'Helgoland': a quantum physicist’s crusade against Lenin

In Helgoland, physicist Carlo Rovelli introduces his own new interpretation of quantum mechanics, coupled with an attack on Lenin. As Ben Curry explains, Rovelli feels the need to attack Lenin, the 20th century’s greatest materialist, because Rovelli himself is clearly abandoning materialism. And while he is attempting to answer Lenin, it turns out that Lenin long ago answered Rovelli’s own philosophical errors.

[This article was originally published as part of issue 48 of In Defence of Marxism magazine – the quarterly theoretical magazine of the Revolutionary Communist International. Subscribe and get your copy here]

In 2021, Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, a book about quantum mechanics and philosophy, was published in English. It quickly shot to the top of ‘bestsellers’ lists, and was chosen as ‘book of the year’ by The Times, the Financial Times, the Sunday Times and The Guardian.

The book begins on the misty, barren North Sea island of Helgoland, where the physicist Werner Heisenberg sought refuge from his allergies, and in 1925 made breakthroughs in quantum theory. But from Helgoland, we are very quickly transported back – in the flowery style which is Rovelli’s signature – to familiar terrain: the world of quantum mysticism:

“We watch the sea. ‘It’s really incredible,’ Časlav whispers. ‘Can we believe this? It’s as if reality… didn’t exist…’”^[1]

Rovelli describes the quantum world, around which he promises to guide us, as “profoundly mysterious, subtly disturbing. […] Distant objects seem magically connected. Matter is replaced by ghostly waves of probability.”^[2]

“Mysterious”, “magical”, “ghostly”, matter suddenly disappearing... we’ve surely heard it all before when it comes to the train of mystical garbage that has been hitched to the wagon of quantum mechanics for the past century. Rovelli has his own spin on it. In this book, he proffers a ‘new’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, what he calls the ‘relational interpretation’.

But somewhere in the middle of Helgoland, Rovelli heads off into seemingly unexpected territory. From the pioneers of quantum mechanics, we are abruptly brought face-to-face with Lenin, defending materialism against the Bolshevik-turned-Machian, Alexander Bogdanov.

One gets the feeling that, writing this book, Rovelli’s philosophical conscience was pricked. Being an old leftist who has been around communist circles since the 1970s, he anticipates the need to defend himself (none too successfully, it should be said), from the twentieth century’s greatest philosophical materialist: Lenin. The book is dedicated in the acknowledgements to Lenin’s antagonist, Bogdanov, unusual for a book on quantum mechanics perhaps, but not at all inappropriate.

The quantum revolution

Rovelli begins his book with the revolution in quantum mechanics of the early twentieth century that brought to light new features of matter far removed from our ‘common sense’ understanding.

At the famous Solvay conference of 1927, a debate erupted over the interpretation of these discoveries between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, heralding a philosophical division that has persisted to the present day. Does the material world exist independently of the conscious observer? This is the crux of the division between materialists who answer in the affirmative, and subjective idealists who answer in the negative.

An illustration of how a wave behaves if it hits a barrier with two slits. A single wave hits a wall with two narrow slits, splitting the wave into two separate waves that interact, interfering with each other to produce a pattern of peaks and troughs on the detection screen / Image: vchal / Alamy Stock Photo

Much of the controversy revolves around the interpretation of a feature of quantum mechanical systems known as ‘wave-particle duality’. To illustrate this contradictory phenomenon, we will take our leave of Rovelli for a moment.

Consider a pond. Take a stone and throw it into the pond and try to hit a lilypad. You can only hit one lilypad at a time. In that sense, the stone acts like a particle: it is what physicists call ‘discrete’ – that is to say, it follows a well-defined path along its journey.

