By MARCOS DANTAS*
Considerations from “Essays on Tectology”, by Alexander Bogdanov.
With about 100 years of delay, they were finally published in Brazil, Tectology Essays, by Alexander Bogdanov. It is still only the first volume, translated by Jair Diniz Miguel, with an introduction by Rodrigo Nunes.
Bogdanov, the nom de guerre of Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky (1873-1928), is little known among us, almost always cited based on the disparaging and unjust words of Vladimir Lenin, in a few paragraphs of Materialism and Empiriocriticism. However, he was, together with Lenin, a co-founder of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. He actively participated in the 1905 revolution; he was not at the forefront but was not absent from the 1917 revolution.
He was one of the founders of the USSR Academy of Sciences; together with Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933), he created the “Proletarian Culture” (Proletkultur) movement, which aimed to educate the working masses in the new ideals of the revolution; and he founded the first hematology institute in the world, leading which, during experiments with his own blood, he would eventually die. In an obituary published in Pravda by Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), Bogdanov was defined as one of “the most eminent theoreticians of Marxism” and the “most learned man of our time”[I].
The controversies with Lenin that would become more intense in the second decade of the 1888th century were set against the backdrop of their disputes over leadership of the Party. Political differences arose between them regarding revolutionary tactics and strategy, as well as Marxist philosophy and theory. However, there was a very important and not insignificant difference between the two: Bogdanov was a doctor who had graduated from Kharkov University in XNUMX. He therefore had scientific knowledge and the ability to read books and articles on physics, biology, chemistry and other sciences that neither Lenin nor other political leaders of his time had.
It was based on this competence that he proposed updating Marxist thought in line with advances in science in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. This purpose gave rise to the project of a new science that would integrate the knowledge then dispersed across those different branches of knowledge. He gave this science the name Tectology – from the Greek “to build”.
Unfortunately, Bogdanov's ideas were repressed in the USSR until they began to be revisited in the 1970s. The publication, now, of the Essay in Brazil, will allow us to know it directly without the filters of biased criticism. This article's main objective is to present some topics of the Essay aiming to demonstrate its theoretical and philosophical importance, in dialogue with more contemporary authors. We will see that Bogdanov was a Marxist author ahead of his time.
Historic context
Bogdanov was born in Tula, where he began to work with the local workers at an early age. The influence of popular culture would not only mark his political views but also the style of his more theoretical works. After graduating, he began to publish his first books, combining his scientific knowledge with his initial efforts to give it a dialectical treatment. He continued his political activities until he was arrested by the Tsarist police and finally exiled in 1904. He joined several other exiled leaders in Switzerland, including Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) and Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918). He became involved in the controversies that divided the Russian Social Democratic Party, allying himself with Lenin, who would later found the Bolshevik Party.
In 1905, Bogdanov actively participated in the uprisings in Russia. Later, when they were all back in exile, political and theoretical differences began to emerge. Bogdanov, together with Lunacharsky, defended the need to advance an educational program for the working masses, and to this end, in 1909, he founded a “social-democratic school of higher studies” in Capri, Italy. Lenin, meanwhile, prioritized the organization of the “vanguard of the proletariat”. It was also at this time that the theoretical and philosophical debates emerged that would mark the relationship between Bogdanov and Lenin in the history of Marxism: in 1904-1906, Bogdanov published the three volumes of his Empiriomonism.
The Menshevik Plekhanov, to whom we owe the expression “dialectical materialism”, criticized the work in an “open letter” in 1907. Two years later, Lenin published his Materialism and Empiriocriticism, a tirade directed mainly against the thought of Ernst Mach (1838-1916) and Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) but which does not leave out, albeit in a few paragraphs and superficially, Bogdanov's “empiriological” proposal.
In 1908, Bogdanov published The Red Star, a science fiction novel, in which he describes his vision of a future communist society, obviously based on his philosophical conception, translated and published in Brazil, in 2020, by Editora Boitempo[ii]. In 1913, he began publishing his most important work: Tectology: the universal organization science – Part I. In 1917, he published Part II. This work would also gain a Part III and some re-editions, with revisions, between 1925 and 1929, already in the Soviet Union. A version summarized by him was published, also in the Soviet Union, in two parts, in the years 1919-1921: Essay. This is the version that Editora Machado has now released in Brazil. For now, only the first volume.
It is impossible to understand the true nature of the great controversies in which the greatest political and theoretical leaders of the European social-democratic movement were involved at the beginning of the 20th century without first seeking to know and understand the profound transformations that European and, from there, global capitalism was undergoing at that time. The second scientific-technical revolution of modern industrial capitalism was being experienced – but not perceived.[iii]. Theoretical leaders such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Eduard Bernstein, Bogdanov, captured aspects of these transformations but none, except Bogdanov, also brought to the debate the “disruptive” (to use a current term) scientific revelations of the time.
