6. Empirio-Criticism and Historical Materialism

Chapter Six: Empirio-Criticism and Historical Materialism[edit source]

The Russian Machians, as we have already seen, are divided into two camps. Mr. V. Chernov and the collaborators of the Russkoye Bogatstvo^[1] are downright and consistent opponents of dialectical materialism, both in philosophy and history. The other company of Machians, in whom we are more interested here, are would-be Marxists and try in every way to assure their readers that Machism is compatible with the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. True, these assurances are for the most part nothing but assurances; not a single Machian would-be Marxist has ever made the slightest attempt to present in any systematic way the real trends of the founders of empirio-criticism in the field of the social sciences. We shall dwell briefly on this question, turning first to the statements to be found in writings of the German empirio-criticists and then to those of their Russian disciples.

1. The Excursions of the German Empirio-Criticists Into The Field of the Social Sciences[edit source]

In 1895, when R. Avenarius was still alive, there appeared in the philosophical journal edited by him an article by his disciple, F. Blei, entitled “Metaphysics in Political Economy.”^[2] All the teachers of empirio-criticism wage war on the “metaphysics” not only of explicit and conscious philosophical materialism, but also of natural science, which instinctively adopts the standpoint of the materialist theory of knowledge. The disciple takes up arms against metaphysics in political economy. The fight is directed against the most varied schools of political economy, but we are interested only in the character of the empirio-critical argument against the school of Marx and Engels.

“The purpose of the present investigation,” writes Franz Blei, “is to show that all political economy until now, in its endeavour to interpret the phenomena of economic life, operates with metaphysical premises; that it . . . ‘derives’ the ‘laws’ governing an economy from the ‘nature’ of the latter, and man is only an incidental factor in relation to these ‘laws.’ . . . In all its theories political economy has hitherto rested on metaphysical grounds; all its theories are unbiological, and therefore unscientific and worthless for knowledge. . . . The theoreticians do not know what they are building their theories on, what the soil is of which these theories are the fruit. They regard themselves as realists operating without any premises whatever, for they are, forsooth, dealing with ‘sober’ (nüchterne), ‘practical’ and ‘tangible’ (sinnfällige) economic phenomena. . . . And all have that family resemblance to many trends in physiology which only the same parents—viz., metaphysics and speculation—can transmit to their children, in our case to the physiologists and economists. One school of economists analyses the ‘phenomena’ of ‘economy’ [Avenarius and his school put ordinary words in quotation marks in order to show that they, the true philosophers, discern the essentially “metaphysical character” of a use of words which is so vulgar and so unrefined by “epistemological analysis”] without placing what they find (das Gefundene) in this way into relation with the behaviour of individuals; the physiologists exclude the behaviour of the individual from their investigations as being ‘actions of the soul’ (Wirkungen der Seele), while the economists of this trend declare the behaviour of individuals to be negligible in relation to the ‘immanent laws of economy’ (pp. 378–79). With Marx, theory established ‘economic laws’ from construed processes, and these ‘laws’ figured in the initial section (Initialabschnitt) of the dependent vital series, while the economic processes figured in the final section (Finalabschnitt). . . . ‘Economy’ was transformed by the economists into a transcendental category, in which they discovered such ‘laws’ as they wished to discover: the ‘laws’ of ‘capital’ and ‘labour,’ ‘rent,’ ‘wages’ and ‘profit.’ The economists transformed man into a Platonic idea—‘capitalist,’ ‘worker,’ etc. Socialism ascribed to the ‘capitalist’ the character of being ‘greedy for profit,’ liberalism ascribed to the worker the character of being ‘exacting’—and both characters were moreover explained by the ‘operation of the laws of capital’” (pp. 381-82).

“Marx came to the study of French socialism and political economy with a socialist world outlook, and his aim as regards knowledge was to provide a ‘theoretical foundation’ for his world outlook in order to ‘safeguard’ his initial value. He found the law of value in Ricardo . . . but the conclusion which the French Socialists had drawn from Ricardo could not satisfy Marx in his endeavour to ‘safeguard’ his E-value— brought into a vital-difference, i.e., his ‘world outlook,’ for these conclusions had already entered as a component part into the content of his initial value in the form of ‘indignation at the robbery of the workers,’ and so forth. The conclusions were rejected as ‘being formally untrue economically’ for they are ‘simply an application of morality to political economy.’ ‘But what formally may be economically incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history. If the moral consciousness of the mass declares an economic fact to be unjust, that is a proof that the fact itself has been outlived, that other economic facts have made their appearance, owing to which the former one has become unbearable and untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed behind the formal economic incorrectness.’” (From Engels’ preface to Karl Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy.)

Having quoted the above passage from Engels, Blei continues: “In the above quotation the middle section (Medial abschnitt) of the dependent series which interests us here is detached [abgehoben—a technical term of Avenarius’ implying: reached the consciousness, separated off]. After the ‘cognition’ that an ‘economic fact’ must be concealed behind the ‘moral consciousness of injustice,’ comes the final section [Finalabschnitt: the theory of Marx is a statement, i.e., an E-value, i.e., a vital-difference which passes through three stages, three sections, initial, middle and final: Initialabschnitt, Medialabschnitt, Finalabschnitt] . . . i.e., the ‘cognition’ of that ‘economic fact.’ Or, in other words, the task now is to ‘find again’ the initial value, his ‘world out look,’ in the ‘economic facts’ in order to ‘safeguard’ the initial value. This definite variation of the dependent series already contains the Marxist metaphysics, regardless of how the ‘cognised’ appears in the final section (Finalabschnitt). ‘The socialist world outlook,’ as an independent E-value, ‘absolute truth,’ is ‘given a basis’ ‘retrospectively’ by means of a ‘special’ theory of knowledge, namely, the economic system of Marx and the materialist theory of history. . . . By means of the concept of surplus value the ‘subjective’ ‘truth,’ in the Marxist world outlook finds its ‘objective truth,’ in the theory of knowledge of the ‘economic categories’—the safeguarding of the initial value is completed and metaphysics has retrospectively received its critique of knowledge” (pp. 384-86).

The reader is probably fuming at us for quoting at such length this incredibly trivial rigmarole, this quasi-scientific tomfoolery decked out in the terminology of Avenarius. But wer den Feind will verstehen, muss im Feindes Lande gehen—who would know the enemy must go into the enemy’s territory.^[3] And R. Avenarius’ philosophical journal is indeed enemy territory for Marxists. And we invite the reader to restrain for a minute his legitimate aversion for the buffoons of bourgeois science and to analyse the argument of Avenarius’ disciple and collaborator.

Argument number one: Marx is a “metaphysician” who did not grasp the epistemological “critique of concepts,” who did not work out a general theory of knowledge and who simply inserted materialism into his “special theory of knowledge.”

This argument contains nothing original to Blei personally. We have already seen scores and hundreds of times that all the founders of empirio-criticism and all the Russian Machians accuse materialism of “metaphysics,” or, more accurately, they repeat the hackneyed arguments of the Kantians, Humeans and idealists against materialist “metaphysics.”

Argument number two: Marxism is as “metaphysical” as natural science (physiology). And here again it is not Blei who is “responsible” for this argument, but Mach and Avenarius; for it was they who declared war on “natural-historical metaphysics,” applying that name to the instinctively materialist theory of knowledge to which (on their own admission and according to the judgment of all who are in any way versed in the subject) the vast majority of scientists adhere.

Argument number three: Marxism declares that “personality” is a quantité négligeable, a cypher, that man is an “incidental factor,” subject to certain “immanent laws of economics,” that an analysis des Gefundenen, i.e., of what is found, of what is given, etc., is lacking. This argument is a complete repetition of the stock of ideas of the empirio-critical “principal co-ordination,” i.e., of the idealist crotchet in Avenarius’ theory. Blei is absolutely right when he says that it is impossible to find the slightest hint of such idealist nonsense in Marx and Engels, and that from the standpoint of this nonsense Marxism must be rejected completely, from the very beginning, from its fundamental philosophical premises

Argument number four: Marx’s theory is “unbiological,” it is entirely innocent of “vital-differences” and of similar spurious biological terms which constitute the “science” of the reactionary professor, Avenarius. Blei’s argument is correct from the standpoint of Machism, for the gulf between Marx’s theory and Avenarius’ “biological” spillikins is indeed obvious at once. We shall presently see how the Russian Machian would-be Marxists in effect followed in Blei’s footsteps.

Argument number five: the partisanship, the partiality of Marx’s theory and his preconceived solution. The empirio-criticists as a whole, and not Blei alone, claim to be non-partisan both in philosophy and in social science. They are neither for socialism nor for liberalism. They make no differentiation between the fundamental and irreconcilable trends of materialism and idealism in philosophy, but endeavour to rise above them. We have traced this tendency of Machism through a long series of problems of epistemology, and we ought not to be surprised when we encounter it in sociology.

“Argument” number six: ridiculing “objective” truth. Blei at once sensed, and rightly sensed, that historical materialism and Marx’s entire economic doctrine are permeated through and through by a recognition of objective truth. And Blei accurately expressed the tendency of Mach’s and Avenarius’ doctrines, when, precisely because of the idea of objective truth, he, “from the very threshold,” so to speak, rejected Marxism by at once declaring that there was absolutely nothing behind the Marxist teaching save the “subjective” views of Marx.

And if our Machians renounce Blei (as they surely will), we shall tell them: You must not blame the mirror for showing a crooked face. Blei is a mirror which accurately reflects the tendencies of empirio-criticism, and a renouncement by our Machians would only bear witness to their good intentions—and to their absurd eclectical endeavours to combine Marx and Avenarius.

Let us pass from Blei to Petzoldt. If the former is a mere disciple, the latter is declared by outstanding empirio-criticists, such as Lessevich, to be a master. While Blei brings up the question of Marxism explicitly, Petzoldt—who would not demean himself by dealing with a mere Marx or a mere Engels—sets forth in positive form the views of empirio-criticism on sociology, which enables us to compare them with Marxism.

The second volume of Petzoldt’s Einführung in die Philosophie der reinen Erfahrung is entitled “Auf dem Wege zum Dauernden” (“Towards Stability”). The author makes the tendency towards stability the basis of his investigation. “The main features of the ultimate (endgültige) state of stability of humanity can be inferred in its formal aspect. We thus arrive at the foundations of ethics, aesthetics and the formal theory of knowledge” (p. iii). “Human development bears its goal within itself, it also tends towards a perfect (vollkommene) state of stability” (p. 60). The signs of this are abundant and varied. For instance, are there many violent radicals who do not in their old age become “more sensible,” more restrained? True, this “premature stability” (p. 62) is characteristic of the philistine. But do not philistines constitute the “compact majority”? (p. 62.)

Our philosopher’s conclusion, which he gives in italics, is this: “The quintessential feature of all the aims of our reasoning and creative activity is stability” (p. 72). The explanation is: “Many cannot bear to see a key Iying obliquely on the table, still less a picture hanging crooked on the wall. . . . And such people are not necessarily pedants. . . . It is only that they have a feeling that something is not in order” (p. 72, Petzoldt’s italics). In a word, the “tendency to stability is a striving for an extreme, by its nature ultimate, state” (p. 73). All this is taken from the fifth chapter of Volume II entitled “Die psychische Tendenz zur Stabilität” (“The Psychical Tendency to Stability”). The proofs of this tendency are all very weighty. For instance: “A striving for an extreme, a highest, in the original spatial sense, is pursued by the majority of mountain climbers. It is not always the desire for a spacious view or joy in the physical exercise of climbing in fresh air and wide nature that urges them towards the peaks, but also the instinct which is deeply ingrained in every organic being to pursue an adopted path of activity until a natural aim has been achieved” (p. 73). Another example: the amount of money people will pay to secure a complete collection of postage stamps! “It makes one’s head swim to examine the price list of a dealer in postage stamps. . . . And yet nothing is more natural and comprehensible than this urge for stability” (p. 74).

The philosophically untutored can have no conception of the breadth of the principles of stability and of economy of thought. Petzoldt develops his “theory” in detail for the profane. “Sympathy is an expression of the immediate need for a state of stability,” runs § 28. “Sympathy is not a repetition, a duplication of the observed suffering, but suffering on account of this suffering. . . . The greatest emphasis must be placed on the immediacy of sympathy. If we admit this we thereby admit that the welfare of others can concern a man just as immediately and fundamentally as his own welfare, and we thus at the same time reject every utilitarian and eudemonistic foundation of ethics. Thanks to its longing for stability and peace, human nature is not fundamentally evil, but anxious to help. . . .