Results from the quantum double-slit experiment. Single electrons are fired one at a time at the double slit, and where they hit the detection screen is recorded as a white dot. The distribution pattern that eventually builds up on the detection screen resembles a wave-like interference pattern, much like the ‘classical wave’ double-slit experiment above / Image: Dr. Tonomura via Belsazar

But if you miss, and the stone lands in the water, waves spread out continuously as ripples in the water. Waves can act in many places at once, making all the lilies bob up and down at the same time.

Quantum mechanics tells us that at the subatomic level, the building blocks of matter (what are called ‘quanta’, like photons, electrons, etc.) display both particle-like and wave-like behaviours. How can this be? How can matter both be isolated in a single place like a particle, yet diffuse and continuous like a wave?

The famous double-slit experiment neatly demonstrates this behaviour. If we take a weak beam of electrons and fire it at a barrier that has two closely spaced slits, behind which we place a detection screen, a steady stream of electrons will arrive, one at a time, at the detection screen. How did they get there?

We might assume that each electron must have passed through just one slit on its way to the detector. That is, after all, how particles behave – a stone can only hit one lilypad at a time and it follows a clear line on its journey there, so a particle presumably only passes through one slit at a time on its way to a detection screen.

Each electron does indeed hit the detection screen at just a single place, like a particle. But as more and more electrons hit the screen, they build up a pattern that has the appearance of a wave that has passed through both slits and interfered with itself, in the way that a ripple in a pond can bounce off the pond’s bank and interfere with itself to form a pattern.

A wave, being continuous (i.e. spreading out), may pass through two slits at once. But a particle, being discrete, can only pass through one at a time.

So what has happened? Did the electron pass through either slit A or slit B like a particle that can only be in one place at a time? Or did it go through both? Or neither? If we dwell on the experiment’s results, we have to conclude that the question is far from trivial.

It is quite another thing altogether to deny the solubility of this problem by claiming that the material world, as such, does not exist at all independent of our observation. Yet this was the conclusion that some quantum physicists drew, including Werner Heisenberg.

According to this view, known as the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, it is meaningless to even ask what path a quantum particle takes. Rather, all that exists are a set of probabilities that the particle might appear here and not there when we observe it.

According to this interpretation, only upon being observed does the particle receive a ‘real’ position, momentum and other properties. Until it is observed, matter exists in an unknowable, indeterminate netherworld, neither here nor there, neither coming nor going. Quantum randomness is just an intrinsic part of nature, and a line is drawn in the sand beyond which science cannot pass.

The problem is thus ‘solved’ (or rather, swept under the carpet) by disposing of cause and effect, and indeed reality itself, until ‘observation’ brings said reality into existence.

It is not hard to see how this interpretation, with the ambiguously defined ‘observer’ bringing the world into existence, opens the door for philosophical idealism. Now, we are told, observation brings material reality itself into existence. Is this conscious observation? Some, like the pioneer of the mathematics of quantum mechanics, van Neumann, certainly stated as much. With this idea, the existence of the material world becomes dependent upon the conscious observer rather than vice versa. Idealism is thus allowed to penetrate into the sciences.

A counter-revolution in philosophy

This philosophical interpretation did not drop from the sky. Idealism had been extending its influence into intellectual and scientific circles for some decades prior to the great quantum revolution, under the banner of ‘positivism’.

The centre of this philosophical movement in the early twentieth century was Vienna. At that time, the revolutionary materialism of Marxism was making enormous strides among the workers’ movement, particularly in the German-speaking world. The spread of philosophical idealism among bourgeois intellectual circles, pioneered by scientist-cum-philosopher Ernst Mach, took place in reaction to Marxism’s growing influence.

Rovelli highlights the influence on scientists at the time of “the discussions on the relation between reality and experience that ran through Austrian and German philosophy at the beginning of the century”:

“Ernst Mach, who had exerted a decisive influence on Einstein, insisted that knowledge had to be based solely on observations, freed of any implicit ‘metaphysical’ assumption. These were the ingredients coming together in the young Heisenberg’s thinking…”^[3]

Rovelli unfairly omits to mention that Einstein would later turn his back on Machism in favour of a kind of materialism inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza. But the influence of Mach on the thinking of physicists down to the present is undeniable.

