Nietzsche, like Marx, is a decisively post-Hegelian thinker. Both thinkers place primary emphasis upon human history, although both -in clear opposition to Hegel - stress future, not past, history. Students of Nietzsche have sometimes been misled by his early essay, Yom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historiefur das Leben (1874) - a title usually translated simply as The Use and Abuse of History, but more accurately as "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of the Historical Consciousness for Cultural Vitality." The "disadvantage" which Nietzsche sees in a hypertrophied historical consciousness is that the "dead" weight of the past stifles present cultural creativity. But for Nietzsche such creativity is not an end in itself; rather, it serves future history, enriching a cumulative culture which is in process of becoming.
The customary opposition of Nietzsche and Marx as individualist and collectivist, respectively, is a dangerous half-truth. For Nietzsche no individual has value or dignity except as a creator and "transvaluator" of cultural values whose creativity serves future history, enriching a public tradition of high culture. Individuals, for Nietzsche, have only historically instrumental value; but their function is essential, since they, and not committees or collectivities, create historical culture. (Certain of the Russian "Nietzschean Marxists" denied the individual nature of cultural creativity, asserting that historical collectives are the true creators of art, science, and philosophy. See Sections 6 and 7 below.)
Marx assigns primary value neither to individuals nor to historical culture, but to historical society. However, Nietzsche's culture-centeredness applies to both present and future, whereas Marx's societycenteredness may be interpreted (although the texts are skimpy and inconclusive on this point) as applying only to the historical present
and immediate future. Man-centeredness, in the sense of recognition of the worth and dignity of the human individual, may apply to the remote post-capitalist future. On this reading, one might say that, for Marx, intrinsic value will accrue only to the unalienated, creative individuals of future communist society. Until that time individuals have only historically instrumental value: those who work to bring about a communist society are to be respected as persons. Those who refuse or fail to do so are to be treated as mere obstacles on the path of historical progress.
Thus, one might say that Marx offers an ethically humanist, perhaps even ethically individualist, ideal for the future, although he clearly rejects ethically humanist, and ethically individualist, principles for the present. Nietzsche does something very similar: he rejects ethical principles as constraints upon free creativity in the present, and he offers an ideal - aesthetic, to be sure, rather than ethical - of the creative individual of the future.
Both thinkers regard present, uncreative and conformist individuals as having only instrumental value, as being valuable only in so far as they serve to bring closer a future in which it will be possible for individuals to be nonconformist and truly creative. But, in Marx's view, beyond a certain future date all individuals will be nonconformist and creative. In contrast, in Nietzsche's view, even in the remote future, only some individuals will be nonconformist and creative, while the majority will remain, as before, conformist and uncreative.
Marx, in short, envisages an ultimate "levelling up" of human individuals; Nietzsche would insist that every levelling is a "levelling down." On this point Marx appears to be more utopian than Nietzsche.
With respect to the ideal of the future, Marx is less remote from ethical individualism than Nietzsche: The liberated, "de-alienated" individuals of the communist future, Marx suggests - though he does not state this explicitly - will, or may, have intrinsic, noninstrumental value. But for Nietzsche even the ultimate t}bermenschen will not, as individuals be ends in themselves, but only, or primarily, instrumentalities for the enrichment of a high historical culture. In other words, for Nietzsche the creators of future culture will themselves be futureoriented, i.e., directed toward and valued in terms of their contribution to, the high culture of their own historical future.1
1 For a somewhat more detailed comparison of Nietzsche and Marx (together with Kierkegaard) as "post-Hegelian," and allegedly "anti-Hegelian" thinkers, see my article, "Some Critical Comments on Marx's Philosophy," in N. Lobkowicz, ed., Marx and the Western World (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967),420-422.
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2. Nietzsche's Impact in Russia
From what has been said it should be clear that "Nietzschean Marxism" is an intellectually respectable position. In fact, many of the young Russian intellectuals who, at the turn of the century, were attracted to Marxism were equally drawn to Nietzscheanism. But before considering their attempts to synthesize Marx and Nietzsche, let me say a few words about the historical impact of Nietzsche's thought in Russia.
Nietzsche began to have an influence in Russia in the 1890'S, at about the same time that he was becoming influential in Germany and France. Like Kant in the 1880'S, Nietzsche in the 1890'S massively displaced both the Hegelianism and the anti-Hegelian positivism that had dominated European thought during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century.
The first study of Nietzsche's philosophy in Russian, by a Professor V. Preobrazhenski, appeared in the Moscow journal Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii in November 1892. It was followed in 1893 by three further articles in the same journal (by Professors Astafiev, Grot, and Lopatin), in 1894 by a Russian translation of Max Nordau's book "Degeneration" (Entartung), with two chapters on Nietzsche, and in 1898 by translations of the Nietzsche commentaries of Riehl and of Simmel. The Russian translation of Lichtenberger's La Philosophie de Nietzsche appeared in 1901, that of Vaihinger's Nietzsche als Philosoph in 1902 with another edition in 1903, that of FouilIee'sNietzsche et l'immoralisme in 1905. During the first decade of this century Russian authors produced a flurry of books2 and articles devoted to the literary, cultural, and philosophical aspects of Nietzsche's work. Russian journals of philosophy and theology published a number of articles on Nietzsche, most of them sharply critical, by foreign as well as Russian authors.
