thing-in-itself" was a fetishcharacteristic of "authoritarian social relations" and of "bourgeoisindividualism" which distinguished between experience, seen as necessarily individual and subjective, and objective reality which caused itbut was outside its bounds.34 He pointed out that this naive dualismled Plekhanov and his followers to misinterpret Marx's statement in hisCritique of political economy that "social being determines the socialconsciousness of man". They took "being" to be external to consciousness,hereas, as the Theses on Feuerbach showed, Marx believed thateconomic factors were inseparable from consciousness: they were thelabour relations of men, not the physical relations of bodies, and labourwas a conscious activity: "Social being and social consciousness [...] areidentical".35This perception of Marx's fundamental activism was unique at aperiod when Marx was generally held to be an economist who offered ascientific demonstration of the inevitable breakdown of capitalism; withfew of Marx's early writings available, Engels' later works were the sourceof the marxist interpretation of materialism. It was nearly two decadesbefore the early writings of Marx, showing him to be far removed fromthe mechanistic determinism preached by Engels, began to be generallyknown. But the empiriocriticists' understanding of what Marx meantby "social practice" was severely distorted by the fact that they knewnothing of the conception of the dialectic which Marx had elaboratedin his early writings on alienation. Like Plekhanov, they identifiedMarx's view of the dialectic with the mechanistic formulation given byEngels in the AntiDuhring and the Dialectics of nature. It is to theseworks that Bogdanov referred when he launched an attack on the dialectic, arguing that the triadic system of development through contradictions was a relic of idealist thought, and had meaning only in the worldof abstract logic;36 he substituted a formulation of dialectical conflictbased on the biological evolutionism of Avenarius and Mach, as "anorganisational process proceeding by means of contradictions, or, whatis the same thing, by a conflict between various tendencies",37 someleading to a loss, others to a gain of energy, the resolution of conflictbeing marked by a restoration of equilibrium. As such, dialecticalconflict was only one of the forms taken by the battle for survival. Theworld whole, including human society, consisted of "endless rows ofcomplexes [...] at different stages of organisation";38 the criterion ofprogress in human society was thus the same as that in the animal andorganic world: "an increase in the organisation of complexes".39 In thehuman species this could be defined as an increase in the harmony andquality of experience. In this light he sees the phenomena of capitalismand class war as representing a state of disorganisation in which individuallynd socially organised experiences were at odds with each other.With the end of class war the boundaries between physical and mental


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 97experience would be effaced. Men were moving towards a unifiedexperience as the content of a unified cognition. The social and legalforms and moral norms which developed in this process were, like biologicalorms, adaptations in the battle for survival, subject to the law ofselection, their fate being determined by the extent to which the net gainin vital energy in the production process (measured by "the growth inenergy of the mental apparatus of the members of society")40 outweighedthe loss incurred by the disturbance of the existing equilibrium.41In the words of Lunacharskii (who saw Bogdanov as the foremostmarxist philosopher of his time) "science", in the form of empiriocriticism,ad , by replacing the dialectic with a biological voluntarism, onceand for all refuted what, in the words of Croce, he called "the subjectivecategory of inevitability".42 It had shown that there existed no certainlaws, only hypotheses, probabilities: the proposition that progress is animmanent law of nature was a metaphysical, and therefore a meaninglessone. The initial dependence of labour on the environment

"does not limit its liberty ]...] but merely places external impedimentson it. The thirst for life this is the free principle in theorganism, and in so far as it can, it processes its environment inits own way."43In believing that this biological voluntarism represented a marxistphilosophy the empiriocriticists were much mistaken; their voluntarismcame from a very different philosophical stable from that of Marx.Ironically, it was closer to the vulgarised Darwinism of Engels (whosemechanistic determinism by applying dialectic to nature divorced itfrom the mediation of human consciousness), than the voluntarism ofMarx, which, as the early Manuscripts show, was rooted in Hegel's categories and in the hegelian dialectic with its view of the world as self-estrangement of Spirit. For Engels, matter was the source of the evolutionf consciousness; in Marx's materialist version of Hegel's metaphysics,man was the conscious creator of the world. In Marx's dialectic, thoughman satisfies his needs through contact with nature, the process wherebythe gap between being and consciousness was to be closed was a historicalone, brought about not by mechanistic responses of the organism tomaterial stimuli but by the conscious shaping of historical conditions, in

the course of which man in the act of satisfying his needs dialecticallycreates both new needs and new possibilities of satisfying them.Empiriocriticism was thus theoretically incompatible with marxism apoor qualification for the role envisaged for it by the aspiring "philosophers of the proletariat". But it was designed to fulfil a need that wasemotional as much as intellectual. Its proponents had an immediatepractical goal: to sustain and increase the intelligentsia's revolutionaryenthusiasm by allowing it to justify and defend its voluntarism, traditionally expressed in the ideal of the integral personality, against theencroachments of the "integral world view" of orthodox marxism. Inthis area, too, its achievements were minimal; but the attempt and thereactions which it provoked among the opponents of empiriocriticism,


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98 AILEEN KELLYshed much light on the psychology of the marxist intelligentsia and thedegree of its self-awareness in the years immediately following the 1905revolution.

