NORDSTREAM 2 ECODISASTER

Is Data the New Gas?

Oleksiy Radynski

e-flux
Journal #107 - March 2020

Smiley-face graffiti on a gas pipe at the Nord Stream 2 construction site in Lubmin, Germany. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 / Axel Schmidt.

1.

In Brussels on May 1, 2019, Rick Perry, then-US energy secretary, announced that “seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi Germany occupation, the United States was again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent.” And, in the twenty-first century, he added, “rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.”1 Perry was referring to a deal that would double the size of US gas exports to Europe. But from what, exactly, would Perry’s “freedom gas” liberate Europe?

Perry’s colorful statement came as an explicit snub to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a project that Russia and Germany have been pursuing since the 2010s to link the two countries directly via the Baltic seabed. The pipeline’s route bypasses intermediary countries like Ukraine, whose state budget depends heavily on gas transit revenues. Nord Stream 2 is expected to double the capacity of the already existing Nord Stream pipeline, increasing the volume of transmitted gas up to 110 billion cubic meters a year. Into 2020, Merkel’s government continues to defend this massive gas infrastructure project that’s been mired in controversy from the start.

Strangely enough, most of the criticism facing the Nord Stream 2 project comes from a geopolitical, rather than an ecological, perspective.2 Its critics say that this pipeline would disproportionately increase the EU’s dependence on Russian fossil fuel exports.3 It’s also quite clear that the actual political rationale for this project is to render obsolete the subterranean, Soviet-era natural gas arteries that run through large parts of the European continent that are no longer under Russia’s control. Following Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territories in 2014, Merkel’s government’s adherence to the Nord Stream 2 project did not cease to raise eyebrows.4 After the downing of a passenger plane over the Donbass in July 2014 by pro-Russian proxies, the ensuing sanctions against Russia did not affect the project in any way. In German public debate, the fact that the completion of Nord Stream 2 would likely cause the economy of Ukraine to collapse, a country at war with Russia, has been constantly referenced—but to little avail.5

The intricacies of the ongoing Nord Stream 2 debate, however, miss a rather large elephant in the room. Without questioning the importance of countering Russia’s neocolonial wars in Ukraine and elsewhere, it is easy to see why the biggest problem with the new pipeline is not at all the fact that it will deprive Russia’s neighbors of their transit revenues. Such revenues, in fact, fuel gross corruption schemes, like those that define Ukraine’s political process, and guarantee the concentration of exorbitant wealth in the hands of oligarchs.6 Nor is the biggest problem the fact that Nord Stream 2 will provide the Russian autocratic elite with another powerful tool to subvert European politics. The real problem is that this tool, just like its countless counterparts, undermines the future of planet Earth by bringing the irreversibility of climate change one large step closer. And this time, placing the blame squarely on Russia is clearly not an option.

With Germany’s ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as a manager, and Mathias Warnig (an ex-Stasi officer with a long-standing connection to Vladimir Putin) serving as the CEO of the project, it is not surprising that the German government values its Nord Stream 2 commitment more than its widely anticipated green transition. In a truly Orwellian move, Nord Stream 2 presents itself as an environmentally friendly initiative that will help decrease carbon emissions from oil and coal, fossil fuels that are, it is claimed, much dirtier than natural gas. This argument is refuted by ecologists who assert that, despite being relatively “cleaner” than much of the existing carbon infrastructure, projects like Nord Stream 2 would increase the structural, long-term dependency on fossil fuels to such an extent that a transition to a carbon-free economy—something that the Earth’s biosphere needs much earlier than we plan to institute—might actually never occur.

At the time of this writing, the construction of Nord Stream 2 has been halted due to US sanctions against the project, which will most likely merely delay the pipeline’s completion by about a year. But why is it that the only real form of opposition to Nord Stream 2 comes from the power that would simply prefer to cook the planet with its own “freedom gas”?

Gerhard Schröder, ex-chancellor of Germany and chairman of the board of directors of Nord Stream 2, and Matthias Warnig, former member of the Stasi and CEO of Nord Stream 2. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 / Wolfram Scheible.

2.

In May 2017, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed an executive order titled “On the Strategy of Economic Security of the Russian Federation until 2030.” This order includes a list of ongoing “challenges and threats to the economic security” of Russia identified at that time. High on the list—number six of twenty-five points—is a threat formulated as follows: “Changes in the structure of global demand for energy resources and their consumption patterns; development of energy-saving technologies and reduction of material consumption; development of ‘green technologies.’”7

This statement warrants closer attention. It’s not difficult to see why the “development of ‘green technologies’” is an existential threat to the Russian Federation, one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels and, according to most estimates, the owner of the largest stock of reserves of natural gas on Earth. This particular list of “threats and challenges” also happens to coincide more or less with a number of actions that are necessary to undertake if humanity is serious about its survival on the planet. As it becomes increasingly evident that the future of humankind depends on its ability to switch to a global economic model that would make the industrial burning of fossil fuels obsolete, the mere hope of such a switch—however distant it might seem at the moment—is now officially recognized as a threat to the regime that governs Russia. Clearly, the Russian political model values the future of fossil fuel and capital flows over the future of the innumerable species (including humans) whose existence is threatened by climate change. A question worth asking, then: Is the Russian government actually being, perversely, more straightforward than most other governments about the fact that they are ultimately accountable to entities such as gas, oil, and their derivative petrocurrencies, rather than to the members of human society who voted them into power?

Well before Trump came to power, it was abundantly clear that the global carbon-based capitalist model is incompatible with the futures of democracy and of the environment. Despite the broad scientific consensus on the grave effects of the fossilized economy on the planetary climate, and despite the cautious intergovernmental half-measures to prevent a catastrophic scenario (like the nonbinding Paris Accord of 2015, which the US government has already opted out of anyway), “extreme” fossil fuels investments continue to surge.8 Of all the fringe ideologies and discarded ideas that the Trump presidency has brought into the mainstream, climate change denialism could probably have the most lasting and damaging impact on the future of humankind. Of course, Donald Trump’s “climate skepticism” is far more publicized than that of his Russian counterpart and political patron—even though the effect of the latter could be more fundamental, given Putin’s global support of fossil fuel kleptocrats and right-wing conspiracists, Trump included. Like Trump, Putin has repeatedly questioned the human-made nature of climate change, and went as far as to ridicule the use of alternative energy sources like wind turbines for the alleged harm their vibration may cause to worms, urging them to “come out of the ground.” (The US president, meanwhile, focuses on turbines’ apparently murderous effect on birds). Again, this unprecedented (and scientifically baseless), disproportionate concern for subterranean, nonhuman entities—inanimate, like oil and gas, or animate, like worms—provides clues as to the actual allegiance of a certain public servant named Vladimir Putin.

Most commonly, the Russian political model is the object of human rights–based, postcolonial,9 or liberal-democratic criticism of what the Putinists themselves call “the illiberal model.” In order to make sense beyond the redundantly anti-communist “post-sovietology” in the vein of “Cold War 2.0,” these perspectives should necessarily be supplemented with (or sublated in) more universalist—that is, ecological—modes of critique. It is well-known that the infrastructure for the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels—mainly, the oil and gas pipelines that cover the Eurasian continent—form the basic source of the economic and political survival of Putinism. Moreover, those networks guaranteed the emergence of a particular political regime, which arose in the 1990s on the ruins of the Soviet Union and solidified in the early 2000s—largely due to high prices of oil and gas on the global market.

Surprisingly, Russia’s catastrophic climate policies are largely ignored in most critical accounts of the looming ecological disaster. Naomi Klein’s verdict in This Changes Everything (2015)—that capitalism is incompatible with the survival of planetary ecology—is nowhere more obvious than in the case of Russia’s current capitalist model. Still, Russia is conspicuously absent from Klein’s critique: in This Changes Everything, Russia is only mentioned twice; the collapse of the USSR also gets two mentions. For the ecological critique of capitalism to become a truly global political front, as Klein urges, Russia’s disproportionate exemption must be overcome.