Nietzsche was widely translated into Russian. Between 1895 and I9IO virtually all of his works appeared in that language. Ten volumes of his selected works were published in 1900. The complete works (edited by S. L. Frank and G. Rachinski) began to appear in 1908, but the edition was interrupted by the First World War and never finished.
This is clear evidence of widespread interest in Nietzsche's thought. But was Nietzsche only a fin de siecle fashion in Russia, a variation on
2 Two ofthe earliest, and most substantial of them, were: N. 1. Gerasimov, Nitssheanstvo (Nietzscheanism), (Moscow, 1901,) 207 pp.; Nikolai Avksentyev, Sverkhchelovek: Kulturno-eticheski ideal Nitsshe (The Overman: Nietzsche's Cultural and Ethical Ideal), (St. Petersburg, 1906), 267 pp.
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the theme of literary and cultural decadence? That he was something more serious was testified to by widely different sources. Thus, N. K. Mikhailovski's left-wing Populist journal Russkoye Bogatstvo acknowledged, while deploring, the enormous interest and excitement aroused by Nietzschean ideas, especially among young intellectuals. The politically conservative newspaper M oskovskiye Vedomosti grouped Nietzsche with Marx (and, interestingly enough, Tolstoy!) as source of an intellectual poison which was corrupting the faith and morals of Russian young people. One Russian critic declared as early as 1901 that Nietzsche was already exerting a powerful influence upon Russian thought, and could no longer be dismissed as a passing intellectual fancy.S
3. "Nietzschean Marxism" in Russian
The Kantian revision of Marxism in Russia, represented by Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and Struve, flourished between ca. 1896 and 1902.4 Nietzschean Marxism emerged in Russia in about 1903, mainly in works published in the decade 1903-1912 by four talented young men: Volski, Lunacharski, Bogdanov, and Bazarov.5 Bogdanov, the oldest of the four, was born in 1873; Volski, the youngest, in 1880. All of them reached intellectual maturity shortly before the turn of the century.
These four thinkers were also distinguished among early Russian Marxists by the fact that they were either creative writers, literary critics, or excellent prose stylists. Their literary talent was genuine, if minor; and Maxim Gorky - referred to by one Russian critic as "our 'home-grown Nietzschean' "6 - was for a time closely associated with this group.
Lunacharski wrote poetry, plays, short stories, and sketches in addition to critical and theoretical works. Bazarov and Volski, who, so far
3 M. P. Nevedomski, Preface to the Russian edition of Henri Lichtenberger's La Philosophie de Nietzsche, (St. Petersburg, 1901), i. Mikhailovski published two long, severely critical articles on Nietzsche in Russkoye Bogatstvo for November and December, 1894. They are reprinted inPolnoye sobraniye sochineni N.K. Mikhailovskovo (Complete works of N.K. Mikhailovski), 4th ed., VII (St. Petersburg, 1909), cols. 923-976.
4 For an account of the Kantian Marxists, with special emphasis on (early) Berdyaev, see my essay, "Leszek Kolakowski and the Revision of Marxism," in G. L. Kline, ed., European Philosophy Today (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), esp. 132-134 and 140-142; also my "Theoretische Ethik im russischen Friihmarxismus," Forschungen zur osteuropiiischen Geschichte, Bd. 9 (1963), esp. 271-274.
• There were no Nietzschean Marxists in Germany, although there were several Kantian Marxists (Eduard Bernstein, Otto Bauer, Ludwig Quessel) and at least one Darwinian Marxist (Karl Kautsky). German Marxists evinced little intellectual interest in, and no ideological sympathy for, the thought of Nietzsche.
• M. P. Nevedomski, in Lichtenberger, op. cit., cxx.
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as I can determine, wrote no belles lettres, affected a brilliant, almost Nietzschean, style in their philosophical writing. Bogdanov was probably the least gifted in a literary way, but even he tried his hand, with moderate success, as a novelist. He wrote a socialist utopian fantasy, Krasnaya zvezda (The Red Star), and a science-fiction novel, Enzhiner Menni (Engineer Menni).
Thus all of the Nietzschean Marxists were sensitive to the problems of artistic creativity and freedom. It was natural that they should have found in Nietzsche - philosopher-poet, "aesthete," and furious critic of normative morality - a congenial support for their own revisions of Marxism.
