From the Organizational Point of View: Bogdanov and the Augustinian Left, Part 1

For Dri

“Progress and Entropy,” the first chapter of Norbert Wiener’s 1950 The Human Use of Human Beings, is also a short treatise on demonology. After starting, as one might expect, with Maxwell’s famous demon, the text turns to comparing two versions of the devil, which Wiener defines as Manichean and Augustinian. In the first, proposed by the heresy that Saint Augustine first embraced and then devoted himself to fighting, the devil would be an active force opposed to order, an infinitely creative adversary capable of any trick in his quest to disorganize 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 the measure of our own weakness … the passive resistance of nature and [not] the active resistance of an opponent.”1

The scientific name for this resistance is “entropy.” Wiener’s conviction that the second of the two versions is the right one stems from the idea that “we are immersed in a life in which the world as a whole obeys the second law of thermodynamics: confusion increases and order decreases.”2

This precept, the mathematician hastens to explain, does not require abandoning all hope of success in the fight against the silent enemy:

The second law of thermodynamics, while it may be a valid statement about the whole of a closed system, is definitely not valid concerning a non-isolated part of it. There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these islands enables some of us to assert the existence of progress.3

Thus, if in an ultimate sense “progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape,”4 this does not imply the impossibility of “local and temporary” victories, nor the absence of reasons to fight for them.

Aleksander Aleksandrovitch Malinovsky, known by the pseudonym Aleksander Bogdanov, was born on August 22, 1873 in Sokólka, now Polish territory, and died in Moscow fifty-four years later as an apostate from Russian Marxism. (A text he wrote at roughly the same time as the Essays on Tektology was titled “A Decade of Excommunication from Marxism (1904–1914),” and would only come to light in 1995, more than eighty years too late.) Although the theoretical polemics levelled against him were often smokescreens to disguise disputes over control of the Bolshevik fraction of the future Russian Communist Party, it could be said that the fundamental reason he ended his life as a pariah and heretic was his attempt to incorporate into Marx’s doctrine the implications of a scientific revolution that began 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, turned physics away from thinking about what will necessarily happen to what can happen with sufficient probability, and brought about the transition from the rigidly deterministic universe of Newtonian mechanics to the contingent universe of contemporary science––the incompleteness of which, “almost an irrationality in the midst of the world,” resembles Freud’s admission of “a deep irrational component in human behaviour and thought.”5

What did this imply for Marxism, to which Bogdanov would adhere in Tula, the town to which he was banished at the end of 1894 after taking part in a protest as a chemistry student at Moscow University? An important consequence touches on a central point in the scientific pretensions of the orthodoxy elaborated by followers who were less informed about the science of their time than Marx was himself, and who had therefore overlooked the transformations taking place at the time: historical determinism. When natural science was abandoning 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 outcomes, which stripped Marxism of its prophetic force while elevating the problem of organizing these outcomes 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 nurtured by the revolutionary project. In the end, as the Martians discovered in the communist science fiction novel Red Star, published by Bogdanov in 1908, winning the class struggle was no more than overcoming a historical fetish that stood in the way of recognizing the real struggle: that of the species against the passive (and active) resistance imposed by its environment––a struggle that even communism could never bring to an end and which, ultimately, could never be fully won.

Article in New York Times in 1984.

The suspicion that the second law of thermodynamics had smuggled into the heart of the century of science and progress is that, if there is any final equilibrium, it is not that of the plenitude of human fulfilment, but rather the state towards which a system in which disorganization and indifference grow over time statistically tends. “If it turns out to be true that the universal process tends to a stable equilibrium through a continuous growth in entropy, then the entire life of the universe in our phase of it would also turn out to be” a “crisis” of the kind Bogdanov characterizes as “fading,” in which the final equilibrium differs imperceptibly from the initial one and any changes that have occurred are progressively erased.6 Thus, even the “universal irreversibility of natural processes” exemplified by the cumulative gains in organization produced by natural selection would finally find itself, if not strictly speaking reversed, at least extinguished by the relentless advance of ultimate disorganization.7

This singularity of Bogdanov’s Marxism stems from an encounter that probably preceded his discovery of the master from Trier: the one he had in the last decade of the nineteenth century with the empirio-criticism of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius and the energeticism of Wilhelm Ostwald. Bogdanov took at least three central ideas from these authors, by association with whom he would be obstinately flagellated by Lenin in 1909’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism. One of them is monism, that is, the imperative to find a single framework from which to think about terms usually treated as separate, indeed opposed: the physical and the mental, the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the inorganic, nature and culture, action and knowledge. The other two are the conservation of energy and natural selection, as the scientific principles capable of providing the key to such a unifying endeavor. As Bogdanov already put it in his 1899 Basic Elements of the Historical View of Nature, what all things absolutely 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. In this way, both principles can be combined to say that the most viable adaptation will always tend to be the one that is the most energy efficient.8

But the Bogdanovian heresy went even further, going so far as to criticize “dialectical materialism” itself, a term coined not by Marx but by the “father of Russian Marxism,” Georgi Plekhanov. Since his first work of philosophy, Basic Elements of the Historical View of Nature, Bogdanov saw Hegel as a limited precursor to himself, and dialectics as an insufficiently universal method, since “development through contradictions” was only one of the possible cases of development, and its applicability was restricted to phenomena of organic nature, leaving out the nonliving. Furthermore, by employing the linguistic model of argumentation as a metaphor to make sense of all that happens (affirmation-negation-negation of the negation), dialectics curtailed its own powers of analysis. It became unable to think anything that did not adequately conform to the model, which in turn made the use of concepts such as “negation” and “synthesis” arbitrary and approximate. (“It stands to reason that Hegel’s dialectic could not be other than the model of an argument, since he substitutes thought for real processes.”9) Thus, it was able to offer only low-resolution images of things that were best described as a dynamic equilibrium of opposing forces or tendencies present in the same environment, which went through moments of crisis in the search for new equilibria. This did not stop Bogdanov from recognizing “the truth of its day” in Hegel’s system because “cognition is the organization of experience,” and Hegel’s had been the greatest effort in this direction up to that point.10 But if “processes in nature come about not only through a struggle of opposites but also by other means,” dialectics must be “a special case, and its model cannot become a universal method”––hence the “need to move forward to a broader and more universal point of view.”11 This point of view would become “tektology” (from the Greek tekton, “builder”), a name borrowed from the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who had used it, however, to speak only of human activities.12 It was to tektology, simultaneously constituted as the “universal science of organization,” that fell the cognitive endeavor of organizing the experience of its time.

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 is the Essays on Tektology as it has appeared in English and, now, in Portuguese. It develops ideas that had been with Bogdanov for some time, starting with the very conclusion, which had first been aired in 1901’s Perception from a Historical Point of View, that a universal science of organization had become imperative because of the fragmentation of knowledge and society produced by the division of labor.13 The centrality of organizational work, in turn, already figured in A Short Course in Economic Science, from 1897, and in Basic Elements, from 1899, in the form of the opposition between “organizers” and “executors,” the original foundation of the class struggle, whose history extended from primitive to modern societies. Equally present in those works was the suggestion that industrial society contained within itself the conditions for overcoming this separation, insofar as, as machines took on the role of specialized executors, workers who supervised them increasingly became organizers endowed with a vision of the whole. This is, in fact, one of the most (and perhaps unjustifiably) optimistic aspects of Bogdanov’s thinking: contrary to the association between the advance of industry and the deskilling of labor, or a notion of technical alienation such as that later developed by Gilbert Simondon, Bogdanov saw in modern machinery liberation in the making.14 For him, it anticipated a form of nonauthoritarian cooperation, which from 1901 onwards he would call “synthetic” or “comradely,” that had to be organized and expanded so as to become the basis of the society of the future.