Given the overwhelming importance of oil in the twentieth-century economy, political and economic theorists have given this kind of fossil fuel a great deal of attention. In many cases, this scrutiny is informed by the notion of the “oil curse,” that is, the tendency of oil-rich states to evolve into autocracies: internally oppressive, externally aggressive, and overall inefficient. This notion has of course been unfavorably applied to Russia and the fossil fuel lobby that is running the country, along with Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, and other states “cursed by oil.” In Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell exposes the limitations of the “oil curse” theory. Instead, Mitchell undertakes a study of “democracy as oil—as a form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple levels involve the process of producing and using carbon energy.”10 Mitchell’s book seeks to answer a critical question: “Can we follow the carbon itself, the oil, so as to connect the problem afflicting oil-producing states to other limits of carbon democracy?”11 As natural gas overtakes oil’s previous status as the most important fossil fuel of the current century, this inquiry should be extended. Will oil-based liquid modernity make way for a data-based, gaseous postmodernity?

What follows is an attempt to “follow the carbon itself,” by tracing and collaging its various footprints within histories of ideas, technology, and popular culture, in an effort to grasp the evasive substance of natural gas through the no-less-evasive field of the social imagination—informed by the Cold War and the current geopolitical attempts at its reenactment.

In 2017, The Economist famously claimed that “data is the new oil.” At the time, Wendy Chun’s response to this statement was: “Big data is the new COAL. The result: global social change. Intensely energized and unstable clouds.”12 Still, both coal and oil are likely to decline as energy sources. Another question worth asking, then, is: what if data is actually the new gas?

Participants in the Baltic Sea Day Environmental Forum 2017 couldn’t care less about the ecological aspects of Nord Stream 2. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 / Anatolij Medved.

3.

The first ever computer hacker to feature in a Soviet film appeared in a political drama called Deal of the Century (1985). In one scene, this American hacker (played by popular actor Valentin Gaft) struggles to break the computer security system of a Soviet trade mission in Germany, in his effort to prevent the signing of a gas contract between West Germany and the USSR. The film is generously interspersed with documentary news footage of the Reagan administration’s attempts to prevent the deal that would allow the export of Siberian gas to West Germany. Those attempts did, in fact, happen, but they failed to halt a decades-long process that ultimately led to the emergence of the Soviet Union—and later, of Russia—as a major carbon empire.

In 1970, the Soviet Union and West Germany signed the contract that inspired the film. The contract was preceded by a decade-long global dispute following the discovery of unprecedented reserves of natural gas in Siberia. The Soviet Union lacked the technology to construct the pipeline system needed to transport the gas to consumers, while West Germany—whose industry was capable of providing these pipes—began showing interest in helping the Soviets build this system. West Germany’s offer of assistance with construction came with the condition that the new pipelines would penetrate the Iron Curtain and that Siberian gas would flow to the West. Throughout the early 1960s the US government fiercely opposed the idea, and in 1963 then-chancellor Adenauer had to ban German pipe exports to the USSR. Still, part of German industry cherished the plan, and in 1970 the pipe ban was overcome. After the deal was signed in Essen in 1970, it was colloquially called “gas in exchange for the pipes.” Russian historians unequivocally refer to this contract as “the deal of the century.” This was the first in a long series of deals between Western powers and the Soviet Union that, after its collapse, has led to the emergence of an autocratic system based on a ruthless extractivist attitude to the Earth’s resources, facilitated by transcontinental oil and gas transportation networks.

Those networks—the world’s longest at the time—required unprecedented technological expertise, and in this regard the Soviet Union could not count on Western technology (as it did with the German pipes). In the Soviet TV series Acceleration (1984), a group of cybernetic scientists are tasked with computerizing the natural gas transportation network after the US blocks delivery of some needed technology. In one of the scenes, the cyberneticians discuss this gas network as a self-regulating living organism. One of them proposes the concept of the “animation/resuscitation of the equipment.”13 In other words, they recommend reframing the gas network as an intelligent being with a subjectivity of its own, carrying billions of cubic meters of natural gas to be emitted into the atmosphere—a truly post-humanist utopia of a Soviet kind.

This animation or resuscitation of the gas network wasn’t an outlandish fantasy on the part of the filmmakers. In fact, the plot of Acceleration was loosely based on the life story of Viktor Glushkov, a pioneering computer scientist tasked with building oil pipeline networks, among other things, after his bold idea of an information network for the USSR was shelved, and his groundbreaking research on socialist artificial intelligence was put on the back burner by authorities. Glushkov was a leading figure in Soviet cybernetic science, a science that he claimed had to be applied to each and every sphere of socialist society. He declared that cybernetics allowed for the transformation of “the social sciences into exact sciences.” As a result, he claimed, society as a whole would function as one gigantic cybernetic organism running on feedback loops and socialist self-regulation. In 1970—the same year of the “deal of the century”—top party officials downsized Glushkov’s idea for an overwhelming information-management-and-control network to a series of smaller-scale, disparate network projects. For the better part of the 1970s, he was busy computerizing the Druzhba (Friendship) oil pipeline network that carried Siberian oil into Eastern Europe.

In public, Glushkov held that his Druzhba network was an example of a perfect marriage of cybernetics and ecology, claiming that

we’ve developed methods that allow for the use of contemporary computing machines to predict the behavior of all kinds of ecological systems, to model all future options for the development of these systems, and to discover the solutions that would allow us to find the right compromise between the economic needs of the people and their natural need to preserve the environment.14

During closed-door meetings, however, he delivered much darker accounts of his fossil fuel networks, claiming that they were not economically feasible due to the inevitable exhaustion of oil resources.15

Glushkov’s cybernetics had its roots in the Cold War reception of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic theories, which proliferated in the USSR soon after Stalin’s death. However, Glushkov’s vision of cybernetics as a tool for mastering nature stemmed from a strand of philosophical thought that had much deeper roots in the Soviet context. It’s hard to ignore the affinity between Glushkov’s vision of cybernetics as a mode of total socialist management and the “universal organizational science” of Alexander Bogdanov—philosopher, natural scientist, and militant Bolshevik. Bogdanov coined the term “tektology” to describe his totalizing vision of a neopositivist science outlining the universal principles (those of organization as opposed to disorganization) that underlie every known phenomena in the universe: from galaxies to human societies to bacteria. Bogdanov radically undermined not just the distinction between natural sciences and the humanities, but also between theory and practice—a stance later adopted by Glushkov, who claimed “unity of theory with practice” as a founding principle of his cybernetic science. The latter’s position also shared with Bogdanov’s tektology the belief that natural, social, and technological systems function according to the same organizational principles, which may be scientifically identified and put to purposeful use.

For Bogdanov, nature was “changeable,” following knowledge of the universal rules of progress that he had offered to the Bolsheviks (no wonder that McKenzie Wark, in her 2015 book Molecular Red, regards Bogdanov as a Soviet prophet of the Anthropocene). Bogdanov’s work on tektology, published in the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s, was no doubt a major influence on the Bolshevik project of “revolutionizing nature,” as Oksana Timofeeva names the Soviet effort of “diverting rivers, blasting mountains, making animals speak: the idea was to transform the Earth by means of technology in order to make it, as Andrei Platonov says, more ‘kind to us.’”16 Bogdanov’s tektology is also cited as a major (albeit, uncredited) influence on Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general system theory, the cybernetic theories of Ross Ashby, and the writings of Norbert Wiener himself—via the German translation of Tektology, published in 1926. For instance, it’s been pointed out that in Tektology, Bogdanov described the notion of feedback, crucial for cybernetic science, using a different term of his own coinage: “bi-regulation.” In the Soviet Union, Bogdanov’s writings were officially denounced as idealistic perversions of materialist dogmas. His tektology only made a comeback in the postwar decades, as it was incorporated into Western cybernetic science and reimported back to the USSR in a vertiginous transcontinental give-and-take of ideas.

The abridged English translation of Tektology starts with a claim that’s actually absent in Bogdanov’s original—at least in such straightforward terms: “In the struggle of mankind, its aim is dominion over nature. Dominion is a relationship of the organizer to the organized.”17 Still, this entangled paraphrase of Bogdanov accurately reflects the perception of his ideas by later practitioners. When Glushkov proposed building a computer network for the total management of economic and information flows, he was setting out on a truly tektological endeavor. When the Soviets were building the transcontinental networks for fossil fuel flows, they were guided by the idea of “changeable” nature. Few could see the direction this change was taking.


A munitions clearance operation on the Nordstream 2 pipeline route, which runs in close proximity to World War II chemical weapons dumping grounds. Copyright: Axel Schmidt.

4.

In the summer of 1982, a gas explosion of unprecedented proportions was said to have destroyed the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline. In his 2004 memoir At the Abyss, Reagan administration official Thomas Reed claims that this explosion was caused by Canadian equipment added to the pipeline—sabotage via a Trojan horse tactic. (Post-)Soviet experts, on the other hand, vehemently deny that this explosion ever took place.18 They claim that the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline network could not be hacked at the time, because it was not yet computerized to a sufficient degree. Given the lack of evidence related to this purported explosion, it seems that the gas network hack took place in the realm of information, rather than through technology—a case of information warfare.

