Bogdanov Library – serie

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 the two; it is a final summing up of empiriomonism, an illustration of his theory of the social genesis of ideas, and an anticipation of Tektology.

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 In Book Three, Bogdanov argues that empiriomonism is superior to G. V. Plekhanov’s outdated materialism and shows how the principles of empiriomonism solve the basic problem of historical materialism: how a society’s material base causally determines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.

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) wrote the articles in this volume in the years before and during the Revolution of 1905 when he was co-leader, with V.I. Lenin, of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, and was active in the revolution and the struggle against Marxist revisionism. In these pieces, Bogdanov defends the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy on the basis of a neutral monist philosophy (empiriomonism), the idea of the invariable regularity of nature, and the use of the principle of selection to explain social development. The articles in On the Psychology of Society (1904/06) discredit the neo-Kantian philosophy of Russia’s Marxist revisionists, rebut their critique of historical materialism, and develop the idea that labour technology determines social consciousness. New World (1905) envisions how humankind will develop under socialism, and Bogdanov’s contributions to Studies in the Realist Worldview (1904/05) defend the labour theory of value and criticise neo-Kantian sociology.