Conclusion

Abstract

As we noted in our introduction, in the year following the creation of The Philosophy of Living Experience Bogdanov left politics in order to give his full attention to theoretical concerns.¹ It may be argued that not only the period from 1911 to 1917 but also the rest of his life reveal “organizational science” as Bogdanov’s central concern. If one looks at his career in print after The Philosophy of Living Experience and before 1921, one sees, of course, a great flood of publications on proletarian culture.² Although the years of Proletkul’t, they were also the years of the Tektologiia, the three volumes of that work appearing in 1913, 1917 and 1922. There is no evidence which suggests that Bogdanov’s theoretical and organizational involvement with Proletkul’t made organizational science a subordinate concern in those years. In fact, a review of his publications on both subjects suggests that they formed a single project in his mind. To take a single example, one finds the protagonist of his fantasy novel, Engineer Menni (1913) struggling to teach workers how to build their culture on the scientific organization of practice and thought.³ “The Science of the Future” itself suggests the unity of Bogdanov’s concerns after The Philosophy of Living Experience. We may read into it the argument that, if the universal organizational science was to be the science of the future, it was to be the science of the class of the future and, for that, a critically important part of proletarian culture. Judging from the proposed scope of the universal organizational science, Bogdanov must certainly have regarded it fundamental to the proletarian enterprise.