Nikolai Vladislavovich Valentinov (Rusaian: Николай Владиславович Валентинов; 18 May, 1880 – 26 July, 1964) was a Russian philosopher, journalist and economist. A member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDRP), he was an exponent of empirio-criticism. He was also known as Nikolai Valentinov-Volski and, later, as E. Yurevski.
Biography
Early years
Nikolai Vladislavovich Volski was born in Morshansk, in the Tambov Governorate of the Russian empire, in 1879. His family was of Lithuanian origin.
As a student at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, Volski became involved in the revolutionary movement. At first he sympathised with the Narodniki (populists) and became affiliated with some of the early Socialist-Revolutionary circles. Later he discovered Marxism and became involved in the Social-Democratic party.
In 1898, Volski was arrested and banished to Ufa. In 1900, after his release, he moved to Kyiv, where he attended the Polytechnic and resumed his revolutionary activities. He also met his future wife Valentina there; in her honour he came to use the pseudonym 'Nikolai Valentinov'. During these years, Valentinov-Volski undertook a thorough study of Marxism, reading Karl Marx' magnum opus Capital and writings by Georgi Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin. He also took an interest in contemporary philosophy of science, especially in the empirio-criticism and empirio-monist theories of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius.
Bolshevik activist
Valentinov played an active part in the student revolutionary movement and was arrested several times. In 1902, he received a serious head wound, which almost killed him, during a demonstration. In 1903, after his release from yet another term of imprisonment, he went into exile to Switzerland. In Geneva, he associated with Lenin. Under Lenin's influence, Valentinov joined the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (RSDRP) after the party's split at its second congress in 1903. Valentinov later recounted his time with Lenin in his 1953 book entitled My Encounters with Lenin.
Valentinov had been attracted to Lenin because of the latter's pamphlet What Is To Be Done? (1902), whose vision of a network of working-class activists, skilled at the art of evading police, appealed to the former sympathizer of Narodnaya Volya. However, Valentinov soon came into conflict with Lenin, particularly with respect to philosophical issues. Valentinov set out to combine Marxism with the empirio-criticism philosophy of Mach and Avenarius. He was not unique in this; Machism was a popular current in the Russian, German and Austrian socialist movements of the period: The Russian Bolsheviks Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Socialist-Revolutionaries Viktor Chernov and Nikolai Avksentiev and the Austro-Marxist Friedrich Adler were Russian machists strongly influenced by empirio-criticism.
Valentinov claimed Lenin was not so much an orthodox Marxist as a materialist influenced by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. This, Valentinov maintained, was behind Lenin's utter rejection empirio-criticism as a form of subjective idealism. Valentinov objected to this critique, since in his view empirio-criticism was designed to overcome the metaphysical dichotomy of idealism and realism. For Lenin, the dispute had not merely philosophical but political implications: empirio-criticism was a form of petty bourgeois ideology that not only threatened the philosophical purity of Marxism but would also, in time, reveal its objectively counterrevolutionary political consequences.
Valentinov considered Lenin's position dogmatic, unscientific and based on an inadequate understanding of philosophy. Relations soon deteriorated. In 1905, Valentinov returned illegally to Russia and defected to the Menshevik faction of the RSDRP. Valentinov had laid out his philosophy in the book Ernst Mach and Marxism (1907). Lenin wrote a long polemic, Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908), against what he considered the baleful influence of empirio-criticism on the revolutionary movement. Valentinov, along with Bogdanov and Lunacharski, was one of his targets.
Valentinov countered with the book The Philosophical Conceptions of Marxism (1908). In this work he rejected the charge of idealism and, in his various philosophical writings, went out of his way to criticise former Marxists like Sergei Bulgakov and Petr Struve, who had embraced idealist philosophies.