1 Little attention seems to be paid to Materialism and Empirio-criticism today, whether among academics or militants. Even those interested in Lenin’s philosophical writings tend to take a critical view of the 1909 text or to minimize its significance in favor of the reflections on the Hegelian dialectic found in the Philosophical Notebooks. [1] And yet there was a time when Materialism and Empirio-criticism was not only taken seriously but was at the center of earnest debates that divided the Marxist camp. Following the publication of the second edition in 1920, the book remained present in the philosophical debates of the young Soviet Union, [2] even before its canonization by Stalin as a key text of official party philosophy. After Stalin’s death in 1953, such debates, in the USSR as elsewhere, continued to revolve around the philosophical theses of Lenin’s book, whether defending or condemning it. [3] Finally, as part of the “return to Lenin” in the 1960s and 1970s, [4] a great many writings contributing to the development of Leninist epistemology were published in various countries. [5]

2 While many authors have written against Materialism and Empirio-criticism or taken it as a starting point, relatively few have focused on the historical and political context of its genesis. And for good reason: for a long time, Lenin and Stalin were the only sources available to work with. The canonization of Leninism and the purges of the Stalinist regime resulted in the erasure of many of the actors in the political and theoretical history of Russian Marxism who had entered into disagreement with the Bolshevik leaders at one point or another; it was not until the late 1960s, for example, that the first studies on Bogdanov were published. [6] Nonetheless, the end of the widespread infatuation with “Leninism” and the reopening of archives relating to the pre-revolutionary period, under Gorbachev and especially after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, opened up an impressive amount of material, enabling a far more detailed view of the period prior to the formation of the Soviet state. The last twenty years have seen the publication of numerous works—mostly untranslated into French—that shed light on once obscure aspects of Bolshevik history.

3 As a consequence of this work, it is now difficult to ignore the highly politically charged context that gave rise to the publication of the 1909 text. [7] The insights of Pannekoek, who, as early as 1938, explained the book’s philosophical poverty as stemming from the need to combat reactionary tendencies within the political movement, [8] have today been confirmed by a great many studies, supported by a growing number of documents including both long-forgotten published works and the private correspondence of the individuals concerned. The amount of such material now available is such that some scholars are tempted to see ME as a political pamphlet in disguise, lacking in any real philosophical ambition, [9] a view they see as being corroborated by its size and its abstract subject matter, somewhat reminiscent of the methods used by Russian revolutionaries to evade Tsarist censorship. [10] On the basis of the documents available to us today, however, it seems difficult to subscribe to such a reductionism, which is as blind in its own way as those theorists who, for more than half a century, debated Leninist philosophy in a completely decontextualized manner. A more realistic approach would be to admit that the two dimensions of the debate, philosophical and political, may well have existed simultaneously and influenced one another.

4 This article seeks to present a reconstruction of the history of the debates that led to the publication of the book, adopting the guiding hypothesis that Materialism and Empirio-criticism is a work born of the clash between two parallel debates, a philosophical debate about the theoretical foundations of Marxism, and a political debate about the line to be taken with regard to revolutionary practice, which essentially took place between three actors: Georgi Plekhanov, Alexander Bogdanov, and Lenin himself. The diagram below schematizes the triadic relationship between these three actors, a relationship whose transformation would result in the writing of ME.

5 The recent works of English-speaking specialists in the history of Soviet thought, including David Bakhurst, David Rowley, James White, and Robert Williams—not forgetting Robert Service, many of whose works have already been translated into French—will serve as our guide in this reconstruction, which will focus as much as possible on the philosophical and political aspects of the relationships between the actors mentioned above. For other, no less interesting aspects of the affair, such as financial issues, or the various tactics of clandestine struggle, the reader may consult Robert Williams’s fascinating work (cited in note 10). Let us also take this opportunity to salute the work of Dominique Lecourt, who, as early as the 1970s, and well before the opening of the Soviet archives, made available to us in French numerous documents that allowed us to put official versions of “Leninism” in perspective. [11]

The “elders”: Plekhanov and Lenin

6 Georgi Plekhanov was the oldest of the three. When Lenin and Bogdanov were just beginning their involvement in the Russian political debate, Plekhanov was already a Marxist author of international standing; indeed, he and Antonio Labriola were hailed as Engels’s best disciples and the greatest European Marxist theorists of their generation.

