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THINKERS

Aleksandr Bogdanov:Proletkult and Conservation*

By Arran Gare

1. IntroductionWith the failure of Marxist-Leninism in Eastern Europe there has

been an upsurge of interest in Lenin's main rival among theBolsheviks, A.A. Bogdanov — (the pseudonym of AleksandrAleksandrovich Malinovskii).1 Bogdanov has been represented as thefigure who opposed the authoritarian tendencies of the Bolsheviks andwho charted an alternative course of culturally transforming the workingclass so that they could control their own destinies. However, Bogdanovis not a name people associate with conservation. And a closeexamination of Bogdanov's work reveals that while he was concernedabout environmental issues, this was hardly his main interest. In fact,

*I am grateful to John Biggart and Douglas Weiner for their invaluablecomments on an earlier version of this paper.1 There have been a number of books and papers published in recent years.The most important single work on this subject is Zenovia A. Socher,Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca andLondon: Cornell University Press, 1988). See also, Robert C. Williams,The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904-1914 (Bloomington andIndianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986). In July, 1990 an entire issueof The Russian Review (49, 3) was devoted to Bogdanov and to the questionwhether Bogdanov really did offer an alternative, anti-authoritarian path forthe Soviet Union. John Biggart, Georgii Gloveli and Avraham Yassour aresoon to publish an updated bibliography of Bogdanov's works. The firstbibliography was published by Avraham Yassour in Cahiers du MondeRusse et Soveitique in 1963.

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much of his work was devoted to creating a new science which heclaimed would facilitate the total domination of nature. He was also anearly proponent of nuclear power. Yet it was Bogdanov's ideas whichhelped inspire one of the most remarkable conservation movements inhistory, which developed in the first fifteen years of the Soviet Union.2

Bogdanov's ideas should be important to environmentalists not onlybecause they were associated with this conservation movement. Moresignificantly, they are of continuing relevance because they confront theroot causes of environmental destruction in the present, and offer whatis perhaps the only way to overcome these causes.3

2. The Bogdanov's Life and Concerns

Bogdanov is an historically significant figure in a number ofdifferent contexts.4 Born in August, 1873 into the family of a teacher inSokolko, Province of Grodno,5 Bogdanov first studied natural sciencesat the University of Moscow and then medicine at the University ofKharkov from which he graduated in 1899. But even before graduatinghe had become a radical political activist. In 1894, he was banishedfrom Moscow University to Tula for his part in a student protest. Hejoined pro-revolutionary movements and from 1896 onwards worked asa revolutionary propagandist. Originally a Narodnik, Bogdanov soonbecame a Marxist. By the winter of 1895-96 he had become a socialdemocrat by conviction, and he joined the Social Democratic Party in1898. He continued his work as a propagandist after his graduation in1899 and was arrested and sent into exile to Vologda in 1901. In 1904,he was one of the founders of the Bolsheviks, and until his expulsion in1909, Bogdanov was the Bolsheviks' second in command and the

2 Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, andCultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Bloomington and Indianapolis:Indiana University Press, 1988).3 I have tried to reformulate Marxism in the spirit of Bogdanov to addressthe environmental crisis in Beyond European Civilization: Marxism,Process Philosophy and the Environment (Bundgendore, Australia: Eco-Logical Press, 1993).4 Bogdanov wrote a brief autobiography describing his main politicalinvolvements and his main intellectual achievements. This is translated inGeorges Haupt and Jean-Jacques Marie, Makers of the Russian Revolution:Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders, tr. CLP. Ferdinand and D.M. Bellos(Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1974).5 George Gorelik, "Introduction," A. Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology: TheGeneral Science of Organization, 2nd ed. (Seaside, CA: IntersystemsPublications, 1984), p. i. Most writers on Bogdanov mistakenly give Tulaas his birthplace.

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faction's principal leader in Russia. In the uprising of 1905 he was thechief Bolshevik and a leader in the St. Petersburg Soviet, and wasarrested and jailed until the summer of 1906. Together with Lenin,Bogdanov founded, and then became editor of the Bolshevik journalVpered (Forward). The polemic between Lenin and Bogdanov associatedwith their break was one of the most important chapters in the historyof Bolshevism. Bogdanov led a group of left-wing Marxists, theVperedists, a group which included the future heads of theCommissariat of Enlightenment, Lunacharskii and Pokrovskii, and theauthor, Maxim Gor'kii. It was in the platform of this group that theslogan "proletarian culture" was first formulated. Lenin devoted anentire year to writing Materialism and Empiro-Criticism to refute"Bogdanov and Co.,"6 and the former continued to regard Bogdanov ashis main rival for the allegiance of left-wing Marxists after therevolution in 1917. Bogdanov's ideas provided the matrix for the"cultural Marxist" alternative to Plekhanov-Leninism even after Lenin'sdeath.

Bogdanov was also a major intellectual figure. While still astudent, he wrote a book on economics and developed an originalinterpretation of Marx's economic theory,7 and then published anotherwork on philosophy. He wrote on knowledge and culture and was themost original proponent of the effort to weld Marx's social theory withthe "scientific philosophy" of neo-positivism.8 But he was alsoinfluenced, at least indirectly, by Georges Sorel and Friedrich Nietzsche,and was concerned with "meaning of life" issues.9 He anticipatedWestern Marxist theorists of culture and sociologists of knowledge and

6 Lenin's motives for writing this were complex. David Joravsky arguesthat Lenin's primary concern was that the Bolsheviks be seen as orthodox(David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science: 1917-1932 [N.Y.:Columbia University Press, 1961], p. 33). However, John Biggart arguesthat Lenin was trying to discredit Bogdanov as a Marxist to reinforce hisown position in the Bolshevik leadership ("'Anti-Leninist Bolshevism':the Forward Group of the RSDRP," Canadian Slavonic Papers, 23, 2, June,1981).7 Bogdanov's first book, A Short Course on Economic Science, initiallypublished in 1897, went through fifteen editions and was still beingpublished and used as a text for students in 1924 at a time when Bogdanovwas coming under increasing criticism.8 K.M. Jensen, Beyond Marx and Mack: Aleksandr Bogdanov's Philosophyof Living Experience (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978).9 As Zenovia A Sochor has argued ("A.A. Bogdanov: In Search of CulturalLiberation," in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986]).

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systematically analysed the genetic and functional relationships betweenideology and social structure through history and laid the foundationsfor a general theory of organization, foreshadowing the development ofcybernetics, general systems theory, and praxiology.10

Finally, combining his political and intellectual work, Bogdanovparticipated in the organization (along with the other Vperedists) of thefirst social democratic party schools at Capri in 1909 and Bologna in1910. He became the principle proponent of the view that it wasnecessary to develop a new proletarian culture which would be thefuture socialist culture, and he set forth a practical program for this inCultural Tasks of Our Time, published in 1910. In this project hecalled for the establishment of a workers' university as a comprehensiveeducational and scientific institution outside existing educationalinstitutions designed to eventually take their place, as well as for theproduction of a proletarian encyclopaedia. After the revolution, hefounded the Moscow branch of the Proletarian Culture Movement(Proletkult), a movement formally instituted as an all-Russianorganization 1918.n This movement, which Bogdanov dominated,gained the allegiance of many of Russia's leading writers and artists,and by the end of 1920 had between 400,000 and 500,000 members andestablished a Proletarian University. Bogdanov's ideas continued toinfluence education after Lenin had reined in, and then destroyed,Proletkult.12 As Socher has pointed out: "Even those who criticizedBogdanov during the 1920s conceded that, despite all the controversy,he continued to attract 'a large number of young enthusiasts/"13 In1918, Bogdanov became the first director of the Socialist Academy ofSocial Science (after 1924, the Communist Academy, a name changewhich Bogdanov opposed) and continued in that position until 1923.Despite his concern to create a proletarian culture, he took the side ofthe "mechanists" against the efforts of the "dialecticians" to impose a

10 The best brief characterization of Bogdanov's theory of organizations isGeorge Gorelik, "Bogdanov's tektology: its basic concepts and relevanceto modern generalizing sciences," Human Systems Management, 1, 1980.Gorelik is the translator of Bogdanov's Essays in Tektology and has writtena number of expository papers on Bogdanov. See also, Rafael E. Bello,'The Systems Approach — A. Bogdanov and L. Von Bertalanffy," Studies inSoviet Thought, 30, 1985.11 Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: On the Proletkult Movement inRevolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).12 This is evident in Sheila Fitzpatrick's study, The Commissariat ofEnlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).13 Socher, 1988, op. cit., p. 56.