In the years before 1905, the empiriocriticists had concentrated theirattacks on what they saw as the theoretical defects of the official philosophy. After the 1905 revolution, the emphasis in the movementchanged: the new philosophy was advanced above all as a solution to amoral crisis among the marxist intelligentsia. For many of them theevents of 1905 marked the end of a long honeymoon with marxism. Theoutbreaks which began the revolution owed nothing to marxist propaganda, and the party which Lenin had confidently predicted would turnRussia upside down had been as much surprised by events as the otherpolitical parties. The revolutionary intelligentsia's sense of its impotenceand its lack of contact with the masses was sharpened during the subsequent reaction, when the revolutionary parties found it difficult torally mass support. The result was the intensification of factionalsquabbles within the social-democratic party, and an increase in self-questioning among its members as to the party's goals and the relation ofintellectuals to the mass movement. In the view of the empiriocriticistshis was the crisis whose seeds they had discerned several yearspreviously.. In 1910 P. Iushkevich characterised it as follows:

"Marxism [...] is sick [...] from a broad and liberating idea anddoctrine it is becoming in the hands of narrow-minded people theinstrument of ideological enslavement [...] its spring of theoreticalcreativity has dried up, its internal differences of opinion havetaken on the character of intellectual slaughter [...] As thoughpossessed by the spirit of mutual destruction [...] we are ready totear out each other's throats on any pretext: for a paragraph ofthe regulations on organisation, for a point in the agrarian programme, for a philosophical disagreement, for a difference in theevaluation of some political group, or for a crime such as that ofdrinking tea with the Kadet-philistines. Around every disputabletrifle a rapid process of crystallisation begins. Bolsheviks,mensheviks, partyites, rabochesyezdovites, boycottists, antiboy-cottists, materialists, machists, then otzovists, ultimatists, liquidators [...], potresovites, and so on, endlessly [...] In sum, anendless marking of time, an atmosphere permeated with hatredand enmity."44

Iushkevich argued that the party theoreticians had failed to understand that these destructive polemics had ceased to interest the mass ofthe marxist intelligentsia, who yearned for a socialism imbued with aconstructive spirit, an enthusiasm and faith comparable to that whichhad inspired the great religions.A similar diagnosis was made in a flurry of books and articles, includingwo symposia in which the empiriocriticists offered their doctrines as


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 99a remedy for the prevailing malaise. In a preface to the symposiumEssays on the philosophy of marxism (Ocherki po filosofii marksizma)the seven contributors stated that, although their theoretical positionswere far from identical, they were united in seeing socialism as concernednot merely with material reforms, but also with the "higher demandsof the human spirit"46: and while they had no intention of defecting tothe idealist camp, they had ceased to find a response to these demandsin orthodox marxism. The central theme of the symposium is thathistorical determinism, narrowly interpreted by the party theorists, haddestroyed the revolutionary enthusiasm of socialism and turned its poetryinto dull prose. Allegiance to "one-sided" doctrines which ignored themoral and emotional demands of the personality had led among the moreidealistic 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 inhis book Religion and socialism (Religiia i sotsializm). He asserts "ifour materialists are confident and active [...] it is in spite of their materialismnd not because of it".46 To be consistent, a marxist of Plekhanov'sschool had to discard such sentiments as love of humanity and hatredof oppression as "merely froth, merely unmaterial and unnecessaryreflections of a materially inevitable process"; his role was "simply,prosaically to do the work foreordained by history: may what the prophetsave spoken come to pass".47Lunacharskii argued that what had been regarded as the strengthof marxism, namely, its claim to be "scientific", was its main weakness.Deducing social goals from an objective analysis of the laws of socialdevelopment, it dismissed subjective ideals and values as epiphenomena.But it was a psychological fact that man was an evaluating as well as acognizing creature, and that his actions flowed from these two attributesallied in "the fulness of the human attitude to the world".48 Marxismprecluded itself from offering answers to the questions which mosttormented man: "how and for what shall I live?"49The empiriocriticists argued that by demanding suppression of vitalinstincts and feelings, Plekhanov's "fetish" of the thing-in-itself was noless destructive in its effect on the personality than the fetishes erectedby religious and metaphysical systems. Lunacharskii characterised hisorthodox opponents as the spiritual descendants of Bazarov, the "nihilist" ero of Turgenev's Fathers and children (Otsy i dti), a narrowrationalist who claimed to base his actions uniquely on scientific principles, uninfluenced by moral or aesthetic impulses, feelings or ideals;and he pointed out that Marx himself had criticised eighteenth-centurymaterialism in this respect for the one-sidedness of its mechanistic viewof the movement of matter: this movement was also "striving, vitalspirit, tension".50 There was only one way in which the moral and emotional demands of the personality could be reconciled with "scientificsocialism": through the empiriocriticists' approach which, by postulatinghe equal reality of the physical and the mental, made marxism both"a science and a practical philosophy, a synthesis of inevitability and theideal".51

Within the framework of empiriocriticism the rebel philosophers


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100 AILEEN KELLYdeveloped an ideal of the "new man" of the future, an "integral personality" who would not suffer from the divisions of their own "epoch ofcontradictions".52 Progress, they emphasised, was an increase bothin the quantity and harmony of experience. For Lunacharskii the idealis "a personality harmonious in all its desires [...] a society of suchpeople".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 assimilateand destroy [them]."64In their ideal of the integral man the empiriocriticists were (as theneo-kantian revisionists had been) strongly influenced by Nietzsche.65Lunacharskii describes his ethical position as "aesthetic amoralism",based on a nietzschian voluntarism and on contemporary aesthetictheory, which shared the common principle of "fulness of life". Hesupports his aesthetic voluntarism with a physiological explanation ofethics derived from Avenarius: all organisms share the "thirst for life",a striving for the most intense experiences in the greatest possible quantity. All ethical impulses may thus be subsumed under the principleof "the greatest possible flowering of the life of the genus", which Lunacharskii proposes as the basis of "a general science of evaluation".66The empiriocriticists reject "kantian" ethics, centred on the conceptsof duty and self-denial, as irreconcilable with the goal of harmony.Bogdanov sees legal and ethical norms as "fetishes",67 and in an essayin the symposium Studies for a realistic world view (Ocherki realistiches-kogo mirovozzreniia). Bazarov points out that empiriocriticism hasinvalidated the normative ethics of the past by showing that cognitionpresents men not with obligatory laws but with heuristic norms, elaborated ccording to the demands of the struggle for survival and theprinciple of the harmonisation of life.

