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Historical Materialism #172
Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov
In the first full-length biography of Alexander Bogdanov, James D. White traces the intellectual development of this key socialist thinker, situating his ideas in the context of the Russian revolutionary movement. This sweeping and informative volume examines the part Bogdanov played in the origins of Bolshevism, his role in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and his conflict with Lenin which lasted well after the revolution. The book goes on to examine Bogdanov's intellectually legacy―a legacy that, despite being deliberately obscured and distorted, was considerable and of lasting significance.
Bogdanov was an original and influential interpreter of Marx. He attained mastery of many spheres of knowledge, and employed this varied expertise in writing his chief theoretical work, Tectology , which anticipates modern systems theory.
Bogdanov was an original and influential interpreter of Marx. He attained mastery of many spheres of knowledge, and employed this varied expertise in writing his chief theoretical work, Tectology , which anticipates modern systems theory.
494 pages, Paperback
Published November 5, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 20, 2021
This a dense intellectual biography of a thinker who is not only incredibly complex in his own right (mixing together now-defunct strands of early 20thC philosophy, biology, Marxism, invented his own organisational science with its own terminology), but who was also deliberately written out of history in order to make his ideas less popular and disconnect them from popular currents in soviet thought, making him even less readily-intelligible to a modern reader. I should know this, as I’m about to become one of his translators. With all this in mind, White’s biography is fantastic, comprehensive in its research not only into Bogdanov but into his intellectual predecessors and polemical opponents, and explaining/elaborating on all of his books and most of his major essays in close detail, giving an English reader an understanding of untranslated and often hard-to-find materials even in the original russian. The biography deserves nothing but praise, and from what I know of the field, it hugely advances academic study of Bogdanov, certainly those available in English. It’s an invaluable resource for which I’m very grateful.
If there’s one comment to make, it’s that this is by no means the ‘objective’ recounting of Bogdanov’s ideas that the preface suggests. This isn’t surprising: if you decide to write a biography of someone who was written out of history, there is bound to be an underlying distrust of those responsible for his erasure, in this case primarily Lenin (but also Plekhanov, and even Engels himself doesn’t come out too well). There’s also likely to be more of a tendency to defend Bogdanov’s ideas, given the historical trend of defamation and discrediting — although I don’t find Bogdanov as convincing as White suggests, this is no great evil — Bogdanov needs someone to fight his corner, and White does a good job. Especially by the conclusion, White’s opinions on key events and debates become incredibly obvious — but I don’t see this as a negative by any means. With this caveat, it’s not hard to place yourself in relation to the biography’s perspective and work out your own relationship to Bogdanov’s ideas.
If there’s one comment to make, it’s that this is by no means the ‘objective’ recounting of Bogdanov’s ideas that the preface suggests. This isn’t surprising: if you decide to write a biography of someone who was written out of history, there is bound to be an underlying distrust of those responsible for his erasure, in this case primarily Lenin (but also Plekhanov, and even Engels himself doesn’t come out too well). There’s also likely to be more of a tendency to defend Bogdanov’s ideas, given the historical trend of defamation and discrediting — although I don’t find Bogdanov as convincing as White suggests, this is no great evil — Bogdanov needs someone to fight his corner, and White does a good job. Especially by the conclusion, White’s opinions on key events and debates become incredibly obvious — but I don’t see this as a negative by any means. With this caveat, it’s not hard to place yourself in relation to the biography’s perspective and work out your own relationship to Bogdanov’s ideas.
April 11, 2024
A solid intellectual biography of one of the intellectual leaders of the RSDLP and early Bolshevism, the main opponent within Russia of Plekhanov’s wooden and physicalist-leaning “dialectical materialism.” Bogdanov built a monistic philosophical system culminating in an attempt to overcome philosophy and the destructive effect of specialization on knowledge by creating a science of the various methods by which reality organized itself. He sought through this science to join together the disparate spheres of understanding of the different disciplines, and to supersede Marxist Hegelianism and Engels’s *Dialectics of Nature* by situating dialectic as just one method by which the elements of reality are organized in relation to each other. This “tectology” - the term is from Ernst Haeckel - is often cited as a precursor of systems theory and cybernetics; tectology however is comprehensive, really universal in its orientation, applying to the inorganic and organic, non-human and human, to information, to everything. Lenin hounded Bogdanov and his cohort - Gorky, Lunacharsky, Skvortsov-Stepanov, the party schools, the Proletkult. “Leninism” codified this hounding, attributed ideas from Bogdanov and his fellow travelers to Lenin himself, and erased them from the party history. The biographer’s rather excessive hostility to Lenin is understandable in this light.
Bogdanov was very much a democrat. His commitment to the revolution being made by the proletariat ourselves led him to a fixation on the reorganization of education, culture, and science on (what he thought of as) a proletarian basis; he put this work prior to revolution and the transformation of society into a communist dynamic, a stagism as mistaken as Plekhanov’s. I can’t currently claim any grasp of his Empiriomonism or Tectology, but the latter’s successor in systems theory and cybernetics is clearly a technocratic school of thought, as was the Positivism of Bogdanov’s vastly inferior ancestor Auguste Comte. Bogdanov and Gorky were, ironically, founders of Socialist Realism; modernism to Bogdanov was a manifestation of the decay of bourgeois culture and was to be opposed on that basis.
Yet Bogdanov clearly saw and condemned Lenin’s Napoleonic, maneuvering attitude, the cult of leadership he fostered, his intellectual mediocrity, and the tendency of his followers to take his, Marx’s, Engels’s, and Plekhanov’s word as law. Bogdanov conceptualized centralism as a necessity but saw the orientation towards leadership as a weakness. He was influential on left-opposition groups as the revolution was transformed into state-capitalist bureaucracy. Though not rising quite to the level of modern communism, the Bogdanov current represented a rather different possibility for the proletarian movement.
Bogdanov was very much a democrat. His commitment to the revolution being made by the proletariat ourselves led him to a fixation on the reorganization of education, culture, and science on (what he thought of as) a proletarian basis; he put this work prior to revolution and the transformation of society into a communist dynamic, a stagism as mistaken as Plekhanov’s. I can’t currently claim any grasp of his Empiriomonism or Tectology, but the latter’s successor in systems theory and cybernetics is clearly a technocratic school of thought, as was the Positivism of Bogdanov’s vastly inferior ancestor Auguste Comte. Bogdanov and Gorky were, ironically, founders of Socialist Realism; modernism to Bogdanov was a manifestation of the decay of bourgeois culture and was to be opposed on that basis.
Yet Bogdanov clearly saw and condemned Lenin’s Napoleonic, maneuvering attitude, the cult of leadership he fostered, his intellectual mediocrity, and the tendency of his followers to take his, Marx’s, Engels’s, and Plekhanov’s word as law. Bogdanov conceptualized centralism as a necessity but saw the orientation towards leadership as a weakness. He was influential on left-opposition groups as the revolution was transformed into state-capitalist bureaucracy. Though not rising quite to the level of modern communism, the Bogdanov current represented a rather different possibility for the proletarian movement.
July 17, 2022
A thorough intellectual biography of Bogdanov, the genius revolutionary and key Bolshevik who was not so much overlooked as written out of history.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews