Bogdanov’s philosophical and sociological “theories” were one of the methodological foundations of M. N. Pokrovsky’s erroneous concepts. Com. Pokrovsky at one time adhered to “legal Marxism” and later, in an attempt to overcome its objectivism, allowed elements of subjectivism in his historical works. Pokrovsky’s subjectivism is a product of Bogdanov’s direct influence. Pokrovsky was also politically connected with Bogdanov: he was one of the first boycottists, an active member of the Vperyod group, a lecturer at the Vperyod schools - Bologna and Capri. He perceived Marxism through the prism of Bogdanov’s schemes and could not completely free himself from the traces of Bogdanov’s influence until his last days.

Elements of Machism are expressed with particular vividness in his article “Idealism and the Laws of History”, directed against Rickert. This article was written in 1904, but was republished without amendments in 1923 and later. Pokrovsky writes in it:

In fact, according to Pokrovsky, the historian creates history, “organizes” it; the laws of social development are introduced by the cognizing subject depending on his class interests. In a number of his articles, Pokrovsky denied the existence of objective laws of human history. Thus, he asserted that the proletarian revolution was victorious not on the basis of objective laws of social development, but contrary to all laws, “breaking through all laws”. In this connection, Pokrovsky denied the possibility of objective historical science, contrasting objectivity with party ideology, defining objectivity with bourgeois objectivism, and understanding party ideology as subjectivism. He put such a subjectivist understanding into his formula: “History is politics thrown into the past”.

Pokrovsky’s economic materialism coexists just as peacefully with elements of subjectivism, just as subjective idealism does with vulgar naturalism and technicism in Bogdanov’s sociology, mutually complementing each other. Anti-dialecticism is the most characteristic feature of both Bogdanov and Pokrovsky. Pokrovsky himself held the view that “economic materialism is Marxism minus dialectics”.

Pokrovsky’s historical schemes, especially his theory of merchant capitalism, as already indicated, are also to a large extent a reflection of Bogdanov’s schemes of social development. Economic materialism pushed Pokrovsky to underestimate the role of class struggle in history, as was the case with Bogdanov. He portrayed politics as a passive consequence of economics. Marx understood the economic structure of society as the totality of its production relations, the relationship of direct producers to the owners of the means of production, that is, the relationship between classes. Consequently, Marx did not separate economics from the class struggle. Pokrovsky interpreted economics in a very simplified manner, reducing almost all economic relations to exchange relations.

Therefore, when Pokrovsky talks about the class struggle, at least in the Moscow State, the decisive form for him turns out to be the struggle of the merchants of different trading centers: Moscow, Tver, Novgorod, Pskov, etc., or the struggle of the peasants, as small commodity producers, against the trade capital, which, according to Pokrovsky, was the main active force in the enslavement of the peasantry. Pokrovsky devotes a lot of space to the struggle between the feudal lords – the boyars and the small nobility, and, from his point of view, the nobility are agents of merchant capital. The struggle between the main classes – between the feudal lords and the peasantry – was relegated to the background by Pokrovsky, like Bogdanov. Being in captivity of Bogdanov’s scheme of “merchant capitalism”, Pokrovsky even reduced the struggle of imperialist states in the 20th century to trade rivalry. He saw the cause of the world war of 1914-1918 in the struggle for trade routes.

Thus, the influence of Bogdanov sociology on M. N. Pokrovsky was not limited to general methodological issues, but was also reflected in his specific historical concepts.

Bogdanov's fragmentation of all social history into small stages, instead of analyzing the main socio-economic formations, represents a vivid example of a mechanistic concept of the historical process. One stage imperceptibly passes into another; the patterns of the previous stage in social development are the same as those of the upcoming stage. Bogdanov periodizes capitalism based not on an analysis of its economic stages, but primarily on the various stages of technological development (household industry, manufacturing, machine industry).

The era of domestic capitalist industry and manufacture is depicted by Bogdanov as the highest point in the development of the individualistic direction of the barter economy. In manufacturing, in his opinion, class stratification reaches its highest form. For Bogdanov, the essence of class division lies in the separation of organizational labor from executive labor. And this gap reached its highest form in manufacture, where the worker is completely devoid of initiative and produces only one particular part. In an “industrial capitalist society” that unites thousands of workers at enterprises, according to Bogdanov, the reverse process begins - the individual nature of production gradually gives way to the collectivist. Thanks to the use of machines, Bogdanov asserts, the gap between the labor of organizers and performers begins to smooth out. A worker operating a complex machine is no longer just a performer. In a word, according to Bogdanov, the era of capitalism represents a less antagonistic stage than the previous class societies.