"The psychology of a free man cannot be reconciled with any formof leadership. That man is not free who is afraid of himself, whodoes not dare to acknowledge that each of his sensations is inprinciple of equal value, [and who does not] seek in them, in thetestimony of direct feeling, the norms of his life. The demand foran absolute non-empirical norm [...] is psychological slavery."58Following Nietzsche, Bazarov denies that altruism and self-sacrifice,traditionally conceived, are virtues; like Nietzche's Superman, the newsocialist man will use others as instruments in his creative battle withnature, 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 conflictbetween duty and pleasure and do good from inclination, cannot be virtuous. The psychology behind the categorical imperative was oneregrettably widespread in Russian society; it was represented by thephenomenon of the "repentant noblemen" and the heroes of Dostoevskii,for whom torment and suffering, duality and division were "the pearlof creation". To the principle of obligation Bazarov opposes the heuristic

principle of the "harmonisation of life": the search for norms which


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? ioiwould permit man to include in his life all attainable pleasures. Asdistinct from the dionysian apotheosis of instinct, this goal would demanda conscious and critical evaluation of experience by one criterion thatof harmony, defined as "a general feeling of heightened sensation, offulness of life, of spiritual uplift".59Their enthusiasm for the morality of the Superman has led the empirio-criticists to be called "nietzschian marxists";60 somewhat misleadingly,inasmuch as they were unanimously opposed to the individualism whichwas central to Nietzsche's ideal. They all endorsed the collectivistemphasis of empiriocriticism and stressed that their voluntarism wasanti-individualist. Bazarov asserted that "the recognition of the personality as an absolute principle has always been and will always be aliento the proletariat";61 while Lunacharskii observed that individualismwas characteristic of social decadence: "For a true socialist reality is thegenus, mankind."62 They conceived of the Superman in collectivistterms, as the class of the proletariat, asserting that it was through theharmonising of individual with collective experience in the creativityof the class that the individual attained his integrality. In the wordsof Lunacharskii: "[man] is a part, and without the corresponding wholehas no meaning."63

To sum up: in their revolt against official marxist philosophy theempiriocriticists were seeking to resolve a tension endemic in the outlookof the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, between voluntarism and thesearch for absolutes. Their rebellion followed a pattern very similar tothat of the neo-kantian revisionists: a criticism of the one-sidedness ofmarxist determinism as constricting and distorting the personality,followed by the demand for a rvaluation of ideals and values from thestandpoint of the aspirations of the "integral man", whose harmony andself-fulfilment (conceived in terms strongly influenced by the aestheticamoralism of Nietzsche) were set up as the goal of history. However,while the neo-kantians held that the ideal of individual wholeness entailedan ethical individualism incompatible with marxism as a collectivistphilosophy of progress, the empiriocriticists believed that their task wasto synthesise the ideal of the whole and harmonious individual with themarxist vision of mankind as collectively moving to one single, unitaryview of reality. For them the ideal of the integral personality wasinseparable from an integral view of the world. The author of the Introduction to the symposium Studies for a realistic world view put it asfollows:

"the fullest and strongest life is life that is integral and harmonious: this means that the most perfect and powerful cognitionmust be unitary and harmonious; this means that truth is monist."The same writer attacks the "subjectivist sociology" through whichthe Russian populists had sought to defend the interests of the "integralpersonality" against the demands of universals and absolutes. They had


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102 AILEEN KELLYsuffered from eclecticism, "the professional illness of the intelligentsia":"Eclecticism is a sign of weakness, an expression of a pitiful, unharmo-nious life."64Curiously, Bogdanov, who had been the most enthusiastic of theempiriocriticists in welcoming marxism as the liberating "negation ofthe absolute objectivity of any truth whatsoever, the negation of alleternal 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 mostprimitive 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 inconsistencyhe is directly following Avenarius and Mach. Their dmystification ofknowledge, their attacks on the "fetishes" of dogmas and laws were onlythe means for achieving what they saw as the goal of human reason, theconstruction of a unitary vision of the world as a basis for the unificationof all endeavours of thought and action. As Mach asserted, by reducingthe material world to a complex of identical elements, "we may reasonably ope to build a unified monistic structure [...] and thus to get rid ofthe distressing confusions of dualism".67 The tool for this task wasphilosophy which, being the only discipline concerned with all areas ofhuman experience, could, they believed, integrate all the data of thesciences into one harmonious whole.This concern to eliminate the "distressing effects" of the divisionsof consciousness led both thinkers into contradiction with their ownempiricism. As their critics have pointed out, their assertion that thegoal of reason is a unitary world view is not a deduction from experiencebut an a priori assumption, a metaphysical hypothesis designed to satisfyman's need to overcome his sense of an inner split.68 Whatever itspsychological justification, the view, stressed by Avenarius more thanMach, that knowledge is moving in a continuous progression towardsone all-embracing synthesis, was in direct contradiction with the radicalreaction against dogmas and absolutes which had led both to emphasisethe relative, provisional and exclusively methodological significance ofscientific laws.This paradoxical combination of "nihilism" and faith undoubtedlyaccounts for the overwhelming attraction which empiriocriticism hadfor its Russian adherents; but as a result they were caught in a viciouscircle. Their revolt against marxist determinism had been a defence ofthe personality with its subjective goals and values in the face of objectivehistorical laws; but they were not individualists. Together with Machthey believed that "the ego must be given up". The integrality, creativitynd even the free will which they defend against abstract norms andsanctions are themselves lodged in an abstraction: the collective. It istrue that Lunacharskii admits that in the contemporary world "thereconciliation of the ideal of fulness of life for myself and maximumbenefit to the genus is not always possible";69 but he believes that thisis due to the distorting effect of capitalist society which suppresses thegenus instinct and leads the individual to see his own urge for wholeness


