Russian Machism

Also known as “Empirio-criticism”, a trend of thought which is named after its founder Mach. Russian Machism is the general term including the various schools of Machism that emerged during the spread of Machism in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The advocates of Russian Machism openly proposed to “revise” and “complement” Marxism with Machism, and to replace dialectical materialism with “empirio-monism”. Russian Machism was an idealistic philosophical school which was incompatible with Marxism.

The leading representatives of Russian Machism were Bogdanov, Bazarov, Yushkevich, Lunacharsky, Berman, and Chernov. The publication of Vol. 1 of Bogdanov’s work Empirio-Monism in 1903 marked the emergence of Machism in Russia. After the defeat of the Russian Revolution in 1905, Russian Machism formed a trend of thought that culminated in 1908 with the publication of four masterpieces, a collection of essays Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism, Yushkevich’s Materialism and Critical Realism, J. Berman’s Dialectics in the Light of the Modern Theory of Knowledge, and Valentinov’s The Philosophical Conceptions of Marxism.

The main purpose of Russian Machism was an attempt to revise Marxist philosophy by promoting Machism. Bogdanov advocated the idea of empirio-monism, which held that the beginning of all “elements” in the universe was a chaotic world, but it respectively moves to the simple connections of elements, to the experiences organized by mental things or individual persons, and finally to physical things and to the cognition produced by such things, i.e., to the socially organized experiences.

On the other hand, Bazarov, proposed the monism of reality and regarded the recognition of objective reality as the basis of knowledge as an “unconscious materialist mysticism”.

Yushkevich proposed empirio-symbolism, which holds that cognition is the sum of various symbols and that the mission of such symbols is to organize, coordinate, and combine empirical materials. Chernov attacked Engels’ critique of agnosticism and Engels’ acknowledgement of the idea of “thing-in-itself”, as “the crudest materialist dogmatism”. Starting from sensory experience, the representatives of Russian Machism, put forward the theory of “universal substitution”. Based on this theory, they argued that mental experience is the most fundamental and direct thing, and advocated to “substitute” mental experience for the material world. In fact, this was the denial of the objectivity and regularity or the development laws of the material world, and also the objective truth and the practice as the confirmation of the objective truth.

In their view of history, Russian Machism advocated the idea of “identity of social being and social consciousness” and that the law of labor-value should be replaced by the “law of physical consumption of energy” and the “law of labor consumption”. In his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin made a sharp and thorough criticism of the ideological trend of Russian Machism, exposed the hypocrisy of their claims as “non-partisanship” and “neutrality” of philosophy, consequently Lenin proposed and elucidated the party spirit principle of philosophy, and criticized their fantasy of transcending materialism and idealism by Machism.