By RODRIGO NUNES*
Presentation of the Brazilian edition of the recently published book by Alexander Bogdanov, Essays on Tectology: The Universal Science of Organization (ed. Machado, 2025)
From the point of view of the organization – Bogdanov and the Augustinian left
For Dri
“Progress and Entropy”, the first chapter of Cybernetics and society: the human use of human beings by Norbert Wiener, is also a short treatise on demonology. After beginning, as one might expect, with Maxwell's famous demon, the text turns to the comparison of two versions of the devil, which Wiener defines as Manichaean and Augustinian. In the first, proposed by the heresy that Saint Augustine first embraced and then dedicated himself to combating, the devil would be an active force opposed to order, an infinitely creative adversary capable of any trick in his purpose of disorganizing creation. In the second, which the Father of the Church would defend after breaking with the Manichaeans, the devil would not be the opposite of order, but its absence, and “not a power in itself, but a measure of our weakness.”[I] “the passive resistance of nature and not the active resistance of an opponent.”[ii]
The scientific name for this resistance is entropy; and Wiener's conviction that the second of the two versions would be the correct one follows from the idea that “[w]e are immersed in a life in which the universe as a whole obeys the second law of thermodynamics: confusion increases and order decreases”.[iii]
This precept, the mathematician is quick to explain, does not require that we abandon all hope of success in the fight against the silent enemy: “the second law of thermodynamics, although it is a valid statement about the totality of a closed system, is certainly not valid with regard to a non-isolated part of it. There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these islands is what allows some of us to affirm the existence of progress.”[iv]
Thus, if in an ultimate sense “progress itself and our struggle against entropy must inevitably end in the slope from which we are trying to escape,”[v] This does not imply the impossibility of “local and temporary” victories, nor the absence of reasons to fight for them.
Aleksander Aleksandrovich Malinovsky, known by the pseudonym Aleksander Bogdanov, was born on August 22, 1873 in Sokólka, today Polish territory, and died in Moscow 54 years later as an apostate from Russian Marxism. (A text he wrote at the same time as these Tectology tests (it was entitled “A Decade of Excommunication from Marxism (1904-1914)”, and would only come to light in 1995, more than eighty years late.) Although the theoretical controversies brought against him were often masks to disguise disputes over control of the Bolshevik faction of the future Russian Communist Party, it could be said that the fundamental reason for him to end his life as a pariah and heretic was his attempt to incorporate into Marx’s doctrine the implications of a scientific revolution that had begun in the nineteenth century, and which Wiener attributes to figures such as James Clerk Maxwell, Josiah Willard Gibbs and Ludwig Boltzmann: the introduction of the statistical method into physics. This revolution, according to the author of Cybernetics and society, caused physics to stop talking about what will necessarily happen and instead deal with what can happen with sufficient probability, and operated the transition from the rigidly deterministic universe of Newtonian mechanics to the contingent universe of contemporary science — whose incompleteness, “almost an irrationality in the midst of the world”, resembles the Freudian admission of “a deep irrational component in human conduct and thought”.[vi]
What did this imply for Marxism, which Bogdanov would adhere to in Tula, the city to which he was banished at the end of 1894 after participating in a protest while studying chemistry at Moscow University? One important consequence touches on a central point in the scientific pretensions of the orthodoxy developed by followers who were less informed about the science of their time than Marx himself, and who had therefore overlooked the transformations then underway: historical determinism. When natural science itself abandoned necessity in favor of contingency, the scientificity of Marxism could no longer be measured by its ability to enunciate laws capable of establishing the course that History would necessarily take. Hence another consequence, of a practical and political nature: if there was no absolute historical necessity, revolution and a classless society were not inevitable results, which deprived Marxism of its prophetic force while elevating the problem of organizing these results to the position of a fundamental question. Finally, on the cosmic scale on which the new discoveries were unfolding, a consequence was imposed on the very expectation of human progress that the revolutionary project had packaged. In the end, as the Martians discovered in communist science fiction Red Star, published by Bogdanov in 1908, the struggle between classes is just a fetish to be overcome on the path to recognizing the true struggle, that of the species against the passive (and active) resistance imposed by its environment — a struggle that not even communism would ever know how to put an end to and that, in the final analysis, could never be completely won.
The suspicion that the second law of thermodynamics had introduced into the heart of the century of science and progress is that if there is any final equilibrium, it is not that of the fullness of human achievement, but rather the state to which a system in which disorganization and indifference grow with time statistically tends. “If it were true that the universal process tends toward a stable equilibrium through a continuous growth of entropy, the entire life of the universe in the phase we know of it would prove to be so,”[vii][viii] then a “crisis” of the kind that Bogdanov characterizes as “fading,” in which the final equilibrium differs imperceptibly from the initial one and any changes that have occurred gradually fade away. Thus, even the “universal irreversibility of natural processes”[ix] exemplified by the cumulative gains of organization produced by natural selection, would eventually find itself, not reversed, but extinguished by the unstoppable advance of final disorganization.
