Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms)

In this book, Maria Chehonadskih unsettles established narratives about the formation of a revolutionary canon after the October Revolution. Displacing the centre of gravity from dialectical materialism to the rapid dissemination, canonisation and decline of a striking convergence of empiricism and Marxism, she explores how this tendency, overshadowed by official historiography, establishes a new attitude to modernity and progress, nature and environment, agency and subjectivity, party and class, knowledge and power. The book traces the adventure of the synthesis of empiricism and Marxism across philosophy, science, politics, art and literature from the 1890s to the 1930s, offering a radical rethinking of the true scope and scale that the main proponent of Empirio-Marxism, Alexander Bogdanov, had on the post-revolutionary socialist legacies. Chehonadskih draws on both key and forgotten figures and movements, such as Proletkult, Productivism and Constructivism, filling a gap in the literature that will be particularly significant for Marxism, continental philosophy, art theory and Slavic studies specialists. Acknowledgements A Note on Transliteration and Translation Contents Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Strategic Unity of Marxism and Empiricism 2.1 Empirio-Marxism and Revolution 2.2 Ontological Environmentalism as an Epistemic Problem 2.3 Elementality and Organisation 2.4 Labour Causality Chapter 3: The Science of Organisation 3.1 The Organisational Point of View and Tektology 3.2 Translating Reproduction into Biophysical Cooperation 3.3 The Even Distribution of People, Things and Ideas Chapter 4: Proletarian Monism 4.1 Proletkult and Productivism 4.2 Socialisation of Knowledge and the Project of a Proletarian Encyclopaedia 4.3 Proletkult: Proletarian Culture Without a Proletariat 4.4 Proletarian Monism and Life-Building Chapter 5: Structures Take to the Streets 5.1 The Communist Expression of Material Structures 5.2 The Organisation of Things, People and Ideas 5.3 The Structure of Sensibility 5.4 The Punctum of Labour Chapter 6: The Encyclopaedia of Poor Life in Platonov’s Proletarian Literature 6.1 The Encyclopaedic Functioning of Constancy, Narrative and Language in Platonov 6.2 Class: Others, Mistakable, Half-Kulaks, Doubject and Other Class Creatures 6.3 Dual Being and Two Organs of Thought 6.4 Labouring Being, Poor Life and Veshchestvo of Existence 6.5 Struggle with the Void: Toská and Communism Chapter 7: Postscript Bibliography Archival Sources FLLB—Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso—Issoco (Lelio and Lisli Basso Foundation) RGALI—Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Art and Literature) Primary Sources Secondary Sources Index