“The immediacy of sympathy is frequently manifested in the immediacy of help. The rescuer will often fling himself without thought to save a drowning man. He cannot bear the sight of a person struggling with death; he forgets his other duties and risks his own life and the life of his near ones in order to save the useless life of some degraded drunkard; in other words, under certain circumstances sympathy can drive one to actions that are morally unjustifiable.”

And scores and hundreds of pages of empirio-critical philosophy are filled with such unutterable platitudes!

Morality is deduced from the concept “moral state of stability” (The second section of Volume II: “Die Dauerbestande der Seele” [“Stable States of the Soul”], Chapter I, “Vom ethischen Dauerbestande” [“On Ethical Stable States”]). “The state of stability, according to the very concept of it, contains no conditions of change in any of its components. From this it at once follows that it can contain no possibility of war” (p. 202). “Economic and social equality is implied in the conception of the final (endgultig), stable state” (p. 213). This “state of stability” is derived not from religion but from “science.” The “majority” cannot bring it about, as the socialists suppose, nor can the power of the socialists “help humanity” (p. 207). Oh, no!—it is “free development” that will lead to the ideal. Are not, indeed, the profits of capital decreasing and are not wages constantly increasing? (p. 223). All the assertions about “wage slavery” are untrue (p. 229). A slave’s leg could be broken with impunity—but now? No, “moral progress” is beyond doubt; look at the university settlements in England, at the Salvation Army (p. 230), at the German “ethical societies.” In the name of “aesthetic stability” (Chapter II, Section 2) “romanticism” is rejected. But romanticism embraces all forms of inordinate extension of the ego, idealism, metaphysics, occultism, solipsism, egoism, the “forcible coercion of the minority by the majority” and the “social-democratic ideal of the organisation of all labour by the state” (pp. 240-41).^[4]

The sociological excursions of Blei, Petzoldt and Mach are but an expression of the infinite stupidity of the philistine, smugly retailing the most hackneyed rubbish under cover of a new “empirio-critical” systematisation and terminology. A pretentious cloak of verbal artifices, clumsy devices in syllogistic, subtle scholasticism, in a word, as in epistemology, so in sociology—the same reactionary content under the same flamboyant signboard.

Let us now turn to the Russian Machians.

2. How Bogdanov Corrects and “Develops” Marx[edit source]

In his article “The Development of Life in Nature and Society” (From the Psychology of Society, 1902, p. 35, et seq.), Bogdanov quotes the well-known passage from the preface to Zur Kritik,^[5]: where the “great sociologist”, i.e., Marx, expounds the basis of historical materialism. Having quoted Marx’s words, Bogdanov declares that the “old formulation of historical monism, without ceasing to be basically true, no longer fully satisfies us” (37). The author wishes, therefore, to correct the theory, or to develop it, starting from the basis of the theory itself. The author’s chief conclusion is as follows:

“We have shown that social forms belong to the comprehensive genus—biological adaptations. But we have not thereby defined the province of social forms; for a definition, not only the genus, but also the species must be established. . . . In their struggle for existence men can unite only with the help of consciousness : without consciousness there can be no intercourse. Hence, social life in all its manifestations is a consciously psychical life. . . . Society is inseparable from consciousness. Social being and social consciousness are, in the exact meaning of these terms, identical” (pp. 50, 51, Bogdanov’s italics).

That this conclusion is absolutely alien to Marxism has been pointed out by Orthodox (Philosophical Essays, St. Petersburg, 1906, p. 183, ff.). But Bogdanov responded simply by abuse, picking upon an error in quotation: instead of “in the exact meaning of these terms,” Orthodox had quoted “in the full meaning of these terms.” This error was indeed committed, and the author had every right to correct it; but to raise a cry of “mutilation,” “substitution,” and so forth (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. xliv), is simply to obscure the essence of the point at issue by wretched words. What ever “exact” meaning Bogdanov may have invented for the terms “social being” and “social consciousness,” there can be no doubt that the statement we have quoted is not correct. “Social being” and “social consciousness” are not identical, just as being in general and consciousness in general are not identical. From the fact that in their intercoutse men act as conscious beings, it does not follow that social consciousness is identical with social being. In all social formations of any complexity—and in the capitalist social formation in particular—people in their intercourse are not conscious of what kind of social relations are being formed, in accordance with what laws they develop, etc. For instance, a peasant when he sells his grain enters into “intercourse” with the world producers of grain in the world market, but he is not conscious of it; nor is he conscious of the kind of social relations that are formed on the basis of exchange. Social consciousness reflects social being—that is Marx’s teaching. A reflection may be an approximately true copy of the reflected, but to speak of identity is absurd. Consciousness in general reflects being—that is a general principle of all materialism. It is impossible not to see its direct and inseparable connection with the principle of historical materialism: social consciousness reflects social being.

Bogdanov’s attempt imperceptibly to correct and develop Marx in the “spirit of his principles” is an obvious distortion of these materialist principles in the spirit of idealism. It would be ludicrous to deny it. Let us recall Bazarov’s exposition of empirio-criticism (not empirio-monism, oh no!—there is such a wide, wide difference between these “systems”!): “sense-perception is the reality existing outside us.” This is plain idealism, a plain theory of the identity of consciousness and being. Recall, further, the formulation of W. Schuppe, the immanentist (who swore and vowed as fervently as Bazarov and Co. that he was not an idealist, and who with no less vigour than Bogdanov insisted on the very “exact” meaning of his terms): “being is consciousness.” Now compare this with the refutation of Marx’s historical materialism by the immanentist Schubert-Soldern: “Every material process of production is always an act of consciousness on the part of its observer. . . . In its epistemological aspect, it is not the external process of production that is the primary (prius), but the subject or subjects; in other words, even the purely material process of production does not lead us out of the general connection of consciousness (Bewusstseinszusammenhang).” (See Das menschliche Glück und die soziale Frage, S. 293, 295-96.)

Bogdanov may curse the materialists as much as he pleases for “mutilating his thoughts,” but no curses will alter the simple and plain fact. The correction of Marx’s theory and the development of Marx supposedly in the spirit of Marx by the “empirio-monist” Bogdanov in no essential respect differ from the way the idealist and epistemological solipsist Schubert-Soldern endeavours to refute Marx. Bogdanov assures us that he is not an idealist. Schubert-Soldern assures us that he is a realist (Bazarov even believed him). In our time a philosopher has to declare himself a “realist” and an “enemy of idealism.” It is about time you understood this, Messrs. Machians!

The immanentists, the empirio-criticists and the empirio-monists all argue over particulars, over details, over the formulation of idealism, whereas we from the very outset reject all the principles of their philosophy common to this trinity. Let Bogdanov, accepting in the best sense and with the best of intentions all the conclusions of Marx, preach the “identity” of social being and social consciousness; we shall say: Bogdanov minus “empirio-monism” (or rather, minus Machism) is a Marxist. For this theory of the identity of social being and social consciousness is sheer nonsense and an absolutely reactionary theory. If certain people reconcile it with Marxism, with Marxist behaviour, we must admit that these people are better than their theory, but we cannot justify outrageous theoretical distortions of Marxism.

Bogdanov reconciles his theory with Marx’s conclusions, and sacrifices elementary consistency for the sake of these conclusions. Every individual producer in the world economic system realises that he is introducing a certain change into the technique of production; every owner realises that he exchanges certain products for others; but these producers and these owners do not realise that in doing so they are thereby changing social being. The sum-total of these changes in all their ramifications in the capitalist world economy could not be grasped even by seventy Marxes. The paramount thing is that the laws of these changes have been discovered, that the objective logic of these changes and their historical development have at bottom and in the main been disclosed—objective, not in the sense that a society of conscious beings, men, could exist and develop independently of the existence of conscious beings (and it is only such trifles that Bogdanov stresses by his “theory”), but in the sense that social being is independent of the social consciousness of men. The fact that you live and conduct your business, beget children, produce products and exchange them, gives rise to an objectively necessary chain of events, a chain of development, which is independent of your social consciousness, and is never grasped by the latter completely. The highest task of humanity is to comprehend this objective logic of economic evolution (the evolution of social life) in its general and fundamental features, so that it may be possible to adapt to it one’s social consciousness and the consciousness of the advanced classes of all capitalist countries in as definite, clear and critical a fashion as possible.

Bogdanov admits all this. And what does this mean? It means in effect that his theory of the “identity of social being and social consciousness” is thrown overboard, that it becomes an empty scholastic appendage, as empty, dead and useless as the “theory of general substitution” or the doctrine of “elements,” “introjection” and the rest of the Machian rigmarole. But the “dead lay hold of the living”; the dead scholastic appendage, against the will of and independently of the consciousness of Bogdanov, converts his philosophy into a serviceable tool of the Schubert-Solderns and other reactionaries, who in a thousand different keys, from a hundred professorial chairs, disseminate this dead thing as a living thing, direct it against the living thing, for the purpose of stifling it. Bogdanov personally is a sworn enemy of reaction in general and of bourgeois reaction in particular. Bogdanov’s “substitution” and theory of the “identity of social being and social consciousness” serve this reaction. It is sad, but true.

Materialism in general recognises objectively real being (matter) as independent of consciousness, sensation, experience, etc., of humanity. Historical materialism recognises social being as independent of the social consciousness of humanity. In both cases consciousness is only the reflection of being, at best an approximately true (adequate, perfectly exact) reflection of it. From this Marxist philosophy, which is cast from a single piece of steel, you cannot eliminate one basic premise, one essential part, without departing from objective truth, without falling a prey to a bourgeois-reactionary falsehood.

Here are further examples of how the dead philosophy of idealism lays hold of the living Marxist Bogdanov.

The article “What Is Idealism?” 1901 (ibid., p. 11 et seq.): “We arrive at the following conclusion: both where people agree in their judgments of progress and where they disagree, the basic meaning of the idea of progress is the same, namely, increasing completeness and harmony of conscious life. This is the objective content of the concept progress. . . . If we now compare the psychological formulation of the idea of progress thus arrived at with the previously explained biological formulation [“biological progress is an increase in the sum-total of life,” p. 14], we shall easily convince ourselves that the former fully coincides with the latter and can be deduced from it. . . . And since social life amounts to the psychical life of members of society, here too the content of the idea of progress is the same—increase in the completeness and harmony of life; only we must add: the social life of men. And, of course, the idea of social progress never had and cannot have any other content” (p. 16).

“We have found . . . that idealism expresses the victory in the human soul of moods more social over moods less social, that a progressive ideal is a reflection of the socially progressive tendency in the idealist psychology” (p. 32).

It need hardly be said that all this play with biology and sociology contains not a grain of Marxism. Both in Spencer and Mikhailovsky one may find any number of definitions not a whit worse than this, defining nothing but the “good intentions” of the author and betraying a complete lack of understanding of “what is idealism” and what materialism.

The author begins Book III of Empirio-Monism, the article “Social Selection (Foundations of Method),” 1906, by refuting the “eclectic socio-biological attempts of Lange, Ferri, Woltmann and many others” (p. 1), and on page 15 we find the following conclusion of the “enquiry”: “We can formulate the fundamental connection between energetics and social selection as follows:

“Every act of social selection represents an increase or decrease of the energy of the social complex concerned. In the former case we have ‘positive selection,’ in the latter ‘negative selection.’” (Author’s italics.)

And such unutterable trash is served out as Marxism! Can one imagine anything more sterile, lifeless and scholastic than this string of biological and energeticist terms that contribute nothing, and can contribute nothing, in the sphere of the social sciences? There is not a shadow of concrete economic enquiry here, not a hint of the Marxist method, the method of dialectics and the world outlook of materialism, only a mere invention of definitions and attempts to fit them into the ready-made conclusions of Marxism. “The rapid growth of the productive forces of capitalist society is undoubtedly an increase in the energy of the social whole. . . .” The second half of the phrase is undoubtedly a simple repetition of the first half expressed in meaningless terms which seem to lend “profundity” to the question, but which in reality in no way differ from the eclectic biologico-sociological attempts of Lange and Co.!—“but the disharmonious character of this process leads to its culmination in a crisis, in a vast waste of productive forces, in a sharp decrease of energy: positive selection is replaced by negative selection” (p. 18).

