Alexander Bogdanov – författare

The Philosophy of Living Experience is the single best introduction to the thought of Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), a Russian polymath who was co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik Party. His landmark achievements are Empiriomonism (1904-6), a philosophy of radical empiricism that he developed to replace what he considered to be the crude materialism of contemporary Marxists, and Tektology: Universal Organisational Science (1912-17), a precursor of cybernetics and systems theory. The Philosophy of Living Experience (1913) was written at a transitional point between them.

Empiriomonism is Alexander Bogdanov 's scientific-philosophical substantiation of Marxism. In Books One and Two, he combines Ernst Mach 's and Richard Avenarius 's neutral monist philosophy with the theory of psychophysical parallelism and systematically demonstrates that human psyches are thoroughly natural and are subject to nature 's laws. In Book Three, Bogdanov argues that empiriomonism is superior to G. V. Plekhanov 's outdated materialism and shows how the principles of empiriomonism solve the basic problem of historical materialism: how a society 's material base causally determines its ways of thinking. Bogdanov concludes that empiriomonism is of the same order as materialist systems, and, since it is the ideology of the productive forces of society, it is a Marxist philosophy.

"[A] surprisingly moving story." —The New Yorker"Bogdanov's novels reveal a great deal about their fascinating author, about his time and, ironically, ours, and about the genre of utopia as well as his contribution to it." —Slavic Review"Bogdanov's imaginative predictions for his utopia are both technological and social . . . Even more farsighted are [his] anxious forebodings about the limits and costs of the utopian future." —Science Fiction Studies"The contemporary reader will marvel at [Bogdanov's] foresight: nuclear fusion and propulsion, atomic weaponry and fallout, computers, blood transfusions, and (almost) unisexuality." —ChoiceA communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist.

Written under conditions of tsarist censorship, Basic Elements of the Historical View of Nature offers a powerful defense of historical materialism. At first, the book appears to be a dispassionate account of nature, life, the psyche, and society, based on the most up-to-date science. But in fact, it has a Marxist goal: to defend the idea of historical materialism. After developing a thoroughly materialist, determinist view of reality, Bogdanov explains how forms of social labor determine the forms of human ideology. Cognition from the Historical Point of View explains the causal connections between labor, forms of cognition, and ideological constructs. Finally, The Science of Social Consciousness, written after the relaxation of censorship, presents a history of European ideological development from an explicitly Marxist point of view.