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"politically correct" philosophy on scientists.14 After Lenin's death inJanuary, 1924, Bogdanov was asked to rejoin the Party by the triumvirsZinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, who hoped to win his collaborationagainst Stalin, an invitation which (perhaps unfortunately) he declined.In 1926, Bogdanov founded the first Russian Institute for BloodTransfusion. He died in 1928 after an experiment in which he exchangedhis blood with a seriously ill patient.

Bogdanov's concern for the natural limits to economic developmentwere expressed in his Utopian novel Red Star, published in 1908. Onthe basis of this tract, Loren Graham commended Bogdanov's presciencein predicting the environmental problems which economic developmentwould inevitably bring.15 This alone, however, would hardly justifyconsidering Bogdanov of major significance to the environmentalmovement. Douglas Weiner, who has provided us with the history ofthe early Soviet conservation movement, has shown that the mostimportant group in this movement were the ecologists, and that theindividual most responsible for providing the conditions under whichthe ecologists and other conservationists could influence governmentwas Anatolii Lunacharskii, the Commissar of Enlightenment.16

Furthermore, it was Lenin who provided the initial impetus to theconservation movement, supported the efforts of the ecologists to haveconservation issues addressed, appointed Lunacharskii Commissar ofEnlightenment, and conferred responsibility for administeringconservation matters to the Commissariat of Enlightenment. What Iwill suggest is that Bogdanov offered the basic philosophical directionrequired for the conservationists to flourish and helped create theintellectual milieu within which ecological ideas could be developed,thus providing the intellectual foundation for the conservationists.17

Bogdanov's significance in this regard is not appreciated becausethe range of his achievements and the diversity of the fields to which hecontributed has blinded people to the interrelationship between allaspects of his work. Yet it is in the unity of his work, both intellectualand political, that his importance to the conservationists in the SovietUnion lies. Bogdanov is unique in that while he anticipated Western

14Joravsky, op. cit.15 Loren R. Graham, "Bogdanov's Inner Message," in Loren R. Graham andRichard Stites, eds., Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First BolshevikUtopia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).16 Weiner, op.cit.17 Arran Gare, "Soviet Environmentalism: The Path Not Taken," CNS, 4, 4,December, 1993.

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Marxist theorists of culture, he was also a scientist concerned to seehumans as part of and within nature; while developing a criticalsociology of knowledge showing how science has been expressive of,and implicated in, oppressive social relations, he proposed an alternativeform of science appropriate for a social order free from classdomination; and while being a highly original thinker, he was also anactive revolutionary who made some progress towards realizing theideals for which he was fighting. Although influenced by a great varietyof thinkers, including Spencer and Bergson, Bogdanov was attemptingto mediate between two major traditions: German social thought, pre-eminently the work of Marx, and German natural science as this wasevolving towards its greatest achievements in the early 20th century. Hesought to transform the ideas of each tradition in the light of the otherinto a coherent world-orientation for political action and the creation ofnew form of society. His contribution was to understand science as partof culture and of socio-economic formations, while simultaneouslysituating the dynamics of societies within the broader context of nature,meanwhile carrying this out as an integral part of his revolutionarywork of creating a new social order.18

3. Bogdanov's Point of Departure

Bogdanov claimed that Marx's A Contribution to the Critique ofPolitical Economy in 1859 laid the foundations for a scientific study ofthe structure and dynamics of human society.19 Bogdanov thought thatMarx and his followers, during the next 40 years, successfully explaineda mass of historical developments. However, Bogdanov was highlycritical of Marxists who treated Marx's works as the embodiment ofabsolute and eternal truths. He equated this view with outmodedauthoritarian and religious frames of mind. To begin with, there weredefects in Marx's ideas. His division between the economic base and thesuperstructure was problematic. The concept of the forces of productionwas defined ambiguously. Sometimes these forces were taken to refer totools and equipment alone, at other times to include human socialactivity and the technological knowledge, skills, and methods of labor

18See Georgii Gloveli, "'Socialism of Science' versus Socialism ofFeelings': Bogdanov and Lunacharsky," Studies in Soviet Thought, 42,1991.19 A.A. Bogdanov, Iz psikhologii obschchestva [From the Psychology ofSociety] (St. Petersburg: 1904). For an exposition of Bogdanov'sarguments, see Alexander Vucinich, "A Blend of Marxism andNeopositivism: A.A. Bogdanov," Social Thought in Tsarist Russia(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 208ff.

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required to use tools and equipment. And no distinction was madebetween relations of production occurring in the labor process andrelat ions associated with appropriation of the product of labor."Economic structure" was also imprecisely defined. How could law,which defined legal relations of ownership, be relegated to thesuperstructure when it is the basic element in the articulation of themode of production? Nor did Marx explain why every society needsideology, or explain what the relationship between ideology andeconomy is. More importantly, revolutionary changes in the naturalsciences, such as Darwin 's theory of evolution, raised serious questionswhich Marxists could not ignore. The Marxist theory of social changeneeded to be brought into a coherent relation with biological theories ofchange and with the new scientific psychology. Marxist theory alsoneeded to take a stand on the accelerated mathematization of science, aswell as theorize the question of energy.

The most important scientific influences on Bogdanov were theMonists: Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) — the biologist who coined theterm ecology and who late in life founded the Monist League,2 0 andWilhe lm Ostwald. 2 1 While Haeckel was the greatest exponent ofDarwin ' s theory of evolution in Germany in the 19th century (and asupporter of eugenics), he was more fundamentally influenced by theNaturphilosophen, or the anti-mechanistic philosophers who strove tocreate a new science of nature in the late 18th and early 19thcen tu r i e s . 2 2 In particular, Haeckel was influenced by Goethe, andreferred to Lucretius, Bruno, and Spinoza as sources of his oppositionto the dualism between Spirit and matter. He argued that these writersshowed " the oneness of the cosmos, the indissociable connectionbetween energy and matter. . .mind and embodiment ." 2 3 Haeckel ' ssuccessor as the chief exponent of Monism and head of the Monist

20 The importance of Haeckel to Bogdanov has been convincingly argued inMark B. Adams, "'Red Star': Another Look at Aleksandr Bogdanov," SlavicReview, 48, 1989, p. 10f.21 In Vucinich's chapter on Bogdanov, he argues that Ostwald's energismwas an enduring influence on all Bogdanov's work (op. cit.). See also,Alexander Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1988), p. 367f.22 For the source and structure of Haeckel's ideas and their importance forconservation, see Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History(New Haven and London: Yale Univesity Press, 1989), Ch. 3.23 E. Haeckel, Monism as Connecting Religion and Science. TheConfessions of Faith of a Man of Science (London and Edinburgh: 1894),p. 5; ibid., p. 44.

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League in Germany, Ostwald, was the leader of an important group ofscientists who were extending the ideas not only of Haeckel, but also ofMach, who argued against atomism on the grounds that all untestablehypotheses should be eliminated from science, and that science shouldproceed by taking an intuitively plausible principle and then striving toharmonize all particular ideas with this principle. Ostwald argued thatall observable phenomena should be reduced to the principle of energy,and he proposed the development of all scientific fields in terms ofenergetics.24 At first, only inanimate matter was to be reduced to thisprinciple; then the phenomena of life were included, and finally, from1900 onwards, Ostwald attempted to deal with psychologicalphenomena as energetic processes. Integrating Ostwald's program intohis own schema of concepts and propositions, Bogdanov representedhuman society as an integral part of nature, an energetic process subjectto self-adjusting natural processes which could be scientificallymeasured, and he formulated an interpretation of the historicalsuccession of social systems and a new theory of knowledge it terms ofthis scheme.

