New Book: Maria Chehonadskih, Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution (2023)

A new book that came out in December of last year but it is worth mentioning here (also because I just got around to reading it). It’s in Marx, Engels, and Marxisms series over at Palgrave Macmillan (and if it is too a bit on the expensive side for a personal purchase, you can ask your library/institution to get a copy for your library or department).

From the publisher’s website:

About this book

In this book, Maria Chehonadskih unsettles established narratives about the formation of a revolutionary canon after the October Revolution. Displacing the centre of gravity from dialectical materialism to the rapid dissemination, canonisation and decline of a striking convergence of empiricism and Marxism, she explores how this tendency, overshadowed by official historiography, establishes a new attitude to modernity and progress, nature and environment, agency and subjectivity, party and class, knowledge and power. The book traces the adventure of the synthesis of empiricism and Marxism across philosophy, science, politics, art and literature from the 1890s to the 1930s, offering a radical rethinking of the true scope and scale that the main proponent of Empirio-Marxism, Alexander Bogdanov, had on the post-revolutionary socialist legacies. Chehonadskih draws on both key and forgotten figures and movements, such as Proletkult, Productivism and Constructivism, filling a gap in the literature that will be particularly significant for Marxism, continental philosophy, art theory and Slavic studies specialists.

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