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 103as being opposed to the interests of the collective. In the socialistsociety "the personal and the genus instinct [will] fuse; [...] the individualwill value himself as a moment in the great Ufe of the genus"70 ... Bogdanovsees the ego as a temporary "adaptation" designed to cope with the disharmony between individually and socially organised experience. Whenthis conflict is resolved, the ego win disappear.71Thus, the promethean revolt of the marxist Superman comes to a verytame conclusion; his pioneering egotism is expressed in absolute obedienceto universal moral norms; according to Lunacharskii the individualincreases 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, receivingtheir spiritual make up from them and determined in general [...] by theirfate."72

The omnipotent marxist voluntarist exists, but only as an idealabstraction: the empiriocriticists have gone full circle, to arrive back atthat thing-in-itself from which they had once retreated in indignantrevolt. Real men were merely the predicates of an abstraction as muchbeyond experience as Plekhanov's "thing-in-itself": "The individualis merely a particular expression of the essence of mankind".73 A newgod had been set up: all that remained was to found a new cult. Thiswas done in the theory of godbuilding; an offshoot of empiriocriticism,it exposes at its most candid and naive the thirst for faith which inspiredthe marxist rebels.Godbuilding" (bogostroitel'stvo) was developed by Lunacharskii inconjunction with Maxim Gor'kii, who expounded it in literary form in hisnovel Confession {Ispove, 1908). Lunacharskii elaborated it in hisbook Religion and socialism, and in a number of articles. In his bookhe attributes the scepticism and apathy prevailing among revolutionariesto 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'sindividuality by fusing with an "infinite life force". This need wasespecially sharply felt in conditions of disorientation and social pessimism such as those prevailing after 1905; and it could be satisfied onlyby religion "a conception and sense of the world which resolves thecontradiction between the ideal and reality", and which provided faithin the future by positing "a higher force kindred to the individual, closeto him, on which he can place his hopes".74"[Religion] will unite the romantic, self-sacrificing, religiouslysupra-individual practice of social democracy with its philosophy,which has attempted in its stern modesty to give itself a dry andcalculating exterior, with no small loss to its cause."75

Lunacharskii's new proletarian religion is anthropocentric: "thegenus, the collective, is the centre; the personality revolves round it butfeels itself deeply united with it".76 Its prophets include Fichte, whosevoluntarism Lunacharskii defines as a "collectivist" philosophy in whichthe individual is the instrument for "the manifestation of the pure egoin the aggregate of rational beings"77 (he attributes the initial inspiration


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

In a campaign which began in 1904 and reached its climax in 1909,the orthodox Russian marxists attacked the empiriocriticist heresy ontwo grounds: its theoretical defects and its social significance. The firstcategory of criticism, which includes one of the sacred texts of Russianmarxism, is both better known and much less interesting than the second,and requires only a brief summary here.The first published attack on empiriocriticism was an article byiubov'Aksel'rod, written in 1904, apparently at the request of Lenin.88A faithful pupil of Plekhanov, Aksel'rod maintained that the essence ofmaterialism lies in the doctrine of the primacy of being over consciousness;the latter being causally dependent on the former, its task is to reflectand adapt to the objective reality which exists outside it and independentlyf it. By conceiving of the physical world as experience, empiriocriticism was asserting that nature had no existence outside consciousness:t was thus a form of subjective idealism verging on solipsism, andirreconcilable with a marxist vision of the world.Of the subsequent attacks on the heresy the principal ones were alengthy refutation of Bogdanov by Plekhanov published in 1908,83 and

Lenin's work of 1909, Materialism and empiriocriticism. Both are no


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 105more than a restatement of the principal theses of Plekhanov's work.On the question of the development of the monist view of history, accompaniedy 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 supportedby copious quotations from Engels (in particular his AntiDilhring andLudwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy) He doespoint to the incompatibility between Marx's view of history and thebiological voluntarism of empiriocriticism, but his work is remarkableabove all for what one critic has described as Lenin's "inability to understand the nature of philosophical worry";85 its crude and contemptuoustone expresses throughout the conviction that all philosophical problemscan be solved by the application of a dose of common sense. Theargument which he most frequently uses is starkly simple: all doctrineswhich do not regard matter as primary and spirit as secondary belongto the category of "subjective idealism" and lead inescapably to "thepurest solipsism".86 This crude reductionism makes short work ofphilosophical subtlety: Avenarius' proposition that the natural scientistcannot abstract himself (i.e. his thinking consciousness), from his pictureof the world, is interpreted by Lenin as the denial of something "notdoubted 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".87In his conclusion Lenin defines the role of empiriocriticism in theclass war. He reminds his readers of the party nature (partiinos)of truth: behind the "gnoseological agnosticism" of empiriocriticism therelurks the ideology of a class hostile to the proletariat. Contemporaryprofessors of philosophy are the "scientific henchmen" of theologians,and empiriocriticism is "totally" reactionary:88 "[its] objective, classrole can be entirely summed up as subservience to the fideists in theirbattle against materialism in general and historical materialism inparticular".89This definition of the class significance of empiriocriticism raises anobvious question: why did a philosophy so antagonistic to the classinterests of the proletariat find its main defendants among the leadingbolshevik theorists? Lenin devotes no more than four lines in his longwork to this embarrassing question. It is, he writes, "the misfortune"of the Russian "machists" that they "put their trust in reactionaryprofessors of philosophy".90 Having done so, they slid down a slipperyslope.If Lenin found it politic to attribute the popularity of empiriocriticismamong his followers to an intellectual aberration which could be remediedby repentance and a return to the fold, the menshevik theorists had noreasons for refraining from a closer examination of the "class" significanceof the heresy on their own doorstep. In the words of Liubov' Aksel'rod,if it was not outstanding in its philosophical content, it had "conspicuoushistorical significance".91 The mensheviks were at one with the empirio-criticists themselves in seeing the movement as the expression of a crisisin the relations between the Russian intelligentsia and the revolutionarymovement; but their interpretation of the crisis was very different.


