Tektology / Energetic Materialism: The Bogdanov - Sultan Galiev Connection Presented to Historical Materialism Conference London November 10-13, 2016 ----- Very early draft, work in progress ---- Örsan Ġenalp orsansenalp@gmail.com Summary Alexander Bogdanov and Mirsaid Sultan Galiev are two forgotten precursors of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Both were scientist, artists, teachers, and political leaders who were eliminated by the primary names of the Revolution. Bogdanov lost his leadership quarrel with Lenin, and Sultan Galiev was the first Bolshevik leader Stalin arrested. Bogdanov was leading the Moscow branch of the Communist University, and Sultan Galiev was one of the managers at the Kazan branch. Bogdanov’s life work and magnum opus Tektology is recognized as a forerunner of modern Structuralism, Cybernetics, General Systems, Chaos and Complexity Theories -which have shaped the development of ‘bourgeois sciences’, during the 20. Century. On the other hand Sultan Galiev is seen as the father of ‘Third Worldist Revolutionism’, because of his political vision, called ‘Muslim National Communism’, and the strategy he developed for the creation of ‘Colonial International’ to lead the world revolution. While Bogdanov’s work was first of its kind that was updating Marx’s Dialectical Materialist methodology in a way that could provide systematic principles, uncovering patterns, generalizations and simplification to analyse the complexities inherited in every kind of living and nonliving systems and their change; Sultan Galiev’s theses can be seen as predecessor to the structuralist analyses of global capitalism and imperialism delivered in late 60s and 70s by theorists like Althusser, Foucault, Balibar; dependency theory of Baran and Sweezy, or the analyses of ‘Capitalist World-System’ by Wallerstein and his colleagues. However, despite the physical and psychical proximity of the spaces they lived, work they did, people they met, and vision they developed, there has been no historical study establishing the relationships between these two significant figures of the Soviet Revolution. Proposed research (as part of a broader project aiming to analyze further the contemporary relevance of Bogdanov and Sultan Galiev’s especially for the theory and practice of global labour class formation and emancipatory change) aims to trace such relationship by investigating any influence of Bogdanov's elaborated scientific philosophy (Empriomonism / Tektology), on the political and strategical vision developed by Sultan Galiev (Muslim National Communism and Colonial Internationalism). My starting point is the key article written by Sultan Galiev in 1925, which caused his second arrest in 1928, where he claimed deploying 'Energetic 1