Russian Machism

Russian Machism (/ˈmɑxɪzm, ˈmɑkɪzm/) was a term applied to a variety of political/philosophical viewpoints which emerged in Imperial Russia in the beginning of the twentieth century before the Russian Revolution. They shared an interest in the scientific and philosophical insights of Ernst Mach. Many, but not all, of the Russian Machists were Marxists, and some viewed Machism as an essential ingredient of a materialist outlook on the world. The term came into use around 1905, primarily as a polemical expression used by Lenin and Georgi Plekhanov. With a shared desire to defend an "orthodox" account of Marxism, from their own differing perspective they both divided the opponents of this putative orthodoxy into the "idealists" and the "Machists".^[1] The term remained a signifier of Marxist-Leninist opprobrium from the 1920s through into the 1970s. This was shown by Alexander Maximov [ru]'s use of the term to criticize Boris Hessen in 1928.^[2] It can also be seen in Evald Ilyenkov's chapter on "Marxism against Machism as the Philosophy of Lifeless Reaction" in Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism (1979).^[3]