From an industrial-technological point of view, the solutions found by Thomas A. Edison (1837-1931), Ernst von Siemens (1816-1892), George Westinghouse (1846-1914), Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), among others, for the widespread use of electrical power in industry, transportation, and homes, would produce a transformation in production processes, and therefore in important aspects of the capitalist logic of accumulation, and even in everyday life, comparable to the transformations we are experiencing today with the digitalization of society. Along with electricity, the internal combustion engine also appeared, and from there, new frontiers of exploration of fossil fuel sources and consequent changes in the times and spaces of work and everyday life.
In 1872, Eugen Baumann (1846-1896) invented PVC. In 1894, Charles Frederick Cross (1855-1935) invented nylon. They were inaugurating what would become one of the most powerful industries of the XNUMXth century: chemistry. And with it, the introduction into everyday life of a new material, with a thousand and one uses, entirely artificial: plastic. Last but not least, we cannot ignore the invention and dissemination in society of the telephone, radio, cinema, these technologies and industries. imaginary, with all its consequences that would only begin to be perceived, albeit very intellectually, from the theorizing of the Frankfurt School.
It will be very difficult to find in the political literature of the time references to the social and economic impacts of the disruptions caused by these then revolutionary technologies and by the companies and industries that were born from them and developed with them – as new and innovative at that time as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google are today… One of these impacts would be the expansion, in Western Europe and the United States, of a new layer wage earner of workers, but separated from the factory floor: individuals with university education (engineering, economics, sociology, etc.), receiving better salaries, enjoying better living conditions, exercising management power and command in companies, and even being able to dream of rising to the upper classes, who did not see themselves and were not seen as part of the proletariat either: they would come to be known as “white collars”, as opposed to the “blue collars” of factory workers’ overalls[iv].
Only Bernstein perceived the phenomenon and understood its political importance – which does not mean that he correctly understood its nature and implications in theoretical terms. It was not necessary – and is never necessary – to break with dialectics in order to understand new realities. It is only necessary to be… dialectical.
Bogdanov was another who, due to his scientific training, was able to perceive aspects of the emerging realities that were not very evident at the time – in his case, in science. At that same time and in that same context, physicists had made important revelations about the structure of matter that called into question “truths” that had been established since the 1845th century, among them Newtonian mechanics. The discovery, for example, of the X-ray by Konrad von Röntgen (1923-1895) in XNUMX, a form of energy that was apparently invisible, silent, odorless, that is, imperceptible to the senses, and which, on top of that, could pass through material bodies, left physicists astonished, to say the least.[v].
Then, Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1909), Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), Marie Curie (1867-1934), Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) – and we haven’t even reached Einstein yet – would add more paradoxical elements to the knowledge established until then, demonstrating that the atom can be divided into even more imperceptible particles, and can therefore have somewhat inexplicable behaviors in terms of the physics paradigms still dominant at the time. Max Planck (1858-1947) resolved these doubts in 1899, suggesting that energy is constituted by discontinuous (or “discrete”) bodies – or photons – and is the product of the activities of these bodies in a time interval by a constant that received the name of its discoverer.
Planck's theory paved the way for Einstein's theory of relativity and for the quantum physics of Max Born (1882-1970) and Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976). To get an idea of what Planck's theory meant, it suffices to know that until then energy was considered some form of continuous wave.[vi].
Such a revolution in physics, accompanied by many others in theoretical chemistry and biology, would provoke epistemological and even ontological questions. Physicists are Cartesian, or even positivists, by education and training. The atomized practice and experience in their laboratories makes it seem as if the scientist is an individual distinct from the objects they manipulate, ignoring the fact that he himself is guided by his beliefs and goals, which are socially determined, and both modifies and is modified in these experiences, from the new neurological connections that are formed in his brain, to the knowledge that, recorded in these new connections, he elaborates about the objects themselves, and the greater reality in which they are inserted.
Physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916) and philosopher Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) sought to rethink positivism in light of these new developments, inaugurating the school of thought that became known as empirio-criticism. As we know, the penetration of their ideas into the leadership and militancy of social democracy was opposed by Lenin in his famous philosophical essay. It was also opposed by Bogdanov in Empiriomonism. But, unlike Lenin, Bogdanov understood that materialist dialectics would also need to be updated in light of the new paradigms of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
The key word here is “monism”. Western philosophy has been struggling between two major epistemological branches since the times of Plato and Aristotle: dualism vs. monism. Saint Augustine vs. S. Thomas; Descartes and Kant vs. Spinoza and Hegel. On the one hand, the separation between “spirit” and “body”, “subject” and “object”. On the other, the unity (of opposites) “spirit/body”, “subject/object” – the “identical subject-object”, in Lukács’s terms.[vii].
In practice, the recognition that when acting to modify reality, the agent is also modified by this reality. He is inserted in it, it is a component of him. This was the basic message, in summary, from Bogdanov in his Empiriomonism, accepting the starting points of Mach and Avenarius because they were supported by the latest advances in Physics, but heading towards a very different point of arrival because, along the way, they were supported by Marxist materialist dialectics. It is worth noting that, in the debates of that same period, Lukács and Korsch would also claim monism as the essential foundation of materialist dialectics. For these thinkers, “historical materialism is monistic”, states Sochor[viii]. There is controversy as to whether this would be the case for Engels and, above all, Lenin.