7 Plekhanov’s personal history is inseparable from that of the original Russian socialism, agrarian socialism or “Populism,” a broad movement of intellectuals who advocated the possibility of a large-scale revolution led by the peasants who constituted the overwhelming majority of the Russian population. [12] The movement’s bitter failure to win the peasants over to its cause led to the terrorist radicalization of some of the Narodniks, who, under the name Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), began to carry out attacks against the regime, the most famous of which was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II himself in 1881. This event aroused ambivalent sentiments among Russian revolutionaries: while the heroism of Narodnaya Volya was widely admired and praised by all socialists, the repression that followed the assassination put a brutal end to the Populist movement and forced Russian socialism to seek out other paths. Initially a Populist militant himself, Plekhanov was hit hard by the failure of agrarian socialism, but his positive personal experiences with workers suggested that socialist propaganda could potentially find more receptive ears than those of the peasants. It was not until his exile to Geneva in the early 1880s, however, that Plekhanov turned away from Populism and converted to Marxism, which meant giving up all hope of a revolution that did not pass through the “bourgeois” stage. [13] Toward the end of 1883, he and other Russian émigrés formed the first embryonic manifestation of the Russian social-democratic movement, in the form of the group known as Emancipation of Labor.

8 Plekhanov’s work is distinguished from that of other Marxists of the time by its highly speculative tendencies. More than any other Marxist theorist, Plekhanov seemed convinced that progress in nature and in human history obeyed invariable scientific laws that would lead ineluctably to socialism. This historical determinism also explains why, during the Bernstein affair, he placed himself on the front line by publishing articles in Die Neue Zeit in which he vigorously defended Marxism against Bernstein’s criticisms: whereas Kautsky saw them as bearing solely upon tactical questions, for Plekhanov the “reformist” tendencies of the English workers as described by Bernstein dealt a potentially fatal blow to the very idea of the ineluctability of the proletarian revolution and of any historical determinism in the strict sense. Paradoxically, it was the abstract nature of Plekhanov’s writings that made it possible for them to escape more easily from the censorship of the Tsarist authorities, ensuring a wide circulation for his work as a theorist and translator of the works of Marx and Engels. Thus, in spite of the peculiarities of his interpretation and the contortions to which it subjected the founders’ texts, [14] for many decades Plekhanov, the “father of Russian Marxism,” remained the undisputed custodian of Marxist orthodoxy both in his home country and internationally—so much so that all new generations of Russian socialists were obliged to measure themselves against him, whether they wanted to or not.

9 Like many Russian Marxists of the time, the young Vladimir Ulyanov grew up under the influence of Plekhanov, but his link to the father of Russian Marxism was not purely theoretical. His brother Alexander had himself been a victim of the wave of Tsarist repression that followed the 1881 assassination: after his participation in a planned attack on Alexander III, he had been arrested by the regime and was ultimately hanged in 1887. This tragic event helped persuade the young Vladimir of the need to put an end to Tsarism; he was also ambivalent toward terrorism, which he always felt a certain sympathy for, even when he rejected Populism. [15] The fact that he had been deeply marked by the same experience may explain the young Ulyanov’s adoration for Plekhanov, who, together with Kautsky, became the tutelary figure of his militancy. The relationship they formed over time was downright passionate, to the point of sometimes being described by Plekhanov as a “marriage.” [16] In the early days of his career, the young lawyer followed closely in the footsteps of his political master: not only did he criticize the Narodniks and revisionists and establish contacts with German social democrats, but, along with other Marxist students, he also formed a social-democratic group in Saint Petersburg, which later joined Plekhanov’s group within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). In his famous 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, whose references to Populism and leniency toward the Populists’ methods somewhat angered orthodox Marxists, [17] he vigorously asserted the need to create a vanguard party with the aim of freeing Russia from the “yoke of autocracy,” which he considered to be a fundamental imperative for Russian socialism. It was during this period that Ulyanov, now known by the pseudonym Lenin, established himself as a significant new figure within Russian Marxist circles.

