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Red Star Hamlet

Our Spectacular Times correspondent has sent in a report on another philosophical soliloquy from the New World's foremost cantankerous windbag.




From deep inside the Bohemian Šumava.

A young wanderer is softly singing a song based on the ancient Greek proverb: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Quietly taking in the sound of the wind through the trees and water trickling over the rocks...



...a small band of weary travellers rests, awaiting inspiration, listening for echoes of the ancient voices of the Boii people.



They are bruised and weary, their former retreat in the Hrubý Jeseník having been overrun by foreign invaders. Without assistance from anyone, they had fought for their adopted country with everything they had, then fell back through a long march into the deep woods of Southern Bohemia, to a place near the Bavarian border.

Grandmother Boob, who had journeyed with this happy tribe of New World travellers off and on for months, lay down next to her timeless old black bear, a beast with so many battle scars that it's hard to tell he was once a handsome young cub.

She poured a cup of tea from her famously ornate thermos that features a golden number 5. Handing a beaten and battered old tumbler filled with tasty Q5 tea to PQ, who was grooming his white bear (a beast somewhat mysteriously named "1987"), she said, "So. Mr. PQ, tell us more about this legendary person from the Other World whom you mentioned before the invasion of Moravia. This 'Bogdanov' character."

The bikkhini formerly known as Wren skootched up closer so she could hear better. The other members of the little gypsy caravan, along with their animal companions, gathered around too.




"Well," said PQ, "some people call him the 'Red Hamlet' because of how he anguished over the state of the revolution."



"The legends say that his name was Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, although his birth name was Alyaksandr Malinouski (which in Belarusian is spelled Алякса́ндар Маліно́ўскі). The legends about him are legion and quite instructive, I believe, for navigating our way through the sorrows and joys of the New World.

"It is said that Bogdanov joined something called the Bolshevik (majority) faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the year 1903 of the Other World calendar. For the next 6 years he was a major figure among the early Bolsheviks, second only to the famous entity Vladimir Lenin in influence.

"Between the years 1904 and 1906 of their calendar, he published three volumes of a philosophic treatise called Empiriomonism, in which he tried to merge "Marxism" with the philosophy of some comedians named Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Richard Avenarius. His work later affected a number of "Marxist" theoreticians, including Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (Никола́й Ива́нович Буха́рин), who wrote something called "Imperialism and the World Economy", a book that the Lenin fellow later plagerized under the name "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism".

"A majority of Bolshevik leaders either supported Bogdanov or were undecided five years later (that's 1,825 days in our terminology) when the differences between Lenin and Bogdanov became irreconcilable. At that point Lenin concentrated on undermining Bogdanov's reputation as a philosopher. In our world, we would say that Lenin set about trolling Bogdanov unmercifully. This was, in fact, Lenin's greatest skill, rather like Emerick. In their world, during the time of these legends, this was often accomplished by writing lengthy "books" on paper."




A ripple of laughter coursed through the camp, except amongst the anarcho-primativist compadres, who frowned, taking offense at the very idea of chopping down trees solely for the purpose of putting ink on them.

After taking a long sip of tea, PQ continued...

"In the year 1909 (which is their way of saying "about 697,262 days since the end of Beta") the Lenin published a scathing book of criticism entitled Materialism and Empiriocriticism, assaulting Bogdanov's position and, somewhat perversely, accusing him of philosophical idealism.



One of the younger bikkhus piped up, saying, "Philosophical idealism? Isn't that what you were blabbing on and on about during your last long boring lecture, with respect to the Stalin Entity and RL Fred Engels?"

"Yes," said PQ, "that's right. Now you might think that Mr. Lenin was on to something with his criticism of Mr. Bogdanov. After all, it is quite clear from the transmissions that have come over to us that Mr. Lenin succeeded in winning the leadership of the Bolshevik faction. And as you probably know, his image, his name and his personality are closely associated with the foundational mythology of Sovietism in much the same way that the Other World "K. Marx" Entity is associated with the foundational legends of Other World Communism more generally.

"It seems to me that the key lesson to be discerned in the studying the legend of Bogdonov is rather like that song you were singing earlier."



PQ smiled in the direction of the young traveller who'd been singing about old men planting trees. He continued...

"I don't mean to completely trash the Lenin Entity here. For one thing, the transmissions make it clear that he was very fond of cats. Also his life-partner, the great revolutionary librarian Nadezhda Krupskaya, was a very cool customer and she was honored by having a chocolate factory named after her, so he couldn't have been all bad, right? (RL note: Krupskaya Confections is still in operation at 21 Ulitsa Sotsialisticheskaya, 191119 St Petersburg, Russia, though it is now owned by a Norwegian company.)