Like other Marxist revisionists (including the Kantian Marxists), the Nietzschean Marxists centered their critical scrutiny and doctrinal innovation in the two "underdeveloped areas" of classical Marxism: ethics and epistemology. I shall concentrate on their views in ethicsconstrued broadly enough to include social philosophy and the philosophy of man. I shall not discuss their epistemological views - even though all four of them wrote copiously on epistemology - for two reasons: (a) in this area they were least original (a partial exception is afforded by Bogdanov's socially-oriented "empiriomonism") and most submissively dependent upon Western sources; (b) because their sources were not in Nietzsche, but in the "empiriocritical" writings of Mach and Avenarius.
In contrast to their generally unimaginative appropriation of "empiriocritical" themes, their assimilation of Nietzschean themes was free and constructive. Each of the four modulated and exploited Nietzschean insights and distinctions in a different way. '
It is perhaps natural that admirers of Nietzsche should have been nonconformists, that, far from constituting a homogeneous group, these four thinkers should have been extremely free-wheeling in their ways of combining Marx and Nietzsche. All of them followed Nietzsche in rejecting deontological or normative (especially Kantian) ethics. All of them were concerned to free the creative individual from the "tyranny of the ought." They insisted that Marx's proletariat, like Nietzsche's Obermensch, stands "beyond (bourgeois-Christian) good and evil."
All of them stressed free volition, desire, and creativity. But they disagreed sharply on the question of whether volition and creativity should take individual or collective forms. The more individualistic (and hence more orthodoxly Nietzschean) among them were Volski and Lunacharski; the more collectivistic (hence more orthodoxly Marxist), Bogdanov and Bazarov. However, the "collectivism" of the last-named
"NIETZSCHEAN MARXISM" IN RUSSIA 171
- as opposed to the deontological or morally-obligatory collectivism of later Leninists and Stalinists - was meant to be voluntary and nonobligatory. The Nietzschean collectivists maintained that under socialism individuals would/reely desire to subordinate their individual creativity to the creativity of the collective. The Leninists and Stalinists (including contemporary Soviet Marxist-Leninists) insist that individuals are, and will be, duty-bound to subordinate their interests to those of the collective.
Ranged on a spectrum from most to least individualistic, the Nietzschean Marxists would stand: Volski, Lunacharski, Bogdanov, and Bazarov. I shall consider them in that order. 7
But before doing so, I wish to make one further preliminary remark. For the Nietzschean Marxists, as for Nietzsche himself, the rhetoric and passion of their utterance is of its essence. One can paraphrase the Kantian Marxists (or Kant himself) without serious loss of content; but paraphrase of the Nietzscheans (or of Nietzsche) seems to me to entail major loss. Hence, in what follows I shall frequently quote their words in direct - if inadequate - translation. This will also permit a fairer judgment of their strength, as well as their weakness, as writers. All of them were romantics and, to a degree, utopians. Their prose at its best is powerful and passionate; at its worst it is overblown and sentimental.
4. Stanislav V olski
Volski's real name was Andrei Vladimirovich Sokolov. He was born in 1880, and died around 1936, during the Stalin purges, in circumstances that have not yet been clarified. Expelled from Moscow University in 1899, he was an active Bolshevik until March 1917, when he broke decisively with Lenin. During the 1920'S and 1930'S he was reduced to the role of literary popularizer and translator. But in 1909 he had published the longest and most systematic treatise on ethics in the literature of pre-Soviet Russian Marxism. He called it The Philosophy 0/ Struggle: An Essay in Marxist Ethics,S and described it
7 I have briefly surveyed the four Nietzschean Marxists' views on the question of the individual person in my essay, "Changing Attitudes Toward the Individual," in C. E. Black, ed., The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change Since I86I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 618-624. The views of Vol ski and Bazarov are sketched in my "Theoretische Ethik ... " (cited in fn. 4 above), 275-278. For concise summaries of the philosophical - including epistemological - views of Volski, Lunacharski, Bogdanov, and Bazarov, see my articles in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan & Free Press, 1967).
as an investigation of the various forms in which the individual's struggle with the natural and social environment expresses itself. The position which Volski's book develops might be called a "pluralistic ethical individualism."
Societies - Volski asserts - belong to individuals, serving them as weapons or instruments in their struggle with the natural environment. But in "bourgeois" society (based on what Volski calls "fixed" division of labor) the individual is free to develop only within the narrow confines of a specialty. He is self-alienated, conformist, myopic. The bourgeoisie as a class imposes conformity, undercutting any originality which its individual members might strive to attain.
In contrast, the future classless society (based on "variable" division of labor) will be made up of nonconformist, self-determining individuals. In sharp opposition to the bourgeois, the proletarian of the future will be unafraid of selfhood, hospitable to originality.