10 Comparing the theoretical output of the young Lenin with that of Plekhanov, one cannot fail to observe that philosophy hardly seems to be Lenin’s principal subject, and that he focuses largely on questions of politics and economics. It is not that he was ignorant of philosophical thought: in his own polemic with Mikhailovsky, for example, he follows Plekhanov in his criticism of the “subjectivism” of the Populists, while in his criticism of Struve’s book on Populism he reproaches the latter for his “objectivism,” in which necessity becomes pure fatalism [18]; not to mention his famous statements—themselves inspired by Plekhanov [19]—on the importance of revolutionary theory for the revolutionary movement. Nor did he lack the will to write about philosophy: in 1899, after reading texts on materialism and neo-Kantianism, he affirmed his allegiance to materialism, and in a letter to Potresov he expressed his urgent desire to take the neo-Kantians to task. However, he felt that his philosophical education was not sufficient for the task, stating that he did “not intend to write on these subjects until [he had] learned more,” but added that he had already studied d’Holbach and Helvétius with this in mind and, having just begun to read Kant, asked to be sent further neo-Kantian works. [20] Lenin had nurtured the project of writing on philosophical subjects since his youth, but his lack of education on the subject long prevented him from carrying it out; and since the tasks of revolutionary organization were soon to occupy his attention to a large extent, the plan itself would have to be postponed until such time as the revolutionary movement was for some reason or another at a standstill. Thus, although he had followed all of the philosophical controversies surrounding Plekhanov from the 1880s onward, [21] Lenin seems, in Trotsky’s words, to have been content to follow Plekhanov’s lead [22]—something for which Plekhanov himself would later reproach him: “but to [Lenin] all the other philosophical ‘subjects’ are alien as well, because about philosophy he has always been absolutely careless.” [23]

11 Lenin’s debate with Struve, however, already gives us a clue as to his attitude toward Marxist philosophy. In his writings, Struve had suggested that there was no “purely philosophical basis” to Marx and Engels’s thought, but that such a philosophical basis could be produced starting from recent work in (neo-Kantian) philosophy and sociology. This suggestion deeply irritated Lenin, who simply did not accept the idea that there was any flaw to be corrected in the writings of the fathers of Marxism. [24] This literalist stance toward Marxist orthodoxy, no doubt motivated by his status as a cultured man and an avid reader, was to play a significant role in Lenin’s approach to philosophical problems within the movement.

The “youth”: Bogdanov and his comrades

12 While Lenin tended to set philosophy aside in favor of politics, other Russian Marxists seem to have taken philosophical questions more seriously within the framework of their practical struggle. Many of them, anxious to reach the masses with their thinking, believed that it was necessary for the revolutionary struggle to also confront the problems of the meaning of existence, which sometimes led them to adopt religious motifs. Within this vast movement, as presented in a classic article by Aileen Kelly, [25] the name that would impose itself most enduringly was that of Alexander Malinovsky, better known under the pseudonym Bogdanov.

13 Like Lenin, Bogdanov had become involved in politics during his university years. His participation in protests at the Moscow University Faculty of Science in 1894 led to his being exiled, along with his friend Vladimir Rudnev (known as Bazarov), to his home town of Tula; there he re-enrolled at Kharkiv University to resume his medical studies, while organizing a school for workers along with Bazarov and another exile, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov. During this same period, Bogdanov became acquainted with Lenin’s writings and, together with Skvortsov-Stepanov, wrote A Short Course of Economic Science, the quality of which was praised by Lenin (partly owing to a misunderstanding: Lenin was in fact convinced that “Bogdanov” was one of Plekhanov’s pseudonyms [26]). After he graduated from medical school, the Tsarist police arrested Bogdanov again because of his fleeting participation in a social-democratic group in Kharkiv. While awaiting a verdict, he was sent with Bazarov and Skvortsov-Stepanov to Kaluga, where he befriended (and in fact became the brother-in-law of) a student from Kiev, Anatoly Lunacharsky, who had been exiled on account of suspicions linked to his relations with the RSDLP in Switzerland, and who shared Bogdanov’s deep interest in philosophy, in particular contemporary epistemology. It was this new friend who introduced Bogdanov to the thought of Richard Avenarius (a Swiss philosopher whose courses Lunacharsky had attended) and Ernst Mach. [27] The two of them then had to spend the rest of their confinement in Vologda, among a large community of mainly Ukrainian political expatriates, including, among others, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev had already made a name for himself as an author within the Legal Marxism movement, distancing himself from Plekhanovian orthodoxy. In his texts of the period, which already foreshadowed his later religious turn, he noted, like Struve before him, a lack of philosophical content in Marxism; he located the cause of this absence in the materialism and positivism adopted by the orthodox Marxists, which, in his view, served to stifle the spiritual dimension of human individuality. In his concern to make up for the ethical dimension wanting in Marxism, Berdyaev referred first and foremost to Kant, whose categorical imperative offered him a way to reassert the importance of individual responsibility against the mechanistic determinism of orthodox Marxism. [28]