According to Mach, the role of science is not to uncover the laws of a material world, existing independently of our minds, but to organise ‘experience’.

For materialists, ‘experience’ – the content of our sensations – is our window onto the material world, caused by the impact of matter on our material sense organs. For Mach, what we think of as material objects are just correlations of sense impressions.

In his writings, Mach refers to these ‘sense impressions’ as ‘world elements’. But merely substituting a more scientific-sounding word for ‘sensations’ does not change the essence of his philosophy. The thoughts imparted to our minds by sensation are reality for Mach.

I see red, feel a firm crunchy sphere, and taste sweet. I call it an ‘apple’. To Mach, this is just a word for that correlation of senses, and it is senseless to speak of a material apple independent of these sensations.

This is subjective idealism, as Lenin well points out in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, a polemic against some so-called ‘Marxists’ in Russia, including Bogdanov, who bought into Mach’s ideas.

It has a clear affinity with the idealist ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, in which the conscious observer becomes the central component of reality. In the words of the co-inventor of that interpretation, Niels Bohr: “In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena, but only to track down, as far as it is possible, the relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.”^[4]

Neither materialism or idealism?

It is regularly claimed (quite spuriously) that a materialist explanation of the phenomena described by quantum mechanics is ruled out. For a century, attempts to interpret quantum mechanics materialistically have been met with hostility and scorn by the scientific establishment.

The ‘pilot wave’ theory for instance, pioneered by Louis de Broglie and developed more fully by David Bohm, regularly encounters this attitude. Bohm himself was even chased out of the United States during the McCarthyite ‘Red Scare’ for his past associations with the Communist Party. His views were confined to the fringes of physics for 70 years.

According to this theory – which is now experiencing a revival of interest – quantum particles are intimately bound up with self-generated waves that guide their motion. In the aforementioned double-slit experiment, the particle goes through one slit. But its self-generated wave goes through both slits and guides its path on the other side.

Whilst this theory predicts that quantum particles behave chaotically, it is wholly deterministic (that is to say, lawful, and preserves causality) and materialistic. It is a bold hypothesis, which instead of drawing a limit for science, attempts to push it further, without requiring an ill-defined observer to bring reality into existence.

What is Rovelli’s stance on these conflicting interpretations?

On the Copenhagen interpretation, which effectively makes the existence of nature dependent on a (presumably conscious) observer, Rovelli repeatedly asks throughout his book, “What does Nature care whether there is anyone to observe it or not?”^[5]

So far, so good. And what of attempts to interpret quantum mechanics materialistically in the manner of de Broglie or Bohm? Rovelli rejects them out of hand.

He gives his own explanation of how Bohmian mechanics posits the existence of both an observable, material particle, and a self-generated, material wave that guides it. But he then explains that he is unhappy with the idea of such a wave, the existence of which is only indirectly inferred through its effect in guiding particles:

“Is it worth assuming the existence of an unobservable world, with no effect not already foreseen by quantum theory, only to assuage our fear of indeterminacy?”^[6]

His argument is thus that it seems very uneconomical to posit the existence of new facets of nature, such as waves guiding quantum particles, when we can only see their effects indirectly.

This falls back on a classic idealist argument against materialism in general, which far predates quantum mechanics. If we strip away the ‘quantum’ language, his question can be reformulated thus: “Just to preserve causality, you materialists propose that there exists an unknowable material ‘thing-in-itself’?”

In fact, Mach used precisely this argument to reject the widely accepted theory of atoms in his own day.

We can never ‘see’ or directly ‘experience’ atoms, but infer their existence through reason and experimentation. Why posit the existence of an ‘unobservable’ world of atoms at all? The idea of the atom rested on much less experimental data in Mach’s day than we have in the present. Today, electron microscopes and X-ray crystallography, aids to the human eye, have given us a much clearer picture of these entities that were once dismissed as mere ‘unobservable’ intellectual constructs.

