Cooperation as a Creative Force: Alexander Bogdanov on Labor Organization and the New SocietyIn the early 20th century, when revolutions were shaking the world and capitalism was demonstrating its cruel logic, one person proposed to look at the history of humanity from an entirely unexpected angle. Not through class struggle or the change of formations, but through organization. Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov — a philosopher, economist, physician, revolutionary, and creator of the universal organizational science — believed that the key to the future lay not in the redistribution of property, but in the reconstruction of the way people work together, understand the world, and govern themselves. His ideas about cooperatives and labor organization, which were far ahead of their time, sound strikingly modern today.Against Prejudices: Why Cooperation Is Not OpportunismBogdanov began his career as one of the leaders of Bolshevism, but his path eventually diverged from Lenin's. The reason was a fundamental difference of opinion on how socialism should be built. Unlike Lenin, who bet on the seizure of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, Bogdanov saw the main force in worker collaboration. During the revolutionary years, he spoke out against the entrenched prejudice against cooperation in left-wing circles.Many revolutionaries of that time looked down on cooperatives. They believed that this "narrow-practical" work, associated with commercial calculations and compromises, could narrow the worker's outlook, undermine his battle idealism. They saw cooperators as opportunists engaged in trivial matters and indifferent to the higher ideals of class struggle.Bogdanov categorically rejected this disdain. He proved that working in a cooperative gives the worker a different, new meaning and significance, not trivially commercial, but seriously social. For him, cooperation was not a secondary matter, but a direct school of socialism. It is in the cooperative that the wo ... Read more