Bogdanov, Tektology, and Systems Thinking

Who was Alexander Bogdanov?

Alexander Bogdanov, whose works were largely unexplored until recent times, in many ways, sowed the intellectual seeds of a new stream of thinking, which, later (1930s onwards), germinated into the full-fledged discipline called systems thinking, as we know it today.

Russian physician, philosopher, science fiction writer, and Bolshevik revolutionary, Alexander Bogdanov?(1873 - 1928), was one of the most creative and revolutionary thinkers of the twentieth century. He received formal training in medicine and psychiatry. He played an influential role in the Bolshevik faction of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was a rival to Vladimir Lenin?(1870–1924) within the same faction. His interests were wide ranging from universal systems theory to pioneering initial experiments of human rejuvenation through blood transfusion. He even wrote well-acclaimed science fiction novels, back in the day, when the genre was in its nascent stages. With his thinking and contributions, Bogdanov is regarded as a forerunner of cybernetics?and organization theory and is credited to have developed a concept of (social) ideology, a form of social consciousness?in relation to social psychology (Bykova?2020).

The crux of Bogdanov's thesis

Bogdanov was driven by his political goal to create a society that would bridge the widening gap between the organized and the organizers, for which he vehemently worked towards the aspiration to create a new proletarian culture. Although he was critical?of several of Marx’s theories, Bogdanov regarded the primacy of social praxis in Marx’s ideas as a significant aspect for changing the status-quo. He viewed the axes of economic life and social consciousness as integral to humans as a social being.

Bogdanov?(1902) believed that an analysis of economic and social engagement within individual groups can provide the basis for the understanding of knowledge.

Knowledge is not objective and value-free, it is rather ideological and value-laden.

With extensive manuscripts that he prepared between 1913 and 1928, Bogdanov developed a concept of “universal organization science”, an original systems theory that sought to find solutions to generalized scientific and philosophical?questions for the unification of all biological, physical, and human sciences. He advocated that this is only possible if sciences are approached as systems of relationships that are driven by fundamental principles of interrelationships and emergent behaviors.

Creation of and access to knowledge is at the core of social consciousness?that determine the evolution of human society through social, economic, and political progress. Bogdanov was keen on approaching knowledge production and consumption as a sociological process that determines the dynamics of human relationships and shapes perspectives. He accorded equal importance to art, literature, philosophy, and science and considered them ideological labor. It is through these disciplines that people organize themselves and it is through these disciplines that people can transform their own experience of the world.

He considered art as the most powerful weapon for the organization of collective and class forces in exploitative societies to create a new culture.

He further opined that in the new culture, science would take center-stage because it bridges the gap between ideological and technological knowledge. He talked about developments in science that he considered to be manifestations of change in the terms of work and working. Truth, for him, is relative and is determined by the time in which it is deemed to be the truth based on dominant perspectives that are prevalent during that time. Bogdanov, to a large extent, inspired state planning in Russia. Unlike Stalin, he proposed planning to be organized not as a top-down, but as a bottom-up, process on the basis of self-organization?of producers, which is described in his novel, RedStar?(Maracha?2021).

Tektology

Bogdanov’s thinking and writings were consolidated under the title of tektology?(Gorelik?1980). The vision of Bogdanov's tektology was to replace the erstwhile understanding of classical science and bring a systemic?dimension to scientific thinking that would “transcend the division between the human and the natural sciences and between science and philosophy” (Gare?2000, p. 342). With his profound views, Bogdanov potentially set the prelude to the germination of systems thinking.

Senlap and Midgley?(2023) say:

As of today, there is a consensus amongst scholars who have seriously engaged with Bogdanov's work that his ideas, especially as found in Tektology, represent the first emergent moment for the systems paradigm in its near contemporary form (p. 330).        

Tektology focuses on the study of any phenomenon from an organizational perspective. Bogdanov?believed that all activities of human beings and in nature are primarily of organization and disorganization of elements. The organizational factor generates synergy through their structural and dynamical laws, which, in turn, gives rise to systemic?relationships. With his views, he shifted from the erstwhile traditional focus on individual subject knowledge to cross-cutting organizational systemic knowledge.

Tektology attempted to systematize the fragmentations of organizational methods to unravel general characteristics of organizational activities. There was centricity of inquiry to be based on the concepts of wholeness, self-regulation, transformation and development, equilibrium?and disequilibrium, and stability, instability, and crisis (Gare?2000).

According to Bogdanov, the universe is calibrated at all levels.