By that time, massive amounts of Siberian natural gas were being exported to Western Europe, and new contracts signed in the wake of the Soviet–German “deal of the century” were proliferating. This caused consternation amongst US officials, who saw this German strategy as suicidal: not only would Europe’s access to energy be dependent on Soviet gas networks, but the latter could also, according to some military experts, be used to fuel the Soviet army in case of European invasion. The Germans themselves, though, had adopted a more dialectical-materialist approach to the problem of Soviet natural gas.

Otto Wolf von Amerongen, chairman of the German East–West Trade Committee from 1955 to 2000, later recalled the logic behind the deal: “The gas pipe through the continent is, if you wish, an instrument that not only makes us dependent on the Soviet imports, but also, vice versa, renders their ‘crane’ dependent on the West.”19 In his conversations with German chancellor Ludwig Erhard, von Amerongen introduced the political dimension into this dialectical vision: “If we are linked together through our gas pipelines, this will mean much more than the sale of pipes or the purchase of gas. The will also lead to a positive change in the political picture in the Soviet Union.”20

What kind of change would that be, and how would it be achieved? Von Amerongen: “I was always sure that this deal had introduced another constant medium of communication, a reliable bridge for further development, or to be more precise, the rebirth of the traditional German–Russian connections that were lost in the course of decades after the October coup in Russia in 1917.”21

Construction corridor for the Russian onshore section of Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 AG / Agiteco.

With gas as a medium of communication, what kind of message did its networks convey? At stake was no less than the legacy of what von Amerongen (an ex-Nazi) referred to as “the October coup.” In the 1980s, with the Soviet economy failing while (and, in fact, because of) the lucrative fossil fuel export deals proliferated, party elites were faced with the chance to put this enormous wealth to personal gain. The top-down collapse of Soviet Communism was, among other things, the result of a successful attempt by the party apparatus to privatize the enormous profits derived from the extractivist economic model in its transition to capitalism. The message delivered by the Western elites to their Soviet counterparts—“abandon communism for your personal profit!”—was conveyed through the medium of natural gas.22

In the post–Cold War world, after the “end of history”—which is gradually morphing into the end of a habitable climate—is a project like Nord Stream 2 designed to serve as another channel of constant communication? With US sanctions against Nord Stream 2 strangely appearing as a reenactment of the Reagan-era sanctions against the Trans-Siberian pipeline, are we definitively stuck in a final historical loop, a dead end in which the only real resistance to this politically and environmentally devastating project comes from a no-less-devastating competitor whose only solution is: burn “freedom gas” instead? Abandon the planet for your personal profit!—this is the message conveyed by virtually every communications medium in this echo chamber, be it the medium of an underwater gas pipeline or an liquid natural gas terminal.23

But if carbon infrastructure is a medium of communication, then it can be—like any other such medium—disrupted, subverted, and hacked. This is where, to quote Nick Dyer-Witheford, the dominant structures are most vulnerable today: “If we’re going to look at the equivalent of something that was like strike power, we need to look to hacking, we need to look at the new vulnerabilities of capital that lie in its transportation and logistics networks, we need to look at the possibilities of the interruption of its various types of energy flows: both electrical and otherwise.”24 But who would be the agent of this strike power?

One recent development in the extraction industry provides a glimpse of what form this agent might take. In January 2020, Russian Gazprom announced a major decrease in its monthly production of natural gas. The reason for this decrease? Unexpectedly high temperatures in gas extraction areas.25

Postscript: This is a revised version of an essay that was intended for publication in the Almanac of the Center for Experimental Museology, but it was withdrawn by the author after it was censored by the publisher, V-A-C Press (Moscow). The fragment excised by the editors is reproduced here in full:


The moment at which this text is written is crucial and greatly impacts what I have to say in the following paragraphs. I’m writing these lines on the fortieth day of Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike, while he is held in a Russian prison camp in the Arctic. Sentsov demands the immediate release of all political prisoners from Ukraine currently jailed in Russia. Before he was kidnapped by the Russian Federal Security Service during the military occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in May 2014, Sentsov resided with his family in Crimea. Together with the anti-fascist eco-activist Olexander Kolchenko, he was accused of plotting a terrorist attack as a protest against the annexation of Crimea by the Russian army. Detained in Crimea, Sentsov and Kolchenko were then kidnapped and transported to the Russian Federation, where, in defiance of all judicial norms, the two were stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship and put on a show trial that found them guilty—despite the absence of evidence, and on the basis of forced confessions by two other tortured political prisoners. Sentsov and Kolchenko were sentenced, respectively, to twenty and ten years in prison camps. In Russia, this trial had been instrumental in silencing any possibility of dissent against the 2014 occupation of Crimea and Russia’s sparking of the war in East Ukraine. This silencing especially targeted artists and cultural workers: the scapegoating by the Russian secret services of Oleg Sentsov, who had worked in Crimea as an auteur filmmaker, was conspicuously random, as if its sole meaning was to send a message to other artists: stay away from politics, for this can happen to anyone. In a similar vein, the conviction of Olexander Kolchenko was meant to introduce a purely Orwellian dimension into this process: a committed anti-fascist, he, along with Sentsov, was accused of participation in a far-right Ukrainian group. The imprisonment of Sentsov and Kolchenko led to a swift deterioration of cultural and artistic links between Russia and Ukraine, with numerous Ukrainian artists and cultural workers boycotting any Russia-related projects. As a counterpart to this boycott, since 2015 I’ve been practicing a strategy of accepting invitations from Russian non-state institutions with the purpose of hijacking public debate and staging interventions based on the cases of Sentsov and Kolchenko. While working on this particular essay, I was surprised to discover that no special intervention of this kind would even be needed in this case, as my research trajectory had actually brought me to a point that reflects the context of Sentsov’s case with unexpected clarity. While this research is focused on the manifold ways that the exploitation of natural resources, primarily natural gas, affects cultural and political developments by boosting colonial and authoritarian practices, Sentsov is holding his hunger strike in a town called Labytnangi in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region in Russia’s Far North, which is where one of the world’s largest gas fields is located. There, reduced to the position of homo sacer, Sentsov is challenging the regime from the very heart of Russia’s natural gas empire. It is an extremely dire, but somehow, still strangely hopeful coincidence which reinforces the intuitions that brought this text into existence.

As of March 2020: Oleg Sentsov survived his hunger strike, which lasted for 145 days. He and Oleksander Kolchenko were released by the Russian government in a prisoner swap in September 2019.

V-A-C press is a project of V-A-C Foundation, cofounded by Leonid Mikhelson, head of Novatek company, Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer, based in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region where Oleg Sentsov was held illegally.

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Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films have been screened at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), DOK Leipzig, Bar Laika by e-flux, and Kmytiv Museum among other venues, and received awards at a number of film festivals. His texts have been published in Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (Archive Books, 2017), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (MoMA, 2018), Being Together Precedes Being (Archive Books, 2019), and in e-flux journal. After graduating from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he studied at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (Beirut). Radynski is a participant of the Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics founded in Kyiv, 2008. Currently, he is a BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

© 2020 e-flux and the author

 “Physiological collectivism”: the origins of the Institute of Blood Transfusion’s ideas and their practical realization 

Mariya S. Sergeeva 

I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation 8 Trubetskaya St., building 2, Moscow 119991, Russia 

Abstract.

