Alexander Bogdanov

“ This gave and continues to give humanity a growing superiority over even the most powerful and fearsome threats. This is how life that sets humanity apart from the rest of her kingdom. But humanity faces an even more difficult task for humanity - to organise themselves, their efforts, their activity at the individual and at the collective level. There are contradictions hidden amongst the complexity of the human body and natural forces of society. These contradictions can be as menacing and destructive, as the very forces of nature, which spawned mankind. ”

“ For them, science is not a collective experience of organized labor nor an organizational instrument of collective work; for them, knowledge is something in itself, even something opposed to practice, with a special “ideal”, "logical" nature, and if in their view it should lead to some practical outcome, they attribute this precisely to this higher nature, and not because it has arisen from any practice which may have shaped it. ”

“ If isolated proletarian representatives, at the cost of enormous expenditure of energy, become masters of one or the other of its branches, its class character is then felt: as they are cut from the collective working, they commit to a path of rupture with the life, the interests and thought structure of the working community from which they come. The corporatist narrowness doubles here the tendency towards an intellectual aristocracy. In a word, as a bourgeois ideology [1] , from its origin, science organizes the soul of the proletariat according to a bourgeois model. ”

“ So, proceeding from the facts of experience and ideas of modern science, we inevitably come to the only integral, the only monistic understanding of the universe. It appears before us as an infinitely evolving fabric of forms of various types and levels of organisation, from elements of the ether unknown to us to human collectives and stellar systems. ”

“ Each specialty has created their own language that has become incomprehensible not only the broad masses but even to scholars of another specialty. The same correlations, the same experimental links, the same processes of knowledge are studied in different branches, as if it were quite different things. The methods of one branch only share knowledge with other branches with much delay and difficulty. This is the origin of the narrow horizon, the corporatist narrowness that develops in men of science, weakening and slowing their creation. ”

“ We are in a society, where classes and groups face each other in a destructive way. They disorganise one another, precisely because each such group seeks to organise the world and humanity for themselves in their own way. This is the result of isolation in which social forces are organised separately - they do not reach a point of unity with a shared simplified organisation. This is the struggle of organisational forms.
So, the conclusion is confirmed: all the interests of mankind are organizational. ”

“ Where does humanity find such instruments as speech, ideas and norms? Not from external nature, as with material tools, but from our own nature - from our activities and experiences, from my experience. All of this - the products of organising experience are performed by mankind in the course of millennia. ”

“ The nature of science is to be organized collective experience of humanity and the instrument of the organization of the life of society. The ruling science in its various branches, is bourgeois science: it has worked on all representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia, it is the concentrated material of the experience accessible to the middle classes; they have understood their bourgeois point of view and have made this generally understandable, they have organised affairs according to their own processes and habits. ”

“ It is further necessary to do everything possible to eliminate the disparate nature of science that has led to the increase of specialisation; the unity of scientific language most be the objective, matching and generalising the methods of the various branches of knowledge, not only in relation to each other, but as regards the methods of all other areas of practice, developing of a complete monism of them all. It will be embodied in the universal organizational science necessary for the proletariat, the future organizer of the whole life of mankind in all its aspects. ”

“ Yes, of course, nature is the great first organiser; and humanity itself is only one of its organisational products. The simplest of living cells, visible only at a thousandfold magnifications, in complexity and perfection of organisation far surpasses everything that humanity can organise. It is a student of nature and is still very weak. ”

“ The self-organisation of humanity is the struggle with our inner spontaneity, at a biological and social level. Just as humanity takes up tools to fight external nature, the tools of the organisation are no less necessary to humanity. Mankind produces them only with great difficulty and great sacrifices. ”

“ Thus, in the study of relations of production, bourgeois science could not grasp or to distinguish the particular higher form, of collectivist fraternal cooperation, because this form is virtually unknown to the bourgeois classes. Even more significant is the narrowness of this fundamental perspective which is evident across the whole of bourgeois science and which is due to the same position of the bourgeois classes in the social system, including their way of life. This special feature is the split between science and its real basis: socialised labour. ”

“ If humanity organised itself in face of the world only using those forces and means which have been granted by nature, humanity would have gained no advantage over other living beings, who are also fighting for themselves against the rest of nature. However humanity takes tools from external nature and implements it in their work. ”

“ The review of the content of science must first annul this break with collective working practices: the material of science must be understood and informed as the practical experience of humanity; the schemas, conclusions, formulas must be seen as tools for organizing all the social practice of humanity. ”

“ Let's refine the formula more accurately: the organisation of the external forces of nature, the organisation of human power, the organisation of experience.
So what have we found out? Mankind has no activities other than the institutional; there are no problems other than the organisational. Do we not see destructive work of disorganisation wherever we look? ”

“ Also as much as science has given a unity for technical methods, the development of mechanised production has also sparked a trend in science to unify methods, to overcome the harmful aspects of specialization. Much has been done in this direction, but in the meantime, the radical rupture between the individual branches of science remains. So far, this trend to unification may only impact on the details, but it can not lead to harmonisation in a single organization of science as a whole. ”