To answer Rovelli’s question: yes, we materialists propose that there exists a material ‘thing-in-itself’ – matter – but we deny that it is ‘unknowable’ or ‘unobservable’. With our present level of understanding we are unable to delve deeper, but this is wholly different to declaring that we will never delve deeper. To declare such a thing is to announce a halt to the onward progress of science, which is precisely the view of Rovelli and Heisenberg.

Subjective idealists often declare their mode of reasoning superior on the basis of ‘the principle of the economy of thought’. Materialism is inferior to their viewpoint, they claim, because in addition to experience, it ‘uneconomically’ posits the existence of matter as the substrate of experience.

Rovelli takes up cudgels against Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism, but he fails to mention the fact that Lenin directly refuted this argument, along with others deployed in Helgoland. In Lenin’s words:

“Is it ‘more economical’ to ‘think’ of the atom as indivisible, or as composed of positive and negative electrons? Is it ‘more economical’ to think of the Russian bourgeois revolution as being conducted by the liberals or as being conducted against the liberals? One has only to put the question in order to see the absurdity, the subjectivism of applying the category of ‘the economy of thought’ here. Human thought is ‘economical’ only when it correctly reflects objective truth, and the criterion of this correctness is practice, experiment and industry. Only by denying objective reality, that is, by denying the foundations of Marxism, can one seriously speak of economy of thought in the theory of knowledge.”^[7]

It is not merely the apparent ‘economy’ of our thinking that concerns us, but rather the degree of correspondence of our thinking to objective reality, that is, the correctness of our ideas.

The ‘relational interpretation’

Rovelli is therefore unsatisfied with any of the established interpretations of quantum mechanics. He rejects the notion that nature should care if we are observing it, but he sees materialism as ‘dogmatic’. His quest is for a third way, an alternative to both materialism and idealism. Thus, he steps forward with his own interpretation, what he calls the ‘relational interpretation’ of quantum mechanics. On closer inspection, however, there’s nothing new about it at all.

It may reasonably be asked of the proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation: if ‘observation’ brings the world into existence, what counts as an observer and how conscious does an observer have to be? What if I’m sleeping? Is the consciousness of a dog enough? Perhaps even that of a nematode worm is sufficient? Can an even less conscious ‘observer’ – say a carbon atom – grant existence to the world?

By pushing the definition of an ‘observer’ to this level, Rovelli arrives at his ‘relational interpretation’ of quantum mechanics: “If we look at things in this way, there is nothing special in the ‘observations’ introduced by Heisenberg: any interaction between two physical objects can be seen as an observation.”^[8]

The Mirror Maze at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago / Image: Jules Verne Times Two

But for Rovelli, between interactions, that ‘thing-in-itself’ lives a non-existence in an indeterminate limbo just as it does for the Copenhagen interpretation: “When the electron does not interact with anything, it has no physical properties. It has no position; it has no velocity.”^[9] We need only add: “it has no existence”. Fortunately for us, when electrons pop out of existence, they have the good manners to retain some memory that they should pop back into existence at the apposite moment.

For Rovelli electrons and all other material things do not really exist, as such. What we think of as material objects are, to Rovelli, just “nodes” in a web of interactions and relations. The relations exist, but matter itself is an illusion! All that exists are appearances, how this ‘thing’ appears to some other ‘thing’, some ‘observer’ during the fleeting moments when they ‘interact’, without any actual content. Reality is, for Rovelli, “a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other”.^[10]

What we think of as ‘matter’ would be more appropriately replaced by pure nothingness, form without content. This is not a new idea, and Rovelli himself finds parallels in the teachings of the extreme idealist Buddhist philosopher of second century India, Nāgārjuna, who taught, in Rovelli’s words: “Reality, including our selves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which… there is nothing.”^[11]

Rovelli, having discovered that neither mind nor matter, but rather pure nothingness lies at the bottom of reality, believes he has dispensed with both materialism and idealism. But has he?