Tectology
A Tectology and the Essay extracted from it are products of a more mature stage of Bogdanov's life and thought. Most of the work now published in Brazil is “cut-and-paste”, so to speak, of Tectology. A few parts are not found in this one, a few others are even better developed or are exclusive to the Essay.
Da Tectology a translation was made into German, published between 1926 and 1928, and its first volume was translated from Russian into English, in an edition coordinated by Professor Peter Dudley, from the Centre for Systemic Studies at the University of Hull, in 1996[ix]. Two Essay There is also a translation from Russian to English by George Gorelik, published in the United States in 1984[X]. From the cataloging record of the Brazilian edition, where the original title appears in Cyrillic, we are led to believe that the Machado edition was also translated directly from Russian.
Bogdanov opens the Tectology stating: “All human activities are essentially both organizing and disorganizing. It means that human activity, whether technical, cognitive, or aesthetic, can be understood as material of organizational experience, and investigated from an organizational point of view.” (T, p. 1, italics in the original)[xi] [xii]
In 1982, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, one of the most important interpreters of contemporary thought relating to systems, cybernetic, cognitive, informational and related theories, published a book entitled Orders and disorders: survey about a new paradigm[xiii]. This “new paradigm” was already announced and pioneered more than 60 years ago. However…
The first paragraph of the Essay is different: “In all of humanity’s struggle against the elements, the task is to dominate nature. Dominion is the relation of the organizer to the organized. Humanity little by little acquires and conquers this dominion; this means that, little by little, organizes the world – organizes for itself, according to its own interests. This is the meaning and content of its millennial work.” (E, p. 45, italics in the original).
In both statements, the central concept is organization. The essence of the human being is to be an organizer. But before him is a nature that is also organized. In the eighth paragraph of a Tectology a statement similar to the first one will appear Essay: “Generally, the comprehensive process of human struggle with nature, of conquering and exploiting the spontaneous natural forces, is nothing other than the organization of the world for humanity, for its survival and development. This is the meaning, the objective sense of human labor.” (T, p. 2, italics in original).
In these statements, one can observe a complete similarity between Bogdanov's thought and that of the Brazilian dialectical materialist philosopher, Álvaro Vieira Pinto (1909-1987). In The Concept of Technology, written in the early 1970s but only published posthumously in 2005, Vieira Pinto starts from the same idea: the main contradiction of the human being, founding all others, is with nature because it is from it, by transforming it, that he derives his means of survival and historical evolution.[xiv]. This process of transforming nature to meet its needs is defined by Vieira Pinto as work. In Bogdanov, work is the act that organizes.
In Vieira Pinto it is the act of designing and executing the project. Vieira Pinto would very unlikely have even been aware of Bogdanov's work, perhaps he only knew of its existence through some reading of Materialism and Empiriocriticism (a book that, if you read it, everything indicates, you didn't take very seriously...). But it is not at all coincidental that two authors so separated in time, space and socio-cultural conditions in which they were objectively and subjectively inserted, started from the same basic approach to construct the rest of their theories: they were both based on the materialist dialectic of Karl Marx.
As the Essay begin with such a peremptory statement about the relationship between human beings and nature, and also considering how much questionable, at least from a Marxist point of view, has been said in recent times about this same relationship, including in Rodrigo Nunes's “Introduction” to the Brazilian edition, it is necessary to pay greater attention to this point. Let us forget, for a moment, the achievements of capitalist science and technology in the last two to three centuries. Let us remember, because many people forget or have not learned, that the corn or wheat we eat are not those original to nature but hybrid species that our ancestors managed to produce about 10 thousand years ago. This is modifying nature.
Let us remember, because many people forget or have not learned, that from the 1,7th century BC to the XNUMXth century AD, successive Chinese rulers built a canal, now XNUMX kilometers long, connecting the basins of the Yangtze and Huang Ho rivers. This is changing nature. Let us remember the terraces that the pre-Columbian Inca populations built in the foothills of the Andes, thus creating spaces that did not exist before for agriculture. This is changing nature. Let us remember that human beings are the only animals capable of controlling fire. It is also worth remembering that the wheel does not exist in nature, but having controlled fire and invented the wheel, to give just these radical examples, human beings were able to change themselves with the neurological, and therefore cognitive, resources that nature gave them to change it, by changing themselves. A clearing that an indigenous group opens in the forest to build their huts there is changing nature.