14 Bogdanov and Lunacharsky’s exchanges with Berdyaev allowed them to determine their position on the chessboard of Marxist philosophical debate in Russia. Although they shared the same dissatisfaction with Plekhanov’s “dialectical materialism” (which however they did not attack directly), for them the necessary philosophical “supplement” to Marxism had to come from the very positivism that Berdyaev had wrongly placed on the side of materialism, and more precisely from the “empirio-criticism” of Avenarius and Mach. A mixture of positivism and neo-Kantianism (to which Bogdanov would also add Ostwald’s energeticism), the doctrine of empirio-criticism, which already enjoyed a certain popularity in the epistemological debate of the time, had at least three qualities that were attractive to a Marxist seeking to be “modern” without being revisionist. First, its connection to contemporary epistemological debate and to a renowned physicist rendered it compatible with the “scientificity” long claimed by Marxism, a virtue in which Bogdanov believed as strongly as did Plekhanov and Lenin. Second, its insistence on the relative and non-eternal character of scientific knowledge confirmed the fundamental historical-materialist thesis of the historicity of all human institutions. Finally, the “dissolution of the self” suggested by the empirio-critical theory of perception was compatible with the anti-individualist values advocated in their eyes by socialism. [29] It is therefore quite understandable that it should have proved attractive to the generation of young Marxist militants to which Bogdanov and Lunacharsky belonged.

Lenin and Bogdanov: political alliance, philosophical divergence

15 During the period when Bogdanov and Lunacharsky were debating philosophy with their fellow exiles, Lenin began to put into action the program he had announced in What Is to Be Done? Toward the end of 1900, along with Julius Martov, Plekhanov, and three other collaborators he founded the newspaper Iskra (The Spark), the first official press organ of the RSDLP, whose inaugural issue was published at the beginning of 1901. Bogdanov, who had forged a great many connections with other revolutionary militants in the Vologda community, learned of the founding of the newspaper and contacted the editorial staff to let them know that he was willing to contribute to the project with pamphlets aimed at the urban masses—a proposal that was ultimately accepted. [30] However, a major obstacle to Bogdanov’s collaboration with Iskra soon presented itself. Plekhanov was hostile to any attempt to deviate from the philosophical orthodoxy of which he considered himself the custodian. When copies of Bogdanov’s latest philosophical work, Knowledge from the Historical Point of View, reached Lenin and Plekhanov in 1901, the father of Russian Marxism told Lenin that the contents of the work constituted a “decisive rejection of materialism” [31] and that, while he considered Bogdanov a potential ally in the fight against revisionism, he saw his adherence to the energeticism of Ostwald and Mach as a fundamental philosophical error. [32] Plekhanov believed that a public condemnation of the work was in order, but he was reluctant to issue one himself; even when Bogdanov accepted his proposal for a critique of Mach to appear in a collection of articles on Marxist philosophy, Plekhanov did not send the text. [33] He then asked his followers to write it for him, which they did not have time to do. [34]

16 An opportunity for a meeting between Lenin and Bogdanov finally arrived with the famous Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, which would mark the split in the Russian social-democratic movement between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The long disagreements with Martov and Plekhanov that followed the congress would lead Lenin reluctantly to leave Iskra in 1904; he thus found himself suddenly deprived of any platform for his propaganda activity. Isolated and in need of a new outlet, Lenin asked Boris Liadov to canvass his networks in Russia to find talented writers to participate in the project for a new publication. Liadov contacted Bogdanov and convinced him to join Lenin in Geneva, along with his own comrades. [35] Suddenly Lenin was able to view Bogdanov as a major ally: not only did he himself organize publishing projects (he had just founded a social-democratic newspaper in Tver), he had fully supported Lenin against the Mensheviks in the party quarrels, and he had a good reputation as a writer and boasted a considerable network in Russia, as well as significant financial resources. [36] The two men met in the summer of 1904 near Lac de Bret and drew up a plan of action to mobilize the militants for a new congress. The plan included the creation of a Bolshevik committee independent of the RSDLP and a new paper, Vperyod (Forward), in which Lunacharsky, Bazarov, and Skvortsov-Stepanov would also participate. At the same time, the two also exchanged their most recent theoretical texts, namely the article “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” Lenin’s critical account of the quarrel with the Mensheviks, and the initial volume of Empiriomonism, Bogdanov’s first major philosophical work.

