Bogdanov’s two major theoretical works were Empiriomonizm (1904–1907) and Tektologiia (1913–1929). The first was in process at the time of the writing of Red Star, and the second was similarly underway at the moment of the writing of the sequel, Engineer Menni; the underlying principles of both show up clearly in the novels. In Empiriomonizm Bogdanov maintained that the key to knowledge lay in the principles of its organization, not in a search for “reality” or “essence.” Neither materialism nor idealism, therefore, was an appropriate or useful epistemologica! position. Bogdanov preferred to follow the path of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius in denying the dualism of sense perceptions and physical objects, but he believed that they had not gone far enough in explaining the existence of two different realms of experience, the subjective (e.g., emotions and impulses) and the objective (e.g., sight, sound, smell). Bogdanov attempted to unite these realms in a new philosophical system, empiriomonism, by deriving the physical world from “socially organized experience” and the mental world from “individually organized experience.” The two worlds revealed two different “biological-organizational tendencies.”
Why, asked Bogdanov, do people differ so radically about the second realm, the sphere of individually organized values? The answer, he thought, was that people are torn apart by conflicts that derive from differences in class, race, sex, language, or nationality, by specialization arising from technical knowledge, and by relations of dominance and subordination of all kinds. If these conflicts could be overcome, he continued, a new consciousness would emerge, as a result of which people would be in much greater agreement about values than ever before.
Bogdanov believed that, in fastening upon class conflict as the key to explaining social strife, Marxism was a great liberating force, but that class difference was only one of several sources of social struggle. He wished to generalize Marxism, to show that the framework of Marxism could be widened to include the other sources of social disruption as well. He paid particular attention to male-female relationships, noticing that women and men on Mars were much more physically similar than on Earth, and concluded that on earth “it is the enslavement of women in the home and the feverish struggle for survival on the part of the men which ultimately account for the physical discrepancies between them.” But to Bogdanov male-female differences were just one of many possible sources of social conflict. To him, any relationship of domination and subordination, whether based on sex, race, class, nationality, or possession of technical knowledge, was also appropriate for criticism within a broader Marxism.
So much for the sources of strife among people. How did Bogdanov believe that these differences could be overcome? In developing his concept of “tectology” Bogdanov tried to find through structural analogies and models the organizational principles that would unite under one conceptual scheme “the most disparate phenomena” in the organic and inorganic worlds. Tectology to Bogdanov was a potential metascience both of nature and of society, a unifying concept that would allow human beings torn apart by strife to find a common language. Since the sources of strife were larger than the merely economic, the common language must be larger than traditional Marxism, although it would include Marxism as a special case.
All objects which exist, he wrote, can be distinguished in terms of the degree of their organization. According to Bogdanov the key to understanding the world is organizational analysis. As Netti explained in the epilogue to Engineer Menni, “no matter how different the various elements of the universe—electrons, atoms, things, people, ideas, planets, stars—and regardless of the considerable differences in their combinations, it is possible to establish a small number of general methods by which any of these elements joins with another.” Entities on higher levels of organization possess properties that are greater than the sum of their parts. Living beings and automatic machines are dynamically structured complexes in which “bi-regulators” provide for the maintenance of order. Recent commentators on Bogdanov have pointed repeatedly to the apparent prefiguring here of the concept of cybernetic feedback.2 Bogdanov called for the application of concepts of bi-regulation and a degree of organization in his “universal organizational science” that would embrace the biological and social worlds in the way in which mathematics had described classical mechanics. When Bogdanov called his system “universal” he meant not only that it was equally applicable to all complicated systems, natural and social; he meant also that it was the common language that might unite individuals torn apart by their “individually organized experience.”
Although Bogdanov struggled manfully to complete his universal philosophical system of tectology, eventually writing a three-volume treatise on the subject, one senses that he realized that it was never complete. He was more successful at describing the issues that divided human beings than he was in developing an intellectual scheme that would allow them to unite again with a common language. Hence, Bogdanov’s optimistic struggle to find universal understanding is periodically disrupted by his pessimistic realization that it will never quite happen, that the divisive forces are too strong, that history—on Earth at least—will continue its bloody, barbaric path.