Lenin, cat lover


Krupskaya, commissar of chocolate



"It is said that Alexander Aleksandrovich planted saplings that grew into trees that would last for centuries, much like this forest. Meanwhile Lenin and his cohorts, like Trotsky and Stalin, planted many trees that seemed to be strong, but then blew over, due to internal structural weaknesses, after several strong windstorms.

"This all comes back to philosophical idealism.

"OK. That's the prologue.

"Now let's take a closer look at the debate between Bogdanov and Lenin. Luckily for us, a membrane opened up recently between our New World and the so-called "Real" World where these "Bogdanov", "Krupskaya" and similar characters are said to have played out their adventures. When he crossed over, our good friend the Indolent Inuit, who travels between worlds all the time, was able to bring some fragments of these legendary texts back with him.

"In chapter 5 of "Materialism and Emperio-criticism", the great log-rolling Lenin fired up his main artillery against mighty, mighty Bogdanov in a section rather ponderously titled "Absolute and Relative Truth, or the Eclecticism of Engels as Discovered by A. Bogdanov". Evidently this little section of confused pseduo-scientific gibberish has often been deployed as a dogma-stick by so-called "Leninistas" to bonk the heads of so-called "agnostic" and "electic" socialists. So it is worth our time to study it carefully and separate out the wheat from the chaff.



"In his book, Mr. Lenin unloads his trademark polemical fury against Bogdanov for having criticized Mr. RL Fred Engels around the question of "eternal truth", something that RL Engels argued in favor of in his interesting but at times somewhat dubious work, "Anti-Dühring".

"Bogdanov had criticized Engels for using a banal and trivial example of an "eternal truth", i.e., that an entity named "Napoleon" had died on "date" referred to as "May 5, 1821". (In that other world, they don't use our handy system of simply giving each day a number; rather they use an obtuse and confusing system of "months" and "years" that are related to an amalgam of pseudo-historical and astronomical events recorded in the various ancient legends of their world.)

"The mighty, mighty Bogdanov had summarized his critique of RL Fred Engels by writing, rather clearly: "The recording of a single correlation, which perhaps even has no longer any real significance for our generation, cannot serve as a basis for any activity, and leads nowhere.”

"Choosing to interpret the scientific method in a wholly idealistic manner, the Lenin promptly trolled the Bogdanov character's observation by saying: "If you do not assert that it may be refuted in the future, you acknowledge this truth to be eternal."

"As you see, Lenin obviously missed the entire point that Bogdanov was making. Lenin carries on in this vein for a while, sharing deep thoughts like "Paris is in France" and so on. He finishes up this stand-up bit by claiming that "To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs."

"Here, some alarm bells should be going off, my pretty little hamsters."

One of the bikkhus name Subhuti, who was not afraid to into philosophy, piped up: "Objective truth" is "revealed to us by our sense-organs"? Wut!?"





"Exactly," said PQ.

"To his credit, the Lenin entity does seem to realize in this part of the text that he was veering off into a severely solipsistic understanding of philosophical materialism. And so he then quickly tried to correct himself by quoting from another part of "Anti-Dühring" where Engels wrote: “The sovereignty of thought is realised in a number of extremely unsovereignly-thinking human beings; the knowledge which has an unconditional claim to truth is realised in a number of relative errors; neither the one nor the other (i.e., neither absolutely true knowledge, nor sovereign thought) can be fully realised except through an endless eternity of human existence."

"OK then. Let's pause and think about this.

"We can say that here Engels showed his insight. He recognized that that which is "revealed to us by our sense organs", if understood in an entirely individualistic way, leads into an infinite regress in which every person is obliged to re-create the entire body of human knowledge -- an impossible and rather ridiculous task. And so, to his credit, he acknowledged the role of the "endless eternity of human existence" is accumulating our shared store of knowledge and wisdom, as well noting the scientific method of refuting conjectures ("truth is realised in a number of relative errors").

"But Lenin has just tripped over his own "logic" and has not yet got a firm grip on his dogma-stick. He desperately wants to "prove" that Bogdanov was a "relativist" and not a "dialectician". For him, the nut of the argument is to "prove" that Bogdanov does not believe in the existence of "objective truth", and within that, "absolute truth", and is therefore an idealist of the most reprehensible sort. For Lenin, it is all about winning the cat fight.


Leninist polemical style


"Our Leninski put his argument like this: "To acknowledge objective truth, i.e., truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one Way or another, to recognise absolute truth. And it is this “one way or another” which distinguishes the metaphysical materialist Dühring from the dialectical materialist Engels."

