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.

In this first full-length biography of Alexander Bogdanov, James D. White traces the intellectual development of this key socialist thinker, situating his ideas in the context of the Russian revolutionary movement. He examines the part Bogdanov played in the origins of Bolshevism, his role in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and his conflict with Lenin, which lasted into Soviet times. The book examines in some detail Bogdanov’s intellectual legacy, which, though deliberately obscured and distorted by his adversaries, was considerable and is of lasting significance. Bogdanov was an original and influential interpreter of Marx. He had a mastery of many spheres of knowledge, this expertise being employed in writing his chief theoretical work Tectology, which anticipates modern systems theory. See inside the book.

Empiriomonism is Alexander Bogdanov’s scientific-philosophical substantiation of Marxism. In Books One and Two, he combines Ernst Mach’s and Richard Avenarius’s neutral monist philosophy with the theory of psychophysical parallelism and systematically demonstrates that human psyches are thoroughly natural and are subject to nature’s laws. In Book Three, Bogdanov argues that empiriomonism is superior to G. V. Plekhanov’s outdated materialism and shows how the principles of empiriomonism solve the basic problem of historical materialism: how a society’s material base causally determines its ways of thinking. Bogdanov concludes that empiriomonism is of the same order as materialist systems, and, since it is the ideology of the productive forces of society, it is a Marxist philosophy.

This book offers a reassessment politics against the predominating economicist approach to historical materialism within contemporary Marxism. Boito draws on the structural interpretation of Marxism inspired by Althusser’s works of the mid-1960s and, especially, by Poulantzas’ Political Power and Social Classes. The volume aims to demonstrate the role of the political dimension (together with the economy) and, to a further extent, to contribute to renew contemporary Marxist political theory. The chapters cover topics such as: the nature of political power; the structure and functions of the state; the role of politics in historical change; political crises; and the political formation of the working class. The book highlights the role of political structures and practices in the reproduction of economic and social relations and also in the process of historical change. The aim of the book is to contribute to the renewal of Marxist thought, breaking with the economicist conception that dominated it throughout the last century, and finally meeting the demands of the socialist struggle in the 21st century.

​This book provides a concise overview of Marx’s philosophy and political economy, tracing various changes of his theoretical views over time through his practical and theoretical engagements with contradictions of capitalism from the unique perspective of Japanese Marxism. While it offers an objective introduction to Marx’s critique of capitalism, Sasaki uniquely pays particular attention to the concept of “metabolism,” whose disruption under the capitalist mode of production causes exhaustion of labour-power as well as natural resources. Sasaki reconstructs Marx as a revolutionary thinker, whose devoted his entire life for the sake of establishing a more free and equal society beyond capitalism. Sasaki’s book shows that Marx’s passion for the socialist revolution in his last years is recorded in his late excerpt notebooks that become available through the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe.

This book represents a valuable contribution to the history of the Socialist Second International and, more generally, of European socialism between the Great Depression of the 1880s and WWI. It comes to fill a gap in the scholarship, insofar as it investigates the history of the Socialist Youth International. During the first phase of the making of socialist parties, this organization was in charge of the political and cultural education of the proletarian youth. Capitalizing on an approach based on social, quantitative and political history, and on an analysis of mentalities and languages, the book reconstructs the many-sidedness of the “school of recruits” of the social-democratic and revolutionary movements. The working conditions of youth in Europe, its unionization and economic struggles, the fight against militarism, the pedagogical work, the internationalism and the commitment to maintain peace, and the attitude of young militants towards Bolshevik revolution are some of the themes investigated in the book. It also clarifies the role and the engagement with the issue of the new generation shown by prominent figures of Marxism such as Karl Liebknecht, Jean Jaurès, Henri De Man, Willi Münzenberg, Henriette Roland Holst, and Robert Danneberg. Finally, the book constitutes also a page of European social and political history, reconstructed through the history of the various youth socialisms and their relationship with the Marxist tradition.

The Philosophy of Living Experience is the single best introduction to the thought of Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), a Russian polymath who was co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik Party. His landmark achievements are Empiriomonism (1904–6), a philosophy of radical empiricism that he developed to replace what he considered to be the crude materialism of contemporary Marxists, and Tektology: Universal Organisational Science (1912–17), a precursor of cybernetics and systems theory. The Philosophy of Living Experience (1913) was written at a transitional point between the two; it is a final summing up of empiriomonism, an illustration of his theory of the social genesis of ideas, and an anticipation of Tektology.