17 While the political collaboration seemed to be going well, to the extent that Bogdanov defended Lenin’s article against Rosa Luxemburg’s criticisms, [37] philosophy soon became a cause for dispute between the two. Even prior to his meeting with Bogdanov, in 1901 Lenin had said that he was a “definite opponent of both Hume’s scepticism and Kant’s idealism,” [38] and when in 1904 Nikolai Valentinov defended the theories of Avenarius and Mach before him, he replied, without even having read their work, that “Marx and Engels have outlined and said all that was to be said” and that the only possible response to revisionism was a “slap in the face.” [39] It goes without saying then that Bogdanov’s writings were not exactly to his taste. Reading Empiriomonism prompted Lenin to send his new ally a harsh letter in which he stated that this work “had finally convinced [him] that [Bogdanov] was essentially wrong and that Plekhanov was right” [40]; this no doubt chilled relations with Bogdanov, who no longer kept up the regular correspondence desired by his ally. Indeed, the philosophical disagreement between them was apparently so deep that the two men were forced to agree on a non-aggression pact: philosophy was henceforth to be considered a “neutral field” to be disregarded in the context of their political collaboration. [41] This episode demonstrates two things: first, that Lenin always took philosophical questions very seriously; second, that they nonetheless remained secondary to the success of his political projects.

18 Abandoned by Lenin, who had just found new allies, Plekhanov did not remain passive in the face of recent events. Determined to sow discord between his former pupil and the newcomer, Lenin’s former teacher decided that it was time to take action and attack Bogdanov’s theory in order to discredit him as well as his associate. It was his proselyte Lyubov Axelrod who ultimately took on the task, publishing the article “A New Form of Revisionism” in Iskra in 1904 under the highly appropriate pseudonym “Orthodox.” In this virulent article, authorship of which was immediately attributed to Lenin himself, no doubt with the aim of embarrassing him, Axelrod-Orthodox tried to demonstrate, with the help of highly selective quotations, the non-Marxist character of Bogdanov’s thought, arguing that Bogdanov did not recognize the objectivity of the real laws of historical development. [42] This article by “Orthodox” did not have the desired effect on Lenin, who laughed off Plekhanov’s attempts to ruin his reputation by trying to associate him with philosophies for which he had no sympathy. [43] It did however succeed in embroiling Bogdanov in a philosophical controversy with the Plekhanovites that would last for several years. The second and third volumes of Empiriomonism, published in 1904 and 1906 respectively, contain increasingly explicit criticisms of Plekhanov. [44] In 1907, Bogdanov published an open letter to Plekhanov in the Bolshevik newspaper Vestnik jizni (The Messenger of Life) in which he complained of the disrespectful way he had been treated by Plekhanov and his associates. [45] Abram Deborin—at the time a pupil of Plekhanov—responded with the article “Mach’s Philosophy and the Russian Revolution,” [46] which appeared in 1908 in Golos sotsial-demokrata (Voice of the Social-Democrat), and Plekhanov himself responded in three letters to the same newspaper, the third of which ended up being published elsewhere. [47] Despite attempts by his friends Gorky and Andreyeva to dissuade Bogdanov from perpetuating the conflict any further, [48] Bogdanov wrote a pamphlet entitled Adventures of a Certain Philosophical School in which he once again attacked the Plekhanovites. These incessant quarrels with Lenin’s former teacher did not seem to perturb the relationship between the two Bolshevik leaders, which remained fruitful for several more years.

Materialism and empirio-criticism: the break between lenin and Bogdanov

19 The Russian Revolution of 1905 radically changed the situation within the RSDLP. The wave of insurrection that swept the country prompted Bolshevik militants to seriously question the line to be taken in the event of the overthrow of the Romanovs, and to ask how the party could lead a real revolution. The time for infighting was over, and the two factions, Bolshevik and Menshevik, agreed to hold a new congress to discuss the conditions for their reunification. The 1906 congress in Stockholm was nonetheless numerically dominated by the Mensheviks, and it largely adopted the resolutions proposed by them; the Mensheviks even won the elections for the party’s Central Committee, with seven members elected against only three for the Bolsheviks. Despite the Bolsheviks’ defeat at the congress, Lenin was able to find relief in the creation of a “Bolshevik Center” revolving around Lenin, Bogdanov, and Leonid Krasin, who took charge of the leadership and financing of the faction’s activities. Lenin remained its representative abroad, while Bogdanov and Krasin supervised a number of clandestine operations in Russia, including bank robberies [49] (or “expropriations,” the euphemism used at the time), an activity that had been explicitly condemned at the last congress.

20 The question that was to reveal the fundamental cracks in the relationship between Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, was that of the participation of social democrats in elections to the Duma. Already at the 1906 congress, Lenin had supported a Menshevik motion for participation, even while the majority of the Bolsheviks abstained or voted in favor of a boycott, [50] which ultimately meant that the Bolsheviks did not present any candidates. After a dissolution of the Duma by the government, the Bolsheviks nevertheless recognized the utility of the parliamentary assembly as a propaganda forum and finally agreed to present Bolshevik candidates in the February 1907 elections, provided they formed an independent group and did not form any alliance with the liberals, as the Mensheviks wished to do. [51] The new Duma lasted only a little over three months. Tired of seeing his proposals rejected by the Left, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin decided to dissolve it and call for new elections, while passing a new electoral law that tied voting rights to tax contributions, designed to greatly reduce the number of socialists in the assembly.