Ghosts all the way down?

If we take two bodies at the level of everyday life and examine them, we find that their properties describe relations with other bodies: relative speed, relative size, relative luminosity, etc. But on closer inspection, those bodies are found to be composed of more basic parts, which in turn interpenetrate, and we now discover that those parts have their own set of ‘relationships’. This is hardly a novel discovery.

But this idea fills Rovelli with a feeling of vertigo. Something astonishing seems to be taking place: at each step, matter appears to disappear from view, receding ever further into the distance, leaving us with nothing but those ‘relationships’. Quoting his fellow physicist, Anthony Aguirre, Rovelli explains:

“An electron is a particular type of regularity that appears among measurements and observations that we make. It is more pattern than substance. It is order… Thus we arrive at a strange place. We break things down into smaller and smaller pieces, but then the pieces, when examined, are not there. Just the arrangements of them are. What then, are things, like the boat, or its sails, or your fingernails? What are they? If things are forms of forms of forms of forms of forms, and if forms are order, and order is defined by us… they exist, it would appear, only as created by, and in relation to, us and the Universe. They are, the Buddha might say, emptiness.”^[12]

This idea that everything is form, form is order, and we define order thus reintroduces the conscious thinker as the key component of reality.

This idea – that matter as such is disappearing, in retreat with the onward march of science – is far from new and original. The fact that we have to constantly readjust our understanding of matter with the advance of science is perennially used by idealists to ‘refute’ materialism and to deny the existence of matter.

A letter predating Rovelli’s book, from the 4 January 2014 edition of the New Scientist, gives a very good example of this argument:

“The closer you look at matter the more it dissolves before your eyes.

“Mass, the quantification of stuff, is actually the field energy generated by the Higgs or gluon fields. And it may be that the fundamental particles will ultimately be understood as purely geometrical entities. Thus physics edges ever closer to idealism, the idea that reality is immaterial in nature.

“So people shouldn’t worry that there is no ghost in the machine. The truth is quite the opposite: there is no machine. It’s ghost all the way down.”^[13]

The author of this letter at least has the virtue of being honest and straightforward about his idealism. His argument, however, is a trick: a trick directly answered by Lenin precisely in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism, where he explains that it is not ‘matter’ but our limited, one-sided understanding of it which is retreating before science’s advance:

“‘Matter is disappearing’ means that the limit within which we have hitherto known matter is vanishing, and that our knowledge is penetrating deeper; properties of matter are likewise disappearing which formerly seemed absolute, immutable, and primary, and which are now revealed to be relative and characteristic only of certain states of matter. For the sole ‘property’ of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside our mind.”^[14]

Every step forward in our scientific understanding of matter forces philosophy to keep step.

In the Middle Ages, it was the prevailing view that there is no such thing as ‘empty’ space, that everything is filled with substance. Later, the ancient Greek idea of atoms and void was revived by the French materialist, Gassendi. The existence of atoms was demonstrated scientifically in the nineteenth century with the discovery of Brownian motion, and for a long time these atoms were regarded as impenetrable, hard, absolute building blocks of matter – this was the era of mechanical materialism.

But science continued to penetrate deeper, and the old truth proved to be, in part, relative. It was found that the atom is largely ‘empty’ space, occupied by electrons organised in shells that repel each other through something known as quantum degeneracy pressure. At the centre of these atoms are compact nuclei composed of protons and neutrons. With the discovery of radioactivity, the nucleus too was penetrated; protons and neutrons were shown to be composed of tinier units called quarks and gluons.

It wasn’t just that previously ‘solid’ matter proved a lot ‘emptier’ than we first thought; the ‘empty’ vacuum was found to be much ‘fuller’ than previously anticipated. With the discovery of ‘zero-point energy’, the idea of vacuum as ‘empty space’ had to be revised.