4. Society as a Cultural Process Within Nature

Bogdanov ' s first philosophical work, Basic Principles of aHistorical View of Nature (1899), argued for a synthesis of Newton andDarwin, or rather Haeckel's version of Darwin, giving a central place toenergy in this synthesis. This program was further developed in hisnext work, Knowledge from a Historical Point of View (1902). Inthese books, Bogdanov argued that nature and society together areperpetually changing, although without there being any purpose in thischange. The social sciences should be based on natural science models.This was essentially an extension of Ostwald's project of conceivingeverything in terms of the transformation of energy.25 As Bogdanovunderstood it, the conservation of energy is the same as the law ofuniformity and continuity of natural processes: everything must issuefrom something else.

2 4 Yehuda Elkana, "Bolzmann's Scientific Research Program and itsAlternatives," in Y. Elkana, ed., The Interaction between Science andPhilosophy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1974), p. 265.25 It was not only the second book that was written under the influence ofOstwald, as Vucinich suggests. Bogdanov makes clear that Basic Principleswas also written under Ostwald's influence in Empiriomonizm, III (St.Petersburg: 1906), p. xvii fn. This is pointed out by Karl G. Ballestrem,"Lenin and Bogdanov," Studies in Soviet Thought, 9, 1969, p. 308, fn. 3.

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Accordingly, the basic task of science is to study the interactionand succession of natural phenomena, and Bogdanov saw the energytheory of causation associated with this view as one of the majorinnovations of 19th century science. Science is no longer concernedwith cause and effect as distinct phenomena, but with the processesinvolved in causal sequences. The focus is shifted from the ontologicalto the functional aspects of nature; modern science is not so muchinterested in what things are but in how they work. Extending thisapproach to humanity supports the historical approach in the socialsciences, placing the primary emphasis on the interaction of socialprocesses, particularly the relationship between technology andideology.

The key process revealing the regularities of social change isadaptation, the main mechanism of which is the social selection of themost effective techniques for the satisfaction of changing social needs.All phenomena of social dynamics are specific adaptations to increasesand decreases in social energy, and as with other organic phenomena,there is a spontaneous tendency to eliminate contradictory tendenciesand to strengthen harmonious relations. This heavy dependence onnatural science models, however, did not mean that Bogdanov thoughtthat the social sciences could be reduced to physics or biology. Mentallife was seen as the most complex form of biological development, andsociality a higher manifestation of mental development. The uniquenessof each level of development must be appreciated. Furthermore,sociologists cannot conduct experiments, and must confront theinfinitely complex concrete details of social life. To go beyonddescription, social scientists must resort to an abstract method which isboth deductive and historical to reveal the "tendencies" of socialprocesses.

In Knowledge from an Historical Point of View, Bogdanov wasconcerned primarily with applying the energy approach to the study ofthe evolution of knowledge. For Bogdanov, economic life is an integralpart of social being, and social being is identical to socialconsciousness; therefore knowledge is the moving force of history andthe main line of social progress. Taking knowledge as a sociologicalrather than an epistemological phenomenon, he argued that the study ofthe inner dynamics of social relations is equivalent to the study thedevelopment of knowledge: "An analysis of cooperation withinindividual groups provides the basis for a study of general forms ofknowledge, characteristic for the entire society; an analysis ofcooperation within individual groups provides the basis for the study of

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special ideological tendencies."26 In his later writings, the categories"social being" and "social consciousness" are merged in the category"culture."27 The central theme of Bogdanov's sociology, then, are theregularities in social changes as recorded in cognitive culture.

Reformulating Marx, he argued that social being has two levels,the technical and the organizational. The organization of activity at thetechnical level generates technical knowledge or technology. ForBogdanov, "technology" denotes not material equipment but theorganization and utilization of knowledge related to external nature. Asthe technical level became historically more complex, humans came toneed new organizational forms. This is the realm of ideology (in idealistphilosophy, the realm of spirit) — concepts, thought, norms,everything that is called "ideas" in the broadest sense of the word.Bogdanov saw no essential difference between technical and ideologicallabor. Both exert effort against resistance; in the case of ideologicallabor, against the labor nature of humans. He was concerned to give duerecognition to both technology and ideology in the advancement ofsociety; they are correlates. Techniques are the very essence of humansocial existence and the primary matrix of social relations, butideology, the entire sphere of social life outside the technical process, isalso a vital social force.

5. Knowledge as the Organization of Experience

To develop this conception of society required more attention to thenature of knowledge. Bogdanov turned to the empirio-criticism of ErnstMach, Ostwald's source of inspiration, and of Richard Avenarius,synthesizing their epistemological views with Marx's theory of socialhistory to formulate an original theory of knowledge which he calledempiriomonism.28 However, this did not involve abandoning Ostwald's

26 A.A. Bogdanov, Poznanie s istoricheskio tochki zreniia (Knowledgefrom an Historical Point of View) (St. Petersburg: 1902), p. 193f (translatedand quoted by Vucinich, op. cit., p. 212).27 See A.A. Bogdanov, "Razvitie zhizni v prirode i v obschchestve," in Izpsikhologii obshchestva (From the Psychology of Society) (St. Petersburg:1904). This development is described by John Biggart in "Marxism andSocial Anthropology," Studies in Soviet Thought, 24, 1982, pp. 1-9, esp.p. 4. Biggart argues that this could have been an indirect source ofinspiration for the American school of "cultural materialists" (Leslie White,Julian Steward, Betty Meggars, and Marvin Harris).28 This doctrine was first worked out in A.A. Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm:Stat'i po filosofii (Empiriomonism: Articles on Philosophy), ThreeVolumes (St. Petersburg: 1904-6). It was further developed and more

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energism (although this was pushed into the background), and itreinforced Bogdanov's commitment to the Monism of Haeckel andOstwald. Bogdanov signified by the "monism" of his "empiriomonism"a world-view guided by a single comprehensive principle, whichprovides a key to all understanding and is applicable to the natural aswell as the social sciences, so that reality can be experienced as oneunitary organic whole, with all its parts interrelated.29

Along with the empirio-critics, Bogdanov fully embraced the ideathat what is real is experience, and that the goal of knowledge is toorient people therein. He also accepted the empirio-critics' doctrine thatexperience comprises things and mental representations — experience isnot to be equated with sensations in the minds of individuals. However,following Marx (Marx understood as a philosopher of praxis rather thanas a materialist), Bogdanov qualified this, arguing from "the labor pointof view" or "the point of view of collective labor activity," thatexperience is the sum total of all human effort and resistance to thateffort.30 While the empirio-critics called for the analysis of experienceinto its component parts or elements to discover their bonds andrelationships, Bogdanov argued that the components of experience arenot a priori elements; there are many possible ways to divide experienceinto elements, some more useful than others. Elements are separatedout to accord with the needs of production, the product of a certainamount and type of effort directed against a certain amount and type ofresistance. Such activity is first physical and then mental; one firstmakes a brick as a physical element and then forms the idea of it.Matter, argued Bogdanov, is a mere abstraction, a metaphor designatingthat which resists labor.

Bogdanov also claimed that there were weaknesses in the empirio-critics' analysis of the relation between mind and the physical world.For them the elements, which are neither mental nor material, arebound together by either psychical laws or physical laws, a division

succinctly stated in Filosofiia zhivogo opyta (Philosophy of LivingExperience) (St. Petersburg: 1913). This work has been thoroughlyanalyzed by Jensen, op. cit.29 This is how Zenovia Socher characterized Bogdanov's monism (1986,op. cit., p. 302 fn. 29, citing Bogdanov, Novyi Mir [Moscow, 1905], p.32).30 Bogdanov's understanding of experience, both physical and psychical, iscarefully analyzed by K.M. Jensen. Jensen shows how Bogdanov hasgenerally been misunderstood on this crucial point (Jensen, op.cit.,Chapter IV "Emiriomonism," esp. pp. 126, 128).

