Alexander Lopin Problems of communism

Power, economics, and ideology are the three components of a social system. That is, bureaucratic hierarchy, commercial hierarchy, and cognitive hierarchy coexist within society.

Trade hierarchy, bureaucracy, cognitive hierarchy

Bureaucratic hierarchy is built on the instinct of dominance, or, equivalently, the instinct of violence. It is the flip side of the instinct of self-preservation. The instinct of violence served as the foundation of the labor process, for all labor is an overcoming of environmental resistance, as well as an overcoming of the individual’s own nature. The instinct of violence is opposed by the instinct of consumption, which has a more ancient origin, dating back to the Archean period. It served as the basis for barter relations and the trade hierarchy. The cognitive hierarchy owes its origin to the instinct of curiosity.

In society, labor relations are the leading element in the system of social relations. Labor created society, but since labor is a purposeful activity, all labor is preceded by mental activity, all labor is preceded by cognitive activity. Even the most obtuse performer must have a plan of action in mind, and this mental plan must precede the work.

Therefore, in a primitive community, cognitive activity and the network of information exchange inevitably created a cognitive hierarchy in the form of shamans, sorcerers, oracles, magicians, seers and prophets, sorcerers, and priests, who developed a worldview in the form of mythology. Consequently, cognitive hierarchy is a consequence of the necessity of mental activity for the conduct of labor. Cognitive activity arises from the instinct of curiosity. Through mythology, the community distinguished itself from the surrounding nature and other communities with different mythologies.

Labor, unlike cognition, is violence: violence against oneself and violence against external nature. Therefore, in the contradiction between the cognitive hierarchy and the hierarchy of labor relations (bureaucracy), the latter takes precedence. The thought of resisting the forces of nature is not violence, it lacks subjectivity, but acting on such a thought already constitutes violence against nature, for example, building a house or organizing a community for the purpose of hunting mammoths. We must understand that organizing, that is, organizing, a collective is also labor activity. Labor relations require order, which forces the network of labor relations to create a hierarchy in the form of a bureaucratic system. Consequently, at the core of labor relations lies the instinct of violence turned against oneself, that is, violence against one’s own animal nature. Due to the subjectivity of labor, the instinct of violence initially dominates the instinct of curiosity, and, accordingly, bureaucracy dominates the cognitive hierarchy.

The instinct for violence, as the flip side of the instinct for self-preservation, originates from the animal nature of man, but within the framework of social relations, it is used by society to create a social system. As the saying goes, «Whoever hinders us, helps us.» Violence is inherited by society from the herd organization, and within the network of social relations, against the backdrop of emerging free will, it is transformed into labor relations, from which bureaucracy emerges as a hierarchy within the network of labor relations.

At the beginning of society’s historical development, there was a constant interaction between cognitive hierarchy and bureaucracy. This resulted in the ordering of society and the Neolithic Revolution. However, the transition of human consciousness to the stage of self-awareness led to the recognition of oneself as an individual, to an awareness of one’s needs, and led to the disintegration of the primitive community. This became a necessary condition for the exploitative system and the primacy of exchange relations based on the consumer instinct.

Interaction within the contradiction between cognitive hierarchy and bureaucracy (a power hierarchy based on violence through labor relations) constitutes the essence of the primitive communal system. Violence can acquire subjectivity only if the cognitive hierarchy not only specifies a goal but also organizes society based on a worldview. Any governance requires prior organization of thought. Therefore, violence (bureaucracy) is forced to operate within the framework of an already established worldview. Therefore, leaders require shamans, and the subjectivity of shamans is limited by the abstract thinking of people, which is a consequence of the social practices existing in a given period.

Under favorable economic conditions, the disintegration of the primitive community allowed priests to achieve primacy over chieftains or to control them. In Sumer, temple economies formed the basis of the economy. Similarly, in Ancient Egypt, before its unification by the pharaohs, temple economies existed, and subsequent pharaohs were required to perform fertility rituals under the guidance of priests. In Ancient China, before the Qing Shi Huangdi Empire, kingdoms were influenced by a cognitive hierarchy. The life story of Confucius confirms this. It can be assumed that the influence of priests was decisive during the early emergence of kingdoms.