For the historical present, Volski admits, class solidarity and discipline, which restricts individuality, is a tactical prerequisite to victory in the class struggle. All classes use moral norms as instruments of power. To be effective, class morality must be exclusive - valid only for a given period of human history and for a specific class. The "intense living morality of the [present] historical moment" has never appeared before and will not appear again. 9 The temporary but essential function of proletarian morality is to solidify and energize the proletariat. In this sense, Volski asserts, moral altruism is an instrument of destruction (of the old order), not creation (of the new). "For battle one must forge a good sword and a good shield [Le., proletarian morality] - after the battle is over, let them rust in the museum of the new man."lO All obligatory norms, he insists, will eventually disappear. With the defeat of capitalism, the individual, released from the "numbing pattern of coercive norms" and the ethics of duty - "the inevitable companion of bourgeois society" - will be free to make of himself an "integral, harmonious personality."ll "The class," Volski writes, "sees in itself something to be eliminated, [in] the individual something to be asserted."12 The bourgeoisie, he declares, freed the individual in the hour of its revolution (i.e., in 1789) only to enslave him in the hour of its triumph; the proletariat commands the individual in the hour of its (future) revolution only to free him in the hour of its triumph.
9 Ibid., 2.
10 Ibid., 9-10.
11 Ibid., 272, 37. 12 Ibid., 282.
"NIETZSCHEAN MARXISM" IN RUSSIA I73
The system of values created by free individuals in a classless society will be wholly exempt from class sanction - or indeed any other supraindividual sanction. In the process of creating such values, Volski adds, the "socialization of methods [e.g., in science] is accompanied by an individualization of goals."13 Science is purely instrumental; the individual knows in order to desire more strongly. (This formulation is borrowed from Lunacharski.) Ultimate goals or ideals are plural and diverse, but the means of achieving them are single, a focus for the unified application of social energies. "The moral consciousness of the struggling proletariat," Volski writes, "will sound not as a monotonous church psalm [i.e., in unison], but as a powerful symphony of the most varied instruments, combined in a single harmony by the forces of the elemental storm of history, yet preserving the entire fulness and depth of each individual self."14 However, the proletariat "is not the legislator of mankind, but only the preface to mankind ... a transition, a purging fire, the soil for a future harvest, an instrument for universally human creation."15 In the remote future (Volski sometimes speaks of the future of a thousand years hence) all men will be creative; genuine creativity will permeate the "prose and poetry of life, placing its stamp upon all manifestations of human thought."16
The ultimate moral ideals of socialism, Volski admits, can at present only be dimly guessed at. Their shape is unclear. Yet, "precisely there, in the hazy distances of the future, lies that which is most precious and sacred for the individual. ... Only there is man proud, strong, bold and fair; only there, in harmony of feeling and all-encompassing knowledge, will grow the ruler of the universe, for whom our contemporary reality serves as a mere pedestal."17
The dim present is linked to the radiant future by continuity of struggle. "Struggle," Volski exclaims, "is the joy of being," and "socialism is freedom of struggle. Everything that increases struggle is good; everything that diminishes it is bad."IS Such struggle is wholly unlike the competition of bourgeois society; it is a competition not for what is but for what ought to be. It is a clash of ideals and (cultural) values; its source lies in the individual's sense of overflowing creative power.
Developing Nietzsche's insight that "enemy" means not "villain" but
13 Ibid., 300.
u Ibid., 15. 15 Ibid., 272 .
16 Ibid., 277. 17 Ibid., 12.
18 Ibid., 306, 302.
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"opponent," Volski writes: I grant full freedom to the individual whose ideal is inimical to mine; I strive to make him an "integral personality," and work with him to remove external impediments to our sharp and clear collision. In struggling with me he enriches me. He enlivens my highest value, pressing it eternally forward. He causes me to experience "a great intensity of will, a great ecstasy, when the soul- winged with a passion for victory - flies over the earth like a whirlwind, craving for obstacles in order to destroy them. Thus he strikes sparks from me and kindles a flame with which I set mankind afire. "19 "And if I should be vanquished in this struggle," Volski exclaims, I want to recognize in the eyes of my conqueror "the same passion, the same power, the same great thirst for life, which inspired me."
"Of all those who surround me," Volski asserts, " ... the most precious, most essential is he with whom I struggle for life and death."20 He is both friend and enemy; I want both to vanquish and to preserve him. To strengthen myself I must strengthen him and those like him. "Such," Volski concludes, "is the morality of 'friend-enemies' - the morality of the future."21
The future, in fact, was to be quite otherwise. Volski's book was one of the Jast defenses of ethical individualism (on a secular foundation) to appear in Russia. Leninists have been notably impatient with "Nietzschean" revisions of Marxism, particularly those -like Volski'swhich bear a strongly individualistic stamp.
5. A. V. Lunacharski
Anatoli Vasilyevich Lunacharski (1875-1933) joined the Russian Social Democratic (Marxist) Party in 1892. Because of radical political activities in secondary school, he was not permitted to matriculate at a Russian university. He attended lectures at Kiev University and at the University of Zurich, where in 1894-1895 he studied under Richard A venarius; this experience left him a permanent convert to the "empiriocritical" epistemology.