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which Bogdanov regarded as failing to account for the relationshipbetween neurophysiological processes and sensations. For him, thepsychical and the physical differ in being different levels of organizationof experience. The psychical is individually organized experience withinthe limits of personal life, while physical experience is the product ofsocial organization. The objectivity of the physical does not have abasis in epistemology, but rather a sociological basis as the product andreflection of the organization of social labor. To deny the social-conditionality of the objective is to be "non-dialectical, non-historicaland non-Marxist."31 Both psychical and physical knowledge are theproducts of long historical developments, the gradual, but inexorableexpansion of social experience which has produced the growingcomplexity, depth, and precision of humanity's organization ofexperience.

In defending this social theory of knowledge, Bogdanov disagreedwith the empirio-critics over the importance of explanation. AsBogdanov interpreted them, the empirio-critics were opposed to the"substitution" of metaphysical constructs for experience, for instance,atoms for observed phenomena such as heat flows or correlationsbetween temperature, pressure, and volume. The empirio-critics wantedto free science from such substitutions and reduce knowledge to puredescription of experience, which could be expressed in functionalrelationships between variables. For Bogdanov, description is a slave toexperience; knowledge is the organization of experience, and forms andfulfills it. While he was sympathetic to attacks on substitutions whichhad come to be taken as absolutes, he argued that all advances inknowledge are based on substitution; knowledge is organized bycognitive models through substitution.

Substitution begins with language. For instance, the word "anger"is a substitute for certain gestures and facial expressions. Throughsubstitution people can understand one another and can explain thesense of their actions. From this elemental level, substitution has beencarried over to all other levels of experience to understand, predict andexplain, and to facilitate the control of nature. The process ofsubstitution involves taking an object and effectively changing it intosomething else, while at the same time admitting the essentialdifference. For example, to say that the sun is a star, a conglomerationof gases in space which behaves according to the laws of motion, is tosubstitute something for the sun as it is visually apprehended bypeople. One complex of elements of experience is replaced by another.

31 Bogdanov, 1913, op. cit., p. 287, cited by Jensen, ibid., p. 130.

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Substitution is employed at all levels of thought, includingphilosophical and scientific explanation. In general, advances inunderstanding are made by substituting for a simpler, less plasticcomplex with which relatively little may be done in practice orconsciousness, a complex which is more subtle, more plastic andtherefore more useful — hence the tendency towards mathematicalmodels in science.

Substitution is the basic method for bringing all experience into aunified whole. What is required is not the abolition of substitution buta readiness to substitute indefinitely, and a recognition of the practicaland conscious activity involved in such organization of experience.Bogdanov called for infinite substitution.

This theory of substitution provides the foundation for Bogdanov'ssociology of knowledge. One of the problems raised by the theory ofsubstitution is where do the "substitutes" come from. Bogdanovelaborated a new form of the dialectic to account for this — a dialecticof social labor. He argued that workers who initially develop theirseparate perspectives through labor, come into conflict, which isintensified by the urge to complete a task. The conflict is resolved whenone worker's perspective prevails over the other, or some thirdperspective is generated which is agreed upon. This scheme, "created inone realm of social experience, may then be applied beyond its limits toother realm of phenomena, social and extra-social." This Bogdanovcharacterized as the law of "sociomorphism."32 Cognitive models whichare used as substitutes may originate in simple social-labor practice, inthe methods of social-labor technique, or in economic relations.Cognitive forms taken from the real world in this way then reinforcethe way this world is organized. Particular substitutes are taken asabsolute, are fetishised and treated as idols, just as the institution ofproperty is fetishised and idolized in capitalist society. For instance,Bogdanov argued that:

...the savage living in a commune which is organized on thebasis of authoritarian leadership and passive submission,thinks, that is, organizes in his consciousness, of the entireuniverse in the same way: he thinks of the ruling 'god* and thepeople and things subordinated to him; and he organizes them

32 Ibid., p. 218, cited by Jensen, ibid. p. 93. See also Bogdanov, 1913, op.cit., p. 291f.

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in his thought into the ruling, leading 'soul' and the passive'body/33

Conceiving of the universe in the same way, fetishizing theauthoritarian relationship which is being used as a substitute,legitimates such authoritarian leadership and makes it difficult to evenconceive the possibility of organizing society in a different way.Extending this theory of substitution, Bogdanov argued that atomism"originated in ancient thought when individualism developed in societysetting men apart. People were accustomed to think about themselvesand others as isolated entities, and they transferred this habit ontonotions about nature: in Greek, 'atom' means an 'individual,' and inLatin it means 'indivisibility.'"34 Atomism is then fetishised and usedto legitimate such individualism. In Philosophy of Living Experience,Bogdanov used this way of analysing the source of cognitive models toexplain the history of materialist philosophy from the pre-Socratics tothe materialists of the 19th century. He also explained the ideas of theempirio-critics, whom he noted were socialists, as the product of a newclass within capitalist society between the bourgeoisie and theproletariat, which had partially overcome the division betweenintellectual and manual labor, and by virtue of this had come to see thesubstitutions of past science as fetishes, just as they had come torecognize that property is a fetish.35

The criticism of empirio-critics for failing to recognize theimportance of explanation, leading to the development of the theory of"substitution," and the socio-historical analysis of the development ofknowledge utilizing the notion of "sociomorph," closely parallels theviews of knowledge which developed in opposition to logicalpositivism in the West. "Substitution" corresponds to the central placegiven to analogies and metaphors by Thomas Kuhn, Rom Harre andMary Hesse, while the theory of "sociomorphs" anticipates the effortsof Marxist historians of science such as Franz Borkenau, Edgar Zilsel,and Robert Young to show the relationship between scientific theoriesand society. However, while post-positivist philosophers of sciencesuch as Hesse and Marxist historians of science such as Young havebeen at loggerheads over whether developments in science should beunderstood in terms of internal criteria or explained by external factors,

33 A. Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology: The General Science of Organization(1921) (Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 2nd ed. 1984), p. 29.34Loc. cit.35 Jensen, op. cit., pp. 50-66, 81-86.

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Bogdanov combined these two perspectives. He did so by a number ofstratagems.

Bogdanov rejected the claim that any knowledge is absolute,arguing for the relativity of ways of organizing experience to historicalcondit ions. Whi le the cosmology of the Middle Ages must now berejected, it can still be recognized as the best way of organizingexper ience at that t ime. However , Bogdanov was not a completerelativist. He characterized the superiority of modern knowledge bycasting an historical narrative defining the achievements and limitationsof past theories in terms of this knowledge. As Alasdair Maclntyre hasconvincingly argued, this is the way theories can be evaluated withoutrecourse to absolute criteria standing independent of all theories.3 6

Bogdanov, however, did more than this. He also cast into an historicalnarrat ive the changing social condit ions of knowledge, and alsoevaluated these by their achievements and l imitat ions from theperspect ive not of present knowledge, but from the hypotheticalperspective of knowledge developed in a society of the future whichwould enable the fragmentation of present knowledge to be overcome.

