Politics and Philosophy in Russian Social Democracy: Alexander Bogdanov and the Sociotheoretical Foundations ofVpered

Abstract

Bolsheviks struggled to determine the political direction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In 1909 a third tendency emerged, Vpered, whose chief theoretician and representative was Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov and the Vperedists opposed both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks on fundamental questions of the revolutionary movement. Bogdanov was also a prominent exponent of neo-Kantianism or Machism in Russian Social Democracy and, along with other Social Democrats, had developed the epistemological implications of recent discoveries in the natural sciences for the social sciences and, thus, for Marxism.1 But despite philosophical disagreement with Lenin, Bogdanov had collaborated closely with the philosophically orthodox Bolshevik leader between 1904 and 1908 because both men had agreed on the necessity of building the Party to bring from the outside revolutionary consciousness to workers. The experience of the 1905 Revolution convinced Lenin to revise sharply the theses of What is to be Done? on this point. That same experience, on the other hand, led Bogdanov energetically to reaffirm in 1909 his tutelary conception of the Party in the workers' movement.2 In this essay I attempt to establish the nature and reasons for the tutelary role of the Party vis-a-vis the working class. My methodological point of departure seeks to grasp Bogdanov' s views in philosophy and political economy in relationship to his political practice in Vpered because he wanted to help workers contest the coming domination of capitalist society, specifically, the impersonal rule of the market and the attendant ideological mystification engendered by its operation bourgeois ideology. The ideological restructuring of workers' consciousness, if successfully accomplished by Vpered, would shorten the era of bourgeois ideological