This singularity of Bogdanov's Marxism stems from an encounter probably prior to its discovery by the author of the Capital, which he had in the last decade of the 19th century with the empirio-criticism of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius and the energetism of Wilhelm Ostwald. Of these authors, for the association with whom he would be obstinately chastised by Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, from 1909, Bogdanov took at least three central ideas. One of them is the monism, that is, the imperative of finding a single framework from which to think about terms often treated as separate or even opposed: the physical and the mental, the human and the non-human, the organic and the inorganic, nature and culture, action and knowledge. The other two are energy conservation and natural selection as the scientific principles capable of offering the key to such a unification effort. As Bogdanov already stated in the Basic elements of the historical view of nature, from 1899, what absolutely all things have in common is the search for the most economical expenditure of energy possible and the need to adapt in order to remain viable in their environment — so that both principles can be combined to say that the most viable adaptation will always tend to be the one that is most efficient from an energy point of view.[X]
But the Bogdanov heresy went even further, reaching the criticism of “dialectical materialism” itself, a term coined not by Marx, but by the “father of Russian Marxism”, Georgi Plekhanov. Since the Core items, Bogdanov saw in Hegel a limited precursor, and in dialectics, an insufficiently universal method, since “development through contradictions” is only one of the possible cases of development, and its applicability is restricted to phenomena of organic nature, leaving out the non-living. Furthermore, by employing the linguistic model of argumentation as a metaphor to explain everything that happens, dialectics restricted its power of analysis in relation to everything that did not fit adequately into the model, making the use of concepts such as “negation” and “synthesis” arbitrary and approximate. (“It makes sense that Hegelian dialectics could have no other model than argumentation, since it replaces real processes with thought.”[xi]) Thus, it was only able to offer low-resolution images of things that were best described as a dynamic equilibrium between opposing forces or tendencies present in the same environment, which went through moments of crisis in the search for new equilibriums. If this did not prevent Bogdanov from recognizing in Hegel “the truth of his time”, it was because “cognition is the organization of experience”,[xii] and the Hegelian system had been the grandest effort in this direction up to that point. But if “[t]he processes in nature take place not only through the struggle between opposites, but by other means,” then dialectics is “a special case, and its model cannot become a universal method”—hence the “need to advance toward a broader point of view.”[xiii] This point of view would be the tectology (from Greek tekton, “builder”), a name borrowed from the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who had used it, however, to speak only of human activities.[xiv] It was up to it to make the cognitive effort to organize the experience of its time and simultaneously establish itself as a “universal science of organization”.
This project began to come to light in 1913, had its second part published in 1917, and finally appeared in a condensed version in 1921, which are the Tectology tests that the reader now has in her hands. He develops ideas that had already been with Bogdanov for some time, starting with the conclusion itself, which first appeared in Perception from a historical point of view, from 1901, that a universal science of organization had become necessary due to the fragmentation of knowledge and society produced by the division of labor.[xv] The centrality of organizational work, in turn, was already present in the Short course in economic science, of 1897, and in the Core items, from 1899, in the form of opposition between resources for organizers e executors, the original foundation of the class struggle, whose history would extend from primitive to modern societies. There was also already the suggestion that factory society would contain within itself the conditions for overcoming this separation, insofar as, while machines assumed the role of specialized executors, the workers who supervised them became increasingly organizers with a vision of the whole. This is, in fact, one of the most (and perhaps unjustifiably) optimistic features of Bogdanov's thought: contrary to the association between the advance of industry and deskilling [de-skilling] of work, or of a notion of technical alienation like that later developed by Gilbert Simondon, Bogdanov saw in modern machinery a liberation in germ.[xvi] It anticipated a form of non-authoritarian cooperation, which from 1901 onwards he would call “synthetic” or “between comrades”, which needed to be organized and expanded in order to make it the basis of the society of the future.
