Marxism as a Natural Science: Alexander Bogdanov’s Anti-Revisionist Revisionism

Abstract Discussion of Alexander Bogdanov as a Marxist revisionist has largely centred on his philosophy of being and cognition and on Plekhanov’s and Lenin’s accusation that Bogdanov was an idealist renegade from Marxism. However, the real issue of revisionism at the time was not materialism but determinism : the question of whether socialism would appear by the working of the objective laws of nature or the subjective will of human beings. Bogdanov did indeed revise Marxism, but he did so in order to defend it as a natural science. He conceived of society as a form of life subject to biological laws of nature: the need to assimilate energy from the environment and the need to adapt to the environment in the struggle to survive. He reinterpreted the key elements of scientific socialism – the idea that existence determines consciousness and the labour theory of value – in terms of this worldview.