6. Empirio-criticism and Historical Materialism¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 6: Empirio-criticism and Historical Materialism¶
This chapter dissects the attempts by Russian Machians to reconcile empirio-criticism with historical materialism, exposing these efforts as a fundamental betrayal of dialectical materialism. Lenin argues that figures like Bogdanov, who claim to be Marxists while embracing Mach’s epistemology, have failed to grasp the philosophical foundations of Marxism. They have assimilated Marx’s economic conclusions without understanding their basis in consistent materialism, producing a sterile scholasticism that merely reclothes Marxist insights in biological and energeticist jargon.
The chapter systematically demolishes the pretensions of these would-be reformers. Bogdanov’s assertion that “social being and social consciousness are identical” is dismissed as absurd nonsense that contradicts Marx’s fundamental position that consciousness reflects being, not the reverse. This “correction” of Marx is shown to be indistinguishable from the idealist refutations of the immanentist Schubert-Soldern. Similarly, Suvorov’s “universal law of the economy of forces” is exposed as empty bombast, a meaningless phrase that cannot be measured or applied, unlike Marx’s precise analysis of the growth of productive forces.
Lenin traces the ideological lineage of these errors to the European Machian current’s relationship with religion. Empirio-criticism’s claimed neutrality on theism is revealed as servility to fideism: once objective reality is denied, one slides into subjectivism, which is all that religious obscurantism requires. Lunacharsky’s talk of “religious atheism” and the “deification of higher human potentialities” is not an aberration but the logical product of this philosophical position. The Machians’ attack on the “metaphysics” of natural science is an attack on the instinctive materialism of scientists like Haeckel, whose The Riddle of the Universe became a weapon in the class struggle despite his own political naivety.
The chapter concludes by contrasting Haeckel’s vigorous natural-scientific materialism with the Machians’ reactionary subjectivism. Franz Mehring’s assessment is endorsed: Haeckel’s weakness on social questions is inseparable from his strength in demonstrating materialism’s triumph in natural science. The lesson is clear: natural-scientific materialism must be broadened into historical materialism to become an invincible weapon for human liberation. Non-partisanship in philosophy is merely servility to idealism, and the Machians, by following bourgeois professors of philosophy, have become learned salesmen for the theologians.