There is no reason to assume this is the end of the line. But we can say with certainty that however far we go, we will never find thought or ‘pure geometrical entities’ at the bottom of reality. Each layer of nature that we penetrate shows up the one-sidedness of our earlier understanding of matter, the limited, finite character of our thoughts that are only approximations of a universe full of infinite riches.

Idealists regularly deploy the trick of claiming that they are only combatting this or that antiquated form of materialism, only to smuggle in idealism.

The 1927 Solvay Conference, including Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and many other pioneers of quantum mechanics / Image: public domain

Rovelli repeatedly claims he is only combating what he refers to as “naive materialism” – a term he fails to define. Rovelli explains that “Mach’s chief polemical target was eighteenth-century mechanism.”^[15] However, it was behind the crafty guise of targeting one outdated form of materialism that Mach actually took up the struggle against materialism in general.

Again, Lenin explains all this in Materialism and Empirio-criticism:

“Engels says explicitly that ‘with each epoch making discovery even in the sphere of natural science [“not to speak of the history of mankind”], materialism has to change its form’. (Ludwig Feuerbach, German ed., p. 19.) Hence, a revision of the ‘form’ of Engels’ materialism, a revision of his natural-philosophical propositions is not only not ‘revisionism’, in the accepted meaning of the term, but, on the contrary, is demanded by Marxism. We criticise the Machians not for making such a revision, but for their purely revisionist trick of betraying the essence of materialism under the guise of criticising its form and of adopting the fundamental precepts of reactionary bourgeois philosophy…”^[16]

Motion without matter?

The idea of ‘relations’ divorced from matter – i.e. relations divorced from that which relates – is an absurdity. And, despite how Rovelli presents this as something ‘new’, Lenin critiques precisely the same idea in Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

We should say here, whilst Rovelli makes such a big deal of defending Bogdanov against Lenin in Helgoland, we marvel at the superficiality with which Rovelli read Lenin’s book, because he fails to mention any of his arguments! It is remarkable that he did not see the similarity between his ‘new’ interpretation of quantum mechanics and an idea in vogue in Lenin’s day that Lenin directly tackled, the idea of ‘energeticism’.

Mach and his co-thinker, the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, thought that they had hit upon something profound when they proposed to replace ‘matter’ as the fundamental building block of reality with ‘energy’ or motion.

The idea that motion can exist without matter, however, is as absurd as the idea that matter can exist without motion, or that ‘relations’ can exist without matter as Rovelli posits.

Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² has shown that mass and energy are not just deeply interconnected, but are equivalent and transform into one another. Matter and motion are completely inseparable from one another. But Lenin explains that, even if we accept Ostwald and Mach’s replacement of ‘matter’ with ‘energy’ alone, we still cannot avoid falling into either the materialist or idealist camp:

“If energy is motion, you have only shifted the difficulty from the subject to the predicate, you have only changed the question, does matter move? into the question, is energy material? Does the transformation of energy take place outside my mind, independently of man and mankind, or are these only ideas, symbols, conventional signs, and so forth? And this question proved fatal to the ‘energeticist’ philosophy, that attempt to disguise old epistemological errors by a ‘new’ terminology.”^[17]

If we replace matter with ‘energy’ or ‘motion’ as the fundamental basis of reality, the question is still posed whether we are talking about motion occurring in an objective, material world independent of us, or in our minds. If we replace the terms ‘energy’ and ‘motion’ in the aforementioned quotation with ‘relations’, it reads as a direct answer to Rovelli.

Are we talking about material ‘relations’ or purely ideal ‘relations’? The question demands an answer. Marxists answer categorically: the relations of nature exist independently of our minds. That is, they are material relations. All matter exists only through its unending flux of relations with the rest of the material universe.

Rovelli’s inconsistency

Rovelli rejects what he calls naive materialism. He also claims to reject philosophical idealism. But in rejecting the existence of matter, he opens the door once more to idealism. Yet the idea of stepping through that door seems to make him uncomfortable. Something in his conscience tells him what lies beyond it: irrationalism, spiritualism and a retreat to religious faith.