In what way does this differ from Lange? A biologico-energeticist label is tacked on to ready-made conclusions on the subject of crises, without any concrete material whatever being added and without the nature of crises being elucidated. All this is done with the very best intentions, for the author wishes to corroborate and give greater depth to Marx’s conclusions; but in point of fact he only dilutes them with an intolerably dreary and lifeless scholasticism. The only “Marxism” here is a repetition of an already known conclusion, and all the “new” proof of it, all this “social energetics” (p. 34) and “social selection” is but a mere collection of words and a sheer mockery of Marxism.

Bogdanov is not engaged in a Marxist enquiry at all; all he is doing is to reclothe results already obtained by the Marxist enquiry in a biological and energeticist terminology. The whole attempt is worthless from beginning to end, for the concepts “selection,” “assimilation and dissimilation” of energy, the energetic balance, and so forth, are, when applied to the sphere of the social sciences, but empty phrases. In fact, an enquiry into social phenomena and an elucidation of the method of the social sciences cannot be undertaken with the aid of these concepts. Nothing is easier than to tack the labels of “energetics” or “biologico-sociology” on to such phenomena as crises, revolutions, the class struggle and so forth; but neither is there anything more sterile, more scholastic and lifeless than such an occupation. The important thing is not that Bogdanov tries to fit all his results and conclusions into the Marxist theory—or “nearly” all (we have seen the “correction” he made on the subject of the relation of social being to social consciousness)—but that the methods of fitting—this “social energetics”—are thoroughly false and in no way differ from the methods of Lange.

“Herr Lange (On the Labour Question, etc., 2nd ed.),” Marx wrote to Kugelmann on June 27, 1870, “sings my praises loudly, but with the object of making himself im portant. Herr Lange, you see, has made a great discovery. The whole of history can be brought under a single great natural law. This natural law is the phrase (in this application Darwin’s expression becomes nothing but a phrase) ‘struggle for life,’ and the content of this phrase is the Malthusian law of population or, rather, over-population. So, instead of analysing the ‘struggle for life’ as represented historically in various definite forms of society, all that has to be done is to translate every concrete struggle into the phrase ‘struggle for life,’ and this phrase itself into the Malthusian ‘population fantasy.’ One must admit that this is a very impressive method—for swaggering, sham-scientific, bombastic ignorance and intellectual laziness.”^[6]

The basis of Marx’s criticism of Lange is not that Lange foists Malthusianism in particular upon sociology, but that the transfer of biological concepts in general to the sphere of the social sciences is phrasemongering. Whether the transfer is undertaken with “good” intentions, or with the purpose of bolstering up false sociological conclusions, the phrase mongering none the less remains phrasemongering. And Bogdanov’s “social energetics,” his coupling of the doctrine of social selection with Marxism, is just such phrasemongering.

Just as in epistemology Mach and Avenarius did not develop idealism, but only overlaid the old idealist errors with a bombastic terminological rigmarolc (“elements,” “principal co-ordination,” “introjection,” etc.), so in sociology, even when there is sincere sympathy for Marxist conclusions, empirio-criticism results in a distortion of historical materialism by means of empty and bombastic energeticist and biological verbiage.

A historical peculiarity of modern Russian Machism (or rather of the Machian epidemic among a section of the Social-Democrats) is the following. Feuerbach was a “materialist below and an idealist above”; this to a certain extent applies also to Büchner, Vogt, Moleschott and Dühring, with the essential difference that all these philosophers were pygmies and wretched bunglers compared with Feuerbach.

Marx and Engels, as they grew out of Feuerbach and matured in the fight against the bunglers, naturally paid most attention to crowning the structure of philosophical materialism, that is, not to the materialist epistemology but to the materialist conception of history. That is why Marx and Engels laid the emphasis in their works rather on dialectical materialism than on dialectical materialism, why they insisted rather on historical materialism than on historical materialism. Our would-be Marxist Machians approached Marxism in an entirely different historical period, at a time when bourgeois philosophers were particularly specialising in epistemology, and, having assimilated in a one-sided and mutilated form certain of the component parts of dialectics (relativism, for instance), directed their attention chiefly to a defence or restoration of idealism below and not of idealism above. At any rate, positivism in general, and Machism in particular, have been much more concerned with subtly falsifying epistemology, assuming the guise of materialism and concealing their idealism under a pseudo-materialist terminology, and have paid comparatively little attention to the philosophy of history. Our Machians did not understand Marxism because they happened to approach it from the other side, so to speak, and they have assimilated—and at times not so much assimilated as learnt by rote—Marx’s economic and historical theory, without clearly apprehending its foundation, viz., philosophical materialism. And the result is that Bogdanov and Co. deserve to be called Russian Büchners and Dührings turned inside out. They want to be materialists above, but are unable to rid themselves of muddled idealism below! In the case of Bogdanov, “above” there is historical materialism, vulgarised, it is true, and much corrupted by idealism, “below” there is idealism, disguised in Marxist terminology and decked out in Marxist words. “Socially organised experience,” “collective labour process,” and so forth are Marxist words, but they are only words, concealing an idealist philosophy that declares things to be complexes of “elements,” of sensations, the external world to be “experience,” or an “empirio-symbol” of mankind, physical nature to be a “product” of the “psychical,” and so on and so forth.

An ever subtler falsification of Marxism, an ever subtler presentation of anti-materialist doctrines under the guise of Marxism—this is the characteristic feature of modern revisionism in political economy, in questions of tactics and in philosophy generally, both in epistemology and in sociology.

3. Suvorov’s “Foundations Of Social Philosophy”[edit source]

The Studies “in” the Philosophy of Marxism, the concluding article in which is the one by Comrade S. Suvorov mentioned above, by very reason of the collective nature of the book constitutes an unusually potent bouquet. When you have at one time and side by side the utterances of Bazarov,^[7] who says that according to Engels “sense-perception is the reality existing outside us,” of Berman, who declares the dialectics of Marx and Engels to be mysticism, of Lunacharsky, who goes to the length of religion, of Yushkevich, who introduces “the Logos into the irrational stream of experience,” of Bogdanov, who calls idealism the philosophy of Marxism, of Helfond, who purges J. Dietzgen of materialism, and lastly, of S. Suvorov with his article “Foundations of Social Philosophy”—you at once get the “aroma” of the new alignment. Quantity has passed into quality. The “seekers,” who had heretofore been seeking separately in individual articles and books, have come out with a veritable pronunciamento. Individual disagreements among them are obliterated by the very fact of their collective appearance against (and not “in”) the philosophy of Marxism, and the reactionary features of Machism as a current become manifest.

Under these circumstances, Suvorov’s article is all the more interesting for the fact that the author is neither an empirio-monist nor an empirio-criticist, but simply a “realist.” What relates him, therefore, to the rest of the company is not what distinguishes Bazarov, Yushkevich and Bogdanov as philosophers, but what they all have in common against dialectical materialism. A comparison of the sociological arguments of this “realist” with the arguments of the empirio-monist will help us to depict their common tendency.

Suvorov writes: “In the gradation of the laws that regulate the world process, the particular and complex become reduced to the general and simple, and all of them are subordinate to the universal law of development—the law of the economy of forces. The essence of this law is that every system of forces is the more capable of conservation and development the less its expenditure, the greater its accumulation and the more effectively expenditure serves accumulation. The forms of mobile equilibrium, which long ago evoked the idea of objective expediency (the solar system, the cycle of terrestrial phenomena, the process of life), arise and develop by virtue of the conservation and accumulation of the energy inherent in them—by virtue of their intrinsic economy. The law of economy of forces is the unifying and regulating principle of all development—inorganic, biological and social” (p. 293, author’s italics).

With what remarkable ease do our “positivists” and “realists” turn out “universal laws”! What a pity these laws are no whit better than those turned out as easily and swiftly by Eugen Dühring. Suvorov’s “universal law” is just as empty and bombastic a phrase as Dühring’s universal laws. Try to apply this law to the first of the three fields mentioned by the author—inorganic development. You will see that no “economy of forces” apart from the law of the conservation and transformation of energy can be applied here, let alone applied “universally.” And the author had already disposed of the law of the “conservation of energy,” had already mentioned it (p. 292) as a separate law.^[8] What then remained in the field of inorganic development apart from this law? Where are the additions or complications, or new discoveries, or new facts which entitled the author to modify (“perfect”) the law of the conservation and transformation of energy into the law of the “economy of forces”? There are no such facts or discoveries; Suvorov does not even hint at them. He simply—to make it look impressive, as Turgenev’s Bazarov— used to say—flourished his pen and forth came a new “universal law” of “real-monistic philosophy” (p. 292). That’s the stuff we are made of! How are we worse than Dühring?

Take the second field of development—the biological. In this field, where the development of organisms takes place by the struggle for existence and selection, is it the law of the economy of forces or the “law” of the wastage of forces that is universal? But never mind! “Real-monistic philosophy” can interpret the “meaning” of a universal law in one field in one way and in another field in another way, for instance, as the development of higher organisms from lower. What does it matter if the universal law is thus transformed into an empty phrase—the principle of “monism” is preserved. And in the third field (the social), the “universal law” can be interpreted in a third sense—as the development of productive forces. That is why it is a “universal law”—so that it can be made to cover anything you please.

“Although social science is still young, it already possesses both a solid foundation and definite generalisations; in the nineteenth century it reached a theoretical level—and this constitutes Marx’s chief merit. He elevated social science to the level of a social theory Engels said that Marx transformed socialism from a utopia into a science, but this is not enough for Suvorov. It will sound more impressive if we distinguish theory from science (was there a social science before Marx?)—and no harm is done if the distinction is absurd!.

“ . . . by establishing the fundamental law of social dynamics according to which the evolution of productive forces is the determining principle of all economic and social development. But the development of productive forces corresponds to the growth of the productivity of labour, to the relative reduction in expenditure and the increase in the accumulation of energy [see how fertile the “real-monistic philosophy” is: a new, energeticist, foundation for Marxism has been created!]... this is the economic principle. Thus, Marx made the principle of the economy of forces the foundation of the social theory. . . .”

This “thus” is truly superb! Because Marx has a political economy, let us therefore chew the word “economy,” and call the cud “real-monistic philosophy”!

No, Marx did not make any principle of the economy of forces the basis of his theory. These are absurdities invented by people who covet the laurels of Eugen Dühring. Marx gave an absolutely precise definition of the concept growth of productive forces, and he studied the concrete process of this growth. But Suvorov invented a new term to designate the concept analysed by Marx; and his invention was a very unhappy one and only confused matters. For Suvorov did not explain what is meant by the “economy of forces,” how it can be measured, how this concept can be applied, precise and definite facts it embraces;—and this cannot be explained, because it is a muddle. Listen to this:

“ . . . This law of social economy is not only the principle of the internal unity of social science [can you make anything of this, reader?], but also the connecting link between social theory and the general theory of being” (p. 294).

Well, well, here we have “the general theory of being” once more discovered by S. Suvorov, after it has already been discovered many times and in the most varied forms by numerous representatives of scholastic philosophy. We congratulate the Russian Machians on this new “general theory of being”! Let us hope that their next collective work will be entirely devoted to the demonstration and development of this great discovery!

The way our representative of realistic, or real-monistic, philosophy expounds Marx’s theory will be seen from the following example: “In general, the productive forces of men form a genetic gradation [ugh!] and consist of their labour energy, harnessed elemental forces, culturally modihed nature and the instruments of labour which make up the technique of production. . . . In relation to the process of labour these forces perform a purely economic function; they economise labour energy and increase the productivity of its expenditure” (p. 298). Productive forces perform an economic function in relation to the process of labour! This is just as though one were to say that vital forces perform a vital function in relation to the process of life. This is not expounding Marx; this is clogging up Marxism with an incredible clutter of words.