Lunacharski returned to Moscow in 1897, was exiled to Vologda (1899-1902), and spent several years between 1904 and 1917 in Western Europe. He was the first People's Commissar for Education (1917-1929). If he had not died a natural death in 1933, it seems likely that
19 Ibid., 30 9. 20 Ibid., 3 ID.
21 Ibid., 31 I.
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he would have shared the fate of other old Bolshevik intellectuals who were purged during the late 1930's.
Lunacharski's ethical and social theory is essentially Nietzschean and anti-Kantian. (His value theory, however, is essentially positivistic, inspired mainly by Avenarius.) As a self-styled "aesthetic amoralist,"22 he rejects the categories of duty and obligation, stressing free creativity and the unfettered "artistic" shaping of ends and ideals.
He was sarcastic about Kantian ethics, although he recognized it as "the most profound moral system that the bourgeoisie [sic!] has produced."23 Kant, Lunacharski declared, would explain a hen's actions in protecting her chicks by postulating that "there is in her a spark of the divine fire, and this spark, through the categorical imperative, causes her to act as every hen ought to act in her place."24
Lunacharski called his own ethical position an "aesthetics of practice" or "aesthetics of life." He avoided the terms 'ethics' and'morality', which for him had a strong Kantian flavor. To be sure, he used the term 'aesthetics' in a broad and ullconventional sense, equivalent to "general theory of valuation." "We acknowledge the aestheticians of life," Lunacharski declares, "the artists of life, the creators of ideals. Nietzsche is a creator of ideals .... "25
Referring specifically to the relation between Marxism and Nietzscheanism, Lunacharski writes: "Rejecting morality, or rather acknowledging in its place only a morale sans sanction ni obligation ... , some Marxists find Nietzsche's critique of morality, and much in the positive doctrines of the 'philosopher with the hammer' of great interest."26 The French phrase, of course, is from Guyau - the title of his major work.
The only function of moral obligation, and hence of moral norms, for Lunacharski is an instrumental one: to serve as a means for the richer gratification of desire and the fuller manifestation of will, in a word, to increase the "fulness of life" (polnota zhizni - probably a translation of Nietzsche's FiJ,lle des Lebens).
"Nietzsche," Lunacharski wrote in 1903, "and all the other critics of the morality of duty, have defended the autonomy of the individual
22 R. Avenarius: Kritika chistovo opyta v populyarnom izlozhenii A. Lunacharskovo (R. Avenarius: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, Expounded for the Layman by A. Lunacharski), (Moscow, 1905), 206.
23 A. V. Lunacharski, Moral s marksistskoi tochki zreniya (Morality from the Marxist Point of View), (Sevastopol, 1925), 14 .
• < Ibid., 17. 2. " 'Problemy idealizma' s tochki zreniya kriticheskovo realizma" ("Problems of
Idealism from the Viewpoint of Critical Realism"), Obrazovaniye, NO.2 (1903), 136f. 26 Review of Periodical Literature: Obrazovaniye, No.2 (1904), 151.
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person, the individual's right to be guided in his life solely by his own desires."27 He goes on to reject laws, norms, and even "universally human ideals" as constraints upon the free individual.
Moral indoctrination, according to Lunacharski, can generate only slaves. In contrast, "the aesthetic preaching of [individual] life-ideals generates not new obligations. but new, higher needs."28 An ideal should be regarded "not as categorically demanding, but as raising its splendid (prekrasny) voice at the inner council of the impulses, and emerging victorious ... by the power of immediate aesthetic emotion, ... "29 Lunacharski preaches not the "ideal above," but the "ideal ahead" (in history), the ideal of the Vbermensch - the fulness of self-affirming life, "whole, flourishing, triumphant, creative. "30
"We set no limits whatever," Lunacharski writes, "to the will to power and love of the far-off [Nietzsche's Willezur Macht and Fernstenliebe], i.e., a striving to realize one's ideals in their broadest scope .... The more grandiose the scope, ... the more self-sacrificingly the individual person consumes his energies in the name of his ideals - the better."3i
Lunacharski opposes the attempt - by Bogdanov and Bazarov, among others - to "transform the individual into a cell of the social organism,"32 and speaks of a future social order which will provide "the broadest foundation for an infinitely luxurious growth of the most varied individualities." Yet his own preference for "macro-psychic" (broad-souled) over "micropsychic" (narrow-souled) individualism seems to impel him toward a "collectivist" view.
"The most wonderful word in human language," he writes, "is the word 'we'." This "greater I" makes it possible for us to "rejoice in victories which will be achieved a century after the death of the 'little I,' to live the life of generations long dead, which also were a part of the 'we', .... "33 The I of the macropsychic individualist, he writes, "is identified with some broad and enduring 'we' ."34
Lunacharski's characteristic stress on the historical continuity of the creators of culture links his ethics and social philosophy to his philosophy of religion.