If, deep down, the Russian thinker's relationship with the science of his time perhaps never completely shook his conviction in the inevitability of communism, it in any case tempered it with the belief in the necessity of what Maoism would make known as the “cultural revolution”, a term that the author of the Tectology was probably the first to use it. For him, the liberating opportunity provided by the Industrial Revolution needed, in order to be activated, the development of a proletarian culture independent of the dominant bourgeois culture, a task to be initiated by the proletariat before taking power to combat its contamination by the individualistic and authoritarian habits of the bourgeoisie, as well as to prepare itself for its future task of organizing society. This idea would be one of the bases for the creation of the Vpered [Forward] group during the disputes with Lenin for control of Bolshevism (1909-1912); and, after the 1917 Revolution, of the Proletkult [Proletarian Culture] movement, which operated as an independent body of the new Soviet power until 1921, when Bogdanov was forced to resign from the organization's central committee due to the renewed persecution of his ideas — an episode that would seal his definitive withdrawal from politics until his death, seven years later. Tectology, as a synthesis of all of humanity's organizational experience up to that point, was the scientific pillar of this project.
The organization's point of view
If the context, motivations and objectives of this “universal science of organization” had already been familiar to Bogdanov for more than a decade, perhaps the first major novelty of the work of the 1910s was the discovery of the “point of view of organization”, announced for the first time in the text “The Secret of Science”, from 1913. This, “the only monistic understanding of the universe”,[xvii] it is the perspective from which the organization and its mechanisms appear as the most universal reality. Everything is organized, from inorganic to living matter, which is equivalent to saying that organizes everything — every event that occurs is thinkable as an act producing organization — and, finally, that everything get organizeda — that is, that the universe as a whole is a self-organizing phenomenon consisting of the constant organization, disorganization, and reorganization of its parts: “a fabric that can unfold infinitely into all kinds of forms and levels of organization” which, “in their mutual intertwining and struggle, in their constant changes, create the universal organizational process, infinitely fragmented in its parts, but continuous and indissoluble in its whole.”[xviii]
What then is organization? The book offers two distinct and complementary definitions, one indirect, the other explicit. If human labor discovers that “every product is a system organized from material elements through the addition of elements of labor energy,”[xx] it is possible to generalize from this that organization consists of the union of elements through the expenditure of energy. (“No union — neither biological nor any other, in the most general tectological sense — can take place without there being an expenditure of activities” and, therefore, of energy.[xx]) But this also allows us to say that, from the point of view of a system thus composed, the organization corresponds to a combination of activities that overcomes the resistances that oppose it; it is when the sum of the activities of a complex is greater than the sum of the resistances that it encounters, whether internally or externally, that we can say that it is organized, that is, "practically bigger than the simple sum of its parts.”[xxx] From which it can be concluded that adopting the organizational point of view means observing each and every complex or system “taking into account both the internal relationships between all its parts, as well as the external relationships between it, as a whole, and its environment, that is, all external systems”[xxiii] — a principle that clearly places Bogdanov as a precursor of what would become, based on the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1950s, known as “systems theory”.
Several consequences follow from this. The first is the (co)relativity of organization and disorganization: if every creation is an organization from existing elements, elements that in turn were already involved in other arrangements, what appears to one system as an organizational gain will inevitably appear to others as a loss, and vice versa. This does not prevent, of course, the organizational gain of one from also representing a gain for another, as, for example, in a situation in which two systems are in collaboration or one is a subsystem of the other. What is clear, in any case, is that the organization's point of view assumes a perspectivism. This is even more evident in what is the central conceptual pair of tectology, the notion of activity-resistance. As Bogdanov notes, if “two armies, two classes fight each other, then the activities of each side are resistance of the other — it is only a question of the speaker’s point of view.”[xxiii] Bringing both sides together in a single concept, as Bogdanov does, implies a great universal equalization of agency—everything that is, is simultaneously active and passive, subject and object—and a perfectly non-moral way of conceiving it. If organizing oneself and the world implies disorganizing other things, there is no good or bad action in the absolute sense; as Deleuze taught about Spinoza, in a world in which no perspective is privileged, there are always relations that compose each other, even if they imply the decomposition of others, and therefore nothing can be said to be “good” or “bad” without at the same time specifying “for whom.”[xxv] In other words, and against another type of moralizing effort, there is no power to that is not immediately either power over. Perhaps the best term of comparison for Bogdanov’s resistance-activities is, in fact, Michel Foucault’s concept of power — profoundly distorted every time one tries to distinguish two different forms of power, one good and “from below,” the other bad and “from above,” when the point is precisely that they are always the same thing. If resistance comes before power, as Foucault often said, it is not because it is something distinct from it, but precisely because all resistance is always already activity, that is, power — “a set of actions on possible actions.”[xxiv] To resist is always to already act on something and, conversely, to suffer an action is always to already resist it in some way, even if only “passively”.
