Abstract
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian Marxism, which was rapidly gaining intellectual and political influence, faced the need to develop its ethical concepts, since the “atheistic ethics,” represented by the philosophy of Russian narodniki and European social democrats, were found to be ideologically unacceptable. The subject of this article is an attempt to comprehend the moral problems addressed in the heterogeneous circles of Russian Marxism in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The concepts introduced by A. Bogdanov, L. Aksel’rod, and A. Lunacharsky played a critical role in this context. If Bogdanov proclaimed historical legality and morality as such to be forms of ideological consciousness that would be abolished in the course of social evolution, then Aksel’rod sought to defend and justify a universalist understanding of morality, faced with the need to reconcile this understanding with the key provisions of historical materialism. Lunacharsky, finally, found himself in an equally difficult situation, trying to reconcile the position of the self-sufficiency of the Marxist worldview with the obvious, as it seemed to him, need for its “ethical supplement” and finding a solution in peculiar identification of the ethical and the aesthetic. These attempts reflect a peculiarity of the development of Russian Marxism. In the field of ethics, in particular, it followed a path that could be described as one of narrowing interpretations‚ as a result of which a more heuristically simple and unambiguous version of the theory was created.
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Notes
‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx and Engels 1976a, p. 5).
These fluctuations are clearly visible in the Russian intellectual context of the past three decades. This period is characterized by an obvious decline in research interest in Marxism, which is completely logical from a historical point of view, being a kind of reaction to the long-term domination of the Soviet ideological system. It should also be noted that I have mentioned only historiographical reasons for the constant interest in Marxism as a factor that has shaped the modern world. Modern economic and social processes are beyond its scope, but many of their features, such as increased wealth inequality and concentrations of capital, also stimulate the appeal to certain aspects of the heritage of the Marxist tradition.
By classical Marxism I conditionally designate Marx and Engels’ legacy.
For example, one of the options is the interpretation of Marx’s philosophy as a radical form of historicism that implies moral relativism as a consistent and conscious position that was ignored by subsequent Marxists, including Engels (Cornel 1991). According to another interpretation, Marx’s critique of capitalism, sociology, and political economy was based on a holistic and consistent “ethics of freedom” (Blackledge 2012). In addition, there is a point of view which postulates that the ethical concepts created as part of the Marxist tradition are so drastically different from one another that it makes the very concept of a “Marxist ethics” problematic (Guseynov 2000).
It is noteworthy that later—in 1914—when condemning the position of German social democracy (which voted for military loans) and calling for a defensive war against “German imperialism,” Plekhanov already repeatedly appeals to the “simple laws of morality and justice” (Plekhanov 1914).
A reservation should be made that in the Russian language there are two concepts—moral’ and nravstvennost.’ They are used as synonyms. An exception is the context that considers the Hegelian distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit. In Russian Marxism at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, these concepts were used interchangeably, since the above-mentioned distinction probably seemed insignificant in the context of those tasks that were being solved by Russian Marxists at that time. In this paper, I also follow this tradition of usage.
It is noteworthy that Aleksei Remizov carried out one of his first literary experiments—translating Thus Spoke Zarathustra—while he was living in exile in Vologda.
“Furthermore, they [men] find—both in themselves and outside themselves—many means that are very helpful in seeking their own advantage, for example, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for supporting fish and so with almost all other things whose natural causes they have no reason to doubt. Hence, they consider all-natural things as means to their own advantage. And knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to believe that there was someone else who had prepared those means for their use” (Spinoza 1994, 110).
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The research is supported by Russian Science Foundation within the framework of the scientific project No. 19–18-00441 (“The Phenomenon of Evil: from Metaphysics to Moral Theories”).
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Sidorin, V.V. Ethical concepts in Russian Marxism of the first quarter of the twentieth century: A. Bogdanov, L. Aksel’rod, A. Lunacharsky. Stud East Eur Thought 75, 487–503 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-021-09460-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-021-09460-z