In his interpretation of capitalism, Bogdanov also diverges from Marx. He does not understand the specifics of the laws of capitalist society and tries to establish universal laws that operate throughout the entire existence of society. Identifying value with labor costs in general, Bogdanov comes to the conclusion that the basic law of capitalist society - the law of value - expresses the relationship not between people, but between society and nature. Bogdanov tries to present the law of value as one of the forms of manifestation of the universal “energy law”. He believes that the main and final function of the law of value is the establishment of an energy balance between nature and society, from which intra-social equilibrium is also a derivative. Bogdanov interprets value itself naturalistically and considers it not a historical, but a purely logical category. True, he speaks of the social character of value, but only in the sense that labor is expended in society. Thus, nothing remains of the historicism that Bogdanov claimed.

It should be noted that Bogdanov’s understanding of the law of value formed the basis of Bukharin’s ultra-mechanistic “law of labor costs”. According to this “law”, the laws of all formations represent only forms of manifestation of the universal “law of labor costs”, i.e., essentially the same as Bogdanov’s law of energy balance between nature and society. On this basis, Bukharin transferred the laws of capitalism to socialism.

This naturalism of Bogdanov in the question of value, as in all other cases, coexists perfectly with idealism. From the non-historical understanding of Bogdanov, and after him Bukharin, of labor only as an expenditure of energy follows his identification of mental labor with physical labor, for both represent an expenditure of physiological energy. And Bogdanov concludes that value is created not only by physical, but also by mental labor, not only in production, but also in circulation. “Labor that produces value,” writes Bogdanov, “can appear in the most diverse forms – as labor that creates or moves products, physical or spiritual.³

Bogdanov confuses value-producing labor with socially necessary labor, not wanting to understand that in the capitalist system of production, productive labor is only that labor that produces surplus value. Thus, he denies the class character of productive labor under capitalism. The labor of a capitalist, who is the organizer of a factory, according to Bogdanov, is even more productive than the labor of a worker.

Bogdanov considers the distinction between physical and mental labor to be unacceptable and unscientific. All labor is simultaneously both physical and mental: physical labor is conscious labor, and mental labor also expends physiological energy. “The fundamental methodological error of the view under consideration (i.e., the Marxist one - A. Sh.) is that it imposes on social-scientific research an alien point of view on the “materiality” and “spirituality” of phenomena.⁴

Bogdanov openly admits that on this issue he differs from Marx, who emphasizes that only the physical labor of the working class creates value. “These views of the old political economy were not subjected by Karl Marx to the criticism that they deserved; in general, he himself supported them.⁵

Of course, all labor is connected with the activity of consciousness and all labor represents an expenditure of physiological energy. But, nevertheless, the difference between physical and mental labor does not disappear because in a class society the gap between them reflects class division and class exploitation. Bogdanov’s identification of physical and mental labor, depowering their class content, is a clear confirmation of Lenin’s indication of the reactionary nature of Bogdanov’s identification of social being with social consciousness.

Bogdanov adheres to the revisionist position that value is created not only in the process of production, but also in circulation. Like all revisionists, Bogdanov overestimates the role of the market, believing that the market is the only form of connection between disparate producers in capitalist society. In this matter, he stands on the same positions as Rubin, in contrast to Marx, who proved in Capital that the basic social connection in a commodity society is the division of labor and that the market and market connections are already derivative, “secondary” social phenomena in relation to production.

Bogdanov, thanks to his theory of equilibrium, cannot understand the real meaning of the law of value as the law of the movement of capitalist society, reflecting all its contradictions. Value, from his point of view, is only a regulator of commodity economy, establishing equilibrium both between individual branches of production and between society and nature as a whole. With the light hand of Bogdanov, this mechanistic distortion of the law of value (supported by Bukharin and the Rubinites) was at one time widely disseminated in Soviet economic literature. It was exposed and refuted only as a result of Comrade Stalin's criticism of the theory of equilibrium.