 “Physiological collectivism”, a method for the creation of the “new man”, was developed in Russia in 1910–1920s, and served as a pretext for organizing the first Institute of Blood Transfusion in the USSR, the first director of which was its author, the physician, philosopher, and political activist A.A. Bogdanov (1873–1928). Bogdanov’s idea of “physiological collectivism” emerged as part of a dream for a socialist society based on universal unity and equality. Drawing on his own theory of “universal organized science”, Bogdanov argued that the key to sustained and stable development of society was “collectivization”. However, the revolutionary experience showed that the unification of various class representatives was impossible without the formation of a single organizational way of thinking and a profound change and unification of citizens’ consciousness. A unique opportunity to unify the people at a biological level was stipulated in the “exchange blood transfusion” method developed by Bogdanov. It was based on philosophical concepts of E. Mach, W. Ostwald, R. Steiner, and N.F. Fedorov, as well as biologists’ and geneticists’ data. The phenomenon of conjugation in the simplest form affirmed loyalty to philosophical constructs and allowed Bogdanov to offer his own mechanism for the transfer of experience between generations. The announcements of Soviet geneticists, who claimed the possibility of acquired characteristics being inherited, justified his theory. Thus, “physical collectivism”, or exchange of blood between the people, “reinforcing each body along the lines of weakness,” was developed by Bogdanov as the most effective way of building socialism. The creation of the Institute of Blood Transfusion was the result of an interdisciplinary synthesis of philosophy, natural science and social ideas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Physiological collectivism”: the origins of the Institute of Blood Transfusion’s ideas and their practical realization (historymedjournal.com)

 

Engineer Menni and the Prose of Project Management

The recent efforts of Mckenzie Wark to rehabilitate Bogdanov have brought back more than just the lovable vampiric theorist from his bloody grave. With him emerge the concurrent spectres of utopia, state socialism and grandiose public works. Bogdanov, the activist revolutionary of 1905, had by 1917 become a theorist of the abstract, a scientific socialist, and a constructor of tangible Martian utopias. It is on Mars that Bogdanov pursues the doppelganger of Earthly socialism, and so, it is to Mars we go, by means of the collected translation Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia.

What is Mars for Bogdanov? If he defines Nature as “that which labor encounters,” Mars becomes something like “that which theory encounters”.

Mckenzie Wark makes use of the Deleuzian notion of molar and molecular in order to reach Bogdanov. If the molar is the realm of abstract grand thinking, high level concepts, and authoritarian pronouncements, then the molecular is the unseen, the below the below, the minute and particular, carbon liberation, and the world of “actually existing theoritism”. We must contrast the molar concepts of history, philosophy, love, art, with the molecular concepts of metabolic rift, development, attraction, and labor.

What does Bogdanov’s Mars represent? It is a world that is much older than ours, and yet has only progressed a few hundred years ahead of humanity (at least by 1905 – who knows what they’re up to now). They are a communist utopia of course, but have graduated to that position in much more molar way than the Earthlings were trending; because Mars is a harsher, larger, and sadder world, the populace, constrained to smaller plots of inhabitable land; Martians are much more tolerant of social development, much less cruel, much more abstract themselves as historical characters. Leonid (or affectionately, “Lenni”), the main character of Red Star, notices in Martian culture, art, politics, a certain abstract remove which contrasts with the brashness and threatening asymmetry of the development of the proletarian movement on Earth. As comes out in discussion:

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, “but I think that you are wrong. True, the conflicts on Earth have been more acute than ours, and the natural environment has always shown a greater tendency to retaliate with death and destruction. But perhaps this is due to the fact that Earth is so much more richly endowed with natural resources and the life-giving energy of the sun. Look how much older our planet is, yet our humanity arose only a few tens of thousands of years before yours and is at present a mere two or three hundred years ahead of you in development. I tend to think of our two humanities as brothers. The elder one has a calm and balanced temperament, while the younger one is stormy and impetuous. The younger one is more wasteful with his resources, and prone to serious errors. His childhood was sickly and turbulent, and as he now approaches adolescence he often suffers from convulsive growing pains. But might he not become a greater and more powerful artist and creator than his elder brother? And in that case, will he not eventuaily be able to adorn our great Universe even better and more richly? I cannot be certain, but its seems to me that this is what may happen.”

Which is the molecular and which is the molar? In some sense, Mars is the same sort of abstraction as that used by Marx in Das Kapital, the abstractions that David Harvey’s brilliant youtube course makes commodity-clear; in Marx, certain real variables must be factored out of the equation because they over-complicate the development of a solution or tendency. In this sense, Martian society has progressed along molar lines. Big ideas have always managed to triumph with relative ease; the great public works of the canals have succeeded. Earth, on the other hand, is out-of-whack; it is full of metabolic rift, molecular instability, ideas emerge too soon or too late, and coalitions are much more radioactive. They even have a chiller, more widely read Martian doppelganger of Karl Marx, the “renowned Xarma”.

In this we see, not a rejection of the molar as such as Wark sometimes seems to suggest, but a comparison of the abstract with the concrete – by means of hypothetical abstraction (science fiction). The model of Mars, the cool temperaments of its inhabitants, serve as a template that the Earth is already corrupting beyond repair. In this sense, the Martian sequence can never be a program for the Earth, only ever a vague, super-egoic tease, an unreachable success-factor. Or in a more optimistic vein, Martian technical socialism is the idea that must be pursued by the various romantic truth procedures of love, science, art and politics on Earth, pursued but never fully actualized. Only on Mars is a cohesive “poetics of labor” capable of emerging as a whole. Maybe all that Earth can hope to do in the stead of a fully realized poetics of labor, is capture that movement into a banal realism, a “prose of project management”?

It is funny that Red Star, the more traditional utopia of travel, was a huge best-seller during the Russian Revolution, while its much superior prequel Engineer Menni went pretty much unnoticed. Yet the latter is perhaps the heart of Bogdanov’s project; to turn vulgar Marxism into a technical ideal of socialism, and this technical development, through the figure of the Engineer – the Martian Engineers Menni and Netti, who pre-figure the stupid figures of socialist realism and far surpass them.

Engineer Menni gives humanity hope that it can reach the molar one day too. It is the great manifesto of molar projection. The book is presented as a novel from Mars, translated into English by Leonid. As Leonid mentions in Red Star, there is a certain coolness to Martian literature that seems to find more aesthetic joy in the technical – a kind of latent suprematism or Neue Sachlichkeit. Bogdanov is true to his word when, in Engineer Menni, he really does compose such a novel. The device of writing, not about aliens, but an alien novel as such, is really quite brilliant. The gesture practiced in Menni is very compelling, nigh Lovecraftian in its staging of uncanny familiarity:

Translation from the single Martian language into those of Earth is much more difficult than translation from one Earthly language to another, and it is often even impossible to give a full and exact rendering of the content of the original. Imagine trying to translate a modern scientific work, a psychological novel, or a political article into the language of Homer or into Old Church Slavonic. I am aware that such a comparison does not Batter us Earthlings, but it is unfortunately no exaggeration-the difference between our respective civilizations is just about that great.

But who is Menni? The molar hero. The great architect, engineer, project manager, and a Lycurgus or pre-foundational figure of vulgar, technical, molar Marxism. The novel is about his great project and his interpersonal relationships, but moreso the former. Menni has an idea that will greatly expand the territory of Martian life and progress, exploit the untapped resources of the planet, and progress the species of Martian humanity, which feels cramped and narrow in its tiny pockets of inhabitable land, much like the characters in more recent fictions like Attack on Titan.

This is a socialist realist technique, to write about public works, and the great (projected) unity of state, technology, and labor against the elements. The whole trend of Bogdanov’s science fiction is the unity of labor against natural ferocity. He refutes a future left of localism not yet developed in his era; as Žižek proclaims, the Negri style pockets of progress and local contributions do not suffice to deal with the problems of a socialist race, even once the proletariat has conquered. The real enemy is not a rival class, but nature herself.

Thus in Red Star, the great debate of the Martians is whether to colonize Earth or Venus. Placid and artistic, hedonistic even on the surface, the Martians are all bitterly melancholic because the natural world is trying to kill them and their socialist paradise; a dilemma emerges – colonize and kill the humans in the name of a greater more developed humanity (the view of the Martian Sterni) or go to the inhospitable Venus to mine its resources? They have only enough fuel for one project, and they choose the more comradely, leaving Earth its chance.

Menni shows more the pure poetry of labor and project management, a struggle against organizational inertia and natural obstacles, and how class development and ideational progress attach themselves to technical developments in the concrete world. It is a strange novel. The strangest part is the long hallucinatory sequence of the vampire, the representative of old ideas and once-useful historical processes, like democracy or parliamentarism, that have become dead letters but continue to live on and pester the progressive forces.

Technicality triumphs, and history goes with her, but only, it seems, on Mars.

So far.

We have signs. Everybody on Earth now speaks English. The Martians too had a coming together of language. Beercroft’s “universal language” is now a reality.

But the idea lives on after the man disappears, and you have come to understand the main thing: the creativity that found one of its incarnations in you has no end.

