The Bogdanovite Turn: Rethinking Modern Marxian Critique of Global Political Economy from an Organizational Point of View

The Bogdanovite Turn: Rethinking Modern Marxian Critique of Global Political Economy from an Organisational Point of View – A Social History Project The third generation Marxian critique of global political economy, of capitalism and imperialism, had been developed during the second half of the 20st century outside the party lines of official Marxist orthodoxy and within the framework of Western academic discussions. It has been following traditions laid down by the Western Critical Marxists, Frankfurt School, Dependency critique of Development and Modernization theories, Analles School of History, and Althusser’s, Anderson’s, and other’s readings of Gramsci between the 1950s and 70s. Synthesising these lines of thoughts with the Systems Analytic approach of Ilya Prigogine, a follower of Ludwig Von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory, Immanuel Wallerstein delivered the first volume of his magnum opus the Modern World System in 1974. Wallerstein and his fellows provided the most profound and comprehensive historical study of the development of capitalism and imperialism to that day and their work inevitably influenced existing debates and theories arriving after that. French Regulation school was another circle providing the alternative approach, at the time, that can be seen as a weak version of systems analysis applied on capitalist regulation, accumulation, and the state. A decade later, drawing on Regulation school, Palloix, and Poulantsaz, and applying the key concepts developed by Gramsci to the analysis of internationalization of capitalism Robert W. Cox, Kees Van Der Pijl, and their fellows provided a synthetic critique of World System Analysis, paving a way to the development of Neo-Gramscian Critical IPE/GPE. There has also been important Open-, Neo-, Political-Marxist, Trotskyite critiques being developed in the parallel: like those of Harvey’s, Gowan’s, Panitch and Gindin’s, Braverman’s, Petras’, Wood’s, Robinson’s, Callinicos’, and others. The other path opened by the subjectivist and ‘cultural turn’, which meant abandonment of ‘economy political critique’ in favour of cultural critique, too developed important post-structuralist and post-Marxist theories like those of: Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari’s, Derrida, Gorz, Debord, Laclau and Mouffe, Castells, Dickens, Boutang, Bifo, Halloway, Hardt and Negri, Zizek, amongst others informed a broader spectrum of autonomist-Marxist Cognitive / Informational / Digital / Networked Capitalism theories. Globally speaking, all these strands present today comprehensive and complementary spectrum of contemporary studies on the rise, arrival, survival, expansion, transformation and possible demise of the capitalist world order. During last decades dominated by the ‘subjectivist’- post-modernist ‘cultural’ analyses -overlapped with the neo-liberal globalization offensive- we believe all these strands have contributed, without a systemic and conscious organisation, to the holistic theorisation of the dominating transnational, financial, informational, and cultural aspects of evolving and almost-all-encompassing capitalism. The present project departs from the problematic of an obvious gap, caused by a lost paradigm located in early 20th century that is the legacy of Alexander Bogdanov and his version of ‘Russian Critical Marxism’. While there is a continuum between the third generation and the above mentioned contemporary debates (the fourth generation), there is a striking and critical time lapse, and missing link between the second and third generation theories that critiqued global political economy of capitalism. We argue that such a paradigm lost has caused a major ‘epistemological rapture’ as Althusser used the term, between these two generations; the latter arriving almost 40-50 years after the work of second generation theorists’ like Kautsky, Luxemburg, Hilferding, Bukharin, Lenin, Trotsky, Sultan-Galiev and others. Critical of and distant from both the official and doctrinaire reproduction of verities of State Monopoly Capitalism theories of communist and socialist parties, which partly influenced the Regulation school’s work, the Western strand of Critical Marxian analyses of capitalist world economy therefore lagged behind the ruling ideologies. Ironically it was Althusser’s unfair abuse of Bogdanov, for his attack at neo-Hegelian philosophers -in the preface to For Marx (1969) and later in his intro to Lecourt’s analysis of Lysenko case (1977)- gave way to a rapture and to the rise of the ‘Cultural Turn’. Such turn, turned critical thinking into a post-modern nihilism in the offset of the most notorious and totalizing offensive of ruling class forces; neoliberal globalization that has disempowered labouring classes globally. In the second half of the century, through the post- and cold-war following the capitalist golden age, almost entire spectrum of Marxian thinking had been influenced by Gramsci’s rediscovered Prison Notebooks (Gramscian turn) and its critics, on the one hand, and by the reconstruction of the Western Academia by structuralism and systems analysis on the other. The fact that Alexander Bogdanov was preceding not only Gramsci and Western Critical Marxists (with his formulations on culture, ideology, hegemony, and with his strong criticism of the economistic Marxism of orthodoxy), but also the general systems thinking and structuralism as new paradigm makes his legacy extremely relevant for the critique of global political economy of capitalism and imperialism today. As a result this requires us to profoundly re- think and re-construct modern Western- Marxian thinking, as a whole. For some, Bogdanov was one of the most important political figures in the history of Russian Revolution and seen as ‘the Marxist philosopher’ who developed the most elaborate critic of not only orthodoxy and its economistic readings of Marx, but also Materialism and Dialectics as developed by Marx, Engels, and Dietzgen. His magnum opus Tektology is accepted as the forerunner of the General Systems Theory of Bertalanffy's (GST), Cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, Operational Research of Ross Ashby, as well as structuralism developed in the 1920s and 30s. Bogdanov is recognized as one of the most, if not the most, important Marxist philosophers, scientists, and communist leaders of the Bolshevik RSDLP –until 1909- and his work did influence almost entire generation of revolutionary intelligentsia in Russia at the time (Lecourt, 