The whole problem of the market and crises is considered by him from the standpoint of the theory of equilibrium. A crisis is a violation of the balance between production and consumption and between individual branches of production, which occurs exclusively as a result of the disorganization of capitalist society. According to Bogdanov, the market plays a decisive role. The disproportion between individual branches of production, ultimately, only increases the discrepancy between production and consumption. The market regulates and limits production. At the same time, Bogdanov understands the market only as direct consumption. He categorically objects to Marx’s position that expanding production itself creates a market for itself (of course, to a certain extent and within different limits).

According to Bogdanov, crises are intensifying not as a result of the absolute impoverishment of the masses, leading to a relative reduction in the capacity of the market and its defense against the growth of production, but as a result of the continuous complication of the production process and of all economic life as a whole. In these more complex conditions, it becomes more difficult to establish a balance between individual branches of production, between supply and demand. Bogdanov rebels against Marx’s teachings about the cyclical nature of crises and the shortening of the intervals between crises as capitalism develops. From his point of view, there are no economic grounds for either the increase in the frequency of crises or the prolongation of the cyclical nature. The eleven-year intervals between the first three crises were, according to Bogdanov, purely accidental. Marx, Bogdanov declares, made a hasty and unfounded conclusion about the presence of a certain cyclical nature here and, in order to maintain his scheme, was forced to classify as crises accidental and secondary economic upheavals that affected only individual countries.

Bogdanov considers this interpretation of the theory of the market and crises to be his major achievement and believes that he has raised Marxist theory to a higher level, having “corrected” and “developed” Marx. “The theory of the market and crises that we have presented,” he writes, “represents the development of the point of view that was outlined (in many ways briefly and incompletely) in Marx’s works.”⁶

This “development” of Marx’s theory by Bogdanov actually denies the aggravation of the internal contradictions of capitalism as it develops. Moreover, capitalist monopolies, according to Bogdanov, even somewhat weaken the anarchy of the market and production. The logical conclusion from this is the denial of the inevitability of the proletarian revolution and the recognition of the possibility of “organized” capitalism. As is well known, Bukharin, who accepted Bogdanov’s philosophical and sociological concept, ultimately comes to this conclusion.

The theories of “organized” capitalism are revealed even more clearly in Bogdanov’s treatment of the era of imperialism. Bogdanov does not say a word about imperialism as a special and final stage of capitalism. He prefers to adhere to Hilferding’s definition of the current phase of capitalism as the era of finance capital, which he, like Hilferding, identifies with banking capital. Bogdanov contrasts this banking capital with industrial capital in the form of trusts and syndicates. The dominance of finance capital, according to Bogdanov, is something different from the dominance of production monopolies. Financial concerns are displacing industrial ones and implementing completely different methods of regulating the national economy than trusts and syndicates.

Thus, Bogdanov, in separating financial concerns from trusts and syndicates, understood nothing about the new stage of capitalism. Lenin showed that the era of imperialism is the era of the domination of capitalist monopolies of finance capital. But the domination of finance capital means the fusion of banking capital with industrial capital, which determines its enormous power, and not at all the displacement of industrial concerns by banking ones and the insubordination of industrial capitalists by bankers. The concentration of banking capital was conditioned by the concentration of industrial capital; from their fusion arises finance capital, which creates enormous monopolistic associations. Rockefeller, Ford, Krupp, Thyssen - are both industrialists and bankers, they create their own banks to finance their enterprises. It is not bankers who fight against industrialists, but one financial concern against another.

Bogdanov believes that the aggravation of capitalist contradictions is generated by the dominance of banking concerns alone. On the contrary, in his opinion, capitalist production monopolies soften the anarchy and disorganization of capitalism, and lead to a further increase in collectivist elements in society. It is during this period that the formation of a collectivist society, the development of a proletarian ideology and culture, etc., should begin. Capitalism, especially its last stages, for Bogdanov is a transitional stage to communism, which, according to his scheme, begins to develop in the depths of capitalist society. For the future historian, Bogdanov declares, all of capitalism will probably appear to be nothing more than a process of gathering together elements of collectivist production.

Therefore, all the illnesses and contradictions of capitalism, according to Bogdanov, are rooted not in its antagonistic class content, but exclusively in its lack of organization. Such a blurring of the class antagonisms of capitalist society runs like a red thread through all of Bogdanov’s economic works. In no place does he speak of class struggle as the driving force of social development in class formations. He separates economics from class struggle and politics.