It is not only organization and disorganization, activities and resistances, that are relative realities and related terms; the same is true of the pair organization/self-organization. In fact, the difference between the two depends solely on the scale of analysis adopted: the same process that, on the scale of elements, is describable as the action of some systems on others, can be seen from a higher scale as a single system self-organizing. (This is how even discontinuity and “mutual struggle” can be perceived as parts of a single continuous “universal organizational process.”) This follows from three other consequences from the point of view of organization, which are: hierarchy, a near decomposability and scalar relativity. For the first, understood here in the ecological sense of the term[xxv], we must understand the fact that complex systems are composed of elements that are themselves complex systems, forming a multilayer structure of systems within systems at different levels of integration. By the second, we refer to the property of structures of this type by which the rate of interaction between components within the same hierarchical level is much higher than the interaction between components at different hierarchical levels. This is what allows us to isolate one or more levels of analysis from the others, treating as constant the interactions of lower frequency (occurring at higher hierarchical levels) and as too brief to be relevant the interactions of higher frequency (occurring at hierarchical levels lower than the scale of observation adopted).[xxviii] Hence, according to the third consequence, terms such as “system”, “subsystem” and “element” do not have referents determined in an absolute sense, but rather depend on the cut of the hierarchical structure made by an observer.[xxviii]
If the organization of a system is a function of the relationship between its activities and the resistances it encounters in its environment (or, in other words, “of the relative activity-resistances [of this] complex and its environment”[xxix]); and if the environment “is connected with the global flow of events and, in a strict analysis, ultimately unfolds throughout the entire universe”, then “it inevitably changes”[xxx]; we must conclude that it is necessary to consider every system not as a finished entity, but as a process — the process, precisely, by which it maintains itself as the complex that it is despite the disorganization with which its surroundings threaten it. In effect, “activity” refers, first of all, to what Spinoza called conatus, that is, the effort of each system to maintain itself in existence (hence, also, that all activity is automatically resistance).
In addition to natural selection and energy conservation, another scientific principle that Bogdanov intends to generalize is the so-called “Law of Equilibrium” by Henry Louis Le Chatelier, according to which “systems that are in a state of equilibrium tend to preserve it, producing internal opposition to the forces that alter it”.[xxxii] And since the disturbances are continuous and heterogeneous, and so too the effort to compensate for them, the preservation of a complex or form can only be understood as a balance dynamic whereby emerging changes are balanced by other changes in the opposite direction. It follows that equilibrium can never be taken as “absolutely precise”: if “there can be no complete and unconditional equality of opposite changes”, it “is always only approximate, practical”.[xxxi] We say that something is preserved if the difference between loss and gain of organization is small enough that it can be considered as remaining sufficiently equal to itself within the time scale and detail in which it is observed.
A corollary of this dynamic and processual approach is that “there is no ideal and complete organization in nature: it is always mixed, in one form or another, with disorganization.”[xxxii] On the other hand, absolute disorganization cannot exist either: in what sense could an absolutely disorganized entity be called an entity, if it lacked the internal and external connections that would allow it to act and resist in its world? In fact, the constitutive perspective of the concept of activity-resistance, by which every organization at one point presupposes disorganization at some other, implies that organization and disorganization, “ingression” and “disingression,” “assimilation” and “disassimilation,” connection and disconnection, continuity and discontinuity, limit each other mutually. “A total rupture of connections and an absolute separation of complexes does not exist and cannot be given in our experience, which is unified by universal ingression,” that is, the fact that all things are continuously connected even if each thing is not connected to each other. What varies are the “degrees of separation” between them, which is another reason why reality is, so to speak, objectively relative to the observer's action: “[t]o solve a problem, it may be necessary to take into account separation in some cases and, in others, connections”.[xxxv] Finally, what from the point of view of the totality or the relationship between systems presents itself as qualities that mutually limit each other implies, from the point of view of a system taken in isolation, qualities that present themselves as trade-offs (“tectological contradictions”): complexity and instability, diversity and coherence, plasticity and robustness, diffusion and compaction, differentiation and counterdifferentiation.
