LENIN AS PHILOSOPHER
401
revolutionary Social Democracy
in
the party because of arguments
as to materialism or Machism would,
in
my opinion,
be,
an un–
pardonable folly. We must carry on our scrap with each other
about philosophy in such a way as not to affect
Proletarii
at all,
or the Bolshevik fraction either.... You can help ... (Letter of
February 25, 1908).
"In 1903, when I worked with him on
Iskra,"
Lenin wrote to
Gorky, "Plekhanov analyzed for me the error in Bogdanov's views."
Hence it was after the
caveat
of his teacher that Lenin entered into
the "tacit bloc" with Bogdanov.
Nor was Plekhanov slow to taunt his philosophical disciple.
Your tactics, he wrote of Lenin in
Iskra,
are a revision of Marxism in
politics; Bogdanov's theories are a revision of Marxism in philosophy.
Since each theory gets the practice it deserves, Machism is the
proper philosophy for Bolshevism. You are welcome to your Bog–
danov and his Machist philosophy, "and may all possible Machs
and Avenariuses
be
with you!" The embarrassed disciple could only
pretend not to understand the taunt: "Plekhanov drags in Mach and
Avenarius by the hair," he told his followers at the Third (All–
Bolshevik ) Congress of 1905. "It is absolutely incomprehensible to
me what these men, for whom I haven't the slightest sympathy, have
to do with the social revolution. They write on individual and social
organization of experience, or something of the sort, but really they
have no ideas on the democratic dictatorship."
It would carry us too far afield to discuss Mach and his school
in the present work. But that last sentence of Lenin's is worth hold–
ing onto.
If
not altogether adequate as a characterization of Mach, it
is of Bogdanov's "Machism."
((They write on individual and social
organization of experience."
Those nine words contain a clearer,
fairer, more exact account of what Bogdanov had borrowed from
Mach's views and assimilated to his own thinking, than Lenin would
subsequently give anywhere in all his 400 pages of philosophical
polemics, when the bloc with Bogdanov had been broken. In 1905,
disagreeing with Bogdanov's views, he knew how to characterize them
briefly, honestly, exactly. In 1909, he distorted those views the better
to discredit them. Thus was Lenin's clear intellect ever subject to
the torsion of his powerful factional passions.
The year 1908 marked the turning point in his relations with
Bogdanov. Until that time, Lenin still hoped for a fresh armed up–
rising, in which case such matters as the boycott of the Duma would
be
of secondary significance. But the growing reaction now con-