29 Etyudy (Studies), (Moscow, 1922), 250. 30 "Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki" ("Foundations of Positivist Aesthetics"), in Ocherki
realistichcskovo mirovozZ1'cniya, ed. S. Dorovatovski and A. Charushnikov, (St. Petersburg, 1904), 13I.
al "'Problemy idealizma' .... " 136. 3. Etyudy, 255. aa Ibid., 255, 256. "' Lac. cit.
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The faith of the active human being," he declared in 1904, "is a faith in future mankind; his religion is an aggregate of those feelings and thoughts which makp. him a co-participant in the life of mankind, a link in the chain which stretches toward the overman (sverkhchelovek = Nietzsche's Vbermensch), toward a beautiful and powerful creature, a perfected organism .... 3•
I cannot enter here into further discussion of the Promethean "religion of God-building (bogostroitelstvo)" which Lunacharski elaborated and Gorky celebrated during the decade before 1917.36 Such a position, though it has roots in Hegel, Feuerbach, and early Marx, is essentially more Nietzschean than Marxist. It was brusquely repudiated by Lenin and his followers.
6. A. A. Bogdanov
Bogdanov, whose real name was Alexander Aleksandrovich Malinovski (1873-1928), was trained in psychiatry at Kharkov Medical School, served as an army surgeon during the First World War, and was one of the founders (in 1926) of the Moscow Institute for Blood Transfusion. (He died as the result of a transfusion experiment performed upon himself under conditions which suggest suicide.) He became a Marxist in 1896 and divided his mature energies between Bolshevik politics and the elaboration and popularization of Marxist economics, philosophy, and sociology. He is probably best known for his neo-Machian "empiriomonist" theory of knowledge and experience, a position violently attacked by Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909).
Bogdanov shares with Bazarov, his fellow collectivist among the Nietzschean Marxists, a basic doctrinal tension. Both are genuinely concerned to free the individual from the constraints of coercive norms and binding obligation; yet they proceed to dissolve the "emancipated" individual in an impersonal social collective.
Bogdanov recognizes the positive function of norms, even coercive norms, in social organization. Without them, he writes, society "would disintegrate, like a human organism deprived of the regulative, unifying activity of its [central] nervous system."37 Without norms, economic exchange would degenerate into relentless mutual robbery; competition would become a physical annihilation of competitors; class
35 "Osnovy ... ," 181. 36 It is discussed at some length in Ch. 4 of my Weil Lectures, which will be published
in 1968 by the University of Chicago Press under the title Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia.
37 "Tseli i normy zhizni" ("The Goals and Norms of Life"), 1905; reprinted in a collection of Bogdanov's essays called Novy mir (The New World), (Moscow, 1920), 54.
178 "NIETZSCHEAN MARXISM" IN RUSSIA
struggle would take the form of "a cruel and bloody intraspecific war. "38 However, norms - as "forms of life" - are of two radically different
kinds. Bogdanov calls them, respectively, "coercive norms" (normy prinuzhdeniya) and "expediency norms" (normy tselesoobraznosti). It might be less misleading to call them "sanctioning" and "instrumental" norms, respectively. In any case, they correspond to the Kantian categorical and hypothetical imperatives.
All norms are "organizing adaptations for the social life of human beings."39 The organization of social life involves regulation and adjustment of its various manifestations. Such regulation may be either coercive or non-coercive, i.e., effected by expediency norms that merely specify which means are best adapted to achieving a given (freely chosen) end. Their form is: "If you desire x, you must do (or choose) y."
Coercive norms, according to Bogdanov, compel without giving reasons or analyzing relevant conditions; they are rigid, inflexible, exempt from criticism. In contrast, expediency norms are non-coercive, flexible, open to criticism. Their model is the technical or scientific rule.
"Norms of external compulsion," Bogdanov writes, "prescribe man's very goals, or at least the limits of those goals. Expediency norms leave the choice of goals open .. ,,"40
Bogdanov considers expediency norms to be widely accepted in science and technology, but not yet accepted in social, political, or economic relations. The contemporary capitalist system, he wrote in 1905, "is sustained wholly by coercive norms. The [coercive legal] norms of property and contractual subordination comprise the soul of capitalism."41
Socialism, Bogdanov insists, will put an end to the "great fetishism" of coercive norms. Socialist society will be governed entirely by expediency norms. The general goal for which such norms will stipUlate specific means is the "maximum of life" for society as a whole, coinciding with a maximum of life for each of its members. Under socialism man will be not an embryonic but a developed being, not a fragmented but an integral being.42 In his essay of 1906 entitled "The Integration of Man" - at the head of which he placed the Nietzschean epigram, "Man is a bridge to the overman" - Bogdanov sketched the collectivist
38 Ibid., 55. 39 Lac. cit. 40 Ibid., 70. n Ibid., 56 . .. "Sobiraniye cheloveka" ("The Integration of Man"), (1906); reprinted in Navy
mir, 40.
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ideal. "Integrated man," master of the "monism of science," will be freed from both coercive norms and functional specialization.