Therefore, to understand the universe, it is essential to understand the parts that constitute it and go deeper into their interrelationships. As the first systems science, tektology?sought to overcome the disciplinary divisions of knowledge and restore it to a higher plane of systemic unity.

Gorelik?(1980), who worked on translating and analyzing Bogdanov’s main essays, wrote:

Tektology can be characterized as the dynamic science of organized wholes. It is concerned with universal structural regularities, general types of systems, the most general laws of their transformation, and the basic laws of organization of any elements in nature, practice, and cognition… Tektology is relevant today because it has much more in common with such modern generalizing sciences as general systems theory, cybernetics, structuralism, and catastrophe theory. It outlines, complements, and further illuminates the sciences (p. ii).        

Tektology has similar strands with structuralism, more specifically the structuralism of Jean Piaget, both sharing common concepts of wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation (Gorelik?1980). Modes of organization can be explained by the examination of their elements, their combinations into complexes, and the interrelationships within and between those complexes that are constantly affected by contributors and resistors of various kinds. Elements cannot be understood in themselves but in relationship with others.

Every complex, or every system, constituting of an array of elements (subsystems) with underlying structures are able to resist the activities of other complexes.

The degree of resistance determines the effect on the organizational system – if resistance is neutralized, the organization is stable; otherwise, it leads to disorganization. Stability and instability are central to tektology?and stability is not only dependent on the quantity of activities–resistances concentration but, also, on the mode of their coupling and the characteristics of their organizational connections. The aspect of understanding boundaries was central to Bogdanov’s work as it is within and between boundaries of a system that subsystems and interrelationships can be defined. These are cybernetic?concepts that bears the essential characteristics of feedback, communication, and control. According to Bogdanov, a disorganized whole is practically less than the sum of its parts.

Methodological thinking was primary in Bogdanov’s work (Maracha?2021). A process-centric approach runs through all the principles of the methodological thinking of Bogdanov, where a deep structural coupling between the system?and the environment is noticed.

As Gare?(2000) notes:

Tektology should be seen in relation to a broader tradition of thought, which claims that processes are the primary reality rather than things or substances and their attributes” (p. 353).         

It is through structurally coupled processes between innumerable systems that the overall human experience of organization gets shaped and evolved.

Bogdanov’s ideas remarkably anticipated the development of later, more popular, cybernetic?and systems ideas from scholars likes of Bertalanffy, Prigogine, Jantsch, Maturana, and Weiner?(Bykova?2020; Gare 2000; Maracha?2021). Capra?(1996) and Capra and Luisi?(2014) recognize tektology as the first-ever systematic work to present the systems paradigm. Several systems approaches, that have been developed in the last few decades, leverage Bogdanov’s understanding.

To conclude, Bogdanov had a seminal contribution to the development of systems thinking as the discipline that we know of it today. More research into his works and explorations of how his thinking can contribute to a more equitable and just world must be encouraged.

(This is an excerpt from the book, Holistic Flexibility for Systems Thinking and Practice, by Rajneesh Chowdhury)

References

Bykova, M. F. (2020). Alexander Bogdanov and his philosophical legacy: Editor’s introduction. Russian Studies in Philosophy, 57(6), pp. 477– 481. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10611967.2019.1724 043.

Bogdanov, A. A. (1902). Poznanie s istoricheskio tochki zreniia [Knowledge from an Historical Point of View] (St. Petersburg, 1902). Translated and quoted by Alexander Vucinich, Social Thought in Tsarist Russia (1976). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Capra, F. (1996). The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Books.

Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014). The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Chowdhury. R. (2024). Holistic Flexibility for Systems Thinking and Practice. Routledge.

Gare, A. (2000). Aleksandr Bogdanov and systems theory. Democracy & Nature, 6(3), 341–359. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 108556 6002 0020 230

Gorelik, G. (1980). Essays in Tektology: The General Science of Organization. Seaside (CA): Intersystems Publications. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S2212- 5671(14)00819- 3

Jackson, M. C. (2019). Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity. Wiley.

Maracha, V. (2021). “Organizational Point of View” as the Methodological Principle of Bogdanov’s Tektology and Its Development in the Moscow Methodological Circle. Conference: CSS Mini Symposium. Alexander Bogdanov – From Rediscovery and Rehabilitation to Full Recovery, 3 June 2021, Online. 10.13140/ RG.2.2.35904.46087.

?enalp, ?. and Midgley, G. (2023). Alexander Bogdanov and the question of unity: An emerging research agenda. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 40(2), pp. 328–348. https://doi.org/10.1002/ sres.2923