Bogdanov’s separation of economics from politics is also clearly expressed in his view of the causes that give rise to imperialist wars. Bogdanov also resolves this issue on the basis of his theory of equilibrium. Thus, as long as the “forces of interconnectedness” and “forces of pressure” between capitalist countries are equal, peace reigns in society. When the forces of pressure exceed the forces of international interconnectedness, war breaks out. At the same time, Bogdanov comes to the assertion, monstrous for a person who considers himself a Marxist, that there were no economic grounds for the world war of 1914-1918. The war began when the “economic forces of communication” still outweighed the “economic forces of pressure”. The war was caused by the intervention of a “third force” - militarism, in the form of a multi-million army that had allegedly become an independent force.

There is no doubt that the army command staff in capitalist countries is always one of the instigators of imperialist wars; it is enough to take as an example the role of the army in modern Japan. But neither in Japan nor in Germany is the army an independent force, but a tool in the hands of the ruling classes. Its militancy is based on an economic foundation and can lead to war only when the ruling groups of the bourgeoisie want it.

In his last works Bogdanov also advanced the idea that the process of capitalism developing into socialism had already begun in the capitalist countries. As proof of this, he referred to the state regulation of the entire national economy, which was carried out by the bourgeoisie during the imperialist war. True, Bogdanov believes that the “military-state capitalism” that was introduced during the world war in Germany was only a temporary phenomenon caused by the need to ration products. But Bogdanov sees the fundamental shortcoming of this system not in the fact that organization and planning are incompatible with the very essence of capitalism, but in the fact that it attempted to introduce an organized economy in one country. And this, Bogdanov asserts, is fundamentally impossible given the unity of the current world economy; according to Bogdanov, it is also impossible for socialism. But it is possible that the most valuable and justified by experience aspects of state capitalism will be preserved in peacetime, and on a larger scale, embracing several countries. That Bogdanov regards this state capitalism as something akin to socialism is evident from the fact that he denied the fundamental difference between state capitalism in Germany and war communism in Russia. “The military-state capitalism introduced during the war in Germany and Austria represents a mixture of finance capital with war communism.”⁷

Bogdanov developed the same ideas after the war. In his report to the Socialist Academy in 1923, Bogdanov, criticizing the Versailles Treaty from the standpoint of tectology, stated that all the problems of post-war capitalism were explained solely by the incorrect organizational approach to concluding peace. “The methods of Versailles were doomed to failure, because they did not contain the idea of the whole... The idea of the whole is the idea of a planned economy.”⁸  If the organizers of the Versailles Treaty had been familiar with tectology and had tried to organize a planned world economy, capitalism would not have had to endure any crises or other upheavals. And here Bogdanov acts as a predecessor of Bukharin in the theory of organized capitalism.

In his views on the state, the party, the class struggle, and the revolution, Bogdanov also never took Marxist positions, even when he joined the Bolsheviks. Not a word is said about the dictatorship of the proletariat in his “Short Course in Economic Science”. After his departure from the party, Bogdanov openly and finally slid into Menshevism on all the main questions of the state and revolution. All this can be most clearly traced in his attitude to the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR.

In 1917, even before the October Revolution, Bogdanov spoke out against Lenin's teaching on the dictatorship of the proletariat. On June 27, 1917, Bogdanov published an article in Izvestia, which was then the organ of the Menshevik-SR Moscow Council of Workers' Deputies, entitled “The Commune State”, directed against the Bolsheviks. In 1918, in a note to this article, which was included in the collection “Questions of Socialism”, Bogdanov indicated that “the editors of Izvestia intended to open a discussion of the issue and offered their pages to the Leninists to respond to me. But no response has been received to this day (1918).” Thus, Bogdanov himself admits that in 1917 he stood on the Menshevik platform and fought against the Bolsheviks.

In this article, Bogdanov decisively opposes Lenin’s slogan “all power to the soviets” and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He sharply criticizes Lenin’s slogan about the “commune state” as allegedly having nothing in common with Marxism. The Paris Commune, in his opinion, represented a democratic republic with direct and equal elections from the entire population, and not separately from the workers, soldiers, and peasants. Only for this reason, Bogdanov asserts, did Engels characterize the Paris Commune as a prototype of the state of the future.