“ This transformation produces a science vitally close to the working class: Astronomy as the science bringing together the work activity in time and space Physics as the science of the resistances encountered by the collective work of humanity Physiology as the science of the labor force, logic as a theory the social agreement of ideas. ”

“ Then the study of this connection, these laws will allow people to master these methods in the best way and develop them systematically - and this will become the most powerful instrument for any practice and any theory. But which is real, the first or the second?
The deepest difference that we know in nature is the difference between spontaneity and consciousness, between the blind action of the forces of nature and the planned efforts of people. Here one should expect the greatest heterogeneity of methods, their greatest irreducibility to unity. This is the best place to start our research. ”

“ Simplification has already reached a sufficient degree for a single review of science from the viewpoint of collective of work which will release science from the abstract fetishism which is a source of the pseudo-problems and unnecessary devices which were often the subject of 'evidence' in the old mathematics, mechanics or logic, etc. ”

“ It becomes an instrument of the highest order, as illustrated by the scientific technology of our era, by the idea of ​​art is a living tool for rallying the team in the unity of perception, feelings, moods. In this way we are brought up one for our life in the community, we are prepared for the organisational elements of the group, we are introduced to its internal structure. ”

“ Bourgeois science is not very accessible to the working class; it is dense, its specialized corporatist language is obscure and complicated, and further, as it is of course become a product in capitalist society, it's expensive. ”

“ We can now summarise how the overall scheme of the content of human life unfolds before us. Let's summarise: Engels, the founding father of scientific socialism, created the formula: the production of people, the production of things and the production of ideas. ”

“ All this gives to the working class specific missions concerning contemporary science: we must review it from a proletarian point of view, in content as much as form of presentation; the creation of a new organization, as much for the elaboration as for the dissemination amongst the working masses. In most branches of science, accomplishing these tasks will mean a methodical consideration of the legacy of the old world. But in some, a large and deep autonomous creation will be required. ”

“ No wonder the old way of thinking, immersed in innocence, gave rise to the myth of the creation of the world in a word. No wonder people believed in the limitless power of the word over the elements: water and mountains, storms and tempests, disease and death all thought to obey those who knew and spoke the proper word ... ”

“ Even as specialization grew, the bourgeois world was developing all areas of its creation, science in particular. Science is split into an ever larger number of branches, increasingly divergent, always weakening the living relationship that existed between them. ”

“ Well, so be it: we, people, the organisers of nature, ourselves, our experience, our practice, cognition, and artistic creativity, we will consider this from an organisational point of view. But is spontaneous nature an organiser? ”

“ The dissemination of knowledge and scientific work must be organised in parallel. The two things are inextricably linked: they must be embodied in life in terms of the Workers' University and Workers' Encyclopedia. ”

“ Fate has made us witnesses of the monstrous immensity of total warfare. The full story is played out through chains of history, covered with fire and blood, full of the subjugation of millions to the horrors of starvation and hard labour while the few enjoy the parasitic luxury which arises from their cruel domination. ”

“ The review of the content and of the transformation of the external form of science will constitute its basis, that is to say its "socialism", its mode of adaptation to the tasks of the struggle and socialist construction. ”

“ The third such instrument is the social norm. In all its forms - a custom, law, morality, decency - the social norm sets the attitudes of people in the collective, and fixes their relationship. Thus patriarchal consciousness created the specifc rules of its times understood as a legacy of the ancestors or the command of the gods, fetishised, to suit the collective life, and the latest abstract thinking. It did not penetrate into the socio-organisational nature of these regulations. ”

“ That is to say, such organizational tools of work will penetrate into the consciousness of the proletariat more immediately, more easily and more deeply than those same sciences in their present form. ”

“ Giant teams are created by the power of words, and giant teams are managed by this power. The people of the twentieth century saw the imperious word direct millions of people in an unprecedented hell of iron and dynamite to kill and die. ”

“ The Workers' University shall consist of a system of cultural and educational institutions with levels which converge to a single centre for training and organization of scientific forces. At each level of the system, the general education courses must be complemented by practical, technical and scientific courses, of use to society. ”

“ The general nature of the organisation of ants is a patriarchal clan life; at the same time, the queen is not the leader of the work, nor the power in her community, but their living, blood connection ”

“ The development of the courses, and in conjunction with this, the work of publication of scientific workers in the Labour University, should be geared towards the creation of a Workers' Encyclopedia which should not be a mere summary of scientific findings, but above all a complete, harmoniously system which presents the methods of practice and knowledge in their vital links. ”

“ All the conscious co-operation of people is facilitated through the word: a call for work, in the form of requests or orders combining staff, and the distribution of roles between them in their work, an indication of the sequence and context of their activities, encouragement to work, concentrating their forces, a warning where a disagreement starts, stops work, rearrangement, change of direction of effort - all this is done verbally. ”