The possibility of the Project Management Novel

So that’s why I came up with the phrase “prose of project management”, as a kind of realist response to the Bogdanovite “poetry of labor”. We need to recognize that tektological and organizational thinking brings about a weird counter-swing from the molar to the molecular and back to the molar again. Like Bogdanov’s notion of “crisis” as either a conjunction or a destruction (crisises C and D respectively). His point is that no crisis is just a pure crisis-D or crisis-C, but that the interesting features of either can appear to be dominantly one or the other, depending on your point of observation. Likewise, the “poetry of labor” needs its “managemental prose”. This is the molar prose of the technical abstraction, the Brechtian “crude thinking”, the concept-as-blunt-object used by committees to bludgeon reactionaries.

This is clearly a different spin on the idea of the “project” from the (quite molecular) “project-as-self” or any other individualistic narcissism; it is almost classically soviet in comparison to what is prevalent today. It should not be taken in the same vein as the Invisible Committee describes the “I AM WHAT I AM”, the petty atomistic personal project of the self:

The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production…It is at the same time the most voracious consumer and, paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state. 

The PM methodology to be derived from Bogdanov emphatically rejects this. No slight projects, no larval pupas, and certainly no return. In this sense, molar.

Like the dreams of Benjamin, Platonov, Ehrenberg, Lunacharsky, and Piscator, among many others, the hope of functionalizing or socializing the novel form is so old to criticism that it’s surprising that it hasn’t actually manifested itself more frequently. The valorization of the report, the blueprint, the newspaper as aesthetic endstates was a constant refrain in the 1920s. Eventually this led to a re-capture within literature itself – Brecht and Alfred Döblin, for example, made heavy use of reportage and workerist flavoured functionality for artistic ends.

If rhyme really is of feudal provenance, then the same may be said of many other good and beautiful things.

If the Soviet Union’s contribution to the great unreadable genres of mankind was the production novel, Engineer Menni stands as an elegant and surprisingly readable precursor. Yet although production is certainly an element, it is far more high level. We see in Menni the possibility for something like a management or project novel. A novel or literary form that takes as its architecture not story arcs, but phases; not character development, but resource management; not plot resolutions, but outcomes; and finally, not moral platitudes or zen like moments of observation, but strictly documented lessons learned.

All of a suddenly he understood that one didn’t have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came before.

Kim Stanley Robinson.

This functional trend seemed to have gone away for awhile. But the rehabilitation of Red Star/Engineer Menni opens up the possibility for a severe détournement; the language of management, organization, abstract project coordination can be stolen for aesthetic development. And once the literary captures this thinking, it can return it back with a vengeance. No longer will the notions of finance or human resources be linked to solely spreadsheets; a utilitarian flavor will remain, but legends and heroes, or perhaps even new methodologies embodied as heroes. Engineer Menni stands for both a political finality or class division, and a new methodology for the commune as a whole. A vindication of the major or state project, and as such, an aesthetic as much as political vindication.

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Mckenzie Ward’s “Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocence” – Cyborg, Who’re You Calling Bourgeois!?

McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red is a “low theory” book of weird alternatives. Cyborgs, climate science, and soviet Utopian lunacy come together in what I can only describe as a science fair project for a Marxist robot high school of the future. It provides a fascinating account of Bogdanov, the forgotten, the soviet sci-fi alt-scientist, and of course, the political and philosophical “anti-Lenin”. Wark makes the case for a revival Bogdanov’s never-yet-popular Tektology as a corrective methodology appropriate to a world where environmental and technological rifts are increasingly radical and irreversible.

His science fiction super-villain, the “Carbon Liberation Front”, a collective and hilariously well chosen name for the anthropo-technical forces that have (unconsciously) brought about the emancipation of carbon into the atmosphere, causing a situation where there is no back button (or in Wark/Marx, a “metabolic rift”).

Wark wants thinking at the low-level (“designs for Life, low theory and everyday practice from the labor point of view”) to take its place next to, or perhaps push aside this generation’s inheritors of critical theory, Western Marxism, and all those, like Badiou and Žižek, whom he characterizes as worshipers at the the altar of a “psychoanalytic Leninist sublime”.

Wark’s book is very interesting. A revival is always interesting. Wark’s efforts are spent on the hopelessly maligned as Bogdanov, a wonderful crack-pot who, in 1908, almost took over the Bolsheviks, in 1917, was pushing an apolitical/non-revolutionary/technical Marxism, and in 1928 died from a weird blood transfusion experiment gone horribly wrong. Wark’s success in rehabilitating Bogdanov shows the truth behind Benjamin’s statement that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history“:

The idea is a sort of impossible crystal, dead and inert, without which boredom and grief weather us. But the idea on its own is only the concept of death…Better to live then on a secondary idea, which mediates between the idea and labor, keeping the dead ideal from direct contact with life, where either the idea of death will live and kill life, or life itself will kill the deathly idea. The secondary idea should be practical, attaching itself to the problem of life and inert matter, rather than life and soul. The secondary idea is usually a design problem, and hence, in principle, soluble…Our species-being is lost when we make a fetish of a particular idea, a particular love, or a particular labor, as Bogdanov might say..

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Bogdanov was a big weird character, but Wark focuses on his biggest, weirdest project, Tektology, a proto-systems theory that humbly tries to describe and subsume all extant knowledge, practice and natural phenomenon as “organizational”. It is a work of emancipatory org-design as molecular connector – a kind of metaphor machine that allows one to freely and creatively import/export concepts from one science or praxis to another – a “zip and download” function for theory.

The formal process of a given activity can be the experimental template for another.

That this is a very useful train of thinking to revive in this era of design, “big data”, information systems, and metadata goes without saying too much. As a practicing information architect and information management consultant, I am actually salivating to use some of Bogdanov’s thinking around “conjunction” et al. in my professional work, and think they will even bear fruit. It is a “labor point of view” that design and information science sorely needs to hack its seemingly unstoppable sequences and processes for a “comradely” future.

Similarly cool is Wark’s willingness to be totally on side with Bogdanov’s Proletkult, the most avant-garde pre-Stalinist art/education movement in pretty damn avant-garde era of history. This is exemplified in the writing of Platonov, who, now that his works are published and translated, is getting the belated title of “best soviet writer ever”, totally snatching it from Pasternak or whomever. Wark’s readings of Platonov are both welcome and timely, convincing and unexpected. I feel like everyone who has ever been inspired by the avant-garde soviet 10s and 20s secretly was waiting for just this sort of justification of “literary factories”, out of the box proletarian education and artistic creation “from the labor point of view”. Think this kind of production with what the Italian collective Wu Ming are doing, and perhaps frame it with Badiou’s literary subject, and maybe we’ve got something worth doing.

The connections get weirder as Wark follows the Utopian chem-trail from Bogdanov’s utopia Red Star, the first great work of soviet sci-fi, to California, where we find Paul Feyerabend, Donna Haraway (and her cyborg offspring), and the sci-fi protege of Frederic Jameson, Kim Stanley Robinson. Here we have a look at the critical, queer-feminist-cyborg side of California Ideology. For those not familiar with the antihumanist joys of terraforming and cyborg-theorizing, this latter half of the book will inspire weird thoughts from the depths of the uncanny valley. His account of climate science as a potlatch but revolutionary vast-machine, heretofore unthinkable, ties well with his Platonov focus on the below the below, the infrastructure beneath the superstructure, and the sub-infrastructure or non-infrastructure, the gaping foundation pits of half-citizens and mad men.

The main thesis that underlies these excursions and revivals is that “molar” thinking, the thinking of high theory, western Marxism, philosophy etc., while perfectly comfortable thinking around the “death of God” , has not yet convincingly thought around the “death of the Goddess” (i.e. Nature). Only at the level of metabolic rifts, exact scientific accounts hacked by metaphors, détournements (or hijackings) of existing concepts, short-circuitings, a focus on “secondary”, rather than first, principles etc. can we confront the problems, the main problems, to shared and “comradely” life today.

Praxis starts and ends with the struggle for life; everything else is just useless duplicity or dangerous theology.

So why does he see all this as so incompatible with current theory? My main issue with Wark comes from the unnecessary name-calling, the denigrating, and the proletarian posturing he sporadically adopts against his bugbear Žižek and the other “western Marxists”, which near the end he labels outright as proponents of a beyond-useful critical theory, or hypocritical theory:

First – and last: from Bourgeois to Proletarian. Hypocritical theory is in love with the lovely things of its own class – bourgeois things. It makes a fetish of leaders, idolizing Lenin or Mao. It doesn’t want to talk about workers; it wants to deal only with representatives. Or: it finds excuses to remain within the detritus of a lost bourgeois culture – Wagner, Hegel, and Mallarmé. Or: it takes refuge in theology, as if only the gods could save us…

We get that you probably don’t headbang to Wagner, but as someone who is pushing the Apple infused world of “design problems”, and a theorist of “organizational science, isn’t this a little pot vs kettle?