And his creativity will be collective. "The most revolutionary task in history," Bogdanov declared in 1920, "is to move from ... individual to collective creation."43 Earlier Bogdanov had asserted that all great cultural achievements were in fact collective; that Faust was not the individual creation of Goethe, or the theory of evolution the individual discovery of Darwin. Both men merely placed the final touches on an extended collective effort.44
Future socialist society will be a recurrence, "in higher form," of that primitive communism in which "individual interest was not separated from collective interest ... , man was organically fused with the whole, with the group or commune, as cells are fused togetherin living tissue."45 In such a society the individual, "being conscious of himself as an integral part of a greater whole, living a life continuous with its life, ... will lose the very idea of egoistic, narrowly individualistic ends. At the same time, the coercive norms which regulate the conflict of those ends will become superfluous."46
Bogdanov denies that his Nictzschean-Marxist cultural collectivism entails the elimination of individual differences. "In the collective each [individual] supplements the others .... But he can supplement them only to the extent that he is unique and ... independent."47
However, Bogdanov's science-fiction novel The Red Star suggests that individual differences will be reduced to a bare minimum. His idealized Martians - who have enjoyed collectivist "socialism" for several generations - are almost identical in physical appearance. It is difficult to distinguish their sexes. (Masculine and feminine names are indistinguishable.) The earthling-hero lives and works with a Martian doctor for several months before he discovers that she is a female; when he does, he promptly falls in love with her !48
It is in this work of 1908 that Bogdanov gives sharpest expression to the distinction between a Nietzschean morality of free desire and a Kantian morality of duty. The hero contrasts his wife's "Kantian-
43 Preface to v. o. Likhtenshtadt (Lichtenstadt), Gete (Goethe), (Petrograd, 1920), iv. 44 Padeniye velikovo Jetishizma ("The Fall ofthe Great Fetishism"), Moscow, 1910, 46.
Bogdanov adds that on "socialist Mars" - the "Red Star" of his science-fiction novelmonuments are erected only to historical events, whereas before the advent of socialism Martians, like earthlings, erected monuments to individuals. (Krasnaya zvezda, originally published in 1905; reissued Moscow, 1923, 86.)
U "Tsely i normy zhizni," 90. 48 Loc. cit. 47 "Ideal vospitaniya" ("The Ideal of Education"), 1915; reprinted in N ovy mir, 135. 48 Krasnaya zvezda, 73, S3, 10Sf.
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Marxist" views with his own "Nietzschean-Marxist" position: "She went into the revolution under the banner of duty and sacrifice, I under the banner of free desire .... For [her] proletarian ethics was sacred in itself; I considered it a useful adaptation, necessary to the working class in its struggle, but transient, like the struggle itself and the lifesystem which generated it.. .. I held that ... socialist feeling, which makes people comrades in work and joy and suffering, will develop in complete freedom only when it throws off the fetishistic wrapping of all morality."49
Little wonder that Bogdanov has found no favor with Leninists and Stalinists busy erecting the vast structure of interlocking "coercive norms" of their self-proclaimed "socialist law" and "communist ethics"!
7. V. A. Bazarov
Bazarov, whose real name was Vladimir Aleksandrovich Rudnev (1874-1939), was trained as an economist. Though less involved in politics than either Bogdanov or Lunacharski, he was prominent in the Bolshevik faction between 1904 and 1907. After 1922 he worked as an economist in the Soviet State Planning Commission, publishing technical papers until the late 1920'S. He was arrested in 1930, and died, presumably in a forced-labor camp, in September 1939.
Bazarov, in 1904, launched an attack upon normative ethics which has few parallels in the West, apart from Nietzsche himself, and can be compared only to the later revolt of Shestov and Berdyaev among Russian thinkers. His first essay in ethics bears the characteristic title "Authoritarian Metaphysics and the Autonomous Individual."50 Bazarov admits only instrumental norms, norms which serve as "means for attaining the joys of life." Non-instrumental norms are for him "metaphysical" and "authoritarian." He lashes out at "sodden, dull, selfsatisfied moral systems through which life appears in the most desolate light.. .. Life, it may be, appears a hopelessly vulgar thing precisely because it is viewed through the dim glass of moral norms .... To seize life's mystery, one must revolt against norms as such .... "51 What we need, Bazarov declares, is a rejection of law itself, a Brutus of crime, an ascetic, "saintly" criminal, like Raskolnikov (the hero of Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment).
49 Ibid .• 8f . • 0 "Avtoritarnaya metafizika i avtonomnaya lichnost," in Ocherki realisticheskovo
mirovozzreniya (the volume cited in footnote 30 above). 61 Na dvafronta (On Two Fronts). (St. Petersburg. 1910). 105. (This is a collection
of previously published polemical essays with a new preface.)
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Bazarov's own ethics of "hedonistic amoralism," with its principle of the "free harmonizing of experience," is a curious blending of A venarius and Nietzsche. The hedonistic amoralist undertakes "to order his psyche in such a way that new values ... may be conjoined to the old with minimum friction: the principle of harmonization of given hedonistic values should at the same time clear the way for a transvaluation of all values."52 Bazarov's kind of hedonism, as he makes clear, is quite distinct from both utilitarianism, on the one hand, and "orgiastic Dionysian impulse," on the other.