When Bogdanov wrote Red Star he was trying to explain to himself why his task was so difficult, why he so often despaired of its completion. He took the path of maintaining that Earth was an incredibly unfortunate place to live if one dreamed of creating a new socialist civilization in which strife would disappear. Compared to Mars, Earth was violent, fratricidal, divided. In explaining this unfortunate uniqueness of Earth, Bogdanov analytically followed the evolutionary naturalism that was so popular among many Russian revolutionaries. Science and nature lay behind the social brutality of the residents of Earth. The planet Earth was closer to the sun and larger in size than Mars, and therefore life on Earth differed from life on Mars in several important ways. First of all, the warm rays of the sun infused life on Earth with more energy and a faster rate of metabolism. Second, the large size of Earth, compared to Mars, meant that the force of gravity on Earth was stronger, causing Earthlings by necessity to evolve with greater physical strength to counter this binding force.
As a result of their rapid metabolism and physical force, Earthlings, compared to Martians, were irascible, even violent. They loved more deeply and they fought harder. At one point Netti turned to Leonid and remarked, “Your love is like murder.” And Leonid learned that even during the period of the socialist revolution on Mars the struggles between the socialists and the capitalists had never been very violent; the Martian capitalists, unlike their brethren on Earth, gave up rather easily. Martians and Earthlings were simply very different in terms of their basic constitutions; a physician of the seventeenth century, classifying humans in terms of the Galenic humors, would have observed that Earthlings were choleric, Martians phlegmatic. And behind these differences lay natural forces.
But the physical violence of Earthlings was just the beginning of their misfortunes. They were hopelessly divided among themselves linguistically and nationally. In explaining this linguistic diversity Bogdanov employed science to the same effect that Earthlings used the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel. Genesis tell us that God punished the builders of the Tower for their presumption by confusing their tongues. Bogdanov writes that because the planet Earth was much larger than Mars, and because it was divided by great oceans, the humans who inhabited it split into groups that could not physically stay in contact. The various groups and tribes developed instead into separate language communities, and, eventually, nations. When socialism arrived on the historical scene and tried to unite the inhabitants of Earth under a common banner, the effort often foundered on the nationalistic wars that the Earthlings continued to support against each other. In this regard, as in so many others, Mars was different. Easily bound together by communication and transportation even in its early history, Mars had remained an organic whole and had never been plagued by great wars.
All of this seems to add up to
a heavy condemnation of Earthlings in comparison to Martians. Yet Bogdanov was too subtle to leave the situation so one-sidedly in favor of the Martians. (Or was even he infected by a bit of patriotic loyalty to his home planet?) The highlight of Red Star is the debate between Sterni and Netti over whether the Martians should exterminate the Earthlings in their struggle to find more natural resources. Sterni takes the position that Earthlings are so hopelessly malformed by their evolutionary past, and so irrevocably prejudiced by nationalism, that even the Earth’s socialist minority would never be able to find a way to work together amicably with their fellow socialists on Mars. If the Martians try to utilize the natural resources of Earth in place of their own exhausted resources, the Earthlings will rise up in rebellion, refusing to recognize that Martian civilization is vastly superior to their own. The Martians will get involved in a hopeless guerrilla war waged against them by the ferocious Earthlings. The superior technology of the Martians will mean that the Earthlings cannot win this struggle, but the militant spirit of the Earthlings will guarantee an indefinite and costly war. The only way to avoid this ordeal, said Sterni, is to wipe them out in advance with death rays, and then use the riches of Earth to build a more humane socialism on Mars.