We have to ask, who’re you calling bourgeois, Mr. Cyborg? If we’re going to play the ouvriériste, let’s go all the way. Isn’t Wark the one trying to rehabilitate Bogdanov, perhaps (by 1917 at least) the only non-Revolutionary Bolshevik? A writer who seems to imply that education and culture calmly plodding along and adding to the “shared life” stock pile will simply progress to, uh, more “shared life”? Has he ever played Starcraft? Is Wark aware that worker bees have enemies?

His point about the necessity to share comradely struggles against the environment, nature etc. is well taken, but his disdain for political activity and fetish for techno-science is, without a real revolutionary or subjective thrust, almost entirely compatible with the kind of Silicon Valley Common sense he is trying to combat. Are we all just going to throw out lot in with hackers and open-source coders and read sci-fi, and hope that comradely activity emerges unimpeded?

If the “molar thinking” thinking of a Badiou is in the clouds, and a Bogdanov is representative of good, molecular thinking, how does he explain tektology as “organizational design”? Isn’t organizational design the area par excellence of bourgeois, molar thinking today? In a review of Žižek’s Absolute Recoil, Wark claims:

The molar is the language of management. It’s the dialogue of ideas, in which the experience of those who organize labor substitutes for the experience of those whose labor organizes the material world directly.

If he ever does a survey of management theory, I think he’ll be surprised at how close it sounds, not to the “bourgeois communism” of Badiou, but precisely to his beloved Bogdanov. There is no reason in your book to address the Maos and the Lenins, the Shanghai and Paris Communes of history; but no need to attack those who theorize along those “molar” lines; thinking which, incidentally, the workers of history have always found easier to digest. Aren’t grand narratives precisely the narratives of the worker? Isn’t molecular thinking the luxury of the scientist who doesn’t have to work a minimum wage job all day?

If there is something to suspect in “molar” thinking, we mustn’t forget that Bogdanov is a writer who, in praising organization unabashedly, sees more value in the First World War than in the Bolshevik Revolution. Isn’t he being just the slightest bit “managemental” in his attitude to the workers when he says things like:

The World War turned out to be the greatest school of organization; it called for an unparalleled effort of organizational abilities from any person or any collective which was directly or indirectly involved in the War, giving it an invaluable organizational experience…For example, deficiency in people is compensated either by a reinforcement of the technical means of destruction or by an ideological rallying of people, raising the fighting spirit of a military collective through Inspiring and elucidating spheres and orders; deficiency in technical means is equalized by a replenishment of human material, etc. The unity of the organizational point of view intrudes here with the greatest force and creates an acute necessity for the unity of organizational methods.

To be proletarian alongside the bourgeois is perhaps even more unreasonable that believing in a subjectivized “bourgeois communism”. There is no compelling reason to toss out current thinkers like Badiou, who capture and rehabilitate in the name of the Event many elements of art, history, science and love from the enemy camp. Indeed, reading the high-level “organizational” categories of Bogdanov, every good information architect might smirk a little at the abstract philosophical generality that is present. Badiou’s use of Cantor and company certainly represents a more genuine encounter with real modern mathematics than Bogdano-Debordian détournements of science, however cool the latter may be.

But the differences are perhaps not even so stark as Wark thinks. Badiou uses mathematics as an empty or “void” ontology in exactly the same way Bogdanov seems to. There is no magic or bourgeois sentimentality in Badiou’s ontology, and his approach and Bogdanov’s are mutually understanding here. It is Wark who might re-read this paragraph from the Tektology:

Is it really possible that the same laws can be applied to combinations of cosmic worlds and biological cells, living people and etheric waves, scientific ideas and energy atoms? Mathematics provides a decisive and indisputable answer: yes, it is quite possible because it is in fact… Thus mathematics is simply the tektology of neutral complexes, developed before other parts of the universal organizational science.

Indeed, although a little buried beneath the blood, chloride and tektols, Bogdanov’s own concept of an eternal-type “truth” is not all that different from Badiou’s materialist dialectic:

Tektology will preserve and save for mankind much of its labour, crystalized in the verities of the past. Undoubtedly, contemporary verities will also become obsolete and die in their time; but tektology guarantees that even they will not be simply discared and will not be converted in the eyes of future generations into naked, fruitless illusions.

Wark’s book is compelling, fucked up, and probably true on many counts; his rehabilitations are not only interesting, they are obscure, cunning, funny and welcome. He is also probably justified in proposing a new, tektologically informed scientific molecular theory to go alongside the molar. It is something I, as a smarmy cognitarian, find not only exciting in the abstract, but actually applicable. It opens up whole new bypaths of thinking, and will undoubtedly help us, the unhelpable cyborg conglomerate of the 21st century. Molar and molecular need to be the new dynamic duo of critical theory. I Just don’t want to spoil the vibe by calling the one proletarian and the other bourgeois; that move is petty, weirdly archaic, and not at all “comradely”.

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Lenin's polemic against the School of Mach  (Materialism and Empiriocriticism, 1909)

