Written under conditions of tsarist censorship, Basic Elements of the Historical View of Nature offers a powerful defense of historical materialism.

At first, the book appears to be a dispassionate account of nature, life, the psyche, and society, based on the most up-to-date science. But in fact, it has a Marxist goal: to defend the idea of historical materialism. After developing a thoroughly materialist, determinist view of reality, Bogdanov explains how forms of social labor determine the forms of human ideology. Cognition from the Historical Point of View explains the causal connections between labor, forms of cognition, and ideological constructs. Finally, The Science of Social Consciousness, written after the relaxation of censorship, presents a history of European ideological development from an explicitly Marxist point of view.