For all this Marx taught: “Nature is the inorganic body of man, namely, nature insofar as it is not itself the human body. Man lives from nature means: nature is his body, with which he must remain in a continuous process in order not to die. That the physical and mental life of man is interconnected with nature has no other meaning than that nature is interconnected with itself, for man is a part of nature.”[xv]
If it is the destiny of human beings to transform nature, Engels already knew that we should not “let ourselves be overcome by enthusiasm in the face of our victories over nature”[xvi]. There are many examples throughout history of transformations whose results, positive for some people in the short term, produced what today would be called an “environmental disaster” in the long term. However, scientific knowledge developed from the 16th and 17th centuries onwards was allowing humanity to “better understand the laws of nature”, and therefore to be able to anticipate the positive and negative consequences of its interventions in it.
“And the more this becomes a reality, the more men will feel and understand their unity with nature, and the more inconceivable will be this absurd and unnatural idea of the antithesis between spirit and matter, man and nature, soul and body, an idea that begins to spread throughout Europe on the basis of the decadence of classical antiquity and that acquires its maximum development in Christianity.” [xvii].
In short, nature, in its many transformations, ended up constituting an animal species that needs to evolve in order to survive, and in order to evolve it needs to intervene in and make nature evolve as well. In this regard, in principle, this animal cannot destroy nature, because that would be its own destruction. But it also cannot “preserve” it, because that would be its own negation as the “organizing” or constructing animal, which it effectively is – by nature’s creation.
This dilemma, Bogdanov proposes in The Red Star. Communist society is established on Mars as a solution to an ecological crisis, that is, as a necessary solution for the more rigorous and rational management of increasingly scarce natural resources, squandered by capitalism that also preceded it. But when, even in a society without luxuries and ostentatious consumption, these resources are practically exhausted, it is necessary to seek new sources outside the planet: the Martian communists thought they would first find them on Earth, but realizing that they would have great difficulty in negotiating an agreement with these backward Earthlings, they opted to set up exploratory bases on Venus, despite its inhospitable atmosphere.
New challenges to be solved by human ingenuity, come on, Martian, through science and technology. The difference between this extra-planetary solution and the one that, they say, Elon Musk is imagining for his problems here on Earth, is that, in Bogdanov's fiction, the Martians had already gotten rid of their plutocrats a few centuries ago...
Levels of organization
With his theory of organization, Bogdanov seeks to integrate into a totalizing system the knowledge that is dispersed and fragmented in different branches of knowledge. His critique goes in this direction: the development of humanity and its future projects would demand a science of sciences. Proposing it was the intellectual task that he imposed on himself and in which he believed until the end of his life. He makes it clear that Tectology is not philosophy, but science. He has no doubt that in the real society in which he lived, each social group, even each individual, specialized to such an extent in carrying out the tasks that concerned them that they not only lost a greater vision of the whole but, worse, began to understand some whole only through the blinders of their own specializations. In this, again, Bogdanov converges with Lukács, who also criticizes the fragmentation of the subject in bourgeois society and states: “It is the point of view of the totality and not the predominance of economic causes in the explanation of history that decisively distinguishes Marxism from bourgeois science.”[xviii].
Nature as a whole, including the Universe, the living beings in it, and human beings among the living beings, is made up of “elements” that, by interacting with each other, build “organizations” that affect each other mutually. These elements, integrated into “organizations,” or systems, as we say today, are in permanent activity, or movement, but in this, they face “resistance.” “Activity” and “resistance” are two aspects that are not only correlated but, better said, are activities in opposite directions. What is resistance for one element is activity for the other element perceived by it as resistant. Before the Latourians get excited, what we have here is Bogdanov’s recognition of the dialectical principle of reciprocal action, although he does not go so far as to explicitly state it.
“In this sense there are no fundamental differences in nature, between the living and the inanimate, the conscious and the spontaneous, etc. Previously, there was a concept in science about resistance that is not an activity, about the 'inertia' that characterizes matter. Today, this idea has become obsolete. Matter, with all its inertia, is presented as the most concentrated complex of energies, that is, exactly as an activity; its atom is a system of closed movements, its speed is superior to all others in nature. Consequently, the elements of any organization, any complex studied from the organizational point of view, are reduced to activities-resistances.” (E, p. 103; T, p. 74-75).
Immediately afterwards, Bogdanov relativizes the very concept of “element”: “The very concept of ‘elements’, for organizational science, is entirely relative and conditional: they are simply those parts into which, in accordance with the research task, it was necessary to decompose its object; they can be arbitrarily large or small, they can be divisible or not divisible – no framework for analysis can be placed here. The elements of stellar systems should be considered as giant suns and nebulae; the elements of society are companies or individuals; the elements of an organism are cells; the physical body is molecules or atoms or electrons, depending on the task […] But since it is only in the course of research that some of these elements need to be further decomposed, in practice or just mentally, only then does a given element begin to be considered a ‘complex’, that is, as being composed of connections, combinations of any elements of the next order, etc.” (E, p. 103-104; T, p. 75).
Bogdanov describes here a system as Henri Atlan (1931- ) or Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) would describe it. The system is a totality of levels of organization acting in relation to each other. However, the limits of some of these subsystems in relation to others are not given by themselves, but by the purposes and conditions of the observer. The observer, himself, is also an element of the system, acting in it and being acted upon by it. This is the opposite of what the positivist scientist imagines. In this approach that understands the system as a all organic, for a specialist doctor – a cardiologist, for example –, the system is his relationship with the patient's heart and venous system. The rest of the body may be more or less, although never entirely, placed outside his object of observation. It is an “encompassing” level.