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I06 AILEEN KELLYThe menshevik analyses of the social significance of empiriocriticismin Russia are closely connected with their opposition to the bolsheviks onthe issue of the "liquidation" of the party. After 1905 Lenin envisagedthe next phase of the revolution in terms of a proletarian and peasantrising, and he continued to preach the view (which had led to his breakwith the mensheviks) that the revolution must have strong leadershipin the form of a secret organisation consisting of a small vanguard ofdisciplined, professional revolutionaries. The mensheviks on the otherhand believed that Russia was still in the "bourgeois democratic" phaseof revolution, which had not been completed in 1905 because the liberalparties had been insufficiently strong to seize power; and although mostof them believed that in the conditions of repression illegal party committees had to continue to exist, they called for the party to devote mostof its energies to the creation of a mass proletarian party on the westernmodel, to replace the existing party of underground conspirators out oftouch with the everyday interests and activities of the masses. From

1908 Lenin bitterly attacked the leading proponents of this view asliquidators" who were striving for the total disbanding of the existingparty and wished to confine social-democrat politics to legally permittedtrade union activities. The "liquidators" on the other hand saw inLenin's attitude the same "jacobin" mistrust of the spontaneous massmovement as had led to the split in the party in 1903. One of the leadingfigures among them, A. N. Potresov, repeatedly pointed out that as yetthere existed in Russia only the embryo of a party in the marxist sense.Its development was frustrated by the continued and unnatural hegemonyof the intelligentsia over the mass movement, which it was using as "aninstrument on which to play its heroic symphony"; instead of the partyconsolidating the proletarian movement, the latter was serving to consolidate he party, as an apparatus in the hands of the intelligentsia.92Potresov's conclusions were seen as too extreme by many in his ownfaction; but his approach reflected a general interest among mensheviktheoreticians in the social and political significance of contemporarymovements of ideas among the intelligentsia. This led them to seek tointerpret empiriocriticism as part of a general movement rooted in thecharacter of the intelligentsia as a whole. In three articles publishedin 1909 and entitled On the so-called religious seekings in Russia (O taknazyvaemvkh religioznykh iskaniiakh v Rossii),83 Plekhanov pointed tothe similarities between Lunacharskii's "godbuilding" and the religiousrevival among the intelligentsia at the turn of the century, which hadbeen closely connected with the first revisionist movement in Russianmarxism. Lunacharskii's ideology represented a phenomenon recurrentamong the radical intelligentsia but especially evident after 1905a lossof faith in the triumph of a collective social ideal and a resurgence ofindividualism, expressed in introspection and a search for the "meaningof life"; an attempt to find a religious solution for their anxiety aboutthe fate of their personalities in an alien world. Lunacharskii was "atypical Russian intelligent, one of the most impressionable kind".94Though he claimed to speak for the proletariat, he had nothing in commonwith it; his new god had been created "for the improvement, edificationand encouragement of the languishing intelligenty" 9b


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 107Plekhanov offers no real analysis of the causes of the crisis among theintelligentsia, nor any conclusions as to the latter's future in the revolutionary movement. But other menshevik theorists, with Potresov mostprominent 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 movement, and decide whether to identify with the mass movement or topreserve its "intelligentsia" values by reneging from marxism. This isthe theme of a collection of articles by ten leading menshevik theorists(including Potresov, Dan, Martov and L. Aksel'rod) published in 1909and entitled On the boundary (Na mbezhe).96 The authors attempta general interpretation from a marxist point of view of the religious,literary and philosophical movements in Russia from the turn of thecentury, focusing on the pessimistic sense of the rift between the individualand society which they see as common to them all, a symptom of thedecadence of the bourgeois elements of society. F. Dan sees the individualismf all the religious and philosophical movements of the time asrepresenting "the impotent revolt of 'the personality' against 'theenvironment' which it could not [...] control",97 and he analyses thisrevolt among the radical intelligentsia after 1905. The reality of therevolution had been in sharp contradiction with the intelligentsia's rosyhopes. The "people" had not played the role expected of it; it had notleapt over the obstacles which historical reality had placed in its way.Instead of a triumphant march into the kingdom of freedom, there hadensued a protracted and inglorious phase of class war, in the course ofwhich the specific class characteristics and aspirations of the proletariatemerged more clearly, causing "a dissonance in the common 'radical'music".98 Notes were sounded from the depths which found no intellectual or emotional response among the intelligentsia. The poetry oflofty ideals was replaced by the prose of material class interests, and bymundane antlike labours which required neither heroes nor leaders, butcooperation, patience and technical skill. The radical intelligentsia'scharacteristic voluntarism and individualism, previously channelled intoa heroic vision of socialism, began to assert itself in a sense of affinitywith other less radical sections of society; wide ranks of the intelligentsiaexperienced a thirst for spiritual liberation from a traditional causewhich was now revealed as an alien one, and began to search for a faithmore specifically their own. As this could not be a proletarian faith, itcould only be a bourgeois one; the "bourgeois rebirth of the intelligentsia'ssyche",99 taking place at a time of reaction, found expression notin constructive work for the goals of bourgeois democracy, but in socialapathy and religious mysticism, or in the impotent pretence of vitality:the cult of strength and the preaching of hedonistic ethics in much ofcontemporary literature and philosophy. This phenomenon was notwholly negative; it was the sign of the "inevitable liquidation" of theintelligentsia's hegemony over the social movement; some would join theranks of the liberals, others would follow those who had already fusedwith the proletariat and been "ideologically reborn in their innermostdepths".100Dan did not explicitly refer to empiriocriticism as an illustration of