Bogdanov and us
The image of the universe, and by extension of our planet, as a self-organized process in which everything is connected; the emphasis on the entropic force of disorganization and the constant tension between the activities-resistances of humanity and its environment; the certainty of the impossibility of a final equilibrium in any relationship with the environment; the understanding that the imperative of viability and adaptation also applies to humanity, which places it in a potentially precarious situation in a rapidly changing world; all this seems to make Bogdanov a contemporary for those of us who inhabit the Anthropocene. Furthermore, at a time when many claim that the ecological crisis forces us to think beyond anthropocentric exceptionalism, the Russian thinker’s monism (which drives him to seek a single set of principles from which to think about the physical and the psychic, the human and the non-human, the natural and the artificial, the living and the non-living) and the resulting organizational perspective (with the perspectivism and the great leveling that the concept of activity-resistance promotes) indicate that, for Bogdanov, the idea of extending agency beyond the limits of the human would not represent a major novelty. Finally, as McKenzie Wark has pointed out, Bogdanov demonstrated a visionary awareness for his time of life as “part of a self-regulating system, although not necessarily always capable of finding a balance”, and of the collective work of humanity as something that “transforms nature at the level of the [planetary] totality”.[xxxiv]
What, however, to make of his claim that the human task is to “master nature,”[xxxiv] or of his vision of the “human collective” as “the organizing center for the rest of nature,” which “'subordinates' and 'governs' it (…) to the extent of its energies and experience”?[xxxviii] It is necessary to pay attention, first of all, to Bogdanov's observation that expressions such as “conquest”, “subordination” and “government” are metaphors through which authoritarian forms of social organization inadequately named the tectological phenomenon of “egression”, by which a complex within a broader system begins to exert a preponderant influence over the other elements of that system.[xxxviii] Seen without the fetishes of previous historical moments, the notion of humanity as “universal egress” — universal in the sense of tending toward expansion, although always effectively limited in its scope — would not exclude either the agency of the non-human, nor the possibility of another type of relationship other than simple domination between the human and its environment; but would simply name the fact that humanity has revealed itself, in the share of space-time that it has been assigned to occupy within the “great universal organizer, nature,”[xxxix] the complex with the greatest organizing power over what was around it. Instead of a teleological destiny or metaphysical eminence, in other words, we would simply have the observation of a reality.
However, this reality turned out to have a tragic downside: the concept of the Anthropocene marks precisely the discovery that this organizing power was, at the same time, a disorganizing power on a geological scale. This fact, however, if it was not effectively anticipated by Bogdanov as such, does not occupy an entirely blind spot in his thinking either. To see how it is possible to think about it from the “universal science of organization”, it is enough to recall the perspective of the concept of activity-resistance, the fact that organization always presupposes an expenditure of energy, and the observation that the metaphor of the “struggle” against nature expresses a “disorganizing correlation”.[xl]
When he writes this, Bogdanov is clearly considering the relationship from only one of the points of view involved: nature “disorganizes” humanity, that is, it resists the latter’s efforts to transform it according to its ends. As we have seen above, however, the gain in organization in one part always implies a loss of organization in another, and this for two reasons: because elements and connections that previously belonged to one complex end up being consumed, transformed or integrated into another; and because, in the activities necessary for this consumption, transformation or integration, there is a part of the energy expended that is permanently lost in the form of heat. Wiener’s “local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy” feed on the organization existing in other parts, and as such actively contribute to the growth of entropy not only in these, but in general.[xi]
In other words, organization is a local phenomenon that always involves transfer of disorganization and entropy to somewhere else. (One only has to look at the private life of a community or union organizer to prove this.) Starting from this principle, tectology is perfectly positioned to give us an explanation of how and why the organizing activity of “universal egress” could prove to be a disorganizing force on both a local and a global scale. One only has to consider that, as this activity grows in power and scope, nature begins to respond not only with the passive (local) resistance of its arrangements and the (general) entropy that increases as a consequence of the activity necessary to undo them, but also with the activity of a series of new arrangements and nonlinear (global) reactions triggered by the advance of human action.
In other words, the organizing action of humanity, in the same process in which it demonstrates the disorganization of nature, also manifests itself as its reorganizing, and it is the activity resulting from this reorganization that eventually presents itself to humanity as resistance, that is, a force of disorganization. If it is the export of entropy that “allows some of us to affirm the existence of progress”, the ecological crisis signals the realization that there is a limit to the possibility of continuing to export entropy within a closed system without threatening its equilibrium to such an extent that the very continuity of the progress thus constructed is threatened.[xliii]
It is important to note, however, that this explanation is, at the same time, a ban on any moralizing reading of the Anthropocene and the expansion of agency beyond the human. To exist is to organize oneself, and organizing inevitably entails costs; this is as true for us as for any other being, and saying “good” or “bad,” gains or costs, always also implies saying “for whom.” What has made humans a disorganizing force on a global scale is not any moral flaw characteristic of the species, which would make it constitutively averse to a predisposition to harmony that would be spontaneous in all others; but the combination of a system of production and distribution of wealth that demands constant expansion and a huge mismatch between the growth of the capacity to produce effects and the capacity to calculate their costs. Recognizing the non-human can give us another perspective from which to make this calculation, but it cannot eliminate the fact that action has costs. Undoubtedly, it is necessary to drastically reduce them and to rethink from top to bottom the priorities according to which they are assumed, as well as the criteria for their distribution. But the fantasy of a power to that is not immediately either power over, or of an organization that does not imply costs, does nothing to address the real challenge, which is to find a dynamic balance with the environment in which the maximum flourishing of life, human and non-human, is possible. As Wark writes, “the great task” of organization remains “to find and found a totality within which to cultivate the excess [surplus] of life”.[xiii]