The ancient economies listed above arose in favorable natural conditions and represent the Asiatic mode of production. Exchange relations in this mode of production were initially subject to the control of the cognitive hierarchy, as the disintegration of the community and the transition to a temple economy took place within the framework of mythology, and the priests controlled the labor process through both mythology and exchange relations. Subsequently, after the priests lost their power due to conquests by surrounding tribes, the new military administration was forced to assume the priests’ functions. Interestingly, the last example of the Asiatic mode of production was the Jesuit state in Paraguay in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Under conditions of resource scarcity, the disintegration of the community led to the primacy of leaders over shamans in the process of seizing resources from other communities. The surrounding sociosphere was presented to the invaders as a biosphere to be consumed in accessible ways, like hunting wild animals. As a result of wars, a hierarchy of violence arose on a clan or tribal basis. The Assyrian Empire is the first and most striking example of an empire based solely on violence. However, the bureaucracy came under the control of barter relations, as military actions were waged for wealth, and captives were sold. Therefore, in the ensuing first stage of the exploitative system (slavery), barter relations took precedence, while power relations lost their agency (people died for metal). Merchants came to the forefront of social development, thus forming a trade hierarchy. The exchange of consumer goods became the driving force behind social development. At the same time, people themselves, as speaking tools, were transformed into commodities. It should be noted here that the exchange system requires a state for its existence, both for protection and for external management, that is, by the bureaucracy. We must recognize that competition among traders is not like communicating vessels, but like communicating bubbles.

Marx wrote that all social struggle in ancient Rome revolved around land ownership. The key word here is «property,» and property is a consequence of the system of exchange of commodities. Consequently, social struggle in ancient Rome was determined and controlled by this exchange system, that is, by the commercial hierarchy (senators). This social struggle unfolded within the contradiction between the military bureaucracy and the commercial hierarchy, while the cognitive hierarchy played a passive but necessary role in the consolidation of society. Ultimately, as a synthesis of this contradiction, after the civil war, imperial power emerged, financed by the Senate. Society found itself under the control of the commercial hierarchy, labor relations came under the control of exchange relations, and the bureaucratic hierarchy lost its connection with society.

A society transformed into a market lost its ideological coherence and disintegrated into separate economies linked only by barter. Therefore, the Romans, for example, were the last to notice the collapse of the empire, only when Rome was conquered by barbarians. But long before its collapse, ideological processes aimed at creating a unifying worldview were underway in Roman society. To achieve this, pluralism in relation to various mythologies was allowed. As a result, Christian sects prevailed. As the state disintegrated, the role of the state was assumed by the church organization, resulting in the emergence of the papacy in Italy.

Relying on Christianity allowed Constantine to preserve the Eastern Roman Empire virtually intact by consolidating society around a single religion. Moreover, Constantine played a decisive role in the creation of Christianity as a religion. He organized a council at which he forced the hierarchs to achieve unity and develop an orthodox version of Christianity. Before him, Christianity existed in various sects and was essentially mythology. Only with reliance on power did Christianity become a religion, that is, a bond between people through ideal violence (fear of death, trampling death by death, necrophilia, heavenly bliss, etc.), reinforced by the actual violence of the state. Consequently, a cognitive hierarchy, just as a commercial hierarchy, cannot exist without a state.

Similarly, Islam, after its origins as mythology, spread its ideas through violence and evolved into a religion. Judaism, on the other hand, was a tribal mythology that allowed the tribe to consolidate even in the diaspora. Moreover, the cognitive hierarchy secured a leading position in society and prevented bureaucracy from gaining power over it, while simultaneously acting in concert with the commercial hierarchy.

Thus, neither the trade hierarchy (based on the exchange of consumer goods) nor the cognitive hierarchy (based on the exchange of information) are capable of ensuring the governance of society without the state, without the bureaucratic hierarchy (which exercises real violence).

It’s interesting to trace the evolution of the interaction between bureaucracy and cognitive hierarchy. The emergence of collective labor and labor relations based on the «do as I do» method arose from experience (social practice), but this experience had to be generalized into a system of concepts in the form of culture and mythology for the «do as I do» method to work. Therefore, the development of labor relations proceeded in parallel with the development of thought in the process of social practice. But since labor relations and power relations (bureaucracy) occupy a leading position in social practice, the development of thought and cognitive hierarchy occupy a subordinate position in social practice.

The disintegration of the community due to increased economic efficiency and the development of exchange relations allowed the cognitive hierarchy to assume a leading position in social practice, creating ideological cover for the transition to a class state and the transition to an exploitative system. A symbiosis of priests and the state emerged, in which the state was assigned the role of violence against the body, and the cognitive hierarchy the role of spiritual violence against thought. This symbiosis is characteristic of the Asian mode of production. If the disintegration of the community occurred not peacefully, but militarily, through conquest, then the bureaucracy had no need for the patronage of the cognitive hierarchy. As a result, the latter remained in the background and, remaining relatively free, was able to pursue pure cognition, as was observed in Ancient Greece, albeit within the framework of mythology.