It is impossible to enumerate all the clutter contained in Suvorov’s article. “The socialisation of a class is expressed in the growth of its collective power over both people and their property” (p. 313). “ . . . The class struggle aims at establishing forms of equilibrium between social forces” (p. 322). Social dissension, enmity and struggle are essentially negative, anti-social phenomena. “Social progress, in its basic content, is the growth of social relations, of the social connections between people” (p. 328). One could fill volumes with collections of such banalities—and the representatives of bourgeois sociology are filling volumes with them. But to pass them off as the philosophy of Marxism—that is going too far! If Suvorov’s article were an experiment in popularising Marxism, one would not judge it very severely. Everyone would admit that the author’s intentions were of the best but that the experiment was unsuccessful. And that would be the end of it. But when a group of Machians present us with such stuff and call it the Foundations of Social Philosophy, and when we see the same methods of “developing” Marxism employed in Bogdanov’s philosophical books, we arrive at the inevitable conclusion that there is an intimate connection between reactionary epistemology and reactionary efforts in sociology.

4. Parties in Philosophy and Philosophical Blockheads[edit source]

It remains for us to examine the relation between Machism and religion. But this broadens into the question of whether there are parties generally in philosophy, and what is meant by non-partisanship in philosophy.

Throughout the preceding exposition, in connection with every problem of epistemology touched upon and in connection with every philosophical question raised by the new physics, we traced the struggle between materialism and idealism. Behind the mass of new terminological devices, behind the litter of erudite scholasticism, we invariably discerned two principal alignments, two fundamental trends in the solution of philosophical problems. Whether nature, matter, the physical, the external world should be taken as primary, and consciousness, mind, sensation (experience—as the widespread terminology of our time has it), the psychical, etc., should be regarded as secondary—that is the root question which in fact continues to divide the philosophers into two great camps. The source of thousands upon thousands of errors and of the confusion reigning in this sphere is the fact that beneath the envelope of terms, definitions, scholastic devices and verbal artihces, these two fundamental trends are overlooked. (Bogdanov, for instance, refuses to acknowledge his idealism, because, you see, instead of the “metaphysical” concepts “nature” and “mind,” he has taken the “experiential”: physical and psychical. A word has been changed!)

The genius of Marx and Engels consisted in the very fact that in the course of a long period, nearly half a century, they developed materialism, that they further advanced one fundamental trend in philosophy, that they did not stop at reiterating epistemological problems that had already been solved, but consistently applied—and showed how to apply—this same materialism in the sphere of the social sciences, mercilessly brushing aside as litter and rubbish the pretentious rigmarole, the innumerable attempts to “discover” a “new” line in philosophy, to invent a “new” trend and so forth. The verbal nature of such attempts, the scholastic play with new philosophical “isms,” the clogging of the issue by pretentious devices, the inability to comprehend and clearly present the struggle between the two fundamental epistemological trends—this is what Marx and Engels persistently pursued and fought against throughout their entire activity.

We said, “nearly half a century.” And, indeed, as far back as 1843, when Marx was only becoming Marx, i.e., the founder of scientific socialism, the founder of modern materialism, which is immeasurably richer in content and in comparably more consistent than all preceding forms of materialism, even at that time Marx pointed out with amazing clarity the basic trends in philosophy. Karl Grün quotes a letter from Marx to Feuerbach dated October 20, 1843,^[9] in which Marx invites Feuerbach to write an article for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher^[10] against Schelling. This Schelling, writes Marx, is a shallow braggart with his claims to having embraced and transcended all previous philosophical trends. “To the French romanticists and mystics he [Schelling] says: I am the union of philosophy and theology; to the French materialists: I am the union of the flesh and the idea; to the French sceptics: I am the destroyer of dogmatism.”^[11] That the “sceptics,” be they called Humeans or Kantians (or, in the twentieth century, Machians), cry out against the “dogmatism” of both materialism and idealism, Marx at that time already realised; and, without letting himself be diverted by any one of a thousand wretched little philosophical systems, he was able through Feuerbach to take the direct materialist road as against idealism. Thirty years later, in the afterword to the second edition of the first volume of Capital, Marx just as clearly and definitely contrasted his materialism to Hegel’s idealism, the most consistent and developed idealism of all; he contemptuously brushed Comtean “positivism” aside and dubbed as wretched epigoni the contemporary philosophers who imagined that they had destroyed Hegel when in reality they had reverted to a repetition of the pre-Hegelian errors of Kant and Hume.^[12] In the letter to Kugelmann of June 27, 1870, Marx refers just as contemptuously to “Büchner, Lange, Dühring, Fechner, etc.,” because they understood nothing of Hegel’s dialectics and treated him with scorn.^[13] And finally, take the various philosophical utterances by Marx in Capital and other works, and you will find an invariable basic motif, viz., insistence upon materialism and contemptuous derision of all obscurity, of all confusion and all deviations towards idealism. All Marx’s philosophical utterances revolve within these two fundamental opposites, and, in the eyes of professorial philosophy, their defect lies in this “narrowness” and “one-sidedness.” As a matter of fact, this refusal to recognise the hybrid projests for reconciling materialism and idealism constitutes the great merit of Marx, who moved forward along a sharply-dehned philosophical road.

Entirely in the spirit of Marx, and in close collaboration with him, Engels in all his philosophical works briefly and clearly contrasts the materialist and idealist lines in regard to all questions, without, either in 1878, or 1888, or 1892,^[14] taking seriously the endless attempts to “transcend” “one-sidedness” of materialism and idealism, to proclaim a new trend—“positivism,” “realism,” or some other professorial charlatanism. Engels based his whole fight against Dühring on the demand for consistent adherence to materialism, accusing the materialist Dühring of verbally confusing the issue, of phrasemongering, of methods of reasoning which involved a compromise with idealism and adoption of the position of idealism. Either materialism consistent to the end, or the falsehood and confusion of philosophical idealism—such is the formulation of the question given in every paragraph of Anti-Dühring ; and only people whose minds had already been corrupted by reactionary professorial philosophy could fail to notice it. And right down to 1894, when the last preface was written to Anti-Dühring, revised and enlarged by the author for the last time, Engels continued to follow the latest developments both in philosophy and science, and continued with all his former resoluteness to hold to his lucid and firm position, brushing away the litter of new systems, big and little.

That Engels followed the new developments in philosophy is evident from Ludwig Feuerbach. In the 1888 preface, mention is even made of such a phenomenon as the rebirth of classical German philosophy in England and Scandinavia, whereas Engels (both in the preface and in the text of the book) has nothing but the most extreme contempt for the prevailing Neo-Kantianism and Humism. It is quite obvious that Engels, observing the repetition by fashionable German and English philosophy of the old pre-Hegelian errors of Kantianism and Humism, was prepared to expect some good even from the turn to Hegel (in England and Scandinavia), hoping that the great idealist and dialectician would help to disclose petty idealist and metaphysical errors.^[15]

Without undertaking an examination of the vast number of shades of Neo-Kantianism in Germany and of Humism in England, Engels from the very outset refutes their fundamental deviation from materialism. Engels declares that the entire tendency of these two schools is “scientifically a step backward.” And what is his opinion of the undoubtedly “positivist,” according to the current terminology, the undoubtedly “realist” tendencies of these Neo-Kantians and Humeans, among whose number, for instance, he could not help knowing Huxley? That “positivism” and that “realism” which attracted, and which continue to attract, an infinite number of muddleheads, Engels declared to be atb e s ta philistine method of smuggling in materialism while abusing and abjuring it publicly! One has to reflect only very little on such an appraisal of Thomas Huxley—a very great scientist and an incomparably more realistic realist and positive positivist than Mach, Avenarius and Co.—in order to understand how contemptuously Engels would have greeted the present infatuation of a group of Marxists with “recent positivism,” the “latest realism,” etc.

Marx and Engels were partisans in philosophy from start to finish, they were able to detect the deviations from materialism and concessions to idealism and fideism in each and every “new” tendency. They therefore appraised Huxley exclusively from the standpoint of his materialist consistency. They therefore rebuked Feuerbach for not pursuing materialism to the end, for renouncing materialism because of the errors of individual materialists, for combating religion in order to renovate it or invent a new religion, for being unable, in sociology, to rid himself of idealist phraseology and become a materialist.

And whatever particular mistakes he committed in his exposition of dialectical materialism, J. Dietzgen fully appreciated and took over this great and most precious tradition of his teachers. Dietzgen sinned much by his clumsy deviations from materialism, but he never attempted to dissociate himself from it in principle, he never attempted to hoist a “new” standard and always at the decisive moment he firmly and categorically declared: I am a materialist; our philosophy is a materialist philosophy. “Of all parties,” our Joseph Dietzgen justly said, “the middle party is the most repulsive. . . . Just as parties in politics are more and more becoming divided into two camps . . . so science too is being divided into two general classes (Generalklassen): metaphysicians on the one hand, and physicists, or materialists, on the other.^[16] The intermediate elements and conciliatory quacks, with their various appellations—spiritualists, sensationalists, realists, etc., etc.—fall into the current on their way. We aim at definiteness and clarity. The reactionaries who sound a retreat (Retraiteblaser) call themselves idealists,^[17] and materialists should be the name for all who are striving to liberate the human mind from the metaphysical spell. . . . If we compare the two parties respectively to solid and liquid, between them there is a mush.”^[18]

True! The “realists,” etc., including the “positivists,” the Machians, etc., are all a wretched mush; they are a contemptible middle party in philosophy, who confuse the materialist and idealist trends on every question. The attempt to escape these two basic trends in philosophy is nothing but “conciliatory quackery.”

J. Dietzgen had not the slightest doubt that the “scientific priestcraft” of idealist philosophy is simply the antechamber to open priestcraft. “Scientific priestcraft,” he wrote, “is seriously endeavouring to assist religious priestcraft” (op. cit., p. 51). “In particular, the sphere of epistemology, the misunderstanding of the human mind, is such a louse-hole” (Lausgrube) in which both kinds of priests “lay their eggs.” “Graduated flunkeys,” who with their talk of “ideal blessings” stultify the people by their tortuous (geschraubte) “idealism” (p. 53)—that is J. Dietzgen’s opinion of the professors of philosophy. “Just as the antipodes of the good God is the devil, so the professorial priest (Kathederpfaffen) has his opposite pole in the materialist.” The materialist theory of knowledge is “a universal weapon against religious belief” (p. 55), and not only against the “notorious, formal and common religion of the priests, but also against the most refined, elevated professorial religion of muddled (benebelter) idealists” (p. 58).

Dietzgen was ready to prefer “religious honesty” to the “half-heartedness” of freethinking professors (p. 60), for “there at least there is a system,” there we find integral people, people who do not separate theory from practice. For the Herr Professors “philosophy is not a science, but a means of defence against Social-Democracy . . .” (p. 107). “All who call themselves philosophers, professors, and university lecturers are, despite their apparent freethinking, more or less immersed in superstition and mysticism . . . and in relation to Social-Democracy constitute a single . . . reactionary mass” (p. 108). “Now, in order to follow the true path, without being led astray by all the religious and philosophical gibberish (Welsch), it is necessary to study the falsest of all false paths (der Holzweg der Holzwege), philosophy” (p. 103).

Let us now examine Mach, Avenarius and their school from the standpoint of parties in philosophy. Oh, these gentlemen boast of their non-partisanship, and if they have an antipodes, it is the materialist . . . and only the materialist. A red thread that runs through all the writings of all the Machians is the stupid claim to have “risen above” materialism and idealism, to have transcended this “obsolete” antithesis; but in fact the whole fraternity are continually sliding into idealism and are conducting a steady and incessant struggle against materialism. The subtle epistemological crotchets of a man like Avenarius are but professorial inventions, an attempt to form a small philosophical sect “of his own”; but, as a matter of fact, in the general circumstances of the struggle of ideas and trends in modern society, the objective part played by these epistemological artifices is in every case the same, namely, to clear the way for idealism and fideism, and to serve them faithfully. In fact, it cannot be an accident that the small school of empirio-criticists is acclaimed by the English spiritualists, like Ward, by the French neo-criticists, who praise Mach for his attack on materialism, and by the German immanentists! Dietzgen’s expression, “graduated flunkeys of fideism,” hits the nail on the head in the case of Mach, Avenarius and their whole school.^[19]

It is the misfortune of the Russian Machians, who under took to “reconcile” Machism and Marxism, that they trusted the reactionary professors of philosophy and as a result slipped down an inclined plane. The methods of operation employed in the various attempts to develop and supplement Marx were not very ingenious. They read Ostwald, believe Ostwald, paraphrase Ostwald and call it Marxism. They read Mach, believe Mach, paraphrase Mach and call it Marxism. They read Poincaré, believe Poincaré, paraphrase Poincaré and call it Marxism! Not a single one of these professors, who are capable of making very valuable contributions in the special fields of chemistry, history, or physics, can be trusted one iota when it comes to philosophy. Why? For the same reason that not a single professor of political economy, who may be capable of very valuable contributions in the field of factual and specialised investigations, can be trusted one iota when it comes to the general theory of political economy. For in modern society the latter is as much a partisan science as is epistemology. Taken as a whole, the professors of economics are nothing but learned salesmen of the capitalist class, while the professors of philosophy are learned salesmen of the theologians.