On the other hand, the patient’s habits, whether healthy or not, must also be “included” in his object of observation, just as his medical knowledge, his competence and his guidelines are also “elements” of this relationship. Here we have another example of subject-object identity in a relationship that, given the original difference between the two parties, ultimately forms some unity. We also have a clear example of Bogdanov’s anticipation of what is nowadays called second-order cybernetics: that developed by Von Foerster (1911-2002), Atlan, Bateson, among others: a cybernetics that does not isolate a system from its “environment”, nor, by extension, from the “noises” inherent to this “environment”, but rather considers the totality of the elements placed in a given relationship (natural, social), including the totality of the interactions between these elements (or “noises”) that affect, positively or negatively, setting in motion, the relationship itself.
Thermodynamics of equilibrium… and far from equilibrium
The laws of thermodynamics have always been a problem for so-called “orthodox” Marxism. Established by Nicolas Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), improved by Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888), James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) and Ludwig Boltzman (1804-1906), among others, they establish that, in an isolated system, that is, one that does not exchange energy, matter and information with its exterior, the energy within it neither increases nor decreases, but merely transforms (First Law), with this transformation always occurring in the same direction, from hotter to colder; or from more ordered, with form, to less ordered, or formless; or even from non-equilibrium to equilibrium (Second Law). At this point, the system is said to be in a final state of equilibrium, or maximum entropy, because, in this state, all of its elements would be equally distributed throughout its internal space. So, for physicists, the system experiences “heat death”, implying that the energy contained within it can no longer provide work.
If the Universe were considered a closed system, with no other universe with which it could exchange energy and information, its future would be “heat death,” the end of everything. Today we know that the Universe is still expanding, but on the other hand, the Sun, in a few billion years, will begin to “die” in a process in which its mass will grow, “swallowing” all the planets, including the Earth, that orbit around it. For the belief in the permanent progress of humanity that dominated ideas in the 1925th century and justified the revolutionary militancy committed to accelerating this progress, such a perspective could be frustrating and discouraging. Furthermore, this linear determinism seemed to be in contradiction with the “law of reciprocal action,” one of the three “dialectical laws” established by Engels, and should therefore be rejected outright. Such prejudices would be further reinforced after the publication, in XNUMX, in the Soviet Union, of Engels’ fragmentary notes gathered in Dialectic of Nature. In some passages, Engels shows himself to be uncomfortable with possible theological inferences that could be derived from the Second Law, but he also notes that it was still very recent at that time, and that there were therefore still unanswered questions: “it is as certain that it will be resolved as it is certain that miracles do not occur in nature and that the original heat of the nebula was not transmitted to it from outside the cosmos by a miracle.”[xx].
Many authors, critics of Marxism or, at least, of its Leninist version, especially those who, in more recent times, have put the ecological crisis on the agenda, agree that Engels “guided” the rejection of the Second Law, following the example of Bensaid.[xx], also by Martinez-Alliez, Stanley Jaki, others, cited by Foster and Burkett[xxx]. These authors, however, note that, as profound experts in the science of their time, it would have been difficult for Marx and Engels to deny the universal tendency towards entropy. More likely, if the “official” doctrine has consecrated this position, it is due to a misreading of passages that are nothing more than fragmentary notes written on different dates.
The fact is that throughout the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, no serious scientist would challenge the dominant paradigm of the tendency of systems towards “equilibrium”. If “disequilibrium” occurred, as the facts easily demonstrated, the very constitution of the system or, at the limit, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, would make it return to “equilibrium”. Von Bertalanffy would popularize the expression homeostasis to define this process. The neoclassical economic theory formulated by Williams Jevons (1835-1882) and Léon Walras (1834-1910) would adopt the principle to explain the functioning of markets: equilibrium would be typical of perfect competition; “non-equilibrium” situations would be caused by “disturbances” (state intervention, monopolies, etc.) that, in one way or another, could and should be “corrected”.
In psychoanalysis or medicine, balance meant the “homeostatic” cure of the patient. For Bogdanov, therefore, within this paradigm, the organization sought balance, although it could be the target of unbalancing forces that the organization itself should have the means to contain and return to balance. He relies on the physicist Henri Louis Le Chatelier (1850-1936) who he considers the author of the “law of equilibrium”, although, as we have seen, the principle had already been announced by Carnot, Maxwell and others.
Now, if systems regulate themselves in such a way as to remain in balance, where could change come from?
This question was also raised in criticisms of Bogdanov's theory.
After discussing several physical or chemical cases that would confirm the “law of equilibrium”, Bogdanov states that “all this applies specifically to systems in equilibrium, with unbalanced systems the situation is completely different. In them, changes occur simultaneously in two opposite directions, so one of the two groups is more stable, and therefore the whole is transformed, step by step, in its direction. What results are obtained from external action on such complexes?” (E, p. 214; T, p. 266).