21 When it came to discussing participation in the Third Duma, the Bolsheviks reverted to their pre-1907 position of a boycott. Lenin did not consider a boycott to be appropriate in the present situation: it could only be justified if the regime was about to be overthrown, when in fact the revolutionary wave was in retreat. Instead, he adopted the Bolshevik position of February 1907, i.e., the formation of an independent group in the Duma. At the RSDLP conference in Kotka in July 1907, the motion for a boycott supported by Bogdanov was defeated by fifteen votes to nine, with Lenin voting against. To avoid a Menshevik victory that would have meant an alliance with the liberals, the Bolsheviks reluctantly agreed to go along with Lenin’s compromise motion, which was ultimately adopted. [52] The Bolsheviks were not really satisfied with this outcome, however, and the following year the Central Committee of the RSDLP, now with a Bolshevik majority, complained that Menshevik deputies had continued to form forbidden alliances with the other parties. [53] The Bolsheviks then proposed to send an ultimatum to the deputies to conform to the party’s directives and, if they refused to do so, to recall them from the Duma, something Lenin opposed. Bogdanov supported the ultimatum but, like Lenin, refused the recall of deputies proposed by other members of the faction. [54]

22 During this period, intellectual relations between Lenin and Bogdanov continued to deteriorate. Since 1906, the two, along with their spouses, had been living in the same house in Kokkola in Finland, from where they were able to closely follow revolutionary activity in Russia. This cohabitation, supposed to cement the collaboration between the two great intellectual leaders of the Bolsheviks, only deepened the differences between them in matters of philosophy. When, in the summer of 1906, Bogdanov gave Lenin a copy of Book III of Empiriomonism, which he had just finished in prison (and the preface to which is a lengthy critique of Plekhanov), Lenin flew into a fury and decided to send him a “declaration of love” in the form of three notebooks packed full of insults directed against his collaborator’s philosophy. Bogdanov was so offended when he read them that he returned them to the sender, telling Lenin that if they were to continue to keep in contact, the “declaration” should be considered as never having been written, sent, or read. [55] Despite the violence of this exchange, it must be emphasized that, in 1908, when he recounted these events to Gorky, Lenin still believed that a public philosophical confrontation between Bolsheviks (which he believed to be inevitable in the long run) would be a gesture of the utmost folly, and that these issues could be resolved in a way that would not harm the Bolsheviks or their press organs. He thus downplayed the importance of their differences over the Duma, suggesting that, apart from this episode, the Bolsheviks had always been in total agreement. [56]

23 It was two series of events, one political and the other philosophical, that were to change Lenin’s mind on this question. From a political point of view, the year 1908 saw the destinies of Lenin and his former mentor cross paths again. Plekhanov did not appreciate the fact that a history of the 1905 Revolution written by his Menshevik comrades failed to do justice to the role played by the clandestine organizations to which he had contributed. He therefore quit the editorial staff of the Menshevik paper halfway through his polemic against Bogdanov, which explains why the third letter against Bogdanov was not published in the paper. [57] Lenin saw in the struggle against “liquidationism” a common point between himself and Plekhanov, even if for Lenin “liquidationism” was more a matter of the proscription of all clandestine and illegal activities of the party (including Bolshevik “expropriations”) voted at the Fifth Congress. It was this situation of relative isolation in which Lenin and Plekhanov found themselves that favored a new rapprochement between the two.