Here Marx and Nietzsche would concur: their highest good is not the security-oriented life of passive enjoyment, but the freedom-oriented life of active creation. To create is to risk, even to court, pain and loss. "Socialism," Bazarov declares, "is higher than capitalism, not because it eliminates suffering, but because it eliminates the suffering which degrades .... "53
Ethical individualism, for Bazarov (as for his fellow-collectivist Bogdanov), is reactionary, although in earlier periods it had been a source of social progress. In bourgeois society the individual is formally supreme, but factually empty and impotent - a mere "theoretical construct," generated by the institution of private property.
In the socialist society of the future emphasis will fall upon a new "sobornost,"M upon "objective, immediately-social creativity, in which the very notion of 'the individual' and his interests will be extinguished ... "55 The "impenetrable horizontal and vertical partitions which ... destroy the meaning of collective life-building [zhiznestroitelstvoJ for all men ... " must and will be eliminated. "Only socialism is creating the sword with which, at last, the multifarious 'I's' - those 'moneychangers in the temple' of universally-human impersonal creativity" -will be driven out.56
At the present time, Bazarov admits, "the single, universally-human world, a world which is immediately objective, i.e., not walled off into the miserable little cells of self-sufficient individualities, can only be prefelt, detected only as a tendency of development." But in fact the intimacy of lovers offers only a "pale 'preimage' ... , a faint hint of that
52 "Avtoritarnaya metafizika ... ," 275, 236. 53 Na dva franta, xiv. 54 Bazarov here uses Khomyakov's term, which may be translated as 'conciliarity,'
i.e., "organic (religious) togetherness." Presumably the sobornost which Bazarov has in mind will be "new" in the sense of being both secularized and focussed upon cultural creativity.
5. N a dva franta, 141. 5. Ibid., 164, 61.
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fusion of all human souls which will be the inevitable result of the communist order. "67
At only one point does Bazarov's collectivism appear to verge toward the "normative" or "deontological." He asserts that "artists of disorderly individual searching" will be replaced by "artists in schools which move by plan [planomerno] toward their goal. "58 This "movement according to plan" suggests an element of coerciveness, or at least normativeness, which in general is foreign to Bazarov's thinking. Its relevance to the politics of Soviet art is too obvious to require comment.
More characteristic (and more Nietzschean) is Bazarov's claim that socialism "will liberate the spirit of cultural creativity, will create for the first time the possibility of a 'pure,' self-sufficient culture, not subordinated to the extrinsic interests of individuals or groupS."69
Bazarov's collectivism frankly excludes any recognition of the intrinsic worth and dignity of the human individual. "It really is an astonishing thing," he exclaims, "because, for purposes of zoological and certain other classifications, it is convenient to refer to me and to another given individual by the same term, 'man' ... that 'man' as such should become the highest task of my life, that I should be obliged to recognize a practical [i.e., moral] universal validity between myself and every empirically given human being."60 Later, emphasizing the collectivism and solidarity of the proletariat as a class, Bazarov added: "The recognition of the 'individual person' as an absolute principle has always been, and will always be, alien to the proletariat."61
Marx would have had no quarrel with this statement; nor would Nietzsche (except for the reference to the proletariat). But, since Trotsky's embarrassingly candid avowals (in Terrorism and Communism, 1920), Marxist-Leninists have been too hypocritical to admit that they, like Bazarov, repudiate in principle the absolute - or even the intrinsic - value of the individual human person.
8. Conclusion
Russian "Nietzschean Marxism" as a more or less coherent intellectual force lasted little more than a decade. Any amalgam of Nietzsche and Marx, is, of course, beset by tensions: on the issue of individual
67 Ibid., 140.
68 Ibid., 164. 69 Ibid., 208.
80 Ibid., 269. 81 Ibid., 141.
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versus collective creativity, elitism versus egalitarianism, etc. But, as I noted at the beginning, there are also many doctrinal links between Nietzsche and Marx.
However, contemporary Soviet Marxism-Leninism owes much more to Engels and to Lenin than to Marx himself. And both Engels and Lenin were highly allergic to Nietzschean ideas. (Marx died in 1883, before Nietzsche's major works had appeared; how he would have reacted to them we can only guess.) The Engels-Lenin bias explains why Nietzsche is almost entirely neglected by Soviet philosophers, and why, when he is mentioned at all, he is dismissed with standard epithets: "petit-bourgeois," "obscurantist," "reactionary."
The main reason for the disappearance of Nietzschean influence in Soviet Marxism after 1917, I think, is the emphasis (flatly unacceptable to Lenin and his followers) which all four of the Nietzschean Marxists placed upon unfettered desire, free struggle, and genuine cultural creativity - whether individual or collective.
