Alexander Bogdanov

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ... ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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 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. ”

“ First of all, it comes across facts of human imitation of nature in the function and methods of organizational activity.
Nature organises the resistance of many living organisms to the action of cold, covering them with fluffy fur, feathers or other outer coatings that do not conduct heat well. A person achieves the same results in the same way by arranging warm clothes for themself. Spontaneous development has adapted the fish to movement in water, having developed a certain shape and structure of its body. ”

“ It is also well established that leaf ants breed edible fungi inside anthills in Brazil. The extensive cooperation and complex division of labour in social insects are, again, known to everyone; true, the division of labour there is mainly "physiological", that is, directly related to the special structure of the organism of different groups - workers, soldiers, etc . ”

“ All these forms, in their mutual interweaving and mutual struggle, in their constant changes, form a world organisational process, infinitely fragmented in its parts, continuous and indissoluble in its whole. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course, there can be no question of imitation between them. Meanwhile, both in the modes of production and in the forms of cooperation, the parallelism is striking. The construction of complex, dissected dwellings for termites and ants, the herding of many ants, which contain herbaceous aphids in the form of dairy cattle, are well known facts; the embryos of agriculture were also found in some American species: weeding out grasses around edible cereals; it is very likely that human agriculture had such a beginning. ”

“ And from this it follows: there cannot and should not be any other point of view on life and the world, except for the organizational one. And if this is not yet admitted, it is only because people's thinking has not yet completely broken out of the shells of fetishism that enveloped it on the path of development. ”

“ Man gives the same shape to their boats and ships, and also reproduces the structure of the skeleton of a fish: the keel and frames exactly correspond to its spine and ribs. The "sail" moves the seeds of many plants, animals with flying membranes, etc .; man has mastered the sail method and widely applies it in the memory of history. ”

“ And this organising has been going on for a number of centuries, from when labor groups emerged from small tribal primitive communities to the modern era of co-operation of hundreds of millions of people. ”

“ Lehmann, obtained at known temperatures from para-azoxy-brown ethyl ether are capable of not only multiplying by fission and "copulating", that is, merge in pairs, but also feed and grow, taking matter inward, and move like amoebas: all the essential features that are usually determined by the lower unicellular organisms. ”

“ If the organisational methods in one area were alike, but in another had other methods, completely dissimilar to them, and in a third, for example, in the organisation of things, that is, techniques that have nothing to do with the methods of organising people, i.e. ”