Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

A LETTER TO A. M. GORKY449me that his views were wrong and as strongly convincedme that those of Plekhanov were correct.When we worked together, Plekhanov and I often discussedBogdanov. Plekhanov explained the fallacy of Bogdanov’sviews to me, but he did not think the deviation aterribly serious one. I remember perfectly well that in thesummer of 1903 Plekhanov and I, as representatives of theZarya editorial board, had a conversation in Geneva witha delegate from the editors of the symposium Outlines ofa Realistic World Outlook, 155 at which we agreed to contribute—I,on the agrarian question, Plekhanov on anti-Machistphilosophy. Plekhanov made it a condition of his collaborationthat he would write against Mach, a conditionthat the symposium delegate readily accepted. Plekhanovat that time regarded Bogdanov as an ally in the fightagainst revisionism, but an ally who erred in followingOstwald and, later on, Mach.In the summer and autumn of 1904, Bogdanov and Ireached a complete agreement, as Bolsheviks, and formedthe tacit bloc, which tacitly ruled out philosophy as a neutralfield, that existed all through the revolution and enabledus in that revolution to carry out together the tacticsof revolutionary Social-Democracy (=Bolshevism), which,I am profoundly convinced, were the only correct tactics.There was little opportunity to engage in philosophyin the heat of the revolution. Bogdanov wrote anotherpiece in prison at the beginning of 1906—the third issueof Empirio-monism, I believe. He presented it to me in thesummer of 1906, and I sat down to study it. After readingit I was furious. It became clearer to me than ever that hewas on an absolutely wrong track, not the Marxist track.I thereupon wrote him a “declaration of love”, a letter onphilosophy taking up three notebooks. I explained to himthat I was just an ordinary Marxist in philosophy, but thatit was precisely his lucid, popular, and splendidly writtenworks that had finally convinced me that he was essentiallywrong and that Plekhanov was right. I showed these notebooksto some friends (including Lunacharsky) and thoughtof publishing them under the title “Notes of an OrdinaryMarxist on Philosophy”, but I never got round to it. I amsorry now that I did not have them published at the moment.