We would urge him, at the very least, to be consistent about his philosophy. And we note that there are consistent idealists who are urging the very same!

If Rovelli’s flowery language and deliberate ambiguity leaves you in any doubt as to which philosophical camp he belongs in, perhaps the words of Bernardo Kastrup, the executive director of the idealist think tank, the Essentia Foundation, will clarify things.

On his blog, Kastrup describes himself as “leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism”. And he offers his full “endorsement, promotion and defence of physicist Carlo Rovelli’s Relational Interpretation of quantum mechanics”. He writes the following:

“Rovelli and I are in full agreement when it comes to our view of the nature of physical reality: there is no absolute world of tables and chairs with defined mass, position, momentum, etc., out there, but instead an entirely relational world. […] In summary, the physical world has no standalone reality.”

He continues:

“... Rovelli defends the conclusions of quantum mechanics discussed above, but explicitly and deliberately refrains from exploring their philosophical implications […] that ‘emptiness’ is mind at rest, a subject without objects, pregnant with the potential for every conceivable internal relationship.”^[18]

We could not have put it more clearly ourselves.

Why philosophy is important

So far, we have said little about the man to whom Rovelli dedicated Helgoland, the Machian, ex-Marxist, Alexander Bogdanov, who parted company with Lenin in 1909. Rovelli, a left-winger who rejects Leninism, has clear political as well as philosophical sympathies with Bogdanov. That is not accidental. There’s a link between Bogdanov’s and, indeed, Rovelli’s divergence from Marxism and their philosophical ‘innovations’.

Rovelli gives a lot of biographical information about his hero: “A doctor, an economist, a philosopher, a natural scientist, a science-fiction novelist, a poet, teacher, politician, progenitor of cybernetics and of the science of organisation, a pioneer of blood transfusion and a lifelong revolutionary…”^[19]

But about this last-mentioned aspect of his life: Bogdanov's politics – or Lenin’s for that matter – Rovelli gives only a few superficial, trite remarks, delivered with the utmost bombast.

In terms of politics, Bogdanov, we are told, was a great democrat. He wanted “to leave power and culture to the people”. Meanwhile, Lenin was (of course!) an incorrigible authoritarian, guilty of “calcified political dogmatism”. His political programme “was to reinforce the revolutionary avant-garde, the repository of truth that needed to guide the people”.^[20]

We are again in familiar territory. This same portrait can be found in any slanderous, right-wing book about Lenin that you care to choose: Lenin, the authoritarian, dogmatic drill sergeant, giving the ‘party line’ to the people from on high.

Lenin in 1910 / Image: public domain

In fact, things stand in quite the inverse of how Rovelli imagines them. Far from having a calcified and dogmatic point of view, Lenin was the most farsighted and flexible thinker among the Bolsheviks.

Lenin’s starting point was to examine material reality, not to impose on it preconceived notions but to constantly refer back to this material reality, which is the source of the objectivity of our thought. This is the materialist method, the opposite of the sectarianism that actually characterised Bogdanov’s whole approach, of imposing schema and prefabricated formulae on reality, that led him to a whole series of errors, ending in his break with Lenin.

The split between the two was intimately tied to the two distinct philosophical tendencies each represented. Lenin was defending revolutionary dialectical materialism, the cornerstone of a Marxist organisation. Bogdanov, who, like Rovelli, was honest enough in his own way, was unable to perceive the reactionary idealist content hiding behind these new, trendy ideas emanating from bourgeois scientific circles in Western Europe, which ultimately implied the liquidation of revolutionary Marxism.

The struggle for a clear philosophy is of vital importance for the struggle for communism. The common prejudice exists that the pursuit of objective truth in science somehow elevates it above the great class battles in society. This is false, dangerously false. Others, including the more perspicacious of our class enemies, understand this quite as clearly as we do.