1977). He influenced Bukharin’s and Lenin’s thinking in general, and their work on capitalism and imperialism, in particular. First as a result of his long lasting, stubborn, and complicated quarrel with Lenin and ‘his revolution’, and then unfair criticisms of Pannekoek, Korsch, and Althusser –all upholding Lenin politically and against Bogdanov without actually reading the latter’s work- Bogdanov remained virtually absent for the third and contemporary generations of Marxian critique of political economy. As a result, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, the Western Marxism in general gained virtually nothing from Bogdanov and his Tektology since the Russian revolution. As of the rediscovery of Bogdanov in 1980s and 90s, and translation of his major work into English language, studies on Bogdanov’s life and work became an industry in its own right. In his review of the two major contribution coming out in 1998, both by Biggart et. al., David Rowley was writing: “Thanks to the work of Biggart, Glovelli, and Yassour, we can expect a revolution in the field of Bogdanov-studies. Scholars are prepared as never before seriously to seek answers to the question: How Important Was Alexander Bogdanov?” However, in a brilliant trilogy, Kenneth M. Stokes (1994, 1995, 1999) by contextualizing Bogdanov and his Tektology as the Paradigm Lost, and by brilliantly arguing the importance of this lost paradigm for reformation of a holistic re-critique of the cultural and the political economy of globalization -in form of his Meta-theoretical Discourse- was already braking a revolutionary ground for Bogdanov- studies, some five years prior to appearance of Rowley’s review. Stokes’ work was marking a ‘Bogdanovite moment’ that delivers a concrete vision for filling the huge gap playing important negative role in the historical, meta-philosophical, and meta-methodological stagnation of the Marxist critique of capitalism and imperialism, for so long. The proposed project, therefore aims at documenting the social history of such Paradigm Lost, in the historical context of early and mid-20th century Russia and the West, covering before and after the Revolution, after World War 2 periods, and its relevance for the current debates –on the changing nature of work, labour and production such as techno-utopian and techno-dystopian visions of post-capitalism. In order to be able to build a comradely and collaborative links between many strands of modern Marxian critique, reformist-revisionist-revolutionary, from a Tektological point of view, I believe the social historical re-construction and documentation of the Paradigm Lost remains as an urgent, historical, theoretical, and practical necessity in the current conjuncture. References Althusser, L. (1969) For Marx, Allen Lane: The Penguin Press Biggart, J., G. Glovelli, and A. Yassour (1998) Bogdanov and His Work: A Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1873-1928. Aldershot,England and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate. Biggart, J., P. Dudley, and F. King (1998) Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia. Aldershot, England and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate. Bogdanov, A. (1981) Essays in Tektology: The General Science of Organisation, Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications Lecourt, D. (1977) Proletarian Science?: The Case of Lysenko, introduction by L. Althusser. London: NLB. Krementsov, N. (2011) A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rowley, D. (2000) “How Important Was Bogdanov?”, accessed website of the International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI) on 11/07/2017: http://www.socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/109326 Stokes, K. M. (1994) Man and the Biosphere: Towards a Co-Evolutionary Political Economy, London and New York: M. E. Sharpe. Stokes, K. M. (1995) The Paradigm Lost: Cultural and Systems Theoretical Critic of Political Economy, London and New York: M. E. Sharpe. Stokes, K. M. (1999) A Metatheoretical Discourse: Epistemological, Procedural, and Methodological Issues in Political Economy. Toronto: INAPE, 1999. Hybrid CD-ROM. Multimedia. Index. Bibliography. Appendices. Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World-System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York/London: Academic Press. White, J. D. (2018) Marx and Russia: The Fate of a Doctrine, London: The Blumsburry. White, J. D. (2018) Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov, Historical Materialism Book Series, Brill. Gustav A. Wetter (1958) Dialectical Materialism. A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union, Routledge & Kegan Paul. Early and mid-20th cc. 1. Documentation of Lenin’s, Stalin’s, Trotsky’s and other party leaders’ official and informal critique of Bogdanovism. 2. Documentation of Bogdanov’s intellectual and political influence on the leader cadre. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Krasin, Skvortsov-Stepanov, Bukharin, Sultan- Galiev and others. 3. Documentation of influence of Bogdanov, and Proletarian Culture debate on Western / Critical Marxists (Gramsci, Luckacs, Bloch, Korsch, Benjamin, Brecht, and those identified with the early Frankfurt School, Left / Council Communism, and French neo- Hegelian philosophers). 4. Documentation of Bogdanov’s thoughts and work on Left / Council Communists in Italy, Germany, Holland, the UK, the US, and other places. 5. Documentation of Bogdanov’s influence on calculation problem, economic planning, scientific management of labour 6. Documentation of possible influence on unity of science movement, on the Vienna, Bucharest, and Berlin Circles; on Frederic Hayek, Otto Neurath, and others. 7. Documentation of possible influence of Bogdanov’s Tektology on the ‘Mecy Group’; GST of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Cybernetics of N. Wiener, and Operational Research of Ross Ashby. Mid-and Late 20th cc. and early 21th cc. 1. Policy and reaction of various fractions of Western Communist and Socialist parties to both Western-Academic Critical Marxism and Stalinist version of the ‘Two Sciences’, or applied ‘Proletarian Science’. 2. The impact of Maoism, Louise Althusser, and the work of Dominique Lecourt on Lysenko (as Stalinist assimilation of Tektology). 3. Recovery and recognition of the importance of Russian Critical Marxism of Bodanov and Tektology. 4. Bogdanov studies in 60-70s in Italy and Poland 5. Bogdanov studies in the broader context of the West, translation. 6. Bogdanov’s impact in the current debates on changing nature of the system, and Post- capitalism.