Liubov Isaakovna Akselrod: a Free-Thinking "Orthodox"

Although she was one of Russia’s most brilliant Marxist thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century, Liubov Akselrod (1868-1946) was mostly regarded as a follower of Plekhanov, a critic of Lenin’s theory of knowledge, or an opponent of Deborin. Almost 80 years after her death, and with our new sensitivity to the question of what it is like to be a woman philosopher, she deserves to be considered as such, with due attention paid to her life and struggles. Here is a first attempt to outline her biography, from her escape from her Jewish Orthodox village at the age of fifteen, through her involvement in the revolutionary movement and emigration, to her work as one of the few Marxists with an academic philosophical foundation. In the course of her life, she stood up three times in defense of Marxism against what she saw as three different waves of “philosophical revisionism”: the first time against the combination of Marx and Kant, proposed by the “legal Marxists”; the second time against the “mechanical combination of historical materialism and empiriocriticism”; the third time against the “equally mechanical combination of dialectical materialism and Hegelianism”. The chapter is intended to show that she was always a very consistent materialist philosopher (in this sense an “orthodox” Marxist), but never a dogmatic thinker.