The task of Marxists in both cases is to be able to master and adapt the achievements of these “salesmen” (for instance, you will not make the slightest progress in the investigation of new economic phenomena unless you have recourse to the works of these salesmen) and to be able to lop off their reactionary tendency, to pursue your own line and to combat the whole alignment of forces and classes hostile to us. And this is just what our Machians were unable to do, they slavishly follow the lead of the reactionary professorial philosophy. “Perhaps we have gone astray, but we are seeking,” wrote Lunacharsky in the name of the authors of the Studies. The trouble is that it is not you who are seeking, but you who are being sought ! You do not go with your, i.e., Marxist (for you want to be Marxists), standpoint to every change in the bourgeois philosophical fashion; the fashion comes to you, foists upon you its new surrogates got up in the idealist taste, one day à la Ostwald, the next day à la Mach, and the day after à la Poincaré. These silly “theoretical” devices (“energetics,” “elements,” “introjections,” etc.) in which you so naïvely believe are confined to a narrow and tiny school, while the ideological and social tendency of these devices is immediately spotted by the Wards, the neo-criticists, the immanentists, the Lopatins and the pragmatists, and it serves their purposes. The infatuation for empirio-criticism and “physical” idealism passes as rapidly as the infatuation for Neo-Kantianism and “physiological” idealism; but fideism takes its toll from every such infatuation and modihes its devices in a thousand ways for the benefit of philosophical idealism.

The attitude towards religion and the attitude towards natural science excellently illustrate the actual class use made of empirio-criticism by bourgeois reactionaries.

Take the first question. Do you think it is an accident that in a collective work directed against the philosophy of Marxism Lunacharsky went so far as to speak of the “deification of the higher human potentialities,” of “religious atheism,” etc.?^[20] If you do, it is only because the Russian Machians have not informed the public correctly regarding the whole Machian current in Europe and the attitude of this current to religion. Not only is this attitude in no way similar to the attitude of Marx, Engels, J. Dietzgen and even Feuerbach, but it is the very opposite, beginning with Petzoldt’s statement to the effect that empirio-criticism “contradicts neither theism nor atheism” (Einführung in die Philosophie der reinen Erfahrung, Bd. I, S. 351), or Mach’s declaration that “religious opinion is a private affair” (French trans., p. 434), and ending with the explicit fideism, the explicitly arch-reactionary views of Cornelius, who praises Mach and whom Mach praises, of Carus and of all the immanentists. The neutrality of a philosopher in this question is in itself servility to fideism, and Mach and Avenarius, because of the very premises of their epistemology, do not and cannot rise above neutrality.

Once you deny objective reality, given us in sensation, you have already lost every one of your weapons against fideism, for you have slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism—and that is all fideism wants. If the perceptual world is objective reality, then the door is closed to every other “reality” or quasi-reality (remember that Bazarov believed the “realism” of the immanentists, who declare God to be a “real concept”). If the world is matter in motion, matter can and must be infinitely studied in the infinitely complex and detailed manifestations and ramifications of this motion, the motion of this matter; but beyond it, beyond the “physical,” external world, with which everyone is familiar, there can be nothing. And the hostility to materialism and the showers of abuse heaped on the materialists are all in the order of things in civilised and democratic Europe. All this is going on to this day. All this is being concealed from the public by the Russian Machians, who have not once attempted even simply to compare the attacks made on materialism by Mach, Avenarius, Petzoldt and Co., with the statements made in favour of materialism by Feuerbach, Marx, Engels and J. Dietzgen.

But this “concealment” of the attitude of Mach and Avenarius to fideism will not avail. The facts speak for themselves. No efforts can release these reactionary professors from the pillory in which they have been placed by the kisses of Ward, the neo-criticists, Schuppe, Schubert-Soldern, Leclair, the pragmatists, etc. And the influence of the persons mentioned, as philosophers and professors, the popularity of their ideas among the “educated,” i.e., the bourgeois, public and the specific literature they have created are ten times wider and richer than the particular little school of Mach and Avenarius. The little school serves those it should serve, and it is exploited as it deserves to be exploited.

The shameful things to which Lunacharsky has stooped are not exceptional; they are the product of empirio-criticism, both Russian and German. They cannot be defended on the grounds of the “good intentions” of the author, or the “special meaning” of his words; if it were the direct and common, i.e., the directly fideistic meaning, we should not stop to discuss matters with the author, for most likely not a single Marxist could be found in whose eyes such statements would not have placed Anatole Lunacharsky exactly in the same category as Peter Struve. If this is not the case (and it is not the case yet), it is exclusively because we perceive the “special” meaning and are fighting while there is still ground for a fight on comradely lines. This is just the disgrace of Lunacharsky’s statements—that he could connect them with his “good” intentions. This is just the evil of his “theory”—that it permits the use of such methods or of such conclusions in the pursuit of good intentions. This is just the trouble—that at best “good” intentions are the subjective affair of Tom, Dick or Harry, while the social significance of such statements is undeniable and indisputable, and no reservation or explanation can mitigate it.

One must be blind not to see the ideological affinity beiween Lunacharsky’s “deification of the higher human potentialities” and Bogdanov’s “general substitution” of the psychical for all physical nature. This is one and the same thought; in the one case it is expressed principally from the aesthetic standpoint, and in the other from the epistemological standpoint. “Substitution,” approaching the subject taciitly and from a different angle, already deifies the “higher human potentialities,” by divorcing the “psychical” from man and by substituting an immensely extended, abstract, divinely-lifeless “psychical in general” for all physical nature. And what of Yushkevich’s “Logos” introduced into the “irrational stream of experience”?

A single claw ensnared, and the bird is lost. And our Machians have all become ensnared in idealism, that is, in a diluted and subtle fideism; they became ensnared from the moment they took “sensation” not as an image of the external world but as a special “element.” It is nobody’s sensation, nobody’s mind, nobody’s spirit, nobody’s will—this is what one inevitably comes to if one does not recognise the materialist theory that the human mind reflects an objectively real external world.

5. Ernst Haeckel and Ernst Mach[edit source]

Let us now examine the attitude of Machism, as a philosophical current, towards the natural sciences. All Machism, from beginning to end, combats the “metaphysics” of the natural sciences, this being the name they give to natural-scientific materialism, i.e., to the instinctive, unwitting, unformed, philosophically unconscious conviction shared by the overwhelming majority of scientists regarding the objective reality of the external world reflected by our consciousness. And our Machians maintain a skulking silence regarding this fact and obscure or confuse the inseparable connection between the instinctive materialism of the natural scientists and philosophical materialism as a trend, a trend known long ago and hundreds of times affirmed by Marx and Engels.

Take Avenarius. In his very first work, Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmasses, published in 1876, he attacked the metaphysics of the natural sciences,[§ 79, 114,etc.] i.e., natural-scientific materialism, and, as he himself admitted in 1891 (without, however, “correcting” his views!), attacked it from the standpoint of epistemological idealism.

Take Mach. From 1872 (or even earlier) down to 1906 he waged continuous war on the metaphysics of natural science. However, he was conscientious enough to admit that his views were shared by “a number of philosophers” (the immanentists included), but by “very few scientists” (Analysis of Sensations, p. 9). In 1906 Mach also honestly admitted that the “majority of scientists adhere to materialism” (Erkenntnis und Irrtum, 2. Aufl., S. 4).

Take Petzoldt. In 1900 he proclaimed that the “natural sciences are thoroughly (ganz und gar) imbued with metaphysics.” “Their ‘experience’ has still to be purified” (Einführung in die Philosophie der reinen Erfahrung, Bd. I, S. 343). We know that Avenarius and Petzoldt “purify” experience of all recognition of the objective reality given us in sensation. In 1904 Petzoldt declared: “The mechanical world outlook of the modern scientist is essentially no better than that of the ancient Indians. . . . It makes no difference whether the world rests on a mythical elephant or on just as mythical a swarm of molecules and atoms epistemologically thought of as real and therefore not used merely metaphorically (bloss bildlich)” (Bd. II, S. 176).

Take Willy, the only Machian decent enough to be ashamed of his kinship with the immanentists. Yet, in 1905 he too declared: “. . . The natural sciences, after all, are also in many respects an authority of which we must rid ourselves” (Gegen die Schulweisheit, S. 158).

But this is all sheer obscurantism, out-and-out reaction. To regard atoms, molecules, electrons, etc., as an approximately true reflection in our mind of the objectively real movement of matter is equivalent to believing in an elephant upon which the world rests! No wonder that this obscurantist, decked in the cap and bells of fashionable positivism, was greeted by the immanentists with open arms. There is not a single immanentist who would not furiously attack the “metaphysics” of science, the “materialism” of the scientists, precisely because of the recognition by the scientists of the objective reality of matter (and its particles), time, space, laws of nature, etc., etc. Long before the new discoveries in physics which gave rise to “physical idealism” were made, Leclair, using Mach as a support, combated “The Predominant Materialist Trend (Grundzug) of Modern Science” (the title of § 6 of Der Realismus usw., 1879), Schubert-Soldern fought “The Metaphysics of Natural Science” (the title of Chapter II of Grundlagen einer Erkenntnistheorie, 1884) Rehmke battled with natural-scientific “materialism,” that “metaphysics of the street” (Philosophie und Kantianismus, 1882, S. 17), etc., etc.

And the immanentists quite legitimately drew direct and outspoken fideist conclusions from this Machian idea of the “metaphysical character” of natural-scientific materialism. If natural science in its theories depicts not objective reality, but only metaphors, symbols, forms of human experience etc., it is beyond dispute that humanity is entitled to create for itself in another sphere no less “real concepts,” such as God, and so forth.

The philosophy of the scientist Mach is to science what the kiss of the Christian Judas was to Christ. Mach likewise betrays science into the hands of fideism by virtually deserting to the camp of philosophical idealism. Mach’s renunciation of natural-scientific materialism is a reactionary phenomenon in every respect. We saw this quite clearly when we spoke of the struggle of the “physical idealists” against the majority of scientists, who continue to maintain the standpoint of the old philosophy. We shall see it still more clearly if we compare the eminent scientist, Ernst Haeckel, with the eminent (among the reactionary philistines) philosopher, Ernst Mach.

The storm provoked by Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe in every civilised country strikingly brought out, on the one hand, the partisan character of philosophy in modern society and, on the other, the true social significance of the struggle of materialism against idealism and agnosticism. The fact that the book was sold in hundreds of thousands of copies, that it was immediately translated into all languages and that it appeared in specially cheap editions, clearly demonstrates that the book “has found its way to the masses,” that there are multitudes of readers whom Ernst Haeckel at once won over to his side. This popular little book became a weapon in the class struggle. The professors of philosophy and theology in every country of the world set about denouncing and annihilating Haeckel in every possible way. The eminent English physicist Lodge hastened to defend God against Haeckel. The Russian physicist Mr. Chwolson went to Germany to publish a vile reactionary pamphlet attacking Haeckel and to assure the respectable philistines that not all scientists now hold the position of “naïve realism.”^[21] There is no counting the theologians who joined the campaign against Haeckel. There was no abuse not showered on him by the official professors of philosophy.^[22] It was amusing to see how—perhaps for the first time in their lives—the eyes of these mummies, dried and shrunken in the atmosphere of lifeless scholasticism, began to gleam and their cheeks to glow under the slaps which Haeckel administered them. The high-priests of pure science, and, it would appear, of the most abstract theory, fairly groaned with rage. And throughout all the howling of the philosophical diehards (the idealist Paulsen, the immanentist Rehmke, the Kantian Adickes, and the others whose name, god wot, is legion) one underlying motif is clearly discernible: they are all against the “metaphysics” of science, against “dogmatism,” against “the exaggeration of the value and significance of science,” against “natural-scientific materialism.” He is a materialist—at him! at the materialist! He is deceiving the public by not calling him self a materialist directly!—that is what particularly incenses the worthy professors.