Great task of who, however? One point in which Bogdanov remains faithful to a certain humanism that precedes and permeates Marxism is the ease with which he refers to humanity as a collective subject. It is true that this subject is split practically from the beginning by the division between organizers and executors, which is expressed from modernity onwards in the opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But at no point does there seem to be any doubt about the unilinearity of a history in which, even if momentarily separated from this scheme, all human collectives tend to finally incorporate themselves into it and, after the elimination of that original split, come together in a single community of organizers of their world. Nevertheless, it is possible to find in Bogdanov useful principles for thinking about the synchronic coexistence of diverse human collectives, another issue that the Anthropocene tends to bring to the fore with all its force.[xiv]
His insistence that “cognition is an adaptation” whose “‘truth’ equates to its fitness to govern practice,”[xlv] and that “[the] collective is always the subject of practice”,[xlv] therefore also of cognition, it is equivalent to an attribution of truth to all knowledge based on the practice of any group in its encounter with everything that resists its work, that is, “nature”. [xlv] Arising from the friction between collective activity, under its specific conditions of organization, and the activities of the things that populate the environment, truth is always simultaneously objective (because it is limited by the regularities that practice reveals) and relative (because it is conditioned by the relations of production and by the contingencies inherent to encounters; for example, the greater or lesser natural diversity available in the field of action of a collective). Since this encounter takes place continuously in time, and its social and natural conditions are changeable, it never reaches a definitive stage, which would be equivalent to a state of static equilibrium: “There can be no absolute and eternal philosophical [or scientific] truth.”[xlviii] This other dimension of Bogdanov's perspectivism can be very useful when faced with an issue such as the environmental crisis, which involves and requires reconciling a complex ecology of knowledge and practices, to the extent that it institutes a pluralism that does not completely abandon the notion of objectivity.
Furthermore, it helps us not to lose sight of the meaning of incorporating a plurality of perspectives. If truth never ceases to be relative, it is nevertheless possible to increase its degree of generality by expanding the number of results and methods accumulated in different fields of experience that it is capable of integrating and organizing.[xlix] The relative becomes less relative –– that is, relative to more things –– in the process of trying to work out the system of its own relativity. The assumption of historical unilinearity and the confidence in the emergence of a class destined to take upon itself all the tasks of humanity lead Bogdanov to believe that the project of “unifying the experience of all people of past and present generations into a rigorous and coherent system of understanding the world”[l] can converge into a single science. The awareness of the extremely high costs and enormous blind spots of the process of forced economic, technical and cultural unification facilitated by colonial expansion gives us reasons to be much more skeptical about the motivations, viability and desirability of any and all unifying claims. What reading Bogdanov reminds us today, however, is that such skepticism must be employed pharmacologically, as a prudential principle and a tool for controlling the results of our efforts at systematization, and not as a reason to give up such efforts once and for all.
The contemporary “polycrisis”, with the ecological crisis at the forefront, presents us with “tasks organizational of unparalleled scope and complexity” whose resolution cannot be “random or spontaneous”.[li] The answer is not less coordination, but more; and this requires not fewer attempts at global modeling, but more and better, more diverse and self-reflexive ones, from different perspectives and at different scales of granularity. Democracy is, for Bogdanov, a cognitive and practical imperative before being an ethical or recognition issue: “synthetic cooperation” or “cooperation between comrades” is capable of greater achievements because a complex collective modeler is, in principle, capable of more complex models. We can be more moderate than he in our optimism without completely abandoning this insight.
The Augustinian Left
A little over a decade ago, the British art historian T. J. Clark caused some noise with a text that called for the formation of a “futureless left”, which did not expect anything “transfiguring” to happen, but rather adopted for itself a pessimism about human nature that had been during the Enlightenment a prerogative — and strength — of the right: “There will be no future, I say finally, without war, poverty, Malthusian panic, tyranny, cruelty, classes, dead time and all the ills that flesh is heir to, because there will be no future; just a present in which the left (…) struggles to gather the “material for a society” that Nietzsche believed had disappeared from the earth.”[liiii]
As we have seen so far, Bogdanov occupies a diagonal position in relation to the list of ineliminable facts compiled by Clark. On the one hand, Bogdanov truly believed in the possibility of the end of classes, poverty and tyranny; on the other, he did not believe that this meant the end of risks, effort, resistance imposed by the environment, or even, as he demonstrates, Red Star, the struggle against the scarcity of resources or the danger of overpopulation and, eventually, war (albeit interplanetary). The difference lies, first of all, in where the origin of evils is located: for the British critic, in a human nature with an innate tendency towards radical evil; for the Russian author, in the play of activities-resistances, in the material and energetic cost of each thing, in the external and internal work of disorganization. This results in a difference in orientation. Clark's left must function as katechon, and its radicality lies in its recognition of the constant presence of radical evil and in its ability to contain its worst effects. Bogdanov's, on the other hand, does not give up on its ambitions at all, but faces them without the illusion of an end point of equilibrium; his work is never finished, not because the worst always lurks, but because disorganization is always there, nothing comes without costs, and entropy and the dangers of relapse gnaw at any and every struggle to make room for the maximum possible abundance and freedom for those who participate in it.