In living nature, processes occur that contradict “Le Chatelier’s law” because it only applies to “internal processes of systems” that are capable, by their very nature, of reestablishing equilibrium after some unbalancing external interference. Threatened animals react, and in this reaction they can maintain equilibrium in the face of the threat or make decisions that only favor the threatening element – the imbalance increases. The human body balances itself in the face of ambient heat by sweating. But a person can open the windows or fan themselves with a fan, producing in these movements at the same time more agitation for the body, but more cooling for themselves and their environment.
“From this it is clear that, in relation to neuromuscular motor activities, the organism is an unbalanced complex. And we must remember that, in general, the same system can always be, on the side of some of the activities included in its composition, a balanced system, and on the side of others, evidently or covertly unbalanced.” (p. 217-218).
For Bogdanov, “natures that gravitate towards equilibrium, unable to develop their resistance to the environment until its exhaustion, naturally undergo degradation” (p. 219). In other words, they tend towards increasing entropy. Among them, in human beings, are contemplative, patient, humble, submissive individuals. But not every human being is like this. Remembering that “all definitions of Tectology are relative” (E, p. 219; T, p. 271), individuals, for Bogdanov, can also be full of “initiative and impetuously militant” (E, p. 221; T, p. 273). In a “backward country”, a “progressive movement” can also break the “balance” in the face of state reaction, “deepening its slogans, changing to more radical forms of struggle”, which “characterizes these organizations as systems of the second type”, that is, “unbalanced” (E, p. 222; T, p. 274).
“In equilibrium complexes there are always antagonistic activities that neutralize each other at some level […] If such a complex is exposed, it means that new activities entered it coming from the external environment, corresponding to one or other of these antagonistic groups.” (E, p. 223; T, p. 275 italics MD).
In this case, these are “unbalanced complexes because a new influence changes the course of an already ongoing structural transformation.” ongoing” (And, p. 223; T, p. 276, italics in the original).
Bogdanov stopped here, in volumes 1 of Essay and Tectology. In the following volumes, he will further develop his ideas about systems in “crisis,” systems that change due to conditions that disrupt their equilibrium. He thus stops exactly at the threshold of describing the systems far from equilibrium, foretold by Brillouin when exorcising “Maxwell’s demon”[xxiii]; announced by Henri Atlan when developing the principle of “organization through noise”[xxiii]; consecrated by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenghers, who responded, although without even having an idea, to Engels' questioning of the formation of nebulae[xxv]. If any system tends towards entropy, at some point, obviously, it would have to be organized far from equilibrium: negentropy, an expression coined by Brillouin. Due to factors that may be random, elements aggregate and, from there, become an increasingly aggregating, organizing force, up to some thermodynamically determined limit. Clouds, for example, Priogogine and Stenghers explain, are formed and then dissolve into rain due to permanent natural forces of order and disorder, negentropy and entropy. It was necessary to wait until the second half of the 20th century for the paradigm of equilibrium to give way to that of non-equilibrium. Perhaps it would not have been necessary to wait so long if Bogdanov's thought, instead of being repressed and silenced, had been better studied, understood, developed, perfected, and also corrected in some points, in the USSR of Lenin and Stalin.
The historical need for Tectology
“Societies based on the division of labor and the exchange of commodities, which do not have some integral system of work, can only express their tasks on some partial scale,” states Bogadanov in Tectology (T. p. 52). This would explain the fragmented specialization of knowledge throughout history and the need for a “new way of thinking” to emerge, as capitalism engendered large and integrated productive organizations and, within them, a social class that, through its “life relations, the atmosphere of work and struggle,” would have to give rise to this “lacking way of thinking” (E. p. 89; T, p. 56): the industrial proletariat.
Based on the basic principle that human activity, in its relationship with nature and in its social relations, is organizational, Bogdanov understands that, throughout history, human beings have been divided into two large groups: those who organize work and those who perform work. This generalization of the principle of class struggle would become one of the points most attacked by his critics, as it apparently did away with politically and ideologically strong and easily understood opposing concepts, such as slaveholder/slave; noble/serf; capitalist/worker.
But for Bogdanov, in the monistic logic of the unity of opposites, “the deepest separation in the sphere of cooperation was that which separated the organizer from the executor, mental effort from physical effort. In scientific techniques, the labor of the worker encompasses both types. The work of the organizer is the management and control over the executor; the work of the executor is the physical impact on the objects of labor. In mechanized production, the activity of the worker is the management and control of his ‘iron slave’ – the machine – by means of physical influence on it. The elements of labor power here are both those that were required only for the organizational function, such as technical competence, knowledge, initiative in case of breakdowns; and those that characterized the execution function – dexterity, speed, and skill of movements. This combination of types […] appears more clearly and definitely as the machine is perfected, becomes more complex, and approaches more and more the type of ‘automatic’, self-activating mechanism, in which the essence of the work lies in living control, proactive interference, and constant active attention. The combination will be fully complete when a still higher form of machinery is developed – the self-regulating mechanisms. That, of course, is a question for the future […]” (E, p. 90; T, p. 56-57).