And the noteworthy thing in all this tragi-comedy^[23] is the fact that Haeckel himself renounces materialism and rejects the appellation. What is more, far from rejecting religion altogether, he has invented his own religion (something like Bulgakov’s “atheistic faith” or Lunacharsky’s “religious atheism”), and on grounds of principle advocates a union of religion and science. What then is it all about? What “fatal misunderstanding” started the row?

The point is that Haeckel’s philosophical naïvete, his lack of definite partisan aims, his anxiety to respect the prevailing philistine prejudice against materialism, his personal conciliatory tendencies and proposals concerning religion, all this gave the greater salience to the general spirit of his book, the ineradicability of natural-scientific materialism and its irreconcilability with all official professorial philosophy and theology. Haeckel personally does not seek a rupture with the philistines, but what he expounds with such unshakeably naïve conviction is absolutely incompatible with any of the shades of prevailing philosophical idealism. All these shades, from the crudest reactionary theories of a Hartmann, to Petzoldt, who fancies himself the latest, most progressive and advanced of the positivists, and the empirio-criticist Mach—all are agreed that natural-scientific materialism is “metaphysics,” that the recognition of an objective reality underlying the theories and conclusions of science is sheer “naïve realism,” etc. And for this doctrine, “sacred” to all professorial philosophy and theology, every page of Haeckel is a slap in the face. This scientist, who undoubtedly expressed the very firmly implanted, although unformed opinions, sentiments and tendencics of the overwhelming majority of the scientists of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, instantly, easily and simply revealed what professorial philosophy tried to conceal from the public and from itself, namely, the fact that there is a foundation, growing ever wider and firmer, which shatters all the efforts and strivings of the thousand and one little schools of philosophical idealism, positivism, realism, empirio-criticism and other confusionism. This foundation is natural-scientific materialism. The conviction of the “naïve realists” (in other words, of all humanity) that our sensations are images of an objectively real external world is the conviction of the mass of scientists, one that is steadily growing and gaining in strength.

The cause of the founders of new philosophical schools and of the inventors of new epistemological “isms” is lost, irrevocably and hopelessly. They may flounder about in their “original” petty systems; they may strive to engage the attention of a few admirers in the interesting controversy as to who was the first to exclaim, “Eh!”—the empirio-critical Bobchinsky, or the empirio-monistic Dobchinsky^[24]; they may even devote themselves to creating an extensive “special” literature, like the “immanentists.” But the course of development of science, despite its vacillations and hesitations, despite the unwitting character of the materialism of the scientists, despite yesterday’s infatuation with fashionable “physiological idealism” or today’s infatuation with fashionable “physical idealism,” is sweeping aside all the petty systems and artifices and once again bringing to the forefront the “metaphysics” of natural-scientific materialism.

Here is an illustration of this from Haeckel. In his The Wonders of Life, Haeckel compares the monistic and dualistic theories of knowledge. We give the most interesting points of the comparison^[25] :

THE MONISTIC THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE	THE DUALISTIC THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
3. Cognition is a physiological process, whose anatomical organ is the brain	3. Cognition is not a physiological but a purely spiritual process.
4. The only part of the human brain in which knowledge is engendered is a spatially limited sphere of the cortex the phronema.	4. The part of the human brain which appears to function as the organ of knowledge is in fact only the instrument that permits the spiritual process to manifest itself.
5. The phronema is a highly perfected dynamo, the individual parts of which,thephroneta, consist of millions of cells (phronetal cells). Just as in the case of every other organ of the body, so in the case of this mental organ, its function, the “mind,” is the sum-total of the functions of its constituent cells.	5. The phronema as the organof reason is not autonomous, but, through its constituent parts(phroneta)and the cells that com- pose them, serves only as intermediary between the non-material mind and the external world. Human reason differs absolutely from the mind of the higher animal sand from the instinct of the lower animals.

This typical quotation from his works shows that Haeckel does not attempt an analysis of philosophical problems and is not able to contrast the materialist theory of knowledge with the idealist theory of knowledge. He ridicules all idealist—more broadly, all peculiarly philosophical—artifices from the standpoint of natural science, without even permitting the idea that any other theory of knowledge but natural-scientific materialism is possible. He ridicules the philosophers from the standpoint of a materialist, without himself realising that his standpoint is that of a materialist!

The impotent wrath aroused in the philosophers by this almighty materialism is comprehensible. We quoted above the opinion of the “true-Russian” Lopatin. And here is the opinion of Mr. Rudolf Willy, the most progressive of the “empirio-criticists,” who is irreconcilably hostile to idealism (don’t laugh!). “Haeckel’s monism is a very heterogeneous mixture: it unites certain natural-scientific laws, such as the law of the conservation of energy . . . with certain scholastic traditions about substance and the thing-in-itself into a chaotic jumble” (Gegen die Schulweisheit, S. 128).

What has annoyed this most worthy “recent positivist”? Well, how could he help being annoyed when he immediately realised that from Haeckel’s standpoint all the great doctrines of his teacher Avenarius—for instance, that the brain is not the organ of thought, that sensations are not images of the external world, that matter (“substance”) or “the thing-in-itself” is not an objective reality, and so forth—are nothing but sheer idealist gibberish !? Haeckel did not say it in so many words because he did not concern himself with philosophy and was not acquainted with “empirio-criticism” as such. But Rudolf Willy could not help realising that a hundred thousand Haeckel readers meant as many people spitting in the face of the philosophy of Mach and Avenarius. Willy wipes his face in advance, in the Lopatin manner. For the essence of the arguments which Mr. Lopatin and Mr. Willy marshal against materialism in general and natural-scientific materialism in particular, is exactly the same in both. To us Marxists the difference between Mr. Lopatin and Messrs. Willy, Petzoldt, Mach and Co. is no greater than the difference between the Protestant theologians and the Catholic theologians.

The “war” on Haeckel has proven that this view of ours corresponds to objective reality, i.e., to the class nature of modern society and its class ideological tendencies.

Here is another little example. The Machian Kleinpeter has translated from English into German, under the title of Das Weltbild der modernen Naturwissenschaft [World Picture from the Standpoint of Modern Natural Science] (Leipzig, 1905), a work by Carl Snyder well known in America. This work gives a clear and popular account of a number of recent discoveries in physics and other branches of science. And the Machian Kleinpeter felt himself called upon to supply the book with a preface in which he makes certain reservations, such as, for example, that Snyder’s epistemology is “not satisfactory” (p. v). Why so? Because Snyder never entertains the slightest doubt that the world picture is a picture of how matter moves and of how “matter thinks” (p. 228). In his next book, The World Machine (London and New York, 1907), Snyder, referring to the fact that his book is dedicated to the memory of Democritus of Abdera, who lived about 460-360 BC, says: “Democritus has often been styled the grandsire of materialism. It is a school of philosophy that is a little out of fashion nowadays; yet it is worthy of note that practically all of the modern advance in our ideas of this world has been grounded upon his conceptions. Practically speaking, materialistic assumptions are simply unescapable in physical investigations” (p. 140).

“. . . If he like, he may dream with good Bishop Berkeley that it is all a dream. Yet comforting as may be the leger-demain of an idealised idealism, there are still few among us who, whatever they may think regarding the problem of the external world, doubt that they themselves exist; and it needs no long pursuit of the will-o’-the-wisps of the Ich and non-Ich to assure oneself that if in an unguarded moment we assume that we ourselves have a personality and a being, we let in the whole procession of appearances which come of the six gates of the senses. The nebular hypothesis, the light-bearing ether, the atomic theory, and all their like, may be but convenient ‘working hypotheses,’ but it is well to remember that, in the absence of negative proof, they stand on more or less the same footing as the hypothesis that a being you call ‘you,’ Oh, Indulgent Reader, scans these lines” (pp. 31-32).

Imagine the bitter lot of a Machian when his favourite subtle constructions, which reduce the categories of science to mere working hypotheses, are laughed at by the scientists on both sides of the ocean as sheer nonsense! Is it to be wondered that Rudolf Willy, in 1905, combats Democritus as though he were a living enemy, thereby providing an excellent illustration of the partisan character of philosophy and once more exposing the real position he himself takes up in this partisan struggle? He writes: “Of course, Democritus was not conscious of the fact that atoms and the void are only fictitious concepts which perform mere accessory services (blosse Handlangerdienste), and maintain their existence only by grace of expediency, just as long as they prove useful. Democritus was not free enough for this; but neither are our modern natural scientists, with few exceptions. The faith of old Democritus is the faith of our scientists” (op. cit., p. 57).

And there is good reason for despair! The “empirio-criticists” have proven in quite a “new way” that both space and atoms are “working hypotheses”; and yet the natural scientists deride this Berkeleianism and follow Haeckel. We are by no means idealists, this is a slander; we are only striving (together with the idealists) to refute the epistemological line of Democritus; we have been striving to do so for more than 2,000 years, but all in vain! And nothing better remains for our leader Ernst Mach to do than to dedicate his last work, the outcome of his life and philosophy, Erkenntnis und Irrtum, to Wilhelm Schuppe and to remark ruefully in the text that the majority of scientists are materialists and that “we also” sympathise with Haeckel . . . for his “freethinking” (p. 14).

And there he completely betrays himself, this ideologist of reactionary philistinism who follows the arch-reactionary Schuppe and “sympathises” with Haeckel’s freethinking. They are all like this, these humanitarian philistines in Europe, with their freedom-loving sympathies and their ideological (political and economic) captivity to the Wilhelm Schuppes.^[26] Non-partisanship in philosophy is only wretchedly masked servility to idealism and fideism.

Let us, in conclusion, compare this with the opinion of Haeckel held by Franz Mehring, who not only wants to be, but who knows how to be a Marxist. The moment The Riddle of the Universe appeared, towards the end of 1899, Mehring pointed out that “Haeckel’s work, both in its less good and its very good aspects, is eminently adapted to help clarify the apparently rather confused views prevailing in the party as to the significance for it of historical materialism, on the one hand, and historical materialism, on the other.”^[27] Haeckel’s defect is that he has not the slightest conception of historical materialism, which leads him to utter the most woeful nonsense about politics, about “monistic religion,” and so on and so forth. “Haeckel is a materialist and monist, not a historical but a natural-scientific materialist” (ibid.).

“He who wants to perceive this inability [of natural-scientific materialism to deal with social problems] tangibly, he who wants to be convinced that natural-scientific materialism must be broadened into historical materialism if it is really to be an invincible weapon in the great struggle for the liberation of mankind, let him read Haeckel’s book.