As Bogdanov wrote in his second Utopian novel Engineer Menni,also set on Mars after the creation of a communist society:

Thus was born 'Universal Science, ' which soon embraced theentire organization experience of mankind. The philosophy offormer t imes was nothing but a vague presentiment of thissc ience, while the laws governing nature, social life, andthought that had been discovered by the different disciplinesturned out to be individual manifestations of its principles.37

This theory of knowledge has dramatic implications. It implies thatthe limitations in the science of Bogdanov's own time were at least inpart a manifestation of the limitations of the form of society scientistswere living in, and conversely, that the existing social order was beingmainta ined by fetishized substitutions of such defective forms ofknowledge . Bogdanov thus not only interpreted and evaluated theknowledge of his day in relation to past knowledge; constructing his

36 Alasdair Maclntyre, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narratives andthe Philosophy of Science," Monist, 60, 1977. Using Galileo as anexample, Maclntyre pointed out that Galileo's theory "for the first time,enables the work of all his predecessors to be evaluated by a common set ofstandards....the history of medieval science can at last be cast into acoherent narrative" (p. 459f).37 Graham and Stites, eds., op. cit., p. 232.

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history of science involved projecting the direction science should takein the future, and he strove to lay the foundations for this new science.And since he saw science as indissociable from social conditions, hewas able to project what social conditions would be needed to developthis new science — social conditions which he believed would alsorequire this new science. What Bogdanov called for, and devoted most ofthe rest of his life promoting and developing, was the creation of a newway of organizing experience, a proletarian culture.

6. Proletarian Culture and Tektology

The need to create a new proletarian culture had been a concern ofB o g d a n o v ' s from 1904 onwards . 3 8 After having completed theelaboration of his empiriomonist philosophy and having broken withthe Leninists, Bogdanov focused most of his efforts in this direction.As he understood it, the failure of the revolution of 1905 had shownthat the workers were not yet prepared to take political power, and thateven if they gained political power, they were not culturally prepared tocreate a genuinely socialist society. Unlike Lenin whose major concernwas with the seizure of power, Bogdanov was more concerned with thelonger term project of creating a socialist society.39 It followed fromBogdanov ' s social theories that it is not the property relations ofcapitalism which are the most important means of domination insociety but the way production is organized. And since social labor isbased on the organization of experience, what is required to change theway production is organized is the creation and development of newways of organizing experience, a struggle against the fetishisms andidols which prevented people from appreciating that the organization ofproduction and social relations could be different. Socialism cannot beachieved by "a revolution of property, a change in rulers of society — amatter of class interests and material force of the masses." It requires "acreative revolution of world culture, a change from spontaneouseducation and struggle of social forms to conscious creation — a matter

38 In 1925, Bogdanov collected and published a large number of articles onproletarian culture dating back to 1904 in an anthology (O proletarskoikul'ture, 1904-1924 [On Proletarian Culture] [Leningrad and Moscow:1925], pp. 334-35).39 James C. McClelland, "Utopianism versus Revolutionary Heroism inBolshevik Policy: The Proletarian Culture Debate," Slavic Review, 39, 3,September, 1980.

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of a new class logic, new methods of unifying forces, new methods ofthinking."40

Apart from property relations and the organization of production,all social relationships based on domination and subordination, whetheron sex, race, class, nationality, or possession of technical knowledge,are sources of conflict that must be criticised and overcome by theproletariat. As Bogdanov put it: "The struggle for socialism is not byany means to be equated with an exclusive war against capitalism." Itinvolves "the creation of new elements of socialism in the proletariatitself, in its internal relations, and in its conditions of everyday life: thedevelopment of a socialist proletarian culture."41 Bogdanov also paidattention to male-female relationships as problematic, as needing to betransformed by the proletariat.42 Consequently, a genuine revolution isnot something which could be achieved by one gigantic act of will inwhich power is seized, but a transformative process involving manylevels. Only when the proletariat can oppose the old cultural world withits own political force, its own economic plan, and its "new world ofculture, with its new, higher methods" will genuine socialism bepossible.43

Art, literature, philosophy, and science were all accordedimportance by Bogdanov as ideological labor, their object being atransformation of the way people organize their experience to achieve acommon understanding of the world. In opposition to orthodoxMarxists, Bogdanov argued: "Art...is a most powerful weapon for theorganization of collective forces and, in a class society, of classforces."44 The ultimate goal of ideological labor is overcoming thedivisions between people and the creation of a collective of creativeindividuals with a common will which can be appreciated as such byeach individual member of this collective. This is associated withovercoming the alienation of people from one another and theiraffirmation of their own collective power, their common will to createand to control nature for human ends. In the new society, with the

4 0 Bogdanov, "Ideal i put ' ," in Voprosy sotsializma (Moscow: 1918), p.100f.(cited in Socher, 1988, op. cit., p. 39).4 1 Bogdanov, "Sotsializm v sastoiashchem," Vpered, 2, February, 1911, p.68 (cited in ibid., p. 39).4 2 Graham and Stites, eds., op. cit., p. 244. (Alexandra Kollantai was adesciple of Bogdanov.)4 3 Bogdanov, "Programma kul'tury," Voprosy sotsializma (Moscow: 1918),p. 73 (cited by Socher, 1988, op. cit., p. 39).4 4 Cited McClelland, op. cit., p. 403 (without reference).

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overcoming of class and other divisions, the "psychology ofdisconnectedness" will be replaced by the recognition of the self as "anintegral part of the great whole."45 This is Bogdanov's answer toSoreFs reinterpretation of Marx to celebrate not the scientific analysisof society, but the provision of a "myth" which gave the working classsomething to live for, and more importantly, to the challenge ofNietzsche, who diagnosed the nihilism of the age as a consequence ofthe triumph of slave morality, as the will-to-power turned against itself,a triumph which would be only more complete if socialists were toprevail.46 Bogdanov's was not a socialism of negation, of ressentiment,but a socialism which affirmed the human will.

According to Bogdanov, science would be the most importantcomponent of the new culture because it bridges the gap betweenideological and technological knowledge. Recent developments inscience, themselves manifestations of the change in work and workrelations, were seen to be already portents of the new socialist society.In societies with authoritarian structures, such as ancient or feudalsocieties, cause is understood to predominate over effect as somethingstrong and active. Regularities in the material world are seen asproduced by spirit, by something transcending the world. With thedevelopment of capitalist society, effect is understood abstractly asfollowing cause out of some sort of natural or logical necessity,independent of human will and experience, reflecting the powerlessnessof people before the impersonal imperatives of the market. With thedevelopment of more complex technology bringing a closer relationshipbetween labor and the control of production, a new concept of causationhas emerged within science. Machine production changes the world byturning the physical, chemical, and electrical forces into one another asnatural forces are turned into the mechanical forces of production. Inessence, machine production is "the systematic transformation ofefforts, or, in scientific and exact terms, the transformation of'energy'."47 Bogdanov rejected the "fetishistic" concept of energy as athing in itself, and also the notion of it being a useful fiction; the firstbecause energy is represented apart from labor activity, the secondbecause energy is conceived only in relation to thought and not toaction. The concept of energy arises from the use of labor causality as asubstitute, and it should be recognized as such. Energy represents the

45 Bogdanov, "Tseli i normy zhinzi," in Novyi mir, 3rd ed. (Moscow: 1920)(cited by Socher, 1988, op. cit., p. 197).46 See Sochor, ibid.47 Bogdanov, 1913, op. cit., p. 268f (cited in Jensen, op. cit., p. 120).