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I08 AILEEN KELLYthis process, but two other contributors to the collection, Martov andAksel'rod, did. Martov, after an interpretation similar to Dan's of thecrisis among the intelligentsia, concludes with an analysis of the theoryof godbuilding as an expression of the intelligentsia's traditional voluntarism. Lunacharskii's precept "By faith [...] alone will you be saved;by faith alone will you rise above the 'everyday level' of the contemporaryclass battle" is, he asserts, couched in the language of a demagogue:

"It is the formula of a movement in which the shepherd and thesheep, the leader and the led, are sharply differentiated andopposed; in which there exist two truths the esoteric and theexoteric; in which the ideologue utters lies because the masses arenot in a state to accommodate the truth."101According to Martov, Lunacharskii's "religion of the social myth",like all intelligentsia utopianism, represented a view of the relationshipbetween the leaders and the masses which, though incompatible withmarxist ideology, had entered Russian social democracy largely becauseof the "immaturity" of social conditions in the country. The new rel

igion was an attempt to sanction and reconstruct relations already condemned by historynamely, the doctrine of "the hegemony of the'intelligentsia' in the social movement, with its 'aristocratic' positionin relation to the masses". But he confidently predicts its failure: in theproletarian movement of tomorrow there would be no place for sectarianism or jacobinism as "relics of the past".102There is no such optimism in Liubov' Aksel'rod's analysis. Her firstattack on empiriocriticism had been written at the request of Lenin.Now, however, she points out that it is no coincidence that the majorityof the bolshevik theorists are empiriocriticistsbolshevism is "penetratedthrough and through with the method of thought of empiriocriticistphilosophy".103 It shared the latter's two fundamental characteristics:a voluntarism which reflected a "boundless subjective arbitrariness",104and a rigid dogmatism. Empiriocriticism's theory of the identity of thephysical and the mental, by allowing no clear boundary in principlebetween subjective and objective truth, gave no firm criteria for distinguishing between reality on the one hand and Utopian illusions on theother; it encouraged the "machist romantic" to ignore the objectivelimits on his will. On the other hand, empiriocriticism was immovablydogmatic; in a view of the world in which the principles of cause andeffect were understood as functional relations coordinated by consciousness,here was no real place for the concepts of historical process ordevelopment in time. The task of science was reduced to establishing anadequate "picture" of the world, the fundamentaUy conservative taskof describing "that which is".lobShe argued that bolshevism expressed the same paradoxical combination of boundless voluntarism and rigid dogmatism. Its theoreticalbasis was the view of the relation of consciousness to spontaneity expressedy Lenin in his pamphlet What is to be done?, the view that the roleof the critically thinking marxist intelligentsia was to lead the spontaneousworking class masses. However, the theory of the omnipotence of


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 109the conscious individual which was used to justify the dictatorship ofthe social-democrat intellectuals over the masses was based on illusion:the masses followed "conscious" individuals only when there was intellectual contact between themnamely, when the masses themselves hadattained a high level of consciousness. Otherwise, in order to attractthe masses, the conscious individual was forced to adapt to their instincts,using the methods of the demagogue to arouse their "unformed revolutionary passions".106 The bolsheviks' relationship with the masseswas that of the hero and the crowd. But the more bolshevism departedfrom marxist principles and tactics, the more dogmatically rigid it becameregarding the ultimate goals of revolution. It discarded the concept ofprocess essential to marxism, the view of the development of revolutionaryconsciousness in historical stages which involved tactical compromisesand alliances; instead it preached uncompromising isolationism, theimmediate and simultaneous realisation of the social-democrat "programme minimum" expressed in schematic form, in simple slogansdesigned to inflame mass passions.In sum, according to Aksel'rod, empiriocriticism was ideally suitedto those lacking in a sense of historical process, whether they be "peacefulourgeois" or romantic Utopians. In its mixture of dogmatism and"vulgar empiricism" it was what its proponents claimed it to be thetheoretical counterpart to bolshevik practice.107

Liubov' Aksel'rod's analysis, though suffering from a liberal use of thejargon of marxist polemics, is the most interesting of the contributions tothe debate on empiriocriticism s significance as an intelligentsia ideology.It was the fate of the empiriocriticists that their claim to be the theoristsof bolshevik practice was taken seriously only by the mensheviks. Butin the last analysis the strongest support for their claim (and for Aksel'rod's nterpretation of it) may be seen to have come from Lenin himself.For what is most significant in his reaction to empiriocriticism is not whathe wrote against it, but when he chose to attack it and why.Lenin's initial reaction to the attempt to marry empiriocriticism withsocial democracy was no less extreme than Plekhanov's. Valentinov,who took on himself the task of acquainting him with the theories ofAvenarius 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 verypractical ones: the main philosopher of the movement, Bogdanov, wasessential to him in the battle to establish the hegemony of his factionin the social-democrat party. Bogdanov's decision to join the bolshevikfaction in 1904 was a windfall for Lenin; he had an impressive intellectualreputation and a wide network of literary and political contacts (includingor'kii) in Moscow and St . Petersburg. He soon became editor of thebolshevik organ Vpered and Lenin's right-hand man in the organisation


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110 AILEEN KELLYof the new group and in particular of its finances. With Lenin and Krasinhe formed a secret group controlling large sums of money obtained byquestionable methods, mainly by what was euphemistically known as"expropriation": bank robberies with violence. It was in the interestsof this fruitful collaboration that, as Lenin wrote to Gor'kii on 25 February908:

