Toward a New World
Articles and Essays, 1901-1906: On the Psychology of Society; New World, and Contributions to Studies in the Realist Worldview
2022
First Published
420
Number of Pages
Part of Series
Alexander Bogdanov wrote the articles in this volume in the years before and during the Revolution of 1905 when he was co-leader, with V.I. Lenin, of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, and was active in the revolution and the struggle against Marxist revisionism. In these pieces, Bogdanov defends the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy on the basis of a neutral monist philosophy (empiriomonism), the idea of the invariable regularity of nature, and the use of the principle of selection to explain social development. The articles in On the Psychology of Society (1904/06) discredit the neo-Kantian philosophy of Russia's Marxist revisionists, rebut their critique of historical materialism, and develop the idea that labour technology determines social consciousness. New World (1905) envisions how humankind will develop under socialism, and Bogdanov's contributions to Studies in the Realist Worldview (1904/05) defend the labour theory of value and criticise neo-Kantian sociology.
Author
Alexandr Bogdanov
Author · 6 books
Alexandr Bogdanov (1873-1928) was born Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinowski at Sokolka, in what was then Russian Poland. He was a man who turned his hand to almost everything. Trained as a physician, he was also an economist, politician, revolutionary (rival of Lenin), philosopher, science fiction author, poet, and scientist. His work on organizational science foreshadowed present developments in that field and cybernetics. In Moscow, in 1926, he founded the world’s first institute devoted entirely to blood transfusion. Two years later, ironically, he died as a result of a transfusion experiment gone wrong.