One is Manichaean, the other Augustinian. Which of the two is more deserving of the title of tragic, as claimed by Clark? The tragedy of the first is merely human, that of subjects whom we see “perishing, devouring one another, and destroying themselves, with terrible pain often, as if they had come into life for no other purpose.”[iii] The second is cosmic: that of complexes or systems subject to the same mechanisms and laws in a universe where disorganization never goes away, entropy grows, there are non-negotiable limits, action and inaction have irreversible costs and effects. Although it boasts of its disillusioned and “mature” tone,[book] [grown up] as a distinctive feature, the first still has in common with much of left-wing political thought the fact that it occupies the perspective of a specific type of protagonist, a hero of grand gestures, the activist who risks his own life at the moment when the crisis overflows into conflict or the statesman who weighs serious and difficult decisions. The difference is only that, here, the gesture is catechontic rather than Promethean or transfiguring. Bogdanov places us in the point of view of a rarer character, the organizer. A hero of less exceptional gestures, both in size and frequency, whose pathos It is not that of someone who is always faced with the moment of decision, nor of someone who still fantasizes about a final balance, but rather the resigned irresignation of someone who understands that doing and maintaining something always has its cost, that things demand continuous effort, that given enough time and not enough work, everything falls apart; that not only “the simple effort towards the summit is enough to fill the heart”,[lv] as there is much to celebrate along the way; who knows that the true human tragedy is the awareness of contingency, of counter-finality, of the inevitability of trade-offs and choices, and their irreversibility, but that this does not give anyone an excuse for insensitivity in the face of suffering; and that one does not fight for the certainty of victory, but because not fighting — that is, not caring about existing — would be impossible.
*Rodrigo Nunes is a professor of political theory at the University of Essex, UK. Author of, among other books, Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization (Ubu, 2023). [https://amzn.to/3X2SckC]
Reference
Alexander Bogdanov. Essays on Tectology: The Universal Science of Organization. Translation: Jair Diniz Miguel. 2025, 228 pages. [https://abrir.link/NDfuS]
Notes
[I] WIENER, N. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1988, p. 35. [Ed. Brazil: Cybernetics and society: the human use of human beings.New York: Routledge, 1970.]
[ii] Ibid., P. 36.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid., P. 46-7.
[vi] Ibid., P. 11.
[vii] BOGDANOV, A. Essays in Tektology: the General Science of Organization. California: Intersystems Publications, 1984, p. 249 (Whenever an excerpt from Volume II of this translation is cited, we will use the North American edition as a reference [NE]).
[viii] It is true that, in another passage, Bogdanov shows some skepticism regarding the hypothesis of heat death of the universe: according to him, as long as science does not know sufficiently well “how the differences that are now being equalized were created (…) and the bases of the differentiation of the universe within itself”, it would be arbitrary to project a future point of “maximum counterdifferentiation”. Ibid., P. 152.
[ix] Ibid., P. 227.
[X] Bogdanov warns, however, that the best economy is not necessarily non-spending: “Victory over nature is achieved not only by the petty conservation of energy, but by its fullest and most productive use.” Such a statement, if not necessarily false, needs to be qualified in light of the reality of the environmental crisis. BOGDANOV, A. Philosophy of Living Experience. Popular Outlines. Chicago: Haymarket, 2016, p. 147.
[xi] Ibid., P. 174.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid., P. 200.
[xiv] WHITE, J. Red Hamlet. The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov. Chicago: Haymarket, 2018, p. 290.
[xv] Ibid., P. 287.
[xvi] A critique of this optimism, written by Stanislav Volsky, would appear as early as 1911 in the second issue of the newspaper published by the Vpered group, of which Bogdanov was the leading figure. See: Ibid., p. 282. Naturally, it is always possible to suggest that, on this point, Bogdanov would be, contrary to a fairly common interpretation of the German thinker, closer to Marx's true opinion. See: ADLER, Paul S. “Marx, Machines, and Skill”, Technology and Culture, 31 [4] (1990): pp. 780-812.
[xvii] See p. 55.