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practical relationship of society to nature, of human activity to thatwhich resists this activity. The transformation of energy refers to thecreation and change wrought by active, human effort on resistingnature: "to see 'energy* in the processes of nature means to look atthose processes from the perspective of their possible labor exploitationby man."48 Since neither effort nor energy is either created or destroyedin production, but simply takes on different appearances and uses, causeand effect modelled on the transformation of energy must appear asequal, as simply "different phases in a continuous series of changingand changeable phenomena."49

This change foreshadows a situation where workers will cease to bemere laborers and will control production. Then, laboring will berecognized as the organization of the series of changing and changeablephenomena, and laborers will appreciate work as such. As manual workbecomes increasingly organizational and intellectual, laborers will firstunite with the technical intelligentsia, then become engineer-workers,and finally scientist-workers. This will be associated with theovercoming of the specialization of society based on capitalist exchangerelations. What is required to bring this about — for laborers to becomescientists able to appreciate all aspects of production — andsimultaneously, what will emerge with the overcoming ofspecialization based on capitalist exchange relations, is a new sciencewhich focuses on the general features of all organization and whichthereby systematizes the entire cognitive experience of the past.Bogdanov believed that the greatest contribution he could make tocreating a proletarian culture was founding such a science oforganization, and he devoted most of the rest of his life to this,producing what he regarded as his most important work, Tektology:The Universal Organizational Science (from the Greek word "tekton,"meaning "bui lder" — a term Bogdanov took from Haeckel ' smorphology).5 0

Bogdanov described Tektology in his autobiography as "a generalstudy of the forms and laws of the organization of all elements of

48 Ibid., p. 271 (cited in ibid., p. 122).49 Ibid., p. 270 (cited in ibid., p. 121).50 A. A. Bogdanov, Tektologia: Vseobshchaya Organizatsionnay Nauka,Vol. I (St. Petersburg: 1912); Vol. II (Moscow: 1917); Vol. III (Moscow:1922). Bogdanov, 2nd ed., 1984, op. cit., is essentially a condensation ofthis three volume work.

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nature, practice and thought."51 According to him, "we are organizers ofnature, of ourselves and of our experience," and he examined "ourpractice, cognition and artistic creations from this organizational pointof v iew." Moreover , Bogdanov believed that our organizationalexperience could be used as a substitute for understanding the rest ofnature, and argued that this provides the basis for a monistic world-view, allowing us to see ourselves as self-organizing parts of a self-organizing nature. It is not only we who organize. Nature itself is thefirst great organizer, and humans are only one of its organized products."Inorganic" nature is highly organized. "Matter," Bogdanov argued,"with all of its inertia, is being perceived as the most concentratedcomplex of energy, that is, precisely activities; its atom is a system ofclosed motions, the speed of which exceeds all others in nature."52 Andthe simplest of living cell "surpasses in complexity and perfection ofits organization all that man can organize."53 Bogdanov concluded:

Thus, the experience and ideas of contemporary science lead usto the only integral, the only monistic understanding of theuniverse. It appears before us as an infinitely unfolding fabricof all types of forms and levels of organization, from theunknown elements of ether to human collectives and starsystems. All these forms, in their interlacement and mutuals truggle, in their constant changes, create the universalorganizat ional process , infinitely split in its parts , butcontinuous and unbroken in its whole.54

The basic focus of Tektology is on the necessity to study anyphenomenon from the point of view of its organization, since allactivities of humans and of the rest of nature are primarily theorganization and disorganization of elements on hand. The workattempts to systematize the fragmented knowledge of organizationalmethods so they can be studied and developed systematically to revealstructural relations and laws common to the most heterogeneousphenomena , and to reveal the most general characterist ics oforganization. Aspects of organization form considered are wholeness,self-regulation, transformation and development, equilibrium anddisequilibrium, and stability, instability, and crises.

51 Aleksandr, Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (autobiography), in Haupt andMarie, op. cit., p. 288.52 Ibid., p. 42.53 Bogdanov, 2nd ed., 1984, op. cit., p. 5.54 Ibid., p. 6.

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7. The Communist Revolution: Bogdanov andthe Proletkult Movement

In 1916, Bogdanov published four major articles analysing thedynamics of the war economies of the belligerent powers, developing atheory of "War Communism," arguing that this was paving the way forthe emergence of a system of State Capitalism which would bemaintained after the war.55 Bogdanov speculated that this new systemmight not be presided over by the bourgeoisie, but might come underthe management of a new class "of economists, engineers, doctors, andlawyers, in short, of the intelligentsia itself."56 Extending theseanalyses to Russia some years later, Bogdanov characterized thesocioeconomic system which developed in Russia during theRevolution and Civil War as "War Communism of the LaboringClasses." He denied that this was genuine communism, and argued that,like the Military State Capitalism which had developed in the war yearsin the West, War Communism was economically destructive and had tobe abandoned. This explained the New Economic Policy implementedin March, 1921, which was largely a return to a market-based economy.Bogdanov did not attempt to characterize the New Economic Policy, butdid put forward the thesis that the revolution in Russia might yet resultin the subjugation of the proletariat by some new social stratum oftechnical intelligentsia, and he warned that if Gastev's proposals(supported by Lenin) for the scientific organization of labor alongTaylorist lines were implemented, the result would be the emergence ofa new ruling class of scientific engineers.

Bogdanov was actively engaged in opposing such tendencies.Lunacharskii, Bogdanov's brother-in-law and fellow Vperedist hadreturned to Russia in May, 1917, and had rejoined the Bolsheviks.57

Strongly influenced by Bogdanov and also committed to the creation ofa proletarian culture, Lunacharskii organized the first conference ofproletarian cultural-educational organizations (Proletkult) in Petrogradjust before the October Revolution. After the revolution Lunacharskiiwas made Commissar of Enlightenment. His first declaration asCommissar was:

5 5 "Mirovye krizisy, mirnye i voennye," Letopis ' , 2, 4, 5, 7, 1916. Onthese articles see John Biggart, "Alexander Bogdanov and the Theory of a'New Class , ' " The Russian Review, 49, 1990, p. 270f.5 6 Vseobshchaia Organizatsionnaia Nauka (Tektologiia), vol. 2 (Moscow:1917), p. 140 (cited in ibid., p. 271).5 7 On Bogdanov's response to this, see his letter to Lunacharskii(November 19, 1917) in Gloveli, op. cit., pp. 45-50.

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The people themselves, consciously or unconsciously, mustevolve their own culture....The independent actionof ...workers', soldiers', and peasants' cultural-educationorganizations must achieve full autonomy, both in relation tothe central government and to the municipal centres.58

In February of 1918, Bogdanov organized a conference in Moscow toestablish a Moscow Proletkult, and on September 25, 1918, the firstAll-Russian Conference of proletarian cultural-educational organizationsmet in Moscow, and Proletkult was established as a laboratory ofproletarian ideology and as a mass educational organization. At thisconference, Bogdanov called for the establishment of a workers'university and a workers' encyclopaedia, and also for the socialization ofscience, which led to the establishment of the Proletarian University inMoscow in 1919.

Proletkult had a stormy, turbulent, brilliant, and short career,promoting the creativity of the working class in literature, theatre,music, and science, and providing a haven for those opposed to theauthoritarian and capitalistic tendencies in the Soviet government.59

Major Proletkult organizations were established in the big industrialtowns and capitals. Proletkult cells were established in every factory,and studios, where 80 thousand workers learned and practiced the artsand sciences, were set up around the country. Between 1918 and 1923,this organization published as many as 34 journals.60 While supportedby Lunacharskii in his capacity as Commissar of Enlightenment, it wasBogdanov who rose to be Prolekulfs leading light, and his science oforganization was disseminated to half a million working people outsidethe studios. Associated with his work in this movement, Bogdanovwrote Art and the Working Class (1918), Socialism and Science (1918)and The Elements of Proletarian Culture in the Development of theWorking Class (1920). In these writings, and in his debates with otherProletkult members, Bogdanov upbraided those who strove to reduceworkers to a mass or herd, and those who merely attacked the ideas ofthe bourgeoisie, and he railed against proletarian art based on "personalhatred, gloating insults, lynch law, even sadistic delight in the theme ofpulling out the intestines of the bourgeoisie." For instance herepudiated the symbols of V. Kirillov's poem, "We" (My), "In thename of our Tomorrow, / let us burn Raphael, / destroy museums, /trample on the flowers of art," for being suffused with "the spirit of the

58 Quoted in Fitzpatrick, op.cit., p. 89.59 On Proletkult, see Fitzpatrick, ibid., Ch. 5.60 Sochor, 1988, op. cit., p. 129.