“But let him not read it for this purpose alone! Its uncommonly weak side is inseparably bound up with its uncommonly strong side, viz., with the comprehensible and luminous description (which after all takes up by far the greater and more important part of the book) given by Haeckel of the development of the natural sciences in this [the 19th] century, or, in other words, of the triumphant march of natural-scientific materialism.”^[28]

↑ Russkoye Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth)—a monthly magazine published in St. Petersburg from 1876 to 1918. From the beginning of the nineties it passed into the hands of the liberal Narodniks headed by N. K. Mikhailovsky. Grouped round the magazine were publicists who subsequently became prominent members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the Party of “Popular Socialists” and the Trudovik groups in the State Duma. In 1906 it became the organ of the semi-Cadet Trudovik Popular Socialist Party.
↑ Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 1895, Bd. XIX, F. Blei, “Die Metaphysik in der Nationalökonomie,” S. 378-90. —Lenin
↑ These words are an adaptation of a couplet by Goethe, taken by Lenin from I. S. Turgenev’s novel Virgin Soil.
↑ It is in the same spirit that Mach expresses himself in favour of the bureaucratic socialism of Popper and Menger, which guarantees the “freedom of the individual,” whereas, he opines, the doctrine of the Social-Democrats, which “compares unfavourably” with this socialism, threatens a “slavery even more universal and more oppressive than that of a monarchical or oligarchical state.” See Erkenntnis und Irrtum, 2. Auflage, 1906, S. 80-81. —Lenin
↑ This refers to the Preface to Marx’s work Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie(Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).
↑ See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 290.
↑ Bazarov, V. (Rudnev, V. A.), 1874-1939—philosopher and economist. From 1896 onwards took part in the Social-Democratic movement. In 1905-07 collaborated on several Bolshevik publications. In the period of reaction (1907-10) drew away from Bolshevism; advocated “god-building” and empirlo-criticism; was one of the leading representatives of the Machist revision of Marxism.
↑ ]It is characteristic that Suvorov calls the discovery of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy^[*] “the establishment of the basic principles of energetics” (p. 292). Has our would-be Marxist “realist” ever heard of the fact that the vulgar materialists, Büchner and Co., and the dialectical materialist, Engels, regarded this law as the establishment of the basic principles of materialism ? Has our “realist” ever reflected on the meaning of this difference? He has not: he has merely followed the fashion, repeated Ostwald, and that is all. That is just the trouble: “realists” like this succumb to fashion, while Engels, for instance, assimilated the, to him, new term, energy, and began to employ it in 1885 (Preface to the 2nd ed. of Anti-Dühring) and in 1888 (Ludwig Feuerbach), but to employ it equally with the concepts “force” and “motion” and along with them. Engels was able to enrich his materialism by adopting a new terminology. The “realists” and other muddleheads seized upon the new term without noticing the difference between materialism and energetics! —Lenin[*] The discovery of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy, led up to by the whole development of natural science, especially contributed to by the work of Lomonosov, occurred in the forties of the nineteenth century (the works of Robert Mayer, James Joule and Hermann Helmholtz). The word energy in its modern sense was introduced in 1853 by William Rankin, but it only came into general use in the seventies and eighties. Most physicists were at first critical of the new law, but its correctness was speedily proved in all spheres of natural science. Bagels considered this law one of the most important achievements of the nineteenth century and he looked on it as a universal law of nature expressing in the language of physics the unity of the material world. “The unity of all motion in nature,” he wrote, “is no longer a philosophical assertion, but a natural scientific fact” (Dialectic of Nature, p. 264).
Some scientists cast doubt on the universal nature of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy and tried to interpret it in an idealist spirit. Thus, Mach refused to regard it as a universal law of nature and considered that it amounted merely to an acknowledgement of the causal dependence of phenomena. Wilhelm Ostwalff regarded it as the sole universal law of nature and he tried to deny the objective reality of matter, to discard the concept of matter and to prove that energy exists without matter, reducing all phenomena of nature, society and thought to energy. A. Bogdanov tried to depict social changes as an increase or decrease of energy.
Lenin criticised “energeticism” as one of the manifestations of “physical idealism” and he showed the untenability in principle of attempts to transfer the laws of natural science to social phenomena. The further development of science, and study of the phenomena of the micro-world, confirmed the universal character of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy; the relativity theory established the universal relationship between energy and mass.
↑ See Early Writings of K. Marx and F. Engels, 1956, Russian edition, pp. 257-58.
↑ Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French. Yearbooks)—an annual published in Paris in German, edited by Karl Marx and Arnold Ruge. Only the first, double number was issued in Feb ruary 1844. It contained Marx’s works “The Jewish Question” and “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Bight. Introduction”, as well as Engels “Outlines of a Criticism of Political Economy” and “The Position of England. Thomas Carlyle. ‘Past and Present’”. These works mark the definitive adoption of the standpoint of materialism and communism by Marx and Engels. Marx’s disagreement in principle with the bourgeois radical Ruge was the main reason why the journal ceased to appear.
↑ Karl Grün, Ludwig Feuerbach in seinem Briefwechsel und Nachlass, sowie in seiner philosophischen Charakterentwicklung, I. Bd., Leipzig 1874, S. 361. —Lenin
↑ See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1959, p. 19.
↑ Of the positivist Beesly, Marx, in the letter of December 13, 1870, speaks as follows: “Professor Beesly is a Comtist and as such obliged to think up all sorts of crotchets.”^[13] Compare this with the opinion given of the positivists of the Huxley type by Engels in 1892.^[14] —Lenin
↑ Lenin is referring to Engels’ works Anti-Dürhring (1878), Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888), “Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892” of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (see F. Engels, Anti-Dürhring and K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, pp. 358-402, 93-115).
↑ See K. Marx and F. Bagels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, p. 359.
The turn to Hegel in the second half of the nineteenth century was characteristic of the development of bourgeois philosophy in a number of European countries and the U.S.A. In Britain it began with the appearance in 1865 of James Hutchison Stirling’s book The Secret of Hegel. The bourgeois ideologists were attracted by Hegel’s absolute idealism, which offered wide opportunities for a theoretical justification of religion. There developed a special philosophical trend which was given the name of Anglo-Hegelianism, whose representatives (Thomas Green, the brothers Edward and John Caird, Francis Bradley and others) vigorously at tacked materialism, making use of the reactionary aspects of Hegel’s doctrine.
In the Scandinavian countries, too, Hegelian philosophy became more influential in the second half of the eighteenth century. In Sweden its revival was sponsored by Johann Borelius who counterposed Hegelianism to the prevailing subjective-idealist philosophy. In Norway the Right-wing Hegelians Marcus Jacob Monrad, G. W. Ling and others interpreted Hegel’s philosophy in the spirit of mysticism, discarding its rationalism and trying to sub ordinate science to religion. In Denmark, where Hegelian philosophy began to spread even during Hegel’s lifetime, it was criticised from the same standpoint.
The spread of Hegel’s philosophy did not lead to its revival; the bourgeois epigones of Hegel “developed” (mainly in the spirit of subjective idealism) various aspects of his conservative philosophical system.. All this paved the way for the emergence at the turn of the century of neo-Hegelian—a reactionary trend of bourgeois philosophical thought in the imperialist era that attempted to adapt Hegel’s philosophy to fascist ideology.
↑ Here again we have a clumsy and inexact expression: instead of “metaphysicians,” he should have said “idealists.” Elsewhere Dietzgen himself contrasts the metaphysicians and the dialecticians. —Lenin
↑ Note that Dietzgen has corrected himself and now explains more exactly which is the party of the enemies of materialism. —Lenin
↑ See the article, “Social-Democratic Philosophy,” written in 1876, Kleinere philosophische Schriften, 1903, S. 135.] —Lenin
↑ Here is another example of how the widespread currents of reactionary bourgeois philosophy make use of Machism in practice. Perhaps the “latest fashion” in the latest American philosophy is “pragmatism” (from the Greek word “pragm”—action; that is, a philosophy of action). The philosophical journals perhaps speak more of pragmatism than of anything else. Pragmatism ridicules the metaphysics both of idealism and materialism, acclaims expericnce and only experience, recognises practice as the only criterion, refers to the positivist movement in general, especially turns for support to Ostwald, Mach, Pearson, Poincaré and Duhem for the belief that scicnce is not an “absolute copy of reality” and . . . succcssfully deduces from all this a God for practical purposes, and only for practical purposes, without any metaphysics, and without transcending the bounds of experience (cf. William James, Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, New York and London, 1907, pp. 57 and 106 especially). From the standpoint of materialism the difference between Machism and pragmatism is as insignificant and unimportant as the difference between empirio-criticism and empirio-monism. Compare, for example, Bogdanov’s definition of truth with the pragmatist definition of truth, which is: “Truth for a pragmatist becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working values in expericnce” (ibid., p. 68). —LeninPragmatism—a subjective-idealist trend of bourgeois (mainly American) philosophy in the imperialist era. It arose in the seven ties. of the last century in the U.S.A. as a reflection of specific features of the development of American capitalism, replacing the hitherto prevailing religious philosophy. The main propositions of pragmatism were formulated by Charles Peirce. As an independent philosophical tendency it took shape at the turn of the century in the works of William James and Ferdinand Schiller and was further developed in the instrumentalism of John Dewey.
The pragmatists consider that the central problem of philosophy is the attainment of true knowledge. However, they completely distort the very concept of truth; already Peirce looked on cognition as a purely psychological, subjective process of achieving religious belief. James substituted the concept of “usefulness”, of success or advantage, for the concept of truth, i.e., for the objectively true reflection of reality. From his point of view, all concepts, including religious ones, are true insofar as they are useful. Dewey went, even farther by declaring all scientific theories, all moral principles and social institutions, to be merely “instruments” for the attainment of the personal aims of the individual. As the criterion of the “truth” (usefulness) of knowledge, the pragmatists take experience, understood not as human social practice but as the constant stream of individual experiences, of the subjective phenomena of consciousness; they regard this experience as the solo reality, declaring the concepts of matter and mind “obsolete”. Like the Machists, the pragmatists claim to have created a “third line” in philosophy; they try to place themselves above materialism and idealism, while in fact advocating one of the varieties of idealism. In contrast to materialist monism, the pragmatists put forward the standpoint of “pluralism”, according to which there is no internal connection, no conformity to law, in the universe; it is like a mosaic which each person builds in his own way, out of his own individual experiences. Hence, starting out from the needs of the given moment, pragmatism considers it possible to give different, even contradictory, explanations of one and the same phenomenon. Consistency is declared to be unnecessary; if it is to a man’s advantage, he can be a determinist or an indeterminist, he can assert or deny the existence of God, and so on.
By basing themselves on the subjective-idealist tradition of English philosophy from Berkeley and Hume to John Stuart Mill, by exploiting particular aspects of the theories of Kant, Mach and Avenarius, Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, the American pragmatists created one of the most reactionary philosophical trends of modern times, a convenient form for theoretically defending the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie. It is for this reason that pragmatism spread so widely in the U.S.A., becoming almost the official American philosophy. There have been advocates of pragmatism at various times in Italy, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia and other countries.
↑ Studies, pp. 157, 159. In the Zagranichnaya Gazeta^[16] the same author speaks of “scientific socialism in its religious significance” (No. 3, p. 5) and in Obrazovaniye,^[17] 1908, No. 1, p. 164, he explicitly says: “For a long time a new religion has been maturing within me.” —Lenin
↑ O. D. Chwolson. Hegel, Haeckel, Kossuth und das zwölfte Gebot [Hegel, Haeckel, Kossnth and the Twelfth Commandment], 1906, cf. S. 80. —Lenin
↑ The pamphlet of Heinrich Schmidt, Der Kempf und die Welträtsel [The Fight over “The Riddle of the Universe”] (Bonn, 1900), gives a fairly good picture of the campaign launched against Haeckel by the professors of philosophy and theology. But this pamphlet is already very much out-of-date. —Lenin
↑ The tragic element was introduced by the attempt made on Haeckel’s life this spring (1908). After Haeckel had received a number of anonymous letters addressing him by such epithets as “dog,” “atheist,” “monkey,” and so forth, some true German soul threw a stone of no mean size through the window of Haeckel’s study in Jena. —Lenin
↑ Bobchinsky, Dobchiasky—two closely similar characters in Gogol’s comedy Inspector-General, chatterers and tale-bearers.
↑ I use the French translation, Les merveilles de la vie, Paris, Schleicher, Tables I et XVI.] —Lenin
↑ Plekhanov in his criticism of Machism was less concerned with refuting Mach than with dealing a factional blow at Bolshevism. For this petty and miserable exploitation of fundamental theoretical differences, he has been already deservedly punished—with two books by Machian Mensheviks. —LeninLenin is referring to two booklets by Machist Mensheviks published in 1908: N. Valentinov’s Philosophical Constructions of Marxism and P. Yushkevich’s Materialism and Critical Realism.
↑ Fr. Mehring, “Die Weltratsel” [The Riddle of the Universe], Neue Zeit, 1899-1900, XVIII, 1, 418. —Lenin
↑ Ibid., p. 419. —Lenin

[1] Russkoye Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth)—a monthly magazine published in St. Petersburg from 1876 to 1918. From the beginning of the nineties it passed into the hands of the liberal Narodniks headed by N. K. Mikhailovsky. Grouped round the magazine were publicists who subsequently became prominent members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the Party of “Popular Socialists” and the Trudovik groups in the State Duma. In 1906 it became the organ of the semi-Cadet Trudovik Popular Socialist Party.