However, without ideological support, slave empires were doomed to collapse (unlike empires with an Asian mode of production). Therefore, Byzantium was able to survive much longer than the Roman Empire due to the establishment of a symbiosis of religion and state, with the state playing a leading role. After the fall of Constantinople, Orthodox hierarchs flourished under the control of a Muslim state. The Catholic Church, in the context of feudal fragmentation, itself became a feudal lord and, as such, incorporated state functions and barter relations (trading in indulgences). This circumstance served as the ideological impetus for the Reformation and the development of capitalism. Ultimately, other states left the Vatican’s ideological functions, while its participation in barter relations remained unchanged.

Development of people’s thinking

In primitive communities, the formation of consciousness had been completed, but thinking was not yet capable of self-awareness. Therefore, people’s spontaneous, conscious behavior resembled programmed robots: if everyone else ran, I ran too. Even in today’s society, there are people who live their lives, so to speak, without regaining consciousness. It is well known that in a crowd overwhelmed by strong emotions, people lose the ability to self-awareness. It was precisely the use of human consciousness under the control of a cognitive hierarchy that enabled the creation of a new economy in ancient kingdoms under favorable natural conditions. Subsequently, with the development of barter relations, consciousness evolved into self-awareness, based on the instinct for consumption. Ultimately, the primacy of barter relations over all other relationships reached its peak in the contract between people and the gods: people will worship and make sacrifices to the gods, and the gods will be kind to them. Thus, human self-awareness is a product of barter relations — people perceive themselves, first and foremost, as conscious consumers. This leads to the idea of free will as freedom of consumption, which inevitably ends in a dead end of consumption.

Under feudalism, the bureaucratic hierarchy interacted with the cognitive hierarchy, while the commercial hierarchy faded into the background, although it exercised indirect primacy over the bureaucracy, as merchants financed wars. Under capitalism, the commercial hierarchy regained its primacy over the bureaucracy, while the religious cognitive hierarchy was discredited and bifurcated, with the emergence of science. Science came under the control of the commercial hierarchy. The primacy of the commercial hierarchy over bureaucracy achieved harmony when a society, having accepted barter relations as its foundation, chooses a bureaucracy to govern itself through barter relations. This social construct is called bourgeois democracy.

In a communist system, the bureaucratic hierarchy establishes primacy over the commercial hierarchy, while the cognitive hierarchy falls under the control of the bureaucracy. Thus, in the modern era, science is under the control of the commercial hierarchy and science is under the control of the bureaucracy, just as there is the primacy of the commercial hierarchy over the bureaucracy and the primacy of the bureaucracy over the commercial hierarchy.

The information exchange network generates a cognitive hierarchy. The cognitive hierarchy uses human thinking to organize (preserve) social relations. That is, its existence and social functions are a consequence of the existing development of human thinking, but it cannot in principle contribute to the development of thinking, as the cognitive hierarchy is only capable of preserving and transmitting existing information. Therefore, the development of thinking and cognition occurs both thanks to and in spite of the cognitive hierarchy. The cognitive hierarchy controls the information exchange network and, accordingly, the development of consciousness, just as the trade hierarchy controls exchange relations and, accordingly, production.

Science and Christianity. Jesus’s ideas about the conscious pursuit of good served as the foundation for the development of self-awareness and free will. It was free will that allowed the instinct of curiosity to break free within the framework of abstract thought and create science as an alternative cognitive hierarchy, yet still within the framework of religion. The new religion for science is determinism — that is, the dogmatic absolutization of law and the rejection of the inconsistency of the world and the contradictory interaction of law and chance. The absolutization of law leads to the denial of the infinity of the world and the denial of its development.

However, abstract thinking merely reflects reality. It comes, according to Marx, post A festum, like a hangover after a party. Abstractions reflect the surrounding reality (Lenin). Therefore, science, as a cognitive hierarchy, cannot in principle become a subject of social development and is forced to serve the interests of either the commercial hierarchy or the bureaucracy.

People are governed by feelings and emotions (that is, conscious feelings), not by ideas. Therefore, a worldview is a socialized sense of things, not ideas. Ideas are merely a consequence of socialized feelings and emotions. But if ideas evoke general feelings or are associated with specific feelings — that is, if they correspond with general emotions — then such ideas gain mass appeal. A worldview is formed on the basis of what is good and what is bad, defined by a system of social relations that appears to the individual as an indisputable reality. Indisputable because the individual cannot escape it without losing their humanity.