24 But what really angered Lenin was the 1908 publication of Essays in Marxist Philosophy, an edited volume with contributions by Bogdanov, Bazarov, and Lunacharsky, in which the authors developed their empirio-critical interpretation of Marxism while at the same time copiously critiquing the limitations of Plekhanov’s materialism. The leader was quite outraged by the publication of such a work, which, in his eyes, served only to sully the name of “Marxist philosophy” by proposing ideas that had nothing at all to do with it. He made his feelings known to Bogdanov “bluntly and sharply,” and at the same time went back to work on the critique of Bogdanov’s philosophy he had already begun in 1906 under the provisional title “Notes of an Ordinary Marxist on Philosophy,” [58] a critique that, as announced in a note in an article written at the beginning of April, he now planned to have published. [59] This latest altercation with Lenin was felt with such violence by Bogdanov that he was forced to retire to Gorky’s house in Capri to regain his composure. Gorky then proposed to Lenin that he visit them in the hope of putting an end to the philosophical quarrels between himself and the empirio-criticists. After much procrastination, Lenin finally traveled to the Italian island at the end of April 1908 to meet up with the other members of the faction. The trip went as badly as one could imagine. Lenin and the other Bolsheviks disagreed on philosophical questions, and probably also argued about money. [60] They did not even find relief in games: a defeat in chess by Bogdanov provoked childish and exaggerated reactions from Lenin. [61] Lenin finally left Capri—not without telling Bogdanov that there would have to be a parting of ways “for two or three years” [62]—and decided to finish the critique of empirio-critical philosophy that he had already begun during their previous fights. The 1906 “declaration of love” would now take the form of an official publication, eventually to bear the name Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

25 Lenin took advantage of a stay in London in the spring of 1908 to visit the library regularly and consult as many works as possible on questions of epistemology. During this period he sent his associate Iosif Dubrovinsky (known as Innokenty) a series of rather humiliating questions [63] to be asked at a lecture given by Bogdanov in Geneva on his new anti-Plekhanovite pamphlet Adventures of a Certain Philosophical School—giving us a taste of the approach that Ulyanov was to take in his book. The book was only completed in October, and it ended up being a very sizable volume, as if the author had tried to cram into it all of the philosophical reflections he had not been able to elaborate over the past twenty years. As for the position taken up therein, the content of the book is, as White points out, an almost blanket defense of the ideas of Plekhanov, from whom Lenin also borrows the comparison between Mach and Berkeley used in 1908 to discredit Bogdanov. [64] He only allows himself to criticize his master in a chapter in which he points out Plekhanov’s poor translation of Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach, something that had also been criticized by the empirio-criticists and of which Plekhanov himself was already aware, since he himself had revised the translation when a new edition of the work was published. [65] Despite Lenin’s impressive erudition, the tone of the book itself is generally bad-tempered, even insulting, combining abundant arguments from authority, accusations of guilt by association, and attempts to ridicule his opponents through rather churlish comparisons. Although Lenin raises many interesting and sometimes even original philosophical questions, [66] it takes a great deal of patience to identify any reflections and insights amid the flood of insolence and insults.

26 Of course, the Bolshevik publishers refused to publish the work; Gorky argued that Lenin would have been making a mockery of them had they agreed to print something so contemptuous of his comrades. He finally managed to have it published the following May by a reactionary publisher (which offered the advantage of protecting it from Tsarist censorship) in a rather expensive edition with a limited print run of two thousand copies. [67] Upon publication, its reception among social democrats was cold to say the least: it certainly annoyed everyone who was mentioned in it, including Plekhanov, who made sure to complain about the one paragraph in which he was criticized. [68] Even Axelrod-Orthodox, who had every reason to be ecstatic about such a defense of his master’s principles, found it rather poor and lacking in philosophical content, while others above all noted its derogatory tone. [69] Moreover, Lenin did not succeed as he had hoped in rallying the national groups within the RSDLP to him, increasingly tired as they were of endless factional disputes. [70] Overall, the whole operation was a grand failure; far from being the triumph celebrated by Stalinist historiography, according to Valentinov, the book provoked “neither uproar nor debate,” and in fact aroused no real interest at the time. [71] All that Lenin succeeded in achieving with his text was the expulsion of Bogdanov from the Bolshevik Center in June 1909, although this did not prevent him from remaining a member of the RSDLP—after all, the faction itself was illegal according to party statutes. [72] There is reason to believe that Lenin himself was not entirely satisfied with his work, since he returned to these issues once more in 1914 in his reading notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic, correcting a number of the epistemological theses of ME. [73] As for Bogdanov, he would mention thepisodee only in an appendix to his 1910 work The Fall of the Great Fetishism, the bulk of which is devoted to yet another critique of Plekhanov. In this short text entitled “Faith and Science,” Bogdanov complains, among other things, about the authoritarian character of Lenin’s thought, in which the writings of Marx and Engels are regarded as sacred texts that must never be questioned. [74] The diagnosis seems quite correct (at least if we recall what was said above about the polemic with Struve), even if Lenin may have had equal reason to accuse his opponents of religious tendencies. [75]