"In the summer and autumn of 1904 we finally came to an understanding with Bogdanov and concluded as bolsheviks a tacitalliance which tacitly excluded philosophy as being a neutralarea. This alliance [...] gave us the possibility of carrying outjointly in the Revolution [of 1905] that tactic of revolutionarysocial democracy (= bolshevism) which according to my deepestconviction was the only correct one."109According to V. Bonch-Bruevich, then a close associate of Lenin, thelatter called all the bolsheviks together after Bogdanov had joined theparty and told them that, while they were not to agree with Bogdanov'sviews, they must refrain from all polemics with him on the subject, sothat all their energies could be turned to immediate questions of strategyand tactics in the revolutionary battle.110In a conversation with Bonch-Bruevich, Plekhanov described Lenin'scooption of Bogdanov as the sheer opportunism of a man who like acharacter in Gogol's play The inspector general (Revizor) "picks up everything he finds on the road: you never know, it may come in handy".111Bonch-Bruevich's reply, apparently without intended irony, was a classic

example of the same approach: he explained that the bolsheviks were notprepared to attack Bogdanov in print, but would welcome any publicrefutation of his views which the mensheviks might care to make.Plekhanov's taunts against the heretic in his camp eventually stungLenin into a public reply at the Party Congress known by the bolsheviksas the third (the mensheviks repudiated its legality) in April 1905.Referring to attempts by Plekhanov to drag the names of Avenarius andMach into inner-party polemics, he blandly asserts: "I positively cannotunderstand what relation these writers, towards whom I do not feel theslightest sympathy, have to the question of social revolution."112By 1907 however, Lenin's alliance with Bogdanov had began to disintegrate. Bogdanov became (as did Lunacharskii) a leader of the ultraleft wing, the otzovist or ultimatist group of the bolsheviks, which opposedLenin on the issue of social-democrat participation in the Duma. Inaddition, the bolshevik policy of expropriations which he directedtogether with Krasin (who was closely connected with some of the empirio-criticists) began to be an embarrassment to Lenin. It had begun toattract undesirable publicity for the social-democrats and in 1908 theparty's central committee condemned it and ordered an investigationinto expropriations. Lenin managed to stifle this, but in August 1908the bolshevik centre replaced Bogdanov and Krasin by a new financialcommission. By mid-1908 Lenin had ousted Bogdanov from the editorialboard of Proletarii, the bolshevik mouthpiece which had succeededVpered, and on 23 February 1909 the bolshevik centre in a secret vote


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? hicondemned Bogdanov and Krasin for misappropriating party funds andexpelled them from the faction. The public break came in June 1909at a meeting of the bolshevik centre which denounced otzovism and ulti-matism, expelled Bogdanov and Lunacharskii, and in a special resolutioncondemned godbuilding as "a movement implying a breach with thevery foundations of marxism".113In the first issue of Proletarii in early 1908 Lenin had reiterated theview that questions of philosophy were a matter of individual opinion,but the secret condemnation of Bogdanov in February 1909 was followedby a public attack on his philosophical views in Proletarii, and in March,Materialism and empiriocriticism, which Lenin had been preparing fornearly a year, appeared.In his correspondence with Gor'kii, Lenin presents his decision publiclyto attack the empiriocriticists as the result of a final loss of patience withtheir public utterances. In his letter to Gor'kii of 25 February 1908 heasserts that the publication by Bogdanov and others of Essays in thephilosophy of marxism (Ocherki po filosofii marksizma) had "greatlyexacerbated disagreements of long standing among the bolsheviks onphilosophical problems". The preaching of variations of agnosticism,idealism, religious atheism and so on was "going too far. Of course werank and file marxists are not well read in philosophy, but why would wesuffer such indignity, why should we be offered this sort of stuff as marxistphilosophy! ";114 and in a letter of 24 March 1908, announcing his intentionto launch a public attack on empiriocriticism, he writes:

"You must and will of course understand that, if a party man hascome to the conviction that certain propaganda is deeply wrongand harmful, he is in duty bound to speak out against it. I wouldnot 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 inempiriocriticist publications, but their first symposium had appeared in1904 and there had since been no significant change in their theories.What had changed was that Bogdanov had ceased to be useful in Lenin'spolitical strategy; while on the other hand an attack on Bogdanov andhis allies would be tactically useful in Lenin's battle with his mainenemy the mensheviks. As he asserts in his letter to Gor'kii of 24 March1908, far from weakening the bolsheviks, as Gor'kii feared, a break withBogdanov would strengthen them, as the mensheviks would no longerbe able to attack them on theoretical grounds and would have to restricttheir polemics to questions of practical poUtics, where they were no matchfor their opponents.In its timing, Lenin's attack on empiriocriticism seems a particularlyskilful application of what Aksel'rod had called "vulgar empiricism".To emphasise the "partiinost" of all philosophy four years after he hadstated the "irrelevance" of empiriocriticism to social revolution was avolte-face difficult to reconcile with the reigning orthodoxy expressed inPlekhanov's phrase "no fate win move us from the correct point of view


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112 AILEEN KELLYwhich has finally been revealed". Lenin might well have counteredthis with Engels' dictum (which he used frequently) that marxism wasnot a dogma but a guide to action. But this maxim, as expressed in hispolitical practice, was not consistent with the reflective theory of cognition o which he paid lip-service in Materialism and empiriocriticism.It was far closer to the voluntarist view of truth propounded by the self-styled bolshevik theorists, and expressed in Bogdanov's thesis: "Truthis by no means a simple copy of the facts, not a petty and exact representationf them; it is an instrument for domination over them."116 As wehave seen, for the empiriocriticists the concept of laws had only a functional significance as a method of orientation, changing in accordancewith the practical demands of the collective battle for survival. Lenin'sprimary concern was with the survival and domination of the "collective"which in his view embodied the principle of progress he bolsheviks,and in securing this he showed a similar "functionalist" approach tomarxist dogma, maintaining the domination of his group by a skilfulcombination of extreme flexibility, even arbitrariness, in his interpretationof historical laws, with an extreme dogmatism and authoritarianism inenforcing a given interpretation, once the choice had been made. AsAksel'rod had pointed out, his position on ultimate ends was rigidly dogmatic, but these ends were expressed in terms so vague and schematicas not to hinder his freedom of orientation in the present. She mightwell have quoted the history of Lenin's relations with Bogdanov as anillustration of her thesis: ironically, it is the methods which Lenin usedto defeat Bogdanov and his group which provide the most convincingsupport for their claim to be the philosophers of bolshevism.

