About the Farm

Opinion article

Father Sergius Bulgakov in his “Philosophy of Economy” as the main idea puts forward the thesis “Economy is the overcoming by man of his mortality, the attempt to achieve immortality” [1]. The point is that according to Aristotle exactly the mortality separates man from immortal gods and heroes, on the one hand, and from other living beings, not feeling and not foreseeing their death, on the other. In both cases man feels his mortality as a defect, inferiority. In 1992, we were establishing socio-environmental monitoring in the Altai Mountains. Relations between supporters and opponents of the Katunskaya HPP were more than tense, up to and including the use of firearms. Authorities, public representatives, journalists, builders and designers – all had very aggressive mood. A war of all against all was brewing. And all of a sudden, the discussion was about necrocenosis, its structure and content. And suddenly everyone realized that mortality was the one thing we all had in common. And fraternization ensued, and the game moved imperceptibly to the bathhouse of the sanatorium on the Lake Aya.

Economy as Reproduction

There is a strictly limited set of basic processes describing any field of activity:

• Operation
• Fabrication
• Reproduction
• Progression
• Abolition

The process of reproduction is realized, materialized primarily as education, upbringing, and economy.

Schematically, the reproduction process is as follows:

The economic paradigm and the cultural paradigm behind it (the very concept of “culture” originally meant “a way of cultivating the land) is always regarded as a kind of heritage, legacy, of the outgoing generation, society, and as a tradition, legacy, heritage, treasure, which must be preserved and increased, modernize and renew – in order to pass it on to another generation and make the economy immortal.

Economy in the structure of mental activity

Keeping a stable idea of ​​the three-dimensionality of a vital organization, we will offer our own meaningful version, close to the ideas of the methodological school: the world of ideas – the world of communication (communications) – the world of actions.

Thus, the ontological scheme of the economy takes on the following form (Scheme 1).

Each of these spaces forms its own reproductive cycle:

• In the world of ideas – the church as a kind of circle (circus) of ideas, uniting people religiously (religion – reunification of people in faith);
• In the world of communities – community, circle, kuren (Cossack), agora (in Hellenistic Athens), world, gathering (in archaic Greece [7] – koms and demos: proto-ethnoses, not separating themselves and their names from their land and culture);
• In the world of action – the cycle of requesting (combine production and consumption, produce + consume, “consumption”), a reproductive process highlighted by and most pronounced, in his opinion, exactly in the household, family, naturalized economy, but which is crucial for the “third wave” society [5].

The permeability of all three worlds and, consequently, the connectedness of all three cycles are provided by the pivotal (axial, would say O. Spengler and I. In the world of ideas it is interpreted as the right (this is why the right of property is sacred, even charismatic and consecrated by the church, religion and faith); in the world of communications it is interpreted as responsibility (as Aristotle understood property; of course, responsibility is always conventional because not only the Aristotelian measure of property exists, but the dual reflexive pair of questioning and responsibility is presupposed by A. Schubert). In the world of actions, it is the cause, business, which in the Protestant tradition (M. Luther – B. Franklin – M. Weber) is connected to the idea of Beruf, to the vocation. By analogy with the hermeneutic circle, an inductive circle emerges in the cycles of the economic. Applied to our situation, the inductive circle looks as follows: we are so impoverished and dispossessed that we desire nothing, and so powerless that we cannot have anything. One of the strongest impressions-shock the author got in the heat of haymaking season in one of the Vologda state farms: owing to warm weather and abundant rains the grass grows extraordinary, and all the people – in the offices and other working places, if benches and snack-bars can be taken for such, – discuss increase of mixed fodder prices and the need to soon cut the cattle (private and state farm). At the same time, no one has even an excuse for general idleness. The problem of the inductive circle began to acquire a mystical character. In comparative linguistics of the Toporov – Vyach. Ivanov – Sedakov school, the concept “beggar” is close to the concept “poor”, “wretched”, “dead” and “hungry”, he is a representative of “that world” on it [2-4]. The unexpected abundance of beggars in modern cities, especially in big cities, is nothing more or less than the collection of debts accumulated by the dead from the living, payment for the fact that “the other world” is crowded with the dead, for the most part, not at rest. Beggars drag us either into poverty or into some kind of judgment, or, most probably, both at the same time. If we leave aside the plot related to the destruction of the economic circle and the way to get into the inductive circle of poverty and idleness, and return to the ontological scheme of economy, we should note the geographical and activity-based jointness of different economies, the impossibility of their isolated existence (except only in theoretical reductions). In real geographical space there is a joint ownership and use of this or that land (forest, river, pasture etc.), joint transport, joint education etc. At that, two fundamentally different types of jointness can be distinguished:

The first one is based on the idea of a division of labour and, consequently, a market economy (with inherent competition);

The second – on the idea of cooperation (cooperative economy [6].

Any external regulation, such as state regulation, leads to the deformation of economic structures and relations, and always for the benefit of this external and to the detriment of the economy itself.

What is property? A way of life

The concept of property includes:

• Possession
• Directive
• Control
• Exclusion

In our country, the notion of ownership, since the early 90s, since privatization, has taken root only as ownership, and in 99% of cases, as illegal and criminal. In Russia in general, historically, the concept of property has never been formed. A striking example is Suvorov. Catherine II gave him the ownership of the Polish town of Kobrin (now Belarus, Brest region), and after a very short time, Paul I exiled the generalissimo to the same Kobrin, where Suvorov died in prison and under police surveillance. In the mid-90s I worked a lot in the collective farms of the Vologda region, dismantling the slave-holding collective farm system. I remember such a vivid public dialogue with one local peasant:

• The owner draws the boundary of his own self on the boundaries of his household
• It turns out I’m my cow?
• And
• And my vegetable garden is me?
• And the vegetable garden
• And my wife?
• And the wife

He listed different items for a long time and finally asked:

• And myself?
• Aye!

For him, who as a child had survived collectivization and, after the war, four years in a camp “for spikelets”, it was an ontological and moral turmoil.

Household is always a way of life, handed down from generation to generation, transforming and changing, yet unchanging in its homeostasis: a woman grabs a frying pan from above or below like her mother, and that one is like her mother, and that one is like her mother, and so on.

Production and reproduction ideology

The Soviet economy was built on a production ideology:

• Maximization of results with minimization of costs (hence predatory attitude to natural and human resources)
• Development of natural resources as devastation of territories
• Irretrievable removal of source materials
• Selling what can be produced rather than producing what can be sold (anti- market principle of economics)

The reproductive ideology is in stark contrast to the production ideology:

• Resources improve their quality during their exploitation (in Germany, the owner of agricultural land is legally obliged to increase the fertility and productivity of the land)
• Economic activity is purposeless and value-oriented
• The economy is cyclical rather than vectoral, male time dominates here
• Economy comprehensively (historically, naturally) rather than systematically (technically, artificially)

References

1. Bulgakov SN. Philosophy of Economy. 1990.
2. Ivanov VV. Reconstruction of the structure, symbolism and semantics of the Indo- European funeral rite. Studies in the field of Baltic-Slavic spiritual culture. 1990.
3. Sedakova A. The theme of share in funeral rites. Researches in the field of Baltic-Slavic culture.1990.
4. Toporov VN. Note on two Indo-European verbs of dying. Studies in the field of Baltic-Slavic spiritual culture. 1990.
5. Toffler O. Predictions and preconditions. Sociological Studies. 1987; 5.
6. Chayanov AV. Peasant farming. 1989.
7. Yailenko VP. Archaic Greece and the Middle East. 1990.