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soldier not the worker."61 The worker should not be motivated by pettymalice against the individual representatives of capitalism, since suchpeople are the inevitable products of their social environment. What isrequired is unyielding enmity towards capitalism, and a commitment tothe nobler end of creating "a new aristocracy of culture," a culture"combining the work of the head with that of the hands."62 To thosewho were sceptical of the ability of the proletariat to create such aculture, Bogdanov retorted, "And if [proletarian culture] were beyondone's strength, the working class would have nothing to count on,except the transition from one enslavement to another, [that is,] fromunder the yoke of capitalists to the yoke of engineers and theeducated."63

Lenin had been alarmed at the influence of Prolekult in 1919, andin 1920 made a determined effort to have it subordinated to theCommissariat of Enlightenment. In response to this, Bogdanovresigned from its leading councils. Lenin continued to oppose theinfluence of Proietkult and to curtail its activities; in January, 1922,Prolekult lost its subsidy from the Commissariat of Enlightenment.Subsequently, Proietkult withered away and Bogdanov lost the platformto disseminate his ideas to the workers, although he remained a memberof the Socialist Academy of Social Science and continued to publish hisviews in books and the journal of the Communist Academy.

While Bogdanov refrained from analysing the relationship betweenProietkult and the Bolshevik government in class terms, Bogdanov'ssupporters spelt out the implications of his ideas. The "Collectivists,"former members of the Workers' Opposition, inspired by Bogdanov'sorganizational theory and proclaiming themselves "Marxists of thatschool whose intellectual leader is Bogdanov," distributed a manifestoin November, 1921, during the Second All-Russian Congress of theProletkults, which condemned Lenin and characterized the OctoberRevolution as the introduction into Russia of a world-wide system ofState Capitalism.64 They argued that the intelligentsia was emerging asa new, independent class. On reading this manifesto, Lenin labelled it a"Platform of Bogdanovites."65 The Collectivists seemed to vanish, but

6 1 Bogdanov, 1925, op. cit., pp. 163, 173 (cited in ibid, p . 95).6 2 A.A. Bogdanov, Elemny proletarskoi kul'tury v razivitii rabochegaklassa (Moscow: 1920), p. 40 (cited in ibid., p. 132).6 3 A.A. Bogdanov, "Ideal i put ' , " in Voprosy sotsializma (Moscow: 1918)(cited in ibid., p. 186).6 4 See Socher, ibid., p. 277.6 5 Ibid, p. 179.

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also to have merged their activities with a kindred group, RabochayaPravda (Workers' Truth), which also drew its inspiration fromBogdanov. In its journal, this group characterized the post-revolutionaryorder as a continuation of the "military-state capitalism" of pre-waryears, and argued that the technical intelligentsia had united with themore competent members of the old bourgeoisie to form a newbourgeoisie of responsible functionaries, plant directors, managers oftrusts, and chairmen of the Soviet committees antagonistic to theinterests of the working class. The Communist Party had degenerated,turning into a ruling party of the organizers and managers of thegovernmental apparatus and economic life and opportunistic elementsfrom the upper strata of the proletariat.

The activities of this group had unfortunate consequences forBogdanov. In 1923, Rabochaya Pravda organized strikes in industry.Suspected members were arrested by the OGPU (the forerunner of theKGB), and on October 1st, Bogdanov was also arrested. He was releaseda month later after having convinced Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head ofOGPU, that while he shared some of the positions of RabochayaPravdai he had no formal association with it.66 Following this incident,Bogdanov increasingly withdrew from political activity and devotedhimself to scientific work. When Bogdanov died exchanging his bloodwith a seriously ill patient, many saw this as suicide in response to hispessimism about the future of Russia in the face of the increasingauthoritarianism of Stalin's government.

8. Bogdanov's Importance for theEnvironmental Movement

As I have pointed out, Bogdanov addressed the issue of theenvironmental constraints on economic development in his Utopiannovel Red Star, published in 1908. Describing the situation confrontingMartians who were conceived to be far in advance of people on Earth,both in terms of their social development and their problems, Bogdanovshowed great prescience to anticipate the problems that would arise inthe future even if communism were achieved. In one conversation,Bogdanov has his Martian interlocutor point out the continuingproblem — in Martian history — of natural resource and energyshortages, despite the power of their science and technology. TheMartian also describes the frequent disastrous side-effects of trying toovercome these shortages.67 For instance, deforestation resulting from

66 Biggart, 1990, op. cit., p. 280.67 Bogdanov, 1984, op. cit., p. 79.

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an effort to overcome an energy shortage had worsened the climate onMars for decades. The shortage of resources is behind the Martians'expedition to Earth. It transpires that the Martians are consideringeradicating human life by painless death rays to enable them to exploitthe Earth's resources. In the arguments between the Martians over thisstrategy, Bogdanov rehearsed the arguments which have now becomeprominent between "shallow ecologists," who argue that people ineconomically advanced societies are the ultimate end and should beprepared to destroy other life forms in the cause of human progress, and"deep ecologists," who argue that all life is significant. Sterni argues:"There is but one life in the Universe, and it will be enriched rather thanimpoverished if it is our socialism rather than the distant, semibarbaricEarthly variant that is allowed to develop." Netti replies: "'There is butone Life in the Universe,' says Sterni. And yet what does he propose tous? That we exterminate an entire individual type of life, a type whichwe can never resurrect or replace.... But the Earthlings are not the sameas we. They and their civilizations are not simply lower and weakerthan ours — they are different. If we eliminate them we will not replacethem in the process of universal evolution but will merely fill inmechanically the vacuum we have created in the world of life forms."68

Yet what is most important about Bogdanov is that this presciencewas based on a world-view which was elaborated coherently and waseffectively defended. It follows from the place he accorded the concept ofenergy in this world-view that it is necessary to acknowledgelimitations to economic growth, and it follows from his commitmentto monism and the centrality of the notion of organization that theinterdependencies between organisms in nature and the constraints theseimpose on economic life should be recognized, and that non-Europeanforms of human life and non-human life should be appreciated as uniqueorganizational forms along with those of the most socially andtechnologically advanced humans. Even if Bogdanov had not drawn outthese implications, the importance of his world-view forenvironmentalists would still have to be recognized. For this reason, itis not significant that Bogdanov frequently celebrated the ultimate goalof labor as the total domination of nature, since this project isinconsistent with his world-view, and merely shows that he had not yetfully extricated himself from the dualism of bourgeois society, the

68 Ibid., p. 116f.

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overcoming of which he was both predicting and helping to bringabout, in both practice and theory.69

What is germane to us is that Bogdanov and those influenced byhim, most importantly, Lunacharskii, had created an intellectual milieuwithin which those concerned about environmental issues could flourishas never before. After the demise of Proletkult, the Commissariat ofEnlightenment, headed by Lunacharskii , continued to support aneducation devoted to providing equal access of all, to developing thechild's individuality and creativity, and to broadening the curriculum toinclude the study of the surrounding environment, physical and aestheticeducation, and training in elementary labor and craft skills. Also, theCommissariat continued to support creative work in science and the artswith a minimum of outside interference and pressure as the conditionfor creating a new culture. Lunacharskii persevered in trying to cultivatea population of people able to control their own destinies, to creating anew form of society. This was a milieu in which art, music, literature,theater, film-making, literary and cultural theory, economics, legaltheory, sociology, psychology, and the natural sciences all flowered. Itwas a milieu in which Soviet ecologists came to lead the world in theirresearch and to spearhead a radical and powerful conservation movementresolved to harmonizing the economic life of society with the energeticprocesses and spontaneous organization of nature.70

While it can be seen that Bogdanov's tektology set the agenda, amore direct inspiration to the ecologists was Vladimir IvanovichVemadskii. Vemadskii had developed the concept of biosphere, and hadhimself warned of the bio-physico-chemical limits to economicdevelopment . 7 1 While an opponent of Tsarism, Vemadskii had alsobeen an opponent of the Bolsheviks. However, he had very similar ideasto Lunacharskii and Bogdanov on the need for a close relationshipbetween science and the popular masses, to develop radically new ideasin science and to leave behind the old ideas of the 19th century, and onthe centrality of energetic processes and complex interdependencieswithin nature. After the revolution Vemadskii tried to get permanent

69 Mark Adams' claim that Bogdanov should not be considered anenvironmentalist because he did not generalize his analysis of Mars toEarth, is, in my opinion, irrelevant. See Adams, op. cit., pp. 1-15.70 Weiner, op.cit.71 On Vernadskii's concept of the biosphere, see Jacques Grinevald, "Sketchfor a History of the Idea of the Biosphere," in Peter Bunyard and EdwardGoldsmith, eds., Gaia, the Thesis, the Mechanisms and the Implications(Camelford: Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1988). See also ibid., p. 44.