While his relationship with the science of his time may ultimately have never fully upended his conviction in the inevitability of communism, it did temper it with a belief in the need for what Maoism would come to know as “cultural revolution”––a term that Bogdanov was in all likelihood the first to use. For him, the liberatory opportunity brought by the industrial revolution required the development of a proletarian culture independent from the dominant bourgeois culture, a task that the proletariat should begin to undertake before the seizure of power so as to combat its own contamination by the individualistic and authoritarian habits of the bourgeoisie, as well as to prepare itself for its future task as organizer of society. This idea would be one of the bases for the creation of the Vpered (Forward) group during the disputes with Lenin over control of Bolshevism (1909–12), and, after the 1917 Revolution, of the “proletkult” movement, which operated as an independent organ 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 farewell to politics, seven years before his death. Tektology, the synthesis of all of humanity’s organizational experience up to that point, was the scientific pillar of this project.

The Organizational Point of View

While 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 great novelty of the work of the 1910s was the discovery of the “organizational point of view,” announced for the first time in the 1913 text “The Secret of Science.” This, “the only monistic understanding of the universe,” is the perspective from which organization and its mechanisms appear as the most universal reality.15 Everything is organized, from the inorganic to living matter, which is tantamount to saying that everything organizes—every event that occurs can be thought of as an act that produces organization—and, finally, that everything organizes itself, or in other words, that the universe as a whole is a self-organized phenomenon that consists of the constant organization, disorganization, and reorganization of its parts: “An infinitely unfolding fabric of all types of forms and levels of organization, from the unknown elements of ether to human collectives and star systems” which, “in their interlacement and mutual struggle, in their constant changes, create the universal organizational process, infinitely split in its parts, but continuous and unbroken in its whole.”16

What is, then, organization? The book offers two distinct and complementary definitions, one indirect, the other explicit. If human labor discovers that “any product is a system organized from material elements by means of joining them with the elements of energy of human labor,” then it is possible to generalize from this that organization consists of the joining of elements through the expenditure of energy.17 “No conjunction whatsoever—not only this, biological, but none whatsoever, in the most general tektological sense of the word—can occur without an expenditure of activities,” hence also energy.18 But this also means that, from the point of view of a system composed in this way, organization corresponds to a combination of activities that overcome resistance; 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 it is organized,” that is, “practically greater than the simple sum of its parts.”19 From this one can conclude that to adopt the organizational point of view is to observe any complex or system “from the point of view of the internal relationships among all of its parts and also the relationship between it as a whole and its environment; i.e., all external systems”20––a principle that clearly places Bogdanov as a precursor of what would become known, after the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1950s, as “systems theory.”

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, a Bolshevik propaganda poster by El Lissitzky that abstractly represents the defeat of the Whites by the Red Army, 1919 - 1920. License: Public Domain.

Several consequences follow from this. The first is the (co)relativity of organization and disorganization: if every creation is an organization of existing elements, elements which in turn were already involved in other arrangements, what appears to one system as a gain in organization will inevitably appear to others as a loss, and vice versa. Of course, this does not prevent the organizational gain of one system from also representing a gain for another, for instance in a situation where two systems are in collaboration or one is a subsystem of the other. What is clear, in any case, is that the organizational point of view supposes a form of perspectivism. This is even more evident in that which is the central conceptual pair of tektology, the notion of “activity-resistance.” As Bogdanov observes, if “two armies or two classes are engaged in a struggle, then the activities of each side represent resistances for the other; the whole matter is but a question of the point of view taken.”21 Bringing both sides of the coin 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 nonmoral way of conceiving it. If organizing oneself and the world implies disorganizing other things, there is no good or bad action in an absolute sense; as Deleuze taught with regard to Spinoza, in a world where no perspective is privileged, there are always relations that compose with one another, even if they imply the decomposition of others, and therefore nothing can be said to be “good” or “bad” without it being at the same time specified “for whom.”22 To put it another way, and against another kind of moralizing effort, there is no power for which it is not immediately also power over. As a matter of fact, perhaps the best term of comparison for Bogdanov’s resistance-activities is Michel Foucault’s concept of power—which is profoundly distorted every time we try to distinguish between two different forms of power, one good and “from below,” the other bad and “from above,” when the point is precisely that we are always talking about one and 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.”23 Resisting is always already acting on something and, conversely, suffering an action is always already resisting it in some way, even if only “passively.”