The need to explore the context in which Josef Popper's ideas matured obliges us not to neglect to deal with the most famous of the controversies against the whole school of empiriociriticists. First of all, I would like to point out to the reader that the text's approach is based on that of the well-known 'Anti-Dühring', which Engels had written several years earlier. Even in the"Anti-Dühring" there is a fierce (though good-natured) criticism of the way of thinking of a German academic; also there is at the same time the illustration of the most recent discoveries of the natural science of the time in the light of a dialectical materialist interpretation. But here the similarity stops; since Engels' criticism of Dühring is, as I said earlier, good-natured, he sings his opponent, condemning him to a not very flattering judgment: but Engels is very aware of the developments of science, and the criticism is always timely, even if he himself modestly acknowledged that he was sometimes not up to the task as a scientific communicator. It is therefore that ofthe 'Anti-Dühring' a pleasant and useful reading. The difference that comes to the fore reading "Materialism and Impiriocriticism" is the tone not at all good-natured; what we'll see later. Another difference is the method of criticism used by Lenin - he criticizes an entire school of thought all together, every ermpiriocriticist he knows, at the same time: he quotes the sentence of one, below the sentence of another, juxtaxtaxtats the sentence of a third, and so on. In doing so, he has a good game in asading the pieces so that they adhere to the interpretation that he himself has already given a priori. Much more scientific value would have had the book if it had taken the thought of only one of its opponents - let us put it ernst mach- the undisputed head of the school of empiriocriticists, and had placed it to severe criticism. But that was not , I believe , the purpose of the book; the goal was to divide between good and bad, here orthodox dialectic materialists and there the iconoclasts of materialism, and to make one appear respectively as the only true Marxists and the other of mere reactionary agents of the bourgeoisie. One of the main objectives is certainly Aleksandr Bogdanov, who we find a Bolshevik member of the central committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party at the time of the failed revolution of 1905 and then expelled from the central committee in 1909, for touting his ideas incompatible with Orthodox Marxism. And of which - regardless of the actual political role - we now generally find its primogeniture accepted in the formulation of the general theory of systems. In 1926, he established the world's first transfusion center in Moscow, and died in 1928, attempting a scientific experiment on himself. From reading Lenin's text, one might think that Bogdanov was sent to Siberia for at least twenty years in a re-education camp. That was not the case, and it is indeed extraordinary how the unacceptable harshness of his words was accompanied by tolerance and personal respect. In fact, we read "Bogdanov personally is a sworn enemy of every reaction and in particular of the bourgeois reaction. Bogdanov's replacement and the theory of the identity of being social and social consciousness, serve this reaction. This is a sad fact, but it is always a fact." [Lenin, Complete collection of works. V.18. p. 346] Despite the disagreements, Bogdanov considered the October Revolution to be the greatest social achievement, and it was Lenin who supported his project of the transfusion center in Moscow, in the last years of their lives. However, it is difficult not to be impressed by the classifier intent of "Materialism and Impiriocriticism" ; While it is not possible to speak of an inquisition - since there was no repression under Lenin - on the other hand it is frightening because there is a perfect glimpse of the possibility for others to use his words to justify far more tragic consequences. And in any case, it is possible not to recognize that constantly referring to the purity of a doctrine - because otherwise it is barbarism - is, whether we like it or not, a method of doom. In the sequel I will not even try to pursue Lenin in his hunt for all the reactionary little bourgeois who lurk inside the empiriocriticists (try who is capable of it); I shall confine myself to cropping his text so as to highlight only one of his attacks on Ernst Mach and to discuss it. We read a passage of "Materialism and Impiriocriticism": The 'principle of the economy of thought' and the question of 'unity of the world'. "The principle of 'lower force consumption', placed by Mach, Avenarius and many others, based on the theory of knowledge, is... undoubtedly a 'Marxist' tendency in gnoseology". This is what Bazarov asserts in the Essays (p. 69). Marx is about "economics." Mach is about "economics." Is it really "indisputable" that there is even a shadow of a bond between them? In Avenarius' work Philosophy as the thought of the world according to the principle of less consumption of force (1876), this "principle" is applied, as we have seen, in such a way as to declare in the name of the "economy of thought" that sensation is the only thing existing. Causality and "substance" (a term that professors willingly use to "give themselves airs", instead of the more precise and clearer term of matter) are declared "eliminated" in the name of that same economy and in other words you get the feeling without matter, the thought without the brain. [Lenin, p.166] [...] Mach, as usual, creates confusion and machists contemplate and adore this confusion! In Knowledge and Error,in the chapter Examples of researchmethods, we read: "The 'complete and simpler description' (Kirchhoff, 1874), the 'economic representation of facts' (Mach, 1872), as well as the 'concordance of thought with the being and concordance of thought with each other' (Grassmann, 1844) express the same thought with small variations". Isn't that a pattern of confusion? [Lenin, p.167] To deal with the previous step, the difficulty is that Lenin juxtatats all four concepts he opposes: the economic representation of facts, phenomenological physics as "solipsistic psychiasm", criticism of the notion of causality and that of the notion of substance. The different aspects need to be addressed separately. Science as an "economic representation of facts" and criticism of absolute space It is enough to have studied a little mechanics to know that from a certain point of view the whole question of "economic representation" can be connected in a clarifying way to the question of whether it is for example objective truth that the sun turns around the earth, or that it is the earth that turns on itself, generating an apparent motion. It is clear that we are entitled to assert that the earth here and now is my reference system, and therefore to say that it is the sun that is spinning. But if we do some experiments on motion, we'll find out the existence of forces (called Coriolis forces) that tend to shift the trajectory of a body moving along a meridian, forces that are easily explained by earth's rotation. It is those same forces that cause when water falls down the sink hole, they make it form a vortex counterclockwise (for the northern hemisphere); because the center point of the vortex has a higher linear velocity than the points closest to the pole, and less than those closest to the equator (when you are exactly at the equator, the water descends from the hole without forming any vortex!). Does that allow us to say that it is the earth that is turning on itself? The fact is that that is not the point, it depends on our purposes; it is certain that, if we want to keep the centre of our reference system anchored to the Earth's surface, we will have to introduce apparent forces - including coriolis forces - to describe it accurately; it will be our system (called non-inertial)therefore more complex than anchoring the reference system - let's say - in the center of the sun, with the earth circling around itself and the sun. Both ways may give correct results, but the theory will be easier if we put the sun in the center. Only in this sense can we say that it is the earth that is spinning, but in no way can we say that this is the objective truth - since we are placing the sun still, but the sun falls towards another star, and therefore we would need to consider as a reference system the "fixed stars", which are not fixed. But to say that it is the earth that turns, is certainly a cheaper representation of the facts. We therefore see that already with classical mechanics - and classical relativism - we can question the notion of objective truth, unless we shift our attention to functional relationships between the entities considered, which are invariant regardless of the reference system. They would become an "objective truth", with foundation; Unfortunately, this would not help Galileo in his trial before the inquisitors of his time. It is not possible to address this issue as Lenin does: Is it cheaper to "think" that the atom is indivisible or that it is composed of positive and negative electrons? Is it cheaper to "think" that the bourgeois revolution in Russia is directed by liberals or against liberals? You only have to ask the question of to what extent it is absurd and subjective to apply the category of 'thought economy' here. Man's thought is "economic" when it exactly reflects the objective truth, and practice, experiment, industry serve as a criterion for its accuracy. Only by denying objective reality, that is, the very foundations of Marxism, can we seriously talk about the economics of thought in the theory of knowledge! [Lenin, p.166] Because, as was shown before, there are experiments that can refute a theory that doesn't predict their results, but there are different theories -- simpler and simpler -- that can predict identical results; they may predict any possible identical result, and therefore shall be equivalent; or diverge in some aspect. To paraphrase Lenin: is it cheaper to think that the sun revolves around the earth or that the earth turns on itself? The answer is that it is equally possible to think of the two things, but that it is cheaper to think that it is the earth that turns on itself, since we will not need to insert coriolis forces as immanent to the reference system. That's it. All masses, all speeds, so all forces are relative. There is no difference between relative and absolute, which we can grasp with the senses. On the other hand, there is no reason why we should admit this difference, since admission does not bring us any theoretical or other advantage. Modern authors who allow themselves to be convinced by the Newtonian argument of the water vessel [ndA: analogous to what I have just shown] to distinguish between absolute motion and relative motion, do not realize that the system of the world is given to us only once, and that Ptlemaic and Copernican theory are only interpretations, and both equally valid. Try to keep the Newtonian vase still, rotate the sky of the stars and check for the absence of centrifugal forces. [Mach, p. 246] And Lenin actually seems to be making this pointless Herculean effort... Contemporary physics, he says, preserves Newton's idea of absolute time and space, time and space as such. This "there" conception seems absurd, Mach continues, without suspecting, evidently, the existence of materialists and materialistic theory of knowledge. [Lenin, p. 175] But let's see another step by Mach: Yet Newton also needs to be criticized. There is no difference between referring the laws of motion to absolute space and enunciated in abstract form, that is, without explicitly indicating the reference system. This last method is practical and does not bring harm, since every mechanical scholar, when dealing with a particular case, first of all looks for a reference system that is usable. Whenever possible, the first process was understood in this way, and precisely therefore the incorrect Newtonian idea of absolute space has produced little harm in such a long time. [Mach, p. 288] And how angry Lenin is: This naïve remark about the harmlessness of materialistic conception turns against Mach! [...] Such "harmlessness" is synonymous with accuracy. "Harmful" is Mach's idealistic conception of space and time, since, firstly, it opens the door to fideism, and, secondly, induces Mach himself to reactionary conclusions. [Lenin, p.175] The reader may wonder where fideism is and where reactionary conclusion is: he will not find them in Mach's text, but in Lenin's text, as a necessary logical consequence. It just sounds like a quote from Lupus et agnus... Lenin's method throughout the book is always the same: being "wrong" the foundations of Mach's theory of knowledge - according to idealistic