Marx and Russia by James D. White

Author:James D. White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Pravda

Bogdanov’s exile in Vologda ended at the beginning of 1904. He was immediately invited to contribute articles to a new journal of ‘literature and social life’ entitled Pravda (Truth); other contributors to the journal included Lunacharsky, Skvortsov-Stepanov and the historians M. N. Pokrovsky and N. A. Rozhkov. To some degree Pravda was a continuation of Studies in the Realistic Outlook, in that it carried on the polemic against Problems of Idealism. Bogdanov’s main contribution to the journal, the essay ‘The Integration of Mankind’, however, was not of a polemical kind. It was a work which argued that the point of view of the isolated individual in civil society gave a distorted view of the world and of mankind’s place in it; that for such a distorted view to be overcome, it required that the fragmentation of human society should be surmounted and humanity become an integral whole (Bogdanov 1990: 28–46). ‘The Integration of Mankind’ was an essay in the tradition of Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Historical Letters’ and Mikhailovsky’s ‘On Progress’, and, though it was unknown to Bogdanov at the time, also of Marx’s ‘Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844’.

In the spring of 1904 Bogdanov travelled to Geneva to meet Lenin, with whom he had corresponded while he was still in Vologda. Lenin was at this time in desperate straits as Martov and his supporters extended their control over the institutions of the party. Lenin was particularly irked that he did not have a newspaper with which to exert his influence. Bogdanov’s support at this juncture was crucial for Lenin. As Valentinov explained, Bogdanov at that time was already established as a writer; he was very well known among Social Democrats, and had good literary contacts in St Petersburg and Moscow, in particular with Gorky (Valentinov 1968: 235).

For his part, Bogdanov believed that the split in the RSDLP was regrettable and unnecessary, but he sympathized with the Lenin camp because it seemed to him that Martov and his group were acting in defiance of democratic decisions that had been made by the Second Congress. Bogdanov certainly did not subscribe to the idea of What Is To Be Done? that the socialist consciousness had to be brought to the working class from outside, and while collaborating with Bogdanov Lenin did not repeat it. Symptomatically, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, the pamphlet Lenin wrote to justify his stance at the Second Congress, makes no mention of the idea, but instead advances Bogdanov’s conception that the workers’ experience of industrial action has made them disciplined, whereas the intelligentsia are much more individualistic and unruly. When, at the instigation of Martov and the editors of Iskra, Rosa Luxemburg wrote an article criticizing this idea, she was answered not by Lenin but by Bogdanov (Bogdanov 1925).

Despite Lenin’s rejection of Bogdanov’s philosophical views, he was prepared to form a political alliance with Bogdanov. The two men agreed to campaign for the convocation of a third party congress, which would resolve the conflicts created by the Second Congress.

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