[2] Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 1895, Bd. XIX, F. Blei, “Die Metaphysik in der Nationalökonomie,” S. 378-90. —Lenin

[3] These words are an adaptation of a couplet by Goethe, taken by Lenin from I. S. Turgenev’s novel Virgin Soil.

[4] It is in the same spirit that Mach expresses himself in favour of the bureaucratic socialism of Popper and Menger, which guarantees the “freedom of the individual,” whereas, he opines, the doctrine of the Social-Democrats, which “compares unfavourably” with this socialism, threatens a “slavery even more universal and more oppressive than that of a monarchical or oligarchical state.” See Erkenntnis und Irrtum, 2. Auflage, 1906, S. 80-81. —Lenin

[5] This refers to the Preface to Marx’s work Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie(Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

[6] See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 290.

[7] Bazarov, V. (Rudnev, V. A.), 1874-1939—philosopher and economist. From 1896 onwards took part in the Social-Democratic movement. In 1905-07 collaborated on several Bolshevik publications. In the period of reaction (1907-10) drew away from Bolshevism; advocated “god-building” and empirlo-criticism; was one of the leading representatives of the Machist revision of Marxism.

[8] ]It is characteristic that Suvorov calls the discovery of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy^[*] “the establishment of the basic principles of energetics” (p. 292). Has our would-be Marxist “realist” ever heard of the fact that the vulgar materialists, Büchner and Co., and the dialectical materialist, Engels, regarded this law as the establishment of the basic principles of materialism ? Has our “realist” ever reflected on the meaning of this difference? He has not: he has merely followed the fashion, repeated Ostwald, and that is all. That is just the trouble: “realists” like this succumb to fashion, while Engels, for instance, assimilated the, to him, new term, energy, and began to employ it in 1885 (Preface to the 2nd ed. of Anti-Dühring) and in 1888 (Ludwig Feuerbach), but to employ it equally with the concepts “force” and “motion” and along with them. Engels was able to enrich his materialism by adopting a new terminology. The “realists” and other muddleheads seized upon the new term without noticing the difference between materialism and energetics! —Lenin[*] The discovery of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy, led up to by the whole development of natural science, especially contributed to by the work of Lomonosov, occurred in the forties of the nineteenth century (the works of Robert Mayer, James Joule and Hermann Helmholtz). The word energy in its modern sense was introduced in 1853 by William Rankin, but it only came into general use in the seventies and eighties. Most physicists were at first critical of the new law, but its correctness was speedily proved in all spheres of natural science. Bagels considered this law one of the most important achievements of the nineteenth century and he looked on it as a universal law of nature expressing in the language of physics the unity of the material world. “The unity of all motion in nature,” he wrote, “is no longer a philosophical assertion, but a natural scientific fact” (Dialectic of Nature, p. 264).
Some scientists cast doubt on the universal nature of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy and tried to interpret it in an idealist spirit. Thus, Mach refused to regard it as a universal law of nature and considered that it amounted merely to an acknowledgement of the causal dependence of phenomena. Wilhelm Ostwalff regarded it as the sole universal law of nature and he tried to deny the objective reality of matter, to discard the concept of matter and to prove that energy exists without matter, reducing all phenomena of nature, society and thought to energy. A. Bogdanov tried to depict social changes as an increase or decrease of energy.
Lenin criticised “energeticism” as one of the manifestations of “physical idealism” and he showed the untenability in principle of attempts to transfer the laws of natural science to social phenomena. The further development of science, and study of the phenomena of the micro-world, confirmed the universal character of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy; the relativity theory established the universal relationship between energy and mass.

[9] See Early Writings of K. Marx and F. Engels, 1956, Russian edition, pp. 257-58.

[10] Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French. Yearbooks)—an annual published in Paris in German, edited by Karl Marx and Arnold Ruge. Only the first, double number was issued in Feb ruary 1844. It contained Marx’s works “The Jewish Question” and “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Bight. Introduction”, as well as Engels “Outlines of a Criticism of Political Economy” and “The Position of England. Thomas Carlyle. ‘Past and Present’”. These works mark the definitive adoption of the standpoint of materialism and communism by Marx and Engels. Marx’s disagreement in principle with the bourgeois radical Ruge was the main reason why the journal ceased to appear.

[11] Karl Grün, Ludwig Feuerbach in seinem Briefwechsel und Nachlass, sowie in seiner philosophischen Charakterentwicklung, I. Bd., Leipzig 1874, S. 361. —Lenin

[12] See K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1959, p. 19.

[13] Of the positivist Beesly, Marx, in the letter of December 13, 1870, speaks as follows: “Professor Beesly is a Comtist and as such obliged to think up all sorts of crotchets.”^[13] Compare this with the opinion given of the positivists of the Huxley type by Engels in 1892.^[14] —Lenin

[14] Lenin is referring to Engels’ works Anti-Dürhring (1878), Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888), “Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892” of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (see F. Engels, Anti-Dürhring and K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, pp. 358-402, 93-115).

[15] See K. Marx and F. Bagels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, p. 359.
The turn to Hegel in the second half of the nineteenth century was characteristic of the development of bourgeois philosophy in a number of European countries and the U.S.A. In Britain it began with the appearance in 1865 of James Hutchison Stirling’s book The Secret of Hegel. The bourgeois ideologists were attracted by Hegel’s absolute idealism, which offered wide opportunities for a theoretical justification of religion. There developed a special philosophical trend which was given the name of Anglo-Hegelianism, whose representatives (Thomas Green, the brothers Edward and John Caird, Francis Bradley and others) vigorously at tacked materialism, making use of the reactionary aspects of Hegel’s doctrine.
In the Scandinavian countries, too, Hegelian philosophy became more influential in the second half of the eighteenth century. In Sweden its revival was sponsored by Johann Borelius who counterposed Hegelianism to the prevailing subjective-idealist philosophy. In Norway the Right-wing Hegelians Marcus Jacob Monrad, G. W. Ling and others interpreted Hegel’s philosophy in the spirit of mysticism, discarding its rationalism and trying to sub ordinate science to religion. In Denmark, where Hegelian philosophy began to spread even during Hegel’s lifetime, it was criticised from the same standpoint.
The spread of Hegel’s philosophy did not lead to its revival; the bourgeois epigones of Hegel “developed” (mainly in the spirit of subjective idealism) various aspects of his conservative philosophical system.. All this paved the way for the emergence at the turn of the century of neo-Hegelian—a reactionary trend of bourgeois philosophical thought in the imperialist era that attempted to adapt Hegel’s philosophy to fascist ideology.

[16] Here again we have a clumsy and inexact expression: instead of “metaphysicians,” he should have said “idealists.” Elsewhere Dietzgen himself contrasts the metaphysicians and the dialecticians. —Lenin

[17] Note that Dietzgen has corrected himself and now explains more exactly which is the party of the enemies of materialism. —Lenin

[18] See the article, “Social-Democratic Philosophy,” written in 1876, Kleinere philosophische Schriften, 1903, S. 135.] —Lenin

[19] Here is another example of how the widespread currents of reactionary bourgeois philosophy make use of Machism in practice. Perhaps the “latest fashion” in the latest American philosophy is “pragmatism” (from the Greek word “pragm”—action; that is, a philosophy of action). The philosophical journals perhaps speak more of pragmatism than of anything else. Pragmatism ridicules the metaphysics both of idealism and materialism, acclaims expericnce and only experience, recognises practice as the only criterion, refers to the positivist movement in general, especially turns for support to Ostwald, Mach, Pearson, Poincaré and Duhem for the belief that scicnce is not an “absolute copy of reality” and . . . succcssfully deduces from all this a God for practical purposes, and only for practical purposes, without any metaphysics, and without transcending the bounds of experience (cf. William James, Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, New York and London, 1907, pp. 57 and 106 especially). From the standpoint of materialism the difference between Machism and pragmatism is as insignificant and unimportant as the difference between empirio-criticism and empirio-monism. Compare, for example, Bogdanov’s definition of truth with the pragmatist definition of truth, which is: “Truth for a pragmatist becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working values in expericnce” (ibid., p. 68). —LeninPragmatism—a subjective-idealist trend of bourgeois (mainly American) philosophy in the imperialist era. It arose in the seven ties. of the last century in the U.S.A. as a reflection of specific features of the development of American capitalism, replacing the hitherto prevailing religious philosophy. The main propositions of pragmatism were formulated by Charles Peirce. As an independent philosophical tendency it took shape at the turn of the century in the works of William James and Ferdinand Schiller and was further developed in the instrumentalism of John Dewey.
The pragmatists consider that the central problem of philosophy is the attainment of true knowledge. However, they completely distort the very concept of truth; already Peirce looked on cognition as a purely psychological, subjective process of achieving religious belief. James substituted the concept of “usefulness”, of success or advantage, for the concept of truth, i.e., for the objectively true reflection of reality. From his point of view, all concepts, including religious ones, are true insofar as they are useful. Dewey went, even farther by declaring all scientific theories, all moral principles and social institutions, to be merely “instruments” for the attainment of the personal aims of the individual. As the criterion of the “truth” (usefulness) of knowledge, the pragmatists take experience, understood not as human social practice but as the constant stream of individual experiences, of the subjective phenomena of consciousness; they regard this experience as the solo reality, declaring the concepts of matter and mind “obsolete”. Like the Machists, the pragmatists claim to have created a “third line” in philosophy; they try to place themselves above materialism and idealism, while in fact advocating one of the varieties of idealism. In contrast to materialist monism, the pragmatists put forward the standpoint of “pluralism”, according to which there is no internal connection, no conformity to law, in the universe; it is like a mosaic which each person builds in his own way, out of his own individual experiences. Hence, starting out from the needs of the given moment, pragmatism considers it possible to give different, even contradictory, explanations of one and the same phenomenon. Consistency is declared to be unnecessary; if it is to a man’s advantage, he can be a determinist or an indeterminist, he can assert or deny the existence of God, and so on.
By basing themselves on the subjective-idealist tradition of English philosophy from Berkeley and Hume to John Stuart Mill, by exploiting particular aspects of the theories of Kant, Mach and Avenarius, Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, the American pragmatists created one of the most reactionary philosophical trends of modern times, a convenient form for theoretically defending the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie. It is for this reason that pragmatism spread so widely in the U.S.A., becoming almost the official American philosophy. There have been advocates of pragmatism at various times in Italy, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia and other countries.

[20] Studies, pp. 157, 159. In the Zagranichnaya Gazeta^[16] the same author speaks of “scientific socialism in its religious significance” (No. 3, p. 5) and in Obrazovaniye,^[17] 1908, No. 1, p. 164, he explicitly says: “For a long time a new religion has been maturing within me.” —Lenin

[21] O. D. Chwolson. Hegel, Haeckel, Kossuth und das zwölfte Gebot [Hegel, Haeckel, Kossnth and the Twelfth Commandment], 1906, cf. S. 80. —Lenin

[22] The pamphlet of Heinrich Schmidt, Der Kempf und die Welträtsel [The Fight over “The Riddle of the Universe”] (Bonn, 1900), gives a fairly good picture of the campaign launched against Haeckel by the professors of philosophy and theology. But this pamphlet is already very much out-of-date. —Lenin

[23] The tragic element was introduced by the attempt made on Haeckel’s life this spring (1908). After Haeckel had received a number of anonymous letters addressing him by such epithets as “dog,” “atheist,” “monkey,” and so forth, some true German soul threw a stone of no mean size through the window of Haeckel’s study in Jena. —Lenin

[24] Bobchinsky, Dobchiasky—two closely similar characters in Gogol’s comedy Inspector-General, chatterers and tale-bearers.

[25] I use the French translation, Les merveilles de la vie, Paris, Schleicher, Tables I et XVI.] —Lenin

[26] Plekhanov in his criticism of Machism was less concerned with refuting Mach than with dealing a factional blow at Bolshevism. For this petty and miserable exploitation of fundamental theoretical differences, he has been already deservedly punished—with two books by Machian Mensheviks. —LeninLenin is referring to two booklets by Machist Mensheviks published in 1908: N. Valentinov’s Philosophical Constructions of Marxism and P. Yushkevich’s Materialism and Critical Realism.

[27] Fr. Mehring, “Die Weltratsel” [The Riddle of the Universe], Neue Zeit, 1899-1900, XVIII, 1, 418. —Lenin

[28] Ibid., p. 419. —Lenin

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