The speech of Leonid’s lover Netti in reply to Sterni is the most moving section of the entire novel. Netti’s argument even reminds one of recent ecological treatises on the importance of diversity in nature; Netti’s sympathy for Earthlings resembles contemporary ecologists’ arguments for preservation of dolphins or whales. She reprimands Sterni for proposing to eliminate “an entire individual type of life, a type which we can never resurrect or replace.” Sterni, she says, “would drain forever this stormy but beautiful ocean of life.” He does not recognize, she continues, that “the Earthlings are not the same as we. They and their civilization are not simply lower and weaker than ours—they are different” There may even be some advantages in the differences; although the presence of many languages on Earth enforces national prejudices and splinters understanding, this diversity of means of expression also has “liberated notions from the tyranny of the words by which they are expressed.”
One should remember that Mars and Earth in this story are not simply two different planets; they also represent, in accordance with Marxism, the two successive historical epochs of capitalism and socialism. Within the orthodox Marxist framework, there is no doubt that socialism is viewed as superior. But when we see the tolerance and love of heterogeneity that Bogdanov expresses through Netti, can we wonder about how he will react after the Russian Revolution to the campaign to wipe out “the vestiges of capitalism”? Leonid learns from the Martians that they have retained, because of inherent esthetic attraction, forms of literature that originated before the arrival of socialism; one Martian comments that “if rhyme really is of feudal provenance, then the same may be said of many other good and beautiful things.” Bogdanov’s intellectual colleague Lunacharsky wept when he heard that the victorious Bolshevik forces were shelling the architectural and artistic treasures in the tsarist Kremlin.3 Bogdanov was similarly tortured by his simultaneous commitments to the new age of socialism and his respect and admiration for human creation in the diversity of all its forms, including that of capitalism.
But it is not only communication between historical epochs that concerns Bogdanov; he is also deeply interested in how individuals communicate. If, as Marx believed, social being determines consciousness, how can two humans with completely different backgrounds (for example, capitalism and socialism) ever communicate with each other in mutually understandable terms?
Leonid serves as Bogdanov’s example of how difficult it is for an individual to live in two dramatically different epochs. The Martians who landed on Earth searched everywhere for a person who could “serve as a living link between the human races of Earth and Mars.” At first they despaired, but finally they found Leonid, a Russian revolutionary. They considered him to be the most advanced Earthling, in terms of social views, whom they had seen. Yet when Leonid arrived in Mars he had great psychological difficulties in adjusting to life there. When he studied Martian literature he found that “its images seemed simple and clear, yet somehow they remained alien to me.” When he learned that his lover Netti had been married to several men at the same time, Leonid, despite his belief in free love, reacts with the cry, “Why then this agitated bewilderment, this incomprehensible pain that made me want to scream and laugh at the same time? Was it that I did not know how to feel as I thought?” When Leonid tried to learn the principles of Martian science his response was: “Their scientific methods bewildered me. I learned them mechanically . . . [but] I did not really understand them. . . . I was like those mathematicians of the seventeenth century whose static thought was organically incapable of comprehending the living dynamism of infinitely small quantities.” When Leonid tried to work alongside Martians in a clothing factory he found that he lacked “the culture of concentration” and could not keep up with their work tempo. He was humiliated when they constantly had to help him, even with simple tasks.