According to Bogdanov, the Soviets are merely organs of revolutionary struggle, “the destruction and construction carried out by the revolution”. Lenin, however, proposes to transform them into a “state-legal” organization. According to Bogdanov, the Soviets are completely unsuitable for this purpose. He regarded the multi-stage nature of elections to central Soviet organs and the unequal representation standards for workers and peasants as a flagrant violation of democracy.

Bogdanov, as a typical Menshevik, argued for the “advantages” of formal bourgeois democracy over the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under the Soviet regime, he claimed, civil war between the peasantry and the working class would be inevitable.

On the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Bogdanov takes the same positions as the entire 2nd International, praising bourgeois democracy and glossing over its class essence. The dictatorship of the proletariat is interpreted by him as the dictatorship of the party, as the dictatorship of an organized minority over an unorganized majority.

The new Stalin Constitution, adopted on December 5, 1936, abolished all restrictions that existed in the electoral law and established universal, direct, equal and secret elections. But the previous constitutions of 1918 and 1924 were the most democratic constitutions in the world. Only 2-3 percent of the population was deprived of voting rights. The broadest masses had all the opportunities, all the conditions for the actual use of political rights and actively participated in the state political life of the Union.

In 1918-1920, Bogdanov, just like the Trotskyists later, slandered the party and Soviet apparatus, speaking of its separation from the masses and decline.

Bogdanov put forward the demand for the liquidation of the revolutionary party, the creation of a non-party mass organization, including the broadest groups of workers. The central task of this “non-party party” should be the cultural perception of the worker, his acquaintance with the organizational science, for “socialism is a matter of method” and, without mastering the organizational method, the proletariat, as Bogdanov believes, cannot even attempt to begin socialist construction.

In essence, Bogdanov demands the organization of that very “broad congress” that the liquidators preached in the era of reaction. It is characteristic that his then otzovist point of view was outwardly opposed to the liquidationist one. At that time, Bogdanov viewed the party as a narrow, closed organization that embraced only a small elite of the working class that had reached the highest level of political and cultural development. Bogdanov then raised the question that every worker joining the party should undergo the strictest theoretical examination. Bogdanov rejected the educational work of the party. It had to be completed before joining the party.

It is clear that these guidelines of Bogdanov had nothing in common with Lenin's view of the party as an organization of professional revolutionaries. Lenin never turned the party into a closed sectarian organization, cut off from the working masses. Emphasizing that the party should include in its ranks not the entire proletariat, but only its advanced part, Lenin attached decisive importance to the educational role of the party. Of course, only steadfast, consistent, politically literate people should be accepted into the party. But a worker can fully form his communist worldview and receive genuine revolutionary training only in the ranks of the party. At the 2nd Party Congress, in the era of heavy underground work, in the period when the labor movement was just beginning to develop and significant sections of the working class were still far from freeing themselves from petty-bourgeois ideology, Lenin warned against excessive expansion of the party’s ranks. But in the era of revolutionary upsurge, when the political maturation of the proletariat was taking place not by the day, but by the hour, when the advanced workers were no longer in the hundreds, but in the tens and hundreds of thousands, Lenin considered it necessary to expand the party in accordance with the political growth and development of the working class, while at the same time not allowing the party to dissolve into the masses and demanding a strict individual approach to everyone joining the party.

The Party demands and always demanded political literacy when joining its ranks. But Bogdanov distorted this principle in the sense that he demanded from the workers joining not only political development, but also the broadest cultural education, almost to the extent of the philosophical faculties, which, of course, no worker outside the ranks of the Party could achieve under the Tsarist regime. The personal qualities of a candidate for the Party, his devotion to the revolution, courage and selflessness for Bogdanov receded into the background compared to his cultural development. It is clear that, although Bogdanov recognized in 1905 and the years of reaction the need to bring more workers to the Party, his position would inevitably lead to the Party losing its class face, turning into a student-intellectual group. Liquidationism “inside out” led to the same conclusions and results as direct liquidationism. Bogdanov’s denial of the revolutionary party in the period after 1912-1913, when he finally moved away from Bolshevism, was to complete his otzovist views on the party as a closed sect.