and fideistic Lenins, actually fruitfully critical -, then the conclusions (and any subsequent action) can only be reactionary. One would naturally be led to excuse Lenin for not being a physicist - ignorance masked by a huge amount of reading - if it were not for insults: The philosophy of the scientist Mach is for the natural sciences what was for Christ the kiss of the Christian Judas. Likewise, Mach betrays the natural sciences for fideism, essentially siding with philosophical idealism. When Mach denies the materialism of the natural sciences, he performs an act in all reactionary senses: we have seen it with sufficient clarity talking about the struggle of "physical idealists" against the majority of scientists who remain faithful to the old philosophy. We will see this even more clearly by comparing the famous scientist Ernst Haeckel [ndA: a critic of Mach] with the famous (among the small reactionary bourgeois) philosopher Ernst Mach. [Lenin, p.342] [...] But Willy [ndA: in turn a critic of Haeckel] cannot but see that one hundred thousand haeckel readers mean a hundred thousand spitting directed at the philosophy of Mach and Avenarius. [...] The "war" against Haeckel has shown that our view corresponds to objective reality, that is, the class nature of modern society and its class ideologies. [Lenin, p.346] Instead of the hundred thousand spitting,let's take a look at the calmer reflection of a certainly calm man, Albert Einstein, who attributed to Mach, instead of the kiss of Judas, even the authorship of the conceptions that had led him to elaborate the theory of general relativity: The truth is that Mach tried to avoid having to accept as real something that is not observable by striving to replace in mechanics an average acceleration referring to the totality of the masses of the universe instead of an acceleration referring to absolute space. But inertial resistance to the relative acceleration of distant masses presupposes remote action; and since the modern physicist does not believe that he can accept this action at a distance, we return again, if you follow Mach, to the ethere, which must serve as a means for the effects of inertia. But this conception of the ethere, to which we are led by Mach's way of thinking, differs essentially from the ethere as conceived by Newton, Fresnel, and Lorentz. Mach's ethere not only affects the behavior of the masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them. Mach's idea finds its full development in the ethere of the general theory of relativity. According to this theory, the metric qualities of the space-time continuum differ in the environment of different points of spacetime, and are partly conditioned by the matter existing outside the territory under consideration. [from Einstein: Ethere and Relativity - 1920] It should be noted that Einstein always remembered even in his late teens the debt that he himself attributed to Mach, which he called the incorruptible skeptic. causality On causality, Mach essentially adhered to Hume's skeptical stance. Although it is obviously not possible to affirm Mach's authorship also on quantum mechanics, it is curious that in a few years the principle of causality would have been called into question. Heisenberg, the inventor of the famous uncertainty principle, as an example of a crisis of the causality principle proposes the decay of radio(Physics and Philosophy,p. 92-93), so one can determine the probability of a decay event occurring without it being possible to determine its cause. But the example is not very fitting, since it is a practical impossibility to know all the necessary variables, without interference by the observer invalidating all the observation. Heisenberg therefore denies the possibility of a law of causality a priori,as Kant wanted. The literature on the problems of the principle of causality in quantum mechanics is endless and I have no intention of going into the theoretical means to delve into the subject here. Suffice it to say that the greatest physicists have been in bitter disagreement throughout the twentieth century over whether or not the principle of causality is valid at the quantum level, and moreover all quantum mechanics is based on functions of probability amplitudes. Let's quote this cute anecdote about the great American physicist Richard Feynman, nobel laureate for inventing quantum electrodynamics: Thirty years ago Dick Feynman told me about his "sum on stories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything he likes," he said. "He goes in any direction at any speed, back or forth in time, however he likes, and then you add the amplitudes and he gives you the wave function." I said, "You're crazy," but he wasn't. [Freeman Dyson] Considering electrons that go back in time as a normal part in physical calculus - in addition to verifying a maverick mind - indicates that the principle of causality can also be denied (albeit at the microscopic and local level) and yet there is still a science, capable of providing us with transistors, integrated circuits, CD players and computers. Substance - phenomenological physics and "solipsistic sensism" In the song quoted at the opening, Lenin states [...] and the "substance" (a term that the professors willingly use to "give themselves airs", instead of the more precise and clearer term of matter) are declared "eliminated" in the name of that same economy and in other words you get the feeling without matter, the thought without the brain. [Lenin, p.167] Instead, we see that Mach does not think at all that the matter does not exist, rather gives an operational definition: Elsewhere [ndA: in theAnalysis of Sensations] I tried to clarify how the constant stability of the connection between different sensations led to the hypothesis of absolute stability, which is called substance. The first and most immediate example of a substance is offered by a moving body detached from its surroundings. If we consider this body to be divisible into homogeneous parts, each of which has a constant complex of properties, we come to the representation of a substantial entity that varies quantitatively and that we call matter. What is taken out of one body, occurs in another: the amount of matter in its entirety is constant. Speaking more precisely, however, we must say that the substantial properties are as many as there are properties of bodies, and that matter has only the function of representing the constant bond of the various properties, one of which is mass. [Mach, p. 217] Here we see that what Lenin scornfully calls "solipsistic sensism" is actually a knowledge setting on what we can actually know - the sensitive properties of bodies. The existence of an outside world in the senses is never denied (and accusing a physicist of the opposite is truly bizarre). While distinguishing the elements of sensitive knowledge of matter we arrive at a fairly clear definition - except perhaps for Lenin? - of the mass: The amount of matter itself is not a mass, nor is it thermal capacity, combustion heat, nor nutritional value, etc. The "mass" has no thermal meaning, but only dynamic. The way forward is another. The different physical quantities are proportional to each other. Two or three bodies of unit mass together form a body of mass two or three times greater by dynamic definition, and the same additive property applies to thermal capacity by virtue of thermal definition. [Mach, p. 280] In which one only dissects the matter analytically between its different characteristics in order to be able to treat each of them consistently. We see that this is in fact his criticism of the school concept of substance. conclusion. Lenin's text is hard and over the top. You can't really find (I at least couldn't find it) the bourgeois reaction within Mach's philosophy of knowledge, and that's puzzling. Mach's ideas seem to have helped to give - at a time when the very foundations of physics seemed to falter - general guidelines on which other physicists were then able to work profitably. The most interesting recognition in this regard is that of Einstein. Why so fiercely then? Lenin's fear seems to be the consideration - all extra-scientific- that criticism of the foundations of the natural sciences could be exploitedby the bourgeois establishment, to deny scientific validity to Marx's theories and thus induce the proletariat into bewilderment; but with this it was certainly a bad service to Marx himself as a scientist of history and economics, and forced the Marxist left to reject without deepening a large number of new concepts that were being elaborated in that fruitful period. The divergence in political positions between Mach and Lenin is noticeably evident in the footnote in which Lenin talks about Josef Popper: In the same spirit Mach speaks for the bureaucratic socialism of Popper and Menger that guarantees the "freedom of the individual", while the doctrine of the Social Democrats that "disadvantageously differs" from this socialism, threatens "a slavery more general and heavier than that of the monarchical or oligarchic state". See Erkenntus und Irrtum [Knowledge and Error], 2. ed., 1906, pp. 80–81. [Lenin, p. 316] That finally makes us fully understand the ultimate motivation for lenin writing his book. And it had nothing to do with the philosophy of knowledge! We can therefore imagine that Lenin went backwards: wanting to counter his political position vis-à-vis the Bolsheviks,he tried to refute the basis of Mach's thought - his philosophy of knowledge, but, as we have seen, with unsatisfactory results. If so - as I think - one can imagine that vice versa, affirming the validity of one's philosophy of knowledge, logically involved trusting in a more just and less fallible action. This is obviously a vain hope; having a solid foundation has never prevented men from doing terrible things equally, or terrible nonsense... Unfortunately for Lenin, the socialism of the USSR was by no means bureaucratic; and regarding Popper, we do not know in any case if he ever read his Nährpflicht,which only came out in 1912 (we are still here in 1909), and therefore we do not even know how much he spoke about it in full knowledge of the facts in the aforementioned note. From the point of view of science, the influence of Materialism and empiriocriticism was heavy; in 1959, former Nazi Heisenberg had a good game of making fun of Soviet physicists: "Among the different idealistic tendencies of contemporary physics, the so-called Copenhagen school [ndA: Bohr, Born, Dirac, Heisenberg, Pauli] is the most reactionary. This article is dedicated to exposing the agnostic and idealistic speculations of this school on the fundamental problems of quantum physics", blochinzev writes in his introduction. The harshness of the controversy shows that here we are dealing not only with science but with a confession of faith, with adherence to a certain creed. The purpose is expressed in the end with a quote from Lenin's work: "However wonderful, from the point of view of the human intellect, the transformation of the imponderable ether into ponderable matter, however strange in electrons the lack of anything other than electromagnetic mass, however unexpected the restriction of the mechanical laws of motion to a single sector of natural phenomena and their subordination to the deeper laws of electromagnetic phenomena, and so on... all this is nothing more than a confirmation of dialectical materialism". This last statement seems to make Blochinzev's discussion of the relationship of quantum theory with the philosophy of dialectical materialism less interesting, as it seems to be downgraded to a preordained debate in which the judgment is already known before it begins. [Heisenberg, p.138] using pseudoscientific topics in search of materialistic ontology; it should be emphasized here that Einstein also criticized the Copenhagen approach from a materialistic point of view, famous his phrase to Born "you believe a God who plays dice, and I in strict laws in a world that exists objectively", but he has never obviously been accused of having reactionary ontology. And why would he, for that matter? What does quantum mechanics have to do with socialism? Nothing, really nothing. In the end of the Cold War, we try not to lose any good ideas due to prejudice.

(2004) fabio petrosillo Bogdanov (libero.it)

Bibliographical notes Except where otherwise specified, citations refer to the following works: [Lenin] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism,1909 (ed. 1964,1973 - Editori Riuniti) [Mach] Ernst Mach, La Meccanica in his historical-critical development,1883,1912 (ed. it. 1977 - Universale Bollati Boringhieri) [Heisenberg] Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy,1959 (ed. 1961 - The Essayist) [Einstein] The Collected papers of Albert Einstein (Volume 7 - Princeton University Press)