27 Although the 1909 work marked the break-up of the political alliance between Lenin and the empirio-criticists, it was not to be his last dispute with Bogdanov. In the years that followed, Bogdanov continued his theoretical and militant activity far away from Lenin, along with his lifelong comrades. He founded schools in Capri and then in Bologna to educate party militants, something that succeeded in irritating Lenin to the point of inciting him to create his own party school in Longjumeau. [76] Bogdanov’s literary production also resumed in 1913 with several new works: Engineer Menni, a sequel to his popular 1908 science fiction novel, Red Star, in which he imagines a fully accomplished communist society on Mars; The Philosophy of Living Experience, a work in which he once again summarizes his philosophical thought; and finally the first part of his Tectology or “science of organization,” a text that would later be considered a precursor of cybernetics. [77] Following the 1917 Revolution, Bogdanov realized a dream that had long been present in his writings by participating in the creation of an association whose aim was to form and propagate a “proletarian culture” separate from bourgeois culture. The association, called Proletkult, enjoyed great popularity (at its peak it had up to 400,000 members), thanks in part to its funding by the People’s Commissariat for Education (or Narkompros) set up during the Revolution, whose director was none other than his friend and brother-in-law, Lunacharsky. However, in 1920, the proximity of the Proletkultists to movements that opposed the young Soviet regime led Lenin to put an end to the independence of Proletkult, placing it fully under the authority of Narkompros. In order to combat the influence of Bogdanov, whom he associated with Proletkult, Lenin also simultaneously printed a new edition of Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which helped the book achieve a popularity it had not previously enjoyed. [78] This was the last altercation between the two Bolsheviks: following this episode, Bogdanov withdrew definitively from political life to devote himself to experimental medicine—a practice that would later cost him his life. [79] In Soviet philosophy circles, Bogdanov’s name remained for some time a convenient insult to be hurled at opponents suspected of heterodoxy, before being completely erased from Soviet history in favor of Lenin and Plekhanov alone—as if the triangle between the three authors had never existed, and as if to erase the essential role played by this perturbing third element in Lenin’s philosophical reflection and in the political practice of the Bolshevik faction.

Conclusions

28 The debates that gave rise to Materialism and Empirio-criticism reveal the great significance of philosophy for Russian Marxists involved in the organization of the revolutionary movement. Whether orthodox or empirio-critical, Marxist intellectuals of the time recognized the importance of philosophical questions for their militant practice. And the significance of philosophy did not diminish after the October Revolution, as evidenced by the philosophical debates of the 1920s and the use made of philosophical themes by the Stalinist regime.

29 Lenin’s attitude toward philosophy seems at first sight to be different from that of the majority of Russian revolutionary actors. Indeed, Lenin seems to be the only one to have insisted upon a clear separation between philosophy and politics; although he did not hesitate to express his disagreements on philosophy to his comrades in private, he only intervened publicly in the philosophical arena when philosophical debates threatened to endanger his political projects. But although Lenin undoubtedly believed that the revolutionary movement should take priority over speculative quarrels, it seems equally undeniable that he had a sincere interest in philosophical thought. This interest in philosophy, aroused in him by his early role model Plekhanov, manifests itself in almost all of his major texts and seems to have shaped his political thinking to a large extent.

30 Indeed, while many authors have acknowledged the role that Materialism and Empirio-criticism played in the internal disputes of the Russian socialist movement, less attention seems to have been paid to the fact that its philosophical content is itself intimately linked to politics. It is no mere coincidence that Lenin’s defense of a philosophical position that vigorously affirms the objectivity of the external world—that is, a properly realist position [80]—should have been mounted at the very moment when he had to defend the utility of parliamentary tactics against his own radical comrades who refused to consider them and still advocated armed revolution, even in the face of the Stolypin terror. In other words, here Lenin’s philosophical realism is a reflection of his practical realism, which consists both in recognizing the concrete power of the forces at play, and in refusing to deprive oneself on principle of certain tools that might advance the cause. [81] The relationship between Lenin and the “left” Bolsheviks is the perfect expression of this political realism that, for several years, allowed him to put aside any speculative divergence with his comrades in the interests of the unity of the organization.

31 Ultimately, Lenin’s attitude toward philosophy is not so different from that of other Russian Marxists: like them, he believed that philosophical and epistemological questions were of great value for the revolutionary struggle (albeit not necessarily for revolutionary propaganda); his later support for Soviet philosophical initiatives proves as much. [82] The episode thus invites us to recognize the rightful place of theoretical reflection in revolutionary movements, where it should neither be dismissed nor be allowed to replace the movement itself. The link between theory and revolutionary practice must itself constantly be reforged if we wish to avoid the twin pitfalls of dogmatism and utopianism.