The question remains: why, if Lenin's political practice had moreaffinity with the theories of empiriocriticism than with the determinismof Plekhanov, was he so strongly opposed to the former; for contemporaryaccounts leave no doubt of his genuine loathing of them, however muchexpediency may have impeded its expression. Two reasons may beadvanced: firstly, in his outlook and psychology, Lenin was very muchin the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, for whose radical extremethe term "idealism" had for generations connoted all the forces whichlent moral and practical support to Russian backwardness and despotism the impotent dreams of the superfluous men, liberal cant, and thesocial apathy of mystical and religious trends in literature. Lenin'shatred of these tendencies was fanatical, and the label of "subjectivedealism" fixed on empiriocriticism by the social-democrat theorists issufficient to explain his extreme reaction against it. Secondly, on theevidence of his later philosophical notebooks, his defence in 1909 of amechanistic materialism so much at odds with his own political practicemay be attributed to philosophical laziness. In his concern with practicalpolitics he was prepared to take his philosophy at second hand from thosewho had more time to devote to it. His famous "discovery" of Hegel,recorded in his prulosophical notebooks of 1914-1916, shows that hisfirst serious study of the sources of marxism had the same radical effecton him as the Theses on Feuerbach had on the empiriocriticists. Theinfluence of Hegel's dialectic on Marx is a revelation to him: "One maynot fully understand Marx's Capital, especially his first chapter, without


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empiriocriticism: a bolshevik philosophy? 113having studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Thereforeno marxist has understood Marx for half a century!"117 Plekhanov'sdualistic materialism is incompatible with Lenin's new understandingof the dialectic. He quotes Hegel: "it is wrong to see subjectivity andobjectivity as a kind of stable and abstract opposition. They are bothfully dialectical";118 he observes that "objective" idealism "in a zigzagfashion went right up to materialism and partly turned into it."119 He issevere on Plekhanov's critique of empiriocriticism, and other heresies;arguing that it was made "more from a vulgar materialist than from adialectical materialist point of view";120 and asserts that "intelligentidealism is closer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism".121The advent of the revolution prevented Lenin from pursuing hisphilosophical investigations, but it is clear from the philosophical notebooks that well before it he had arrived at what had been the startingpoint of the first bolshevik revision of Marx: repudiation of the dualismof the "reflective" theory of cognition.

If Lenin had read Hegel five years earlier, he would not have writtenMaterialism and empiriocriticism; but, given the role of tactical considerationsn determining his attitude to theory, it is idle to speculate whetherthe 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 littleinfluence. In August 1909 the group founded a party school in Capriwhere Gor'kii was living; they invited collaboration from the bolshevikcentre, but the latter did not respond and by the end of 1909 succeededin engineering a split in the school. Lenin's philosophical developmenthad no effect whatever on the ultimate fate of those empiriocriticists whoremained in Russia after the revolution: no doubt by then philosophicalradicalism was too firmly associated with political indiscipline. Thosewho had fulsomely recanted, like Lunacharskii, were readmitted into thebolshevik fold.122 Bogdanov never recanted, but he took no part inpublic polemics. A doctor by profession, he became director of theMoscow Institute of Blood Transfusion, which he founded in 1926; hedied as the result of infection from an experiment which he had performedon himself. Empiriocriticism had no defenders left in Russia when in1938 it was officially credited with a new and sinister significance as asecret weapon of Hitler's Germany: it was enigmatically alleged in Pravdathat by allying marxism with machism the Austrian marxists had betrayedhe working class and prepared the ground for Hitler's annexationof Austria.123The unqualified success of Lenin's defeat of empiriocriticism cannotbe ascribed to mere pusillanimity on the part of its proponents. Theywere locked in a vicious circle in which defeat was forced on them bythe demands of consistency with their own philosophical premisses.Unlike their revisionist predecessors, whose kantian dualism placed theultimate criterion of truth in the individual consciousness, the empiriocriticists lodged it in the collective; when the latter, in the form of the


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114 AILEEN KELLYparty, condemned them as bourgeois revisionists, they were trapped ina "catch 22" dilemma: the party demanded that they cease to be empirio-criticists; if they rejected that demand this would mean that they hadceased to be empiriocriticists. N. Valentinov, describing his own crisisof conscience in this respect, likens the plight of the group to that of theold bolsheviks condemned at the Moscow trials of 1936-1938 for deviationfrom the party line. Their public self-incrimination, incomprehensibleto observers in the West, was not due to physical torture alone: "therewas also something else there, something very complex, which causedthem to 'confess', to regard as 'criminal' their deviation from the 'generalUne'".124

To conclude: the empiriocriticist heresy, the controversy which itaroused and the manner of its defeat together shed considerable light onthe psychology of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. The newphilosophy had been presented as a final answer to the problem whichhad preoccupied successive generations of the intelligentsia: that of theconflict between its revolutionary voluntarism and its need for absolutes. The empiriocriticists claimed to have performed the miracle ofsynthesising marxism as an "integral world view" with a defence of the"integral personality". But this "synthesis" of voluntarism withdeterminism was not the answer to the intelligentsia's dreams of wholeness; ts most obvious function, as some of its critics pointed out, wasto provide a philosophical justification of the dictatorship of an elite.It was the neatest of historical ironies that the heresy of the bolsheviktheorists produced a ready-made defence of the authoritarianism whichfinally defeated them.Cambridge, 1980.

1. To my knowledge, only one scholar has attempted a detailed analysis ofthe empiriocriticist movement. See G. Kline, " 'Xietzschian marxism' in Russia",Boston College studies in philosophy, II (Boston/The Hague, 1969): 166-173; seealso ch. iv (on 'godbuilding') of his Religious and anti-religious thought in Russia(Chicago, 1968). Kline's analysis, ho

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