Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (1873-1928)

Russian philosopher and physician. Born in Tula on August 22, 1873 and died in Moscow on April 7, 1928. His initial surname was Malinovsky. He joined the workers’ movement after his graduation from the Tula Gymnasium; in 1896 he joined social democrats. Following the Second Congress of Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, he chose to stand with the Bolsheviks, and he was elected as a prospective member to the Central Committee at the 3rd, as an alternate member at the 4th and the 5th Congresses of RSDLP. He worked in the editorial department of Bolshevik newspaper Forward (Vpered), Proletariat and New Life. After the failure of the revolution in 1905, he joined Vperedists group and later led the recallist (Otzovist) group. He was expelled from the Bolshevik party in 1909. After the October Revolution, he was one of the founders of the Proletarian Culture movement, known as Proletkult. In 1926, he founded and became the director of the Institute for Haematology and Blood Transfusions, and later the same year died because of a wrong blood transfusion operation.

Bogdanov’s major philosophical works include Basic Elements of Natural History (1899), Empiriomonism: Articles on Philosophy (3 Volumes in total, 1904-1906), Organizational Morphology (3 Volumes in total, 1913-1922), Science of Social Consciousness (1914), Philosophy of Living Experience (1923), Proletarian Culture (1925), and others.

At first, he was a materialist of natural science. Later, influenced by German physicochemist W. Ostwald’s “rationalism”, he turned to Machism doctrine and founded the idealistic theory of “empirio-monism”. He denies the principle of material first and consciousness second, and unifies spirit and material into “experience”. He thinks that psychological phenomenon is the experience of individuals, physical phenomenon is the experience of social organization, and physical thing is the replacement of psychological thing, that is to say, a school of creatures. He attempts to cover up the essence of idealism with eclecticism. In the view of social history, he revised the Marxist principle that social existence determines social consciousness and said that social existence and social consciousness are “the same”. After the October Revolution in Russia, he advocated nihilism on how to deal with cultural heritage. He argued that proletarian culture was something like chemical reagent, which could be produced in a “laboratory” way.

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin criticised Bogdanov’s philosophical views, stating that his denial and rejection of the Marxist worldview was theoretically wrong and practically harmful.

In “The Tasks of the Youth League” Lenin criticised his nihilistic cultural claims. Lenin pointed out that proletarian culture did not fall from the sky, nor was it invented, but was “the regular development of all the knowledge created by man under the oppression of capitalist, landlord and bureaucratic society”.