It is not just organization and disorganization, activity and resistance, that are relative realities and correlated terms; the same goes for the pair organization/self-organization. In fact, the difference between the two depends solely on the scale of analysis: the same process which, on the scale of the elements, can be described as the action of some systems upon 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,” in Bogdanov’s words.) This follows from three other consequences of the organizational point of view: hierarchy, quasi-decomponibility, and scale relativity. By the first, taken here in the ecological sense of the term,24 it is meant that complex systems are made up of elements that are themselves complex systems, forming a multilayered, nested structure of systems within systems at different levels of integration. By the second, we must understand the property of structures of this type whereby 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 makes it possible to isolate one or more levels of analysis from the others, treating interactions of lower frequency (occurring at higher hierarchical levels) as constant and interactions of higher frequency (occurring at hierarchical levels lower than the scale of observation adopted) as too brief to be relevant.25 Thus, according to the third consequence, terms such as “system,” “subsystem,” and “element” do not have concrete referents in any absolute sense, but rather depend on how an observer chooses to carve up a system’s hierarchical structure.26

If the organization of a system is a function of the relationship between its activities and the resistances it encounters in its environment (or, to put it differently, “the relative activities-resistances of [this] complex and its environment”27), and if the environment “is connected with the current of world events, and with strict analysis, it spreads in the end, to the entire universe,” and “consequently … inevitably changes,”28 then 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 it is despite the disorganization with which it is threatened by its surroundings. As a matter of fact, “activity” refers first and foremost to what Spinoza called conatus: the endeavor of each system to maintain itself in existence (hence why all activity is also automatically resistance).

In addition to natural selection and the conservation of energy, another scientific principle that Bogdanov intends to generalize is Henry Louis Le Chatelier’s so-called “Law of Equilibrium,” according to which “systems which are in a state of equilibrium tend to preserve it by producing internal opposition to forces changing it.”29 And given that disturbances are continuous and heterogeneous, and so is the effort to compensate for them, the preservation of a complex or form can only be understood as a dynamic equilibrium 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 cannot be a complete, absolute balance of opposite changes,” it is “always only approximate and practical.”30 We say that a thing is preserved if the difference between the loss and gain of organization is small enough that it can be seen as remaining sufficiently equal to itself within the scale of time and detail in which it is observed.

A corollary of this dynamic and processual approach is that “full, ideal organization is nonexistent in nature; disorganization is always admixed to it to some degree.”31 On the other hand, absolute disorganization cannot exist either: In what sense could an absolutely disorganized entity be said to be 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 perspectivity of the concept of activity-resistance, whereby every organization at one point presupposes disorganization at another, implies that organization and disorganization, “ingression,” and “disingression,” “assimilation” and “disassimilation,” connection and disconnection, continuity and discontinuity are mutually limiting. “A full break-up of connections and absolute separateness of complexes does not and cannot exist in our experience, which is united by universal ingression,” that is, the fact that all things are continuously connected even if each thing is not connected to every other thing. What varies is the “degrees of separateness” between them, hence another reason why reality is, so to speak, objectively relative to the action of the observer: “To solve a problem, it may be necessary to take into account separateness in some cases, in others it is also necessary to consider connections.”32 Finally, what from the point of view of the totality or of the relationship between systems appears as mutually limiting qualities imply, from the point of view of a system taken in isolation, qualities that appear to that system as trade-offs (“tektological contradictions”): complexity and instability, diversity and coherence, plasticity and robustness, diffusion and compactness, differentiation and counter-differentiation.

To be continued in the April 2025 issue of e-flux journal.