The subject of the master's thesis will be the dispute about empirio-criticism in Russian Marxist philosophy, the protagonists of which were the then most prominent members of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Although political allies, they differed greatly in their philosophical beliefs. In matters of theory, Lenin followed the orthodox materialist Georgy Plekhanov, who was otherwise a Menshevik, while Bogdanov and his associates (mainly Bazarov, Lunacharsky, Gorky) developed a new positivist version of Marxism based on phenomenalism of Mach and Avenarius. The heart of the dispute was the question of the existence of "things-in-themselves". Lenin defended their reality and knowability through their reflections in our representations, while Bogdanov assigned actuality only to "elements". This led to great differences in the epistemological theories of the two authors. According to Lenin, scientists approach the objective truth over time. For Bogdanov, the external world is only a socially organized complex of elements, while individual knowledge is only a subjective perception of an already given socially organized experience. The object of science is thus not absolute truth, but the very expression of the ruling ideology.
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