[xviii] See p. 51.
[xx] See p. 82.
[xx] BOGDANOV, A. Essays in Tektology: the General Science of Organization, P. 149,
[xxx] See p. 99. If the resistances outweigh the activities, we would say that it is a system disorganized and, if nothing happens to change its conditions, it is on the verge of dissolution. As for those cases in which activities and resistances cancel each other out (the sum of their sums is equal to zero), we say they are complex neutral —but such cases are rather abstractions or brief snapshots of a dynamic process in which activities and resistances are always increasing or decreasing.
[xxiii] See p. 116.
[xxiii] See p. 103.
[xxv] See DELEUZE G. Spinoza. Practical Philosophy. Paris: Minuit, 1981, p. 147 et seq [Brazilian ed.: Spinoza: practical philosophy. São Paulo: Escuta, 2002]. Spinoza, as the famous passage on lymph and chyle from the correspondence with Oldenburg demonstrates, is a pioneer both of perspectivism and, as we will see below, of the hierarchical conception of reality assumed from the point of view of organization. See SPINOZA, B. “Letter 32”, Complete Works. Indiana: Hackett, 2002, pp. 848-851.
[xxiv] FOUCAULT, M. “Le Sujet et le Pouvoir”, Sayings and Writings, vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, 2001, p. 1056.
[xxv] See, for example, ALLEN, TFH. and STARR, Thomas B. Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2nd ed., 2017.
[xxviii] SIMON, HA “The Organization of Complex Systems”, in PATTEE, HH (org.), Hierarchy Theory: the Challenge of Complex Systems. George Braziller: New York, pp. 1-27.
[xxviii] See p. XX: “The very concept of ‘elements’, for organizational science, is entirely relative and conditional: they are simply those parts into which, according to 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 laid down here.”
[xxix] See p. 103.
[xxx] See p. 179.
[xxxii] See p. 159.
[xxxi] See p. 119.
[xxxii] See p. 157.
[xxxv] BOGDANOV, A. Essays in Tektology: the General Science of Organization, P. 127.
[xxxiv] WARK, M. Molecular Red. Theory for the Anthropocene. London and New York: Verso, 2015, pp. 54, 12. Wark's work played an important role in the recent rediscovery of the Russian thinker.
[xxxiv] See p. 45.
[xxxviii] BOGDANOV, A. Essays in Tektology: the General Science of Organization, P. 184.
[xxxviii] Ibid.
[xxxix] See p. 133.
[xl] BOGDANOV, A. Essays in Tektology: the General Science of Organization, P. 184.
[xi] This is equivalent to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s insight into the economic process as a transformation from “low entropy” to “high entropy.” Such convergence is not surprising: like Bogdanov, Georgescu-Roegen was heavily influenced by Mach. See GEORGESCU-ROGEN, N. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
[xliii] Closed, that is, in the technical sense of the term: that exchanges energy, but not matter with its environment.
[xiii] WARK, M. Molecular Red, P. 11.
[xiv] Although he personally has somewhat unfortunate comments to make about this synchronic diversity; see BOGDANOV, A. The Philosophy of Living Experience, pp. 24-25.
[xlv] Ibid., P. 158.
[xlv]Ibid, “From Religious to Scientific Monism”, p. 249.
[xlv] “Nature is what people call the infinitely unfolding field of their work experience.” Ibid., p. 42. This is obviously a kind of retrospective projection that leaves aside all the collectives that did not have a concept to designate this totality or designated it by different concepts.
[xlviii] Ibid., P. 13.
[xlix] For Bogdanov, as for Lévi-Strauss, the impulse in this direction is an internal demand of thought itself, which he explains in organizational terms: “Every organization is organized precisely to the extent that it is integrated and holistic. This is a necessary condition for viability. The same is true of cognition, once we recognize that it represents the organization of experience. Therefore, organization always tends toward unity, toward monism.” Ibid., P. 236.
[l] Ibid., P. 10.
[li] Ibid., p. 243. Italics in the original.
[liiii] CLARK, TJ “For a Left with No Future”, New Left Review, 74 (2012), p. 75 [ed. bras.: For a left without a future. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2013]. For a sharp response, see TOSCANO, A. “Politics in a Tragic Key”, Radical Philosophy 180 (2013), pp. 25-34.
[iii] BRADLEY, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. Essays on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. London: MacMillan & Co., 1912, p. 23 [ed. bras.: Shakespearean tragedy. [New York: Routledge, 2009].
[book] CLARK, TJ “For a Left with No Future”, p. 59.
[lv] CAMUS, A. The Myth of Sysyphe. Gallimard: 1942, p. 168 [ed. bras.: The myth of Sisyphus. 26th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2018].
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