Hegel described the evolution of abstract thinking in his «Phenomenology of Spirit» as a succession of stages: consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason. According to recent data, the brain’s limbic system ensures the primacy of sensory perception over abstract thinking, while the frontal cortex governs thinking through its socialization. Therefore, society governs people’s abstract thinking through their worldview. Self-consciousness is blocked by the limbic system (fear and terror), but reason is not. Self-consciousness is controlled through fear and through the blocking of consciousness. Reason cannot be blocked, for it is immersed in the practice of cognition. Therefore, Marx wrote in 1845, «philosophers must change the world,» signifying the subjectivity of the practice of cognition.

The struggle of instincts in the development of human thinking

To address the problem of the emergence of collectivism and the development of thought, we must examine the emergence of labor relations in the human herd. Marx pointed out that people enter into labor relations under the pressure of survival. This point is the starting point for the materialist worldview. Marx also proposed that human society arose with the production of tools. Indeed, tool use is found in the animal kingdom; for example, sea otters use stones to crack shells. But if tool production arises, then so does the division of labor. It is precisely this division of labor that facilitates, on the one hand, the formation of a network of labor relations, and, on the other, facilitates the ordering of this network with the formation of a bureaucratic hierarchy. However, the very emergence of tool production is not a consequence of either the consumer instinct or the dominance instinct, since the emergence of something new cannot be accomplished by command or by desire, for this newness does not yet exist in nature. This newness can only be invented through curiosity and experimentation. The instinct of curiosity is inherited from the biosphere; it is a consequence of the primacy of information acquisition over information transmission, which is the essence of the succession of biological species. Moreover, the instinct of curiosity lies at the origins of consciousness, for consciousness is the product of labor relations and the division of labor that arise from the instinct of curiosity.

The instinct for dominance has struggled with the instinct for consumption throughout the history of the sociosphere. If the instinct for consumption is a necessary condition for labor relations, then the instinct for dominance is a sufficient condition for the formation of labor relations, since labor itself is a violation of external and internal nature through consciousness. In the first stage (primitive communal society), dominance gained primacy over consumption through consciousness, which arose from the instinct of curiosity. It was the development of consciousness, which represents the first stage of human thought, that allowed the instinct for dominance, as an attribute of collectivism, to prevail over the instinct for consumption through labor relations. In the second stage (exploitative society), consciousness transformed into self-awareness through the denial of collective consciousness by individual self-awareness, the emergence of which is conditioned by the awareness of individual needs. Consequently, self-awareness, which is the second stage in the development of human thought, came under the influence of the instinct for consumption. The reliance of consumption on self-awareness allowed consumption to escape the primacy of dominance. Self-awareness, together with the instinct of curiosity, came under the control of the instinct for consumption. If, in the first stage, the instinct of curiosity worked directly to build society through the development of consciousness, then in the second stage, the same thing — that is, the development of thinking — occurred indirectly, through the development of consumption. Specifically, the development of self-awareness through the instinct of curiosity became a consequence and manifestation of the instinct of consumption. Thus, the instinct of curiosity came under the control of the instinct of consumption.

The development of self-awareness occurred under the control of the cognitive hierarchy, which in turn came under the control of the commercial hierarchy. This seems strange, but the state (the bureaucratic hierarchy) rarely interfered with religious cults, and if it did, it quickly ended in its demise. All religious cults always include a ritual of exchange with higher powers in the form of sacrifice, etc. While an object is involved in the exchange, an ideal promise of future consumption is given as an element of consumption. Consequently, the instinct of curiosity, along with the cognitive hierarchy, came under the control of the instinct of consumption through barter relations.

In the third stage (communist social system), dominance regained its primacy over consumption in the form of the mature primacy of labor relations over exchange relations, while the self-consciousness inherited from the second stage remained under the control of consumption. The transition to this third stage occurred through the suppression of individual self-consciousness by a collective consciousness that had not yet reached the level of reason, merely representing a return to the consciousness of the first stage, but armed with the ideas of the second stage of abstract thinking (the stage of self-consciousness), which were subordinated to the ideas of the first stage of consciousness, the ideas of collectivism. Class struggle is based on the instinct for consumption, and therefore cannot free society from the control of exchange relations, from an exploitative system. The instinct for dominance (also known as the instinct for violence and self-preservation) is required as an expression of collectivism, but at the same time, the instinct for dominance must be subordinated to the instinct of curiosity, which has escaped the control of the instinct for consumption. In this way, reason emerges from self-consciousness. Reason arises from the bifurcation of self-awareness, when self-awareness replaces its foundation, the instinct of consumption, with the instinct of curiosity through the practice of cognition. Consequently, reason is forced to turn the instinct of domination against the instinct of consumption, which is the essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But at the same time, the instinct of curiosity, freed from the control of the instinct of consumption, fell under the control of the instinct of domination.