The difficulty of communicating across this chasm provides much of the tension in both Red Star and its sequel, Engineer Menni. It explains Leonid’s nervous breakdown while living on Mars; his murder of Sterni; the difficulties he, as an Earthling, has in loving the Martian Netti; and the painfulness of his recovery while in the hospital back on Earth. It also underlies the “wrecking” activities of some engineers trained before the Martian revolution, people who are constitutionally incapable of adjusting to the new socialist order. (The “wrecker” phenomenon was an uncanny prediction of later Soviet attitudes toward bourgeois engineers, including their prosecution.)4
The incommensurability of language in different epochs is a particularly strong element in the novel Engineer Menni. Here in one family, the ancient ducal house of Aldo, three successive generations of strong men—Ormen, Menni, and Netti—fall into three completely different historical epochs—feudalism, capitalism, socialism—and are incapable of understanding each other. Old Duke Ormen Aldo was a convinced feudalist who could not adjust to the successful republican revolution that swept Mars. At first he pretended to go along with the new order, but at the first opportunity he rose up in rebellion and tried to reestablish the old aristocracy, just as Henri La Rochejacquelein of the Vendée in France had done after the French Revolution. And of course Ormen failed to turn back the clock. Ormen’s son, Menni, received a republican education in isolation from his father and became Mars’s greatest engineer. In politics, Menni was equally opposed to the surviving feudal elements in Mars and to the rising proletariat. At first Menni was a great success, but gradually he, too, was overtaken by events. The workers turned against him because of his antipathy to the unions. Menni’s son, Netti, raised in isolation as a worker, was a convinced defender of socialism, a viewpoint that Menni never could understand. As Netti said to his father, “You have a different consciousness. . . . It is the consciousness of the class which preceded the proletariat.”
The poignant relationship between Menni and Netti reveals Bogdanov’s ambiguity about the harsh judgments inherent in class conflict. It is obvious that Menni and Netti love each other deeply, but the labor leader Arri correctly observes that “Menni and Netti are natural enemies. . . . No matter how they try, life will bring them into conflict, violent conflict. They love and respect each other very much, but that will only make their clash the more painful.” Bogctanov entitled one of the chapters describing Menni’s and Netti’s conversations ‘Two Kinds of Logic,” illustrating the unbridgeable gap between these representatives of different classes, and Menni tells his son “Your words are all simple and clear, yet your thoughts remain strange and incomprehensible to me.”
Toward the end of this second novel, Menni is called by history to perform the reactionary role of his father, Duke Ormen, to revolt against developing socialism just as his father revolted against capitalism. The Vampire who comes to him in
a vision urges “You know what you must do. You must once again become yourself . . . The idyll with the unions will not last much longer. . . . It will mean breaking with Netti and Nella, a bitter struggle, a great sacrifice. Yes, but also a great victory!”
Menni knows that the Vampire is correct in his assertion that Menni cannot become a true socialist; he irretrievably belongs to the previous order. The Vampire exults in this knowledge, crying: “Hear the voice of a sovereign! . . . You are mine, you are mine, you are mine!” Menni also knows that cooperation with his socialist son Netti has now gone beyond the breaking point. But in a desperate act inspired by love for Netti and Nella, Menni refuses to play the role of his father, and defeats the iron logic of history in the only way it can be defeated, by committing suicide. His lover Nella sings to him at his death, “Lest life be stayed or hampered/You leave the ranks; your struggle ends.”
Russian radical readers of Bogdanov recognized the best elements of the prerevolutionary Russian technical intelligentsia in Engineer Menni And they saw other familiar elements in the novel. The great economist “Xarma” is unmistakably Marx. The debate between Menni and Netti over whether a minority of workers belonging to radical unions should be recognized as the sole representatives of the working class was a raging discussion in Russian left-wing circles. The suspicion of engineers by workers was a current in prerevolutionary Russia that would continue after the Revolution, and would be cruelly manipulated by Stalin. And Netti’s opinion that a person’s political beliefs were often hidden from view was endemic among Russian revolutionaries, always suspicious of counterrevolutionary conspiracies. As Netti observed, “Here I am, I meet different people, live with them, trust them, even love them, but do I always know who they really are?”
In Engineer Menni Bogdanov illustrated more fully than in Red Star his concern about the role that science would play during a revolution. Does knowledge lead to freedom, or is it just one more weapon in the hands of the upper-class oppressors, who have the advantage of better education? The workers who are trying to figure out whether a canal must be dug through the dangerous Rotten Bogs or along another path are confused and frustrated by the differing arguments on the subject given by the “specialists,” many of whom they do not trust politically. A young worker asks why workers always have to believe specialists. “Isn’t this slavery, the worst form of slavery? What must we do so that we ourselves can know and see, and not just constantly believe?”
Red Star Page 33