Akselrod, Liubov

(pseudonym, Or-todoks). Born 1868; died Feb. 5, 1946. Russian philosopher and literary critic. Participant in the revolutionary movement from 1884.

Aksel’rod lived in exile during 1887–1906. In 1892 she joined the Marxist group Osvobozhdenie Truda (The Liberation of Labor). In 1900 she graduated from the University of Bern. Following G. V. Plekhanov, Aksel’rod defended the materialist conception of history and attacked “economism,” the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge (the collection Philosophical Essays: Reply to the Philosophical Critics of Historical Materialism, 1906), and empiriocriticism (the collection Against Idealism: Criticism of Several Idealist Trends of Philosophical Thought, 1922). In her statement of Marxist philosophy, Aksel’rod made concessions to agnosticism and relativism and committed errors similar to those of the theory of hieroglyphs; she criticized V. I. Lenin’s book Materialism and Empiriocriticism. In 1903 she joined the Mensheviks. In 1917, Aksel’rod was a member of the Menshevik Central Committee and the Plekhanovite group Edinstvo (Unity). During 1921–23 she taught in the Institute of Red Professors; later she worked in the Institute of Scientific Philosophy of the Russian Association of Scientific-Research Institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (RANION) and in the State Academy of Artistic Studies.

In the 1920’s Aksel’rod was a representative of the mechanist group. During the last years of her life she was engaged in the study of the sociological problems of art.