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funding in the West, but was unable to do so, while in 1925 he wasawarded a newly created chair at the Academy of Science in Russia.72

The most original of the ecologists influence by Vernadskii wasVladimir Vladimirovich Stanchinskii who became the mainspokesperson for the conservation movement.73 Stanchinskii was thefirst person to trace the energy flows through ecosystems and to identifyand give a mathematical formula for the energy transfers between"trophic levels," showing how "heterotrophs," those organisims whichlive by consuming "autotrophs," the organisms which derive theirenergy directly from the sun, can only utilize a small proportion of theenergy from the latter and can only be maintained with a fraction oftheir bio-mass. Biological communities were seen as having adistinctive structure characterized by interdependence among their bioticcomponents and living in a state of relative equilibrium, or"proportionality." The ecologists, Stanchinskii in particular, argued thatif civilization continues to disrupt the balance of natural communities,it will eventually destroy itself, and they were supported in this claimby Lunacharskii.74 They called for a central role for ecology informulating the Five Year Plans.

The creation of the milieu within which these ideas developed waspart of the Vperedist project of breaking down class barriers and thedivision between intellectual and manual labor, and of uniting scientistsand other creative thinkers with the working class, already begun undercapitalism. According to Bogdanov, it was the movement of society inthis direction which would lead to the primacy of the concept of energywithin the sciences, and which would then bring the concept oforganization, both in social life and in nature, into central focus. Theideas developed by Vernadskii and the ecologists confirmed Bogdanov'stheory of sociomorphs and his vision of the way science would developin a classless society free from domination by exchange relations. Butalso confirming Bogdanov's theory, and vindicating his concern aboutthe authoritarian tendencies of the Bolshevik government, was the fateof the ecologists and their environmental concerns as the quest for aclassless society faltered. The failure of Bogdanov's Proletkult paved the

72 Kendall E. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions:V.I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863-1945 (Bloomington andIndianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 161.73 On these ecologists, see Weiner, op.cit.; Douglas Weiner, "TheHistorical Origins of Soviet Environmentalism," Environmental Review, 6,2, 1982; and "Community Ecology in Stalin's Russia: 'Socialist' and'Bourgeois' Science," Isis, 75, 1984.74 Weiner, 1988, op. cit., p. 230.

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way for the crystallisation and consolidation of the new class oftechnical intelligentsia, many of whom had risen from the workingclass, which set itself above the mass of the workers and thepeasantry.75

The rise of Stalin can be understood as part of the development ofthis new class, which was associated first with efforts to impose a partyline on scientific work, and culminated in the reduction of science tonothing but an instrument of economic (and military) development.This Stalinization of science engendered a new dualism betweenconsciousness as the center of action, identified with the CommunistParty, and the rest of the world which was conceived to be material,"the entire world existing independent of us."7 6 With this dualism, thenew ruling class was blinded to the dependence of humanity as oneorganizational form in nature on other organizational forms, whichcorresponded to the blindness of this class to the complexities andsignificance of the organizational forms of the peasantry and minoritygroups within the Soviet Union. With the emergence of this new rulingclass and its dualistic world-view, ecologists were attacked "for their'traitorous' opposition to the heroic projects of the Five-Year Plans"7 7

and marginalized, many of them, including Stanchinskii, losing theiracademic posi t ions. Subsequently, the environmental movementcontracted to a small holding operation.

What these different and opposing developments show withdramatic clarity was that it is through the dissolution of the classdivisions of capitalist society, through the rise of people who neitherdominate nor are dominated, that it becomes possible to thoroughlydevelop and sustain the cognitive forms necessary for societies toproperly comprehend that humans themselves are organizational formswithin nature, dependent on the autonomous dynamics of otherorganizational forms, and to face up to the limits to the sustainableexploitation of these forms.

75 Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin: Originsof the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1978). On Lunacharskii's opposition to thesedevelopments, see p. 169 and passim.76 M.B. Mitin, ed., Dialektichesky materializm (Moskva: 1933), p. 107(cited by N. Lobkowicz, "Materialism and Matter in Marxism-Leninism" inErnan McMullin, ed., The Concept of Matter in Modern Philosophy [NotreDame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978], p. 177). In this article,Lobkowicz examines the dualism of Soviet dialectical materialism in somedepth (pp. 176-188).77 Weiner, 1988, op.cit., p. 692.

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9. ConclusionBogdanov's significance lies in identifying the ultimate cause of

the "ways of organizing experience" which have impaired ourrelationship to nature in the class divisions of society, in the divisionbetween intellectual and manual labor, and between those who organizeand those who are organized. He elaborated a philosophy of livingexperience and a general theory of organization which together revealthe need, and provide the foundation for, a new culture, including a newscience. He accepted that the full development of his own ideas wouldonly be possible as part of the creation of a classless society. But healso pointed out that the development of these ideas, the creation of aproletarian culture, is a necessary part of creating a classless society.After the revolution, Bogdanov and those influenced by him strovemightily to provide the proleteriat and others with the conditions forcreating this new culture in order to make a classless society in theSoviet Union possible. This facilitated, among other culturalachievements, the rise of the ecologists, who elaborated radically newways of organizing experience which accorded with Bogdanov'stektology. Bogdanov also identified and analyzed those tendencies atwork in the Communist Party, in the organization of the economy andin Russian culture which could re-establish class divisions. In so doing,he identified the developments which would undermine the new,environmentally conscious ways of organizing experience which hadbeen fostered.

Bogdanov's achievements extend beyond mere historical interest.His project of developing a concept of experience based on praxis, andof showing that all abstract thinking develops through such experience,has been furthered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his followers. Butwhile these thinkers have defended and developed this project, there areinsights in Bogdanov's work which have not been duplicated. Whilesystems theorists such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy, physicists such asDavid Bohm, and chemists such as Ilya Prigogine have furthered ourunderstanding of energy and the nature of organization (or order), thereare dimensions to Bogdanov's tektology which illuminate features ofthe world ignored by later thinkers. While the tradition of culturalecology which was partly inspired by Bogdanov, modern scholarship —from Leslie White's anthropology through Robert Newbold Adams'extension of this to the study of the energetics of modern industrialsocieties to Stephen Bunker's brilliant reformulation of Marxistdependency theories to take into account energy flows through the worldsystem — has vastly deepened our understanding of the relationshipbetween cultural processes, social labor, and the natural environment.

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Bogdanov's reformulation of Marx's social theories thus can stillprovide guidance for research in this area. His sociology of culture couldprovide insights into, and a basis for the critique of, the presentStalinization of science and trivialization of art and literature inAnglophone nations. But more important than any particular aspect ofBogdanov's work is that all these different areas of research are givendue weight and brought into relationship with each other, and related tothe struggle to overcome the alienation of people and the oppression inexisting societies, and to creating a new socio-economic order, acollective of creative individuals with a common will controlling theirown destiny. Through Bogdanov's work, achievements, and influence,we now know why it is necessary to create a classless society to fullycomprehend and to live in accordance with the dynamics of nature, andthat creating this society will involve a long struggle to develop newforms of social relationships, new forms of art and literature, and a newscience. It will be necessary to create a new culture.

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