The same evolution took place in Bogdanov’s views on the revolution. His views on the revolution of 1905-1906, when he still sided with the Bolsheviks, and his position after 1917, when he actually sided with the Menshevik platform, are opposed not so much in content as in form. During the revolution of 1905, Bogdanov did not at all raise the question of the possibility of the bourgeois-democratic revolution developing into a socialist revolution and limited the tasks of the proletariat exclusively to the struggle for the complete resolution of bourgeois-democratic tasks. When in 1917 Lenin pointed out in the April Theses that the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia was over and that the task of the working class was now the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, Bogdanov, in one of the articles later included in the collection “Questions of Socialism”, sharply opposed Lenin.

The metaphysical method of thinking weighs heavily on Bogdanov. He denies Lenin's teaching on the transformation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. The socialist revolution, in his opinion, can begin only when all the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution have been accomplished. And since the October Revolution “in passing” resolved the still unresolved tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, Bogdanov denies its socialist character and regards it as bourgeois-democratic. Thus, he fully subscribes to the counter-revolutionary Menshevik line and its variety, the Kamenev line, in the revolution of 1917.

Bogdanov tirelessly emphasized the cultural and economic backwardness of Russia, the weakness of the proletariat, and the reactionary nature of the peasantry. He emphasizes that “complete agreement of interests between... workers and small peasant owners cannot continue indefinitely. This agreement exists only in the course of a democratic revolution, and even then it is relative.” Bogdanov proves that the peasant is reactionary by nature. “Revolution is deeply alien to the nature of the peasant, with his habit of stable relations in life, with his gravitation toward the precepts of the past; he can only temporarily, out of necessity, reconcile himself to it... The more sharply the socialist aspirations of the proletariat are advanced in the course of the revolution, the stronger will be its internal divergence from the peasantry.”⁹

9. A. Bogdanov, Questions of Socialism, p. 94.

Lenin noted that in the process of developing the revolution and strengthening Soviet power, the vacillations of the middle peasant are inevitable. But he never spoke about the inevitability of the middle peasant going over to the side of the counterrevolution. Stalin points out that already in the autumn of 1918, when the middle peasant saw that Soviet power had become firmly established, he began to turn towards it. In the party’s policy, this turn of the middle peasant was reflected in the liquidation of the Poor Peasants’ Committees and the transition to the slogan of an alliance with the middle peasantry. The party always took into account the dual nature of the middle peasantry, emphasizing that the working class can overcome contradictions with the peasantry and lead it. On the basis of Lenin’s leadership, the very possibility of a split between the working class and the peasantry at a certain stage of social construction was completely eliminated. Stalin regards disbelief in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry as disbelief in the strength of the working class.

This lack of faith in the strength of the proletariat is also very clearly expressed by Bogdanov. In 1917, he denied the possibility of a proletarian revolution not only in Russia, but also in the advanced capitalist countries. “Of course,” he wrote, “a strong faith is needed in order not to doubt that the European workers, who during this time in the majority so obediently followed the capitalists and who now, after three years of war, so diligently and sincerely fight for them... tomorrow will want and be able to rebuild society from the very foundations.”¹⁰

In the end, Bogdanov comes to the conclusion that there can be no more proletarian revolutions either in Europe or in Russia. Only other, “democratic” ones are possible, which will establish a democratic system in place of monarchies, push back the power of finance capital, declare all debt of the masses to usurious capital annulled, destroy national oppression and restore world relations. Under these conditions, the working class will create its own ideology and culture, remake all science and thereby build socialism.

Bogdanov’s general conception of the question and revolution is typically Menshevik. Like any revisionist from the 2nd International, he claimed that revolution is not a general law of development of society. It is necessary only during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Its only form is a bourgeois-democratic revolution.

Thus, having started with the assertion that contemporary society is not yet ripe for a proletarian revolution, Bogdanov slides into denying both the possibility and necessity of the latter. For him, the construction of socialism is not a matter of revolution, but of cultural and organizational construction based on cooperation, but not at all on class struggle. The transition from capitalism to socialism must be accomplished by evolutionary means.

The term “revolution” in relation to the socialist revolution, Bogdanov, especially in his latest works, uses only in the sense of an ideological, cultural and organizational revolution. The “theoretical” definition of revolution, given by him in “Tectology”, generally means, only, “a change in organizational forms”, i.e. also a peaceful restructuring of the existing system.