"Ah-ha! Do you hear the alarm bell again, my friends? Anyone?

At this point the bikkhu Subhuti made a comment that cannot be re-printed in a family-oriented journal like this one.




"Yes, Subhuti, that's absolutely right.", PQ continued.

"The first sentence in Lenin's core argument is indeed pure Hegelian rubbish. He then went on to pile it higher and deeper by saying: "Human thought then by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths. Each step in the development of science adds new grains to the sum of absolute truth, but the limits of the truth of each scientific proposition are relative, now expanding, now shrinking with the growth of knowledge."

"This is the cleverness of the Lenin entity's comedy. Let's read it again. "..by its nature..." Eh? How so? Why must one conclude that the "grains" sum up to an "absolute truth"? Mr. Lenin doesn't say. He merely asserts that it is so.

"We soon learn that this was in fact only a rhetorical flourish leading up to his zinger: "For Bogdanov recognition of the relativity of our knowledge excludes even the least admission of absolute truth. For Engels absolute truth is compounded from relative truths. Bogdanov is a relativist; Engels is a dialectician."

"And, that, evidently, is A Bad Thing™.




"We've started to understand Mr. Lenin's style of comedy, haven't we? He likes to mix up rational-sounding, if somewhat limited, statements about science and materialist philosophy with grandiloquent but unsubstantiated claims about the "weakness" or "apostasy" of his opponent, all based on a quasi-religious faith in "the dialectic".

"The Lenin entity goes on to give a perfectly good example of a scientific finding that is true within the limits and constraints of its domain: Boyle's Law regarding the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas. This law is constrained because it only applies to an ideal gas kept at a fixed temperature. Mr. Lenin sets us up for another one of routines by stating, after having mentioned Boyle's Law, that "The “grain of truth” contained in this law is only absolute truth within certain limits. The law, it appears, is a truth “only approximately.”


Boyle's Law

"So far, so good, right? But then he immediately follows up with an utter non sequitur: "Human thought then by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths."

"WTFBBQ!?!? Where did that "then" come from? Deus ex "then", Mr. Lenin!

"After playing games like this for a while, the Lenin character finally gets around to the part of Bogdanov's book that really got his panties in a twist. This is where Bogdanov wrote: "The world outlook of the old materialism (PQ note😛 by which Bogdanov means Engels' eclectic understanding of science) sets itself up as the absolute objective knowledge of the essence of things and is incompatible with the historically conditional nature of all ideologies.”

Lenin, always quick with the clever repartée replies: "Every ideology is historically conditional, but it is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology (as distinct, for instance, from religious ideology), there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature. You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite."

"And so Mr Lenin leaves us there with... let's count them... one unproven conjecture ("it is unconditionally true that"), one meaningless phrase ("absolute nature") and one strawman argument ("you will say"), and finishes up with some good old-fashioned ad hominem attacks, this time "accusing" Bogdanov of being a follower of Hume and Kant.




According to our multiverse-travellers who have seen the whole Magillicuddy, Lenin's entire tome goes on and on like this for hundreds of pages."

A traveller who was a particular devotee of the famous anarcho-primativst deva J. Mahurin had been hugging his favorite tree while PQ spoke. When he heard "hundreds of pages", the young player gasped and shouted out "Shame!", amidst a good deal of tut-tutting from other like-minded tree-huggers.


"The parts of the text I have quoted give you the gist of it and capture the flavor of the core debate between Bogdanov and Lenin. Lenin's illogical arguments all come back to two deeply flawed concepts, both of which are hallmarks of philosophical idealism:

"1) The Hegelian idea that human social history is inevitably "moving" in some specific, predictable direction, and

"2) The Platonic concept that science is aimed at perfecting our understanding of idealized forms ("absolute truth")."

Here PQ paused.




The irrespressible Subhuti piped up again: "But Mr. PQ. All you've done is point out that the Lenin was unsuccessful in his critiques of the Bogdanov. Why do you call the Bogdanov "mighty, mighty"? What did he do that was so remarkable? What seeds did he plant that would grow into trees that would stand for tens of thousands of days?"

PQ looked around at the assemblage. Some were already sound asleep. Others were beginning to wander off into the woods in pairs, some to "carry water", others (of the non-anarcho-primativist schools) to "chop wood".

"I think that's enough for now," said PQ, "We'll pick up on Bogdanov's accomplishments next time. For now I will just mention that while a chocolate factory was named after Lenin's love, Krupskaya, the Russian Institute for Haemotology and Blood Transfusions was named after Bogdanov."