This passage is in line with Marx's projections, in floorplans, although Bogdanov is known to have had no access to these drafts, first published in 1939. As mechanization and industrial automation advanced, Marx wrote, labor would no longer appear “so much involved in the process of production when the human being relates to the process of production much more as a supervisor and regulator.”[xxiv]. Burawoy, in a theoretical and empirical critique of Braverman, demonstrates how, in a highly mechanized industry, workers can have, at least at the machine level, some active and conscious control of the process[xxv]. Dantas, also in empirical research, added other elements to the same argument[xxviii].
There is clearly much to discuss on this point, but this is impossible within the limits of the space and objectives of this article. It is important to note that, for Bogdanov, it was a question of educating the working class of his time to become aware of its role not only as an executor, but also as an organizer as a consequence of the development of the productive forces of labor and, of course, of the leading role it should assume in a future socialist society. In other works, he does not fail to record that an intermediate layer of “technical-intellectual” workers (who would later become the “white-collar workers”) was already being formed, who were taking on the functions of organization on behalf of the capitalists. Hence the great importance he would give to the cultural and ideological struggle preceding and coinciding with the revolutionary struggle itself. This point, not discussed in depth in this article, would become another decisive bone of contention between him and Lenin.[xxviii].
In conclusion
In a low shot, of Realpolitik, Bogdanov and his work were defeated and erased from history, as were many other Bolshevik leaders, by the leaders who best understood and knew how to operate the circumstances of the time: notably, Lenin and Stalin. But his ideas, seeking to understand the whole, were perhaps even difficult to grasp and subjectively comprehend by revolutionary social-democratic cadres, later Bolsheviks, later Soviets, and also by ordinary workers, generally specialized and educated people, intellectually and practically, in fragments of knowledge. Not even Lenin could be considered a polymath.
Another obstacle facing Bogdanov would be the difficulty that Marxism, as systematized and codified by the later Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, among others, would have with ideas, even rigorously scientific ones, that could call into question the Enlightenment belief, via Hegel or Saint Simon, in the deterministic progress of humanity, hence, in the unquestionable communist future. If science was abandoning Newtonian determinism for the relativity that would culminate in Einstein and Heisenberg, the science of History would also need to admit that necessity can be a function of probabilistic arrangements, which “removed Marxism’s prophetic force,” as Rodrigo Nunes observes in his introduction to the Brazilian edition.[xxix].
From the 1970s onwards, not coincidentally following the relative openness that followed Stalin's death, Bogdanov's works and thought began to be rediscovered and revisited. A growing number of scientists, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, began to publish articles on his theories, often facing reprimands from the establishment Soviet academic. In this review, it would become clear that Bogdanov's ideas had anticipated the general systems theory of Von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) and the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener (1894-1964).
For some of these new scholars of Bogdanov's thought, he would not only have been the real creator of systems theory, but it would be very difficult for the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in his formative years in the 1930s, not to have been aware of the German translation of Tectology[xxx]. However, he would have “forgotten” to cite it, taking all the “glories” of the theoretical revolution that began there. It is worth noting that while Wiener, to define his science, looked for a Greek word that translates as “control”, Bogdanov looked for another Greek word but that translates as “construction”. The difference is significant.
But Bogdanov lacked the ontological, epistemological and theoretical concept of information, which was only developed from – and critically from – Claude Shannon's pioneering article in 1948.[xxxii]. There is no organization without information, according to Rapoport: “Energy had been the unifying concept underlying all physical phenomena that involved work and heat. Information became the unifying concept underlying the functioning of organized systems, that is, systems whose behavior was controlled in order to achieve some pre-established objectives”.[xxxi]
The relationships that Bogdanov describes as “activities” or “resistance” can be updated in the concept of information – action oriented towards a purpose. The “new activities” that affect the “organization” are “noises”, in the concept of Foerster or Atlan, criticizing Shannon, which can disorganize as well as organize, improve, and make the organization grow. Through information, Brillouin demonstrated, the organization can maintain its degree of negentropy, even if, as Bogdanov also knew, it “exports” entropy to some other level of the system as a whole. In the overall balance, the maintenance of non-equilibrium at one level increases the tendency towards equilibrium at another level.
This balance is inherent to the survival and evolution of living species. Nor has it ever been a major problem for humanity, whose survival and evolution have always occurred through the negentropic transformation of the organic and inorganic nature around it, also knowing how to organize itself, in the Bogdanovian sense, to withstand or overcome the eventual entropic effects of its work on its environment. Until, in its historical evolutionary process, humanity released extraordinary productive forces that led it to a way of life far from equilibrium: capitalism. The solution to the gigantic entropy that capitalism is therefore also generating, and cannot help but generate, would be the Martian one, from Bogdanov's utopia. Or Marxian...