Bogdanov’s reduction of proletarian culture follows from his understanding of socialism, which is entirely based on his subjective idealism. Bogdanov interprets socialism idealistically and psychologically.

The decisive feature of socialism is comradely cooperation. Socialization of the means of production, the abolition of classes, etc. - all these are secondary and derivative tasks. “Socialism is a scientifically organized system of connections... a society where everything is organized on a consciously comradely basis with a high level of mental homogeneity among the workers... All its other features follow from here - public property, the abolition of classes, and the distribution of products.”¹¹

    11. Ibid., p. 68.

Therefore, the construction of socialism requires the preliminary development of a corresponding collectivist consciousness and proletarian culture. This development of a new ideology and culture must precede the political revolution and, therefore, will take place in the depths of capitalist society.

The main task of socialism, according to Bogdanov, is the harmonious organization of all social life. Therefore, “socialism is an organizational task”. And in order to fulfill this task, the working class must master organizational science – tectology. “Until the working class has mastered its organizational tools... until then, obviously, it cannot and should not undertake attempts to directly solve the world’s organizational task.”¹²

“The new cultural worldview of the working class is the real birth of socialism in the present society... And the material conditions? Simply because if the cultural conditions have been created, then the material conditions are already there.”¹³  Perhaps nowhere in the social sciences has Bogdanov’s idealism been revealed so clearly as in this situation. In order to build socialism, literally all sciences must be remade. Consequently, it will not be political leaders who will lead the workers to socialism, but the learned, scientific and technical intelligentsia. In his utopian novels, Bogdanov openly describes great scientists (the engineer Manny and his son), who drag the “stupid” working masses who do not understand them to the heights of culture. As in other matters, Bukharin follows Bogdanov here too, putting forward his theory of four stages of revolution: ideological (which the proletariat is still carrying out within the framework of capitalism), political, economic and technical. Bukharin also recognizes the primacy of the cultural revolution, which, according to him, must precede the political one. Here Bukharin once again proves his servility to capitalism – to the bourgeois culture to which he thinks to accustom the workers within the framework of capitalism.

In the already mentioned collection of articles “Questions of Socialism” Bogdanov proves that no socialism can be built in Russia, because the working class has not mastered organizational science and has not created its own culture. Bourgeois science is hostile to us by its very nature and cannot be used to build socialism.

War communism – the communism of distribution and consumption – expressed, in Bogdanov’s opinion, a regression to a natural economy. Bogdanov generally denied the presence of anything socialist in war communism. The nationalization of production in the RSFSR was caused only by military conditions and should be abolished with the introduction of NEP. Bogdanov viewed the introduction of NEP as the complete failure of the transition to socialism and a complete return to capitalism that he had predicted.

While aligning with counter-revolutionary Trotskyism in regard to the possibility of building socialism in one country, Bogdanov also aligns himself with right-wing opportunism, which opposed the party’s policy of ensuring the economic independence of the USSR. He calls this line anti-socialist, inevitably leading to national narrow-mindedness. “An anti-socialist aspect of the formulation of the task,” writes Bogdanov, “should also be recognized as the tendency toward national-state ‘autarky’, toward doing without the products of other countries as far as possible, and eliminating international economic interdependence. Socialism, in its modern understanding, is impossible without the connection of the world economy, at least the greater part of it.”¹⁴

When Bogdanov begins to describe a socialist society, he completely echoes the supporters of ethical socialism from the camp of Kantian social democrats. Socialism for him is a “progressive ideal, expressing socially progressive tendencies in the human psyche”, expressing people’s desire for “increasing fullness and harmony of life and consciousness”. The task of the revolution is “the harmonization of human existence”.

Bogdanov’s sociological teachings are based on his empiriomonism and tectology and follow from them. Bogdanov’s sociology reveals with unprecedented clarity the reactionary nature of his entire philosophical system. All counter-revolutionary groups, “Workers’ Truth”, Trotskyism, right-wing restorationists, etc., found in Bogdanov’s philosophy and sociology rich material for substantiating their counter-revolutionary theory and practice.

Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Institute of Philosophy, A. V. Shchegolov, Lenin’s Struggle Against Bogdanov’s Revision of Marxism, State Socio-Economic Publishing House, Moscow – 1937, pages 151-198.

Translated from the Russian by Polina Brik.

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