The comments on philosophy from another pioneer of quantum mechanics, the Machian positivist and card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, Pascual Jordan, are highly illuminating in this regard:

“...not only is the resultant liquidation of materialism an important enough result, but also the positivist conception offers new possibilities of granting living space to religion without contradiction from scientific thought. Let us remember that positivism accepts experimental observations and experiences as the sole ‘reality’ for the physicist. The emphasis on this concept leads us to the fact that there are experiences possible which are quite different from those observations and results classified in the physicist's system.”^[21]

These words are admirable in their clarity. They are the words of a class-conscious counter-revolutionary, who is quite aware of the reactionary content of this body of ideas. He sees in them possibilities for obscurantism to make a comeback, with the fulsome support of the scientific establishment itself.

More than this, he understood their usefulness in fighting communism. Indeed, he offered to place his philosophical and scientific work at the feet of the Nazi regime as “an antidote to the materialism of the Bolsheviks”:

“Of course, the defeat of Bolshevism – which is now threateningly raising its head again among various neighbouring peoples – is primarily a matter of political decision-making and ideological and blood-based fighting power, which cannot be replaced by scientific evidence. Nevertheless, it seems to be a significant sign of the times that the materialistic worldview – viewed as a scientific theory – is being exposed as untenable and contrary to scientific knowledge precisely in those areas of science which since the Renaissance have been considered its safest domain.”^[22]

We must agree with Jordan in this much: it is indeed significant that a fight against materialism has erupted precisely in the arena of science.

The great heroes of the Scientific Revolution, which coincided with the dawning of the capitalist era, wielded a daring materialist philosophical outlook in struggle against medievalism in thought. It is a sign of the rottenness of the capitalist class, that once produced such pioneers, that the whole thrust of their thinking is once more towards medievalism. They now turn from reality, obfuscating and sowing mysticism, in order to dupe the masses.

The struggle against idealism is thus bound up with the struggle for a scientific outlook towards all areas of society and nature, and it is bound up with the struggle of the proletariat to achieve a clear insight into its interests and historic tasks. We will take up this struggle, which is fundamentally part of the class struggle taking place on every plane, of which the scientific is far from the least important.

[For more on Lenin's defence of materialism, get a copy of his Materialism and Empiriocriticism from Wellred Books here]

References

^[1] C Rovelli, Helgoland, Allen Lane, 2021, pg 1

^[2] ibid. pg 2

^[3] ibid. pg 12

^[4] N Bohr, ‘Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature’, Collected Works, Vol. 6, North-Holland Physics Publishing, 1985, pg 296

^[5] C Rovelli, Helgoland, Allen Lane, 2021, pg 20

^[6] ibid. pg 56

^[7] V I Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Wellred Books, 2021, pg 137-138

^[8] C Rovelli, Helgoland, Allen Lane, 2021, pg 69

^[9] ibid. pg 71

^[10] ibid. pg 78

^[11] ibid. pg 131

^[12] Quoted in ibid. pg 75

^[13] New Scientist, Issue 2950, 4 January 2014

^[14] V I Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Wellred Books, 2021, pg 218

^[15] C Rovelli, Helgoland, Allen Lane, 2021, pg 105

^[16] V I Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Wellred Books, 2021, pg 210-211

^[17] ibid. pg 227

^[18] B Kastrup, ‘Here I part ways with Rovelli’, bernardokastrup.com, June 2021

^[19] C Rovelli, Helgoland, Allen Lane, 2021, pg 114

^[20] ibid. pg 111

^[21] P Jordan, Physics of the 20th Century, Philosophical Library, 1944, pg 160

^[22] Quoted in D Hoffmann, M Walker, ‘Der gute Nazi: Pascual Jordan und das Dritte Reich’, Pascual Jordan (1902–1980): Mainzer Symposium zum 100. Geburtstag, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2007, pg 100, our translation