*Marcos Dantas He is a retired full professor at the School of Communication at UFRJ. Author, among other books, of The logic of information capital (Counterpoint). [https://amzn.to/3DOnqFx]
Notes
[I] Juta Scherrer (1984), Bogdanov and Lenin: Bolshevism at the Crossroads, in Hobsbawn, Eric (Org.) history of marxism, Vol. 3, Rio de Janeiro: Peace and Land, pp. 189-243.
[ii] Alexandr Bogdanov, Red Star, New York: Routledge, 2020. See also, Marcos Dantas, The Red Star, the earth is round, 19/09/2021, available at https://aterraeredonda.com.br/a-estrela-vermelha/, accessed on 07/03/2025.
[iii] J. D. Bernal (1965 [1954]). Science in History, Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, vol. 3; David Noble (1977). America by Design, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press
[iv] C. Wright. Mills (1969 [1951]). The new middle class (White Collar), Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.
[v] Bernal, op. cit., pg 731-732
[vi] Bernal, op. cit. pg 736-737; Ian Stewart (2013). 17 equations that changed the world, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, pp. 294-297.
[vii] Georg Lukacs (1989 [1922]), History and class consciousness, Rio de Janeiro: Elves.
[viii] Lubomir Sochor (1987), Lukács and Korsch: the philosophical debate of the 20s, inEric Hobsbawm (Ed.), history of marxism, vol 3, pp. 13-69, pg. 21.
[ix] Alexander Bogdanov (1996 [1913-1917]), Bogdanov's Tektology, Peter Dudley (editor), Hull, UK: Center for Systems Studies Press.
[X] A. Bogdanov (1984, 2nd ed.), Essays in Tektology: the General Science of Organization, George Gorelik (translator), Seaside, USA: Intersystems Publications.
[xi] All quotes taken from the English edition of Tectology were translated into Portuguese by me – MD.
[xii] For simplicity and to avoid repetition, all references cited are from the English edition of Tectology, will be identified by the letter T. References to the Essay, in its Brazilian edition, will be identified by the letter E. In the many cases where citations can be found in both editions, the text displayed is that of the Brazilian edition, indicating the corresponding page in the English edition.
[xiii] Jean-Pierre Dupuy (1982). Orders and Disorders: survey about a new paradigm, Paris: The New York Times.
[xiv] Alvaro Vieira Pinto (2005), The concept of technology, Rio de Janeiro: Counterpoint, 2 vols.
[xv] Karl Marx (2004 [1982]). Economic-philosophical manuscripts, São Paulo: Boitempo, pg. 84, italics in the original.
[xvi] Friedrich Engels (1961 [1896]) On the role of labor in the transformation of ape into man, in K. Marx & F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2, pgs. 270-281, Rio de Janeiro: Ed.
[xvii] ditto, ibidem.
[xviii] Lukács, op. cit., pg. 41.
[xx] Friedrich Engels (2020 [1985] [1925]). Dialectic of Nature, New York: Routledge, p. 306
[xx] Daniel Bensaid (2003). Untimely Marx: greatness and misery of a critical adventure, Buenos Aires: Herramienta, pgs. 483-487.
[xxx] J. B. Foster and P. Burkett (2008). Classical Marxism and the second law of thermodynamics, Organization & Environment, v. 21, no. 1, pp. 3-37.
[xxiii] Léon Brillouin (1988 [1956]). The science and the theory of information, Paris: Éditions Jacques Gabay.
[xxiii] Henri Atlan (1992 [1979]). Between the crystal and the smoke, Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Jorge Zahar
[xxv] Ilya Prigogine. and Isabelle Stengers (1984). The new covenant, Brasilia, DF: UnB Publishing
[xxiv] Karl Marx (2011 [1982]). floorplans, New York: Routledge, p. 588.
[xxv] Michael Burawoy (1979). Manufacturing consent, Chicago: The University of Chicago.
[xxviii] Marcos Dantas (2007). The meanings of work: production of values as semiotic production in informational capitalism, Work, Education and Health, v. 5, n. 1, pgs. 9-50, available IN THIS LINK, accessed on 09/03/2025
[xxviii] Zenovia A. Sochor (1988). Revolution and Culture the Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy, Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
[xxix] Ricardo Nunes (2024). From the point of view of the organization: Bogdanov and the Augustinian left, in Alexander Bogdanov, Essays on tectology: the general science of organization, vol. 1, Rio de Janeiro: Machado, pg. 11.
[xxx] Vadim N. Sadovsky and Vladimir V. Kelle (1996). Foreword: Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov and “Tektology”, in Bogdanov's Tektology, cit., pp. iii-xxix.
[xxxii] Claude Shannon (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, v.27, n. 3: pgs. 379-423.
[xxxi] Anatol Rapoport (1976). Mathematical aspects of general systems analysis, in Anohin, PK et alii, Systems theory, Rio de Janeiro, RJ: FGV Publishing, p. 29.
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