About us in brief

Our union of friends and like-minded people goes back to 20 December 1985. On that day, several schoolboys in the city of Baku united to bring the New People out of themselves: the kind of people who have the ability to create a New Life.

One of the main starting points of our union is our common world-view that we call the Red Idea, or the Radical Humanistic Idea. It is based on two principles:

1. Belief in the Human, in the source of Good in the Human Mind. This belief in the Human is a belief that each person is born for happiness and all people are born for happiness. The belief in the Human is also an anguish when this happiness is absent. It is a belief in the potential of each person and of the whole human society, a potential that may be suppressed, concealed and unclear. But this obscurity is first of all a consequence of the socioeconomic conditions that are related to the unjust structure of the world. The belief in the Human is a belief that humankind is able to become a wise life-giver in the world.

To say figuratively, “each person bears the Sun inside — you should only allow it to shine”.

2. “Kinetic Life”, the concept that defines the visual environment as an actual reality, as the sum of all that was ever lived through, overcome, gained and encountered. It is the perception of the world as an evolution of matter in an integral flow that may be harmonious or disorderly, but should always be the one thing given the utmost human attention as the basis, the logic and the joy of human existence. Any substitution of this concept for an understanding of life as an illusion, or as a transitional stage to be followed by a real and better existence, is alien to this world-view. No: there is only the here and now.

We are neither a political organization, nor a commune that separates itself from the outer world. Our aim is to walk the edge of the razor between these two forms. We live in the ordinary world, we work at museums and institutes, workshops, laboratories, archaeological sites and other places, we are pedestrians and passengers along with you, but we keep a spiritual unity among ourselves. One of the main elements in our relations is a principle of conciliarism: a commitment to reaching a concerted point of view without compromises and without suppressing one another’s viewpoints, taking into account the personal experience of each of us. Our arrival at a common decision is possible thanks to our deep openness and our critical analysis of everything that we have known and comprehended.

From the very beginning we were inspired by the ideas of communism, noosphere and conciliarism. We aimed to grow into the people of a communist world and to create communist interpersonal relations in the spirit of the paleontologist and science fiction writer Ivan Efremov. (We do not consider ourselves to be his disciples, however, and he did not like the idea of discipleship himself.) At a later time, as we grew out of our youthful maximalism, we came to an understanding of what we call a principle of total-lot aspiration: that it is impossible to be fully formed people of the communist future in the non-communist world, with its economics and psychology, in which we carry inside ourselves a heritage of millenniums of non-communist history not only at the level of culture but also at the level of biology (or genetics). Yet it is possible to aspire to it completely, so it is absolutely wrong in our view when a person speaks or writes as a communist while being a philistine, an adherent of the abysmal patriarchate or an extreme individualist.

Our union is similar to the togetherness in Vera Pavlovna’s workrooms in the famous novel “What Is to Be Done” by Nikolay Chernyshevsky, except that our collectivity is based not on an industrial foundation but on a theoretical and practical one. We discover, examine and translate a subculture of new interpersonal relations, because we realize that the state of a society is defined not only by socio-economic conditions but also by the personal qualities of people. And as far as we suppose that the World Community of the future may be described with the phrase “All for one and one for all”, we believe that we should develop this ethos within our small community.

This way of our life is brought about when each of your pictures, ideas or articles, your archeological explorations and your conversations with another person in the street, your sessions at the gym and your visits to the library, becomes a common deed. It is brought about when all of our children without exception can see not only their thoughtful parents (that is a normal situation), but a community of the people in which a daughter or a son of my friend is my daughter or son. It is brought about when the common deed becomes apparent through our particular deeds.

We believe that the victory of communism is impossible without the creation of new interpersonal relations, and without the disciplining of a new humanity with an active, energising civil purpose. The building of the future society is in need of strong foundations in the form of grassroots movements and unofficial unions of people who are capable of changing themselves and their environments in concordance with communist ideals. That is why we define the goals of our deliberate construction of a communist subculture. We aim:

  • to elaborate a new radical humanistic ethos based on a collective intellectual and spiritual search;
  • to discover and to verify practically the qualities of a future humanity, and those of a harmoniously developed person;
  • to develop a specific communist lifestyle;
  • to implement all of these ideas in our daily life, to construct an “island of the Future” in the sea of the present.

We assume that the deliberate formation of our communist subculture should proceed as a network of communities consisting of friends and like-minded people, and that the main feature of these relations should be a sense of responsibility for each other. This means that the successes and misfortunes of each person in our community should be experienced by every person as common ones, that all of our emergent disagreements should be considered as a potential for unity (that is, in a shared yearning to overcome them) instead of as a delimitation, that sincerity and openness should be more important than political correctness. In this way, inside the community the paradigm of interpersonal separation (a facet of the present world of alienation, and a necessary condition of its manipulation of people’s minds) will be overcome. This togetherness is to be achieved through a common discussion of the problems in the life of the community, theoretical research, the exchange of ideas, a desire for harmonious self-development, self-education, and the dissemination of our ideas outside the community.

For a long time the importance of subculture was underestimated. Its function as a basis for public movements (for example, the Narodnik movement in Russia in the 1860s or the Communar movement in the USSR of the 1960s and 1970s) was taken for granted as something natural. Yet when favorable conditions disappeared, groups such as those always died down because the subculture was no longer working. Their operations were always based upon specific public activities which were then broadened out as ideas were disseminated. For example, the Communars were based upon informal pedagogic clubs for children. Yet whenever economic conditions worsened, the people never had the means to build upon those activities to maintain their subculture. Our idea is for these spontaneous (and therefore sporadic) groups to be replaced with the humanistic (communist) subculture which we intend to form. We believe that this subculture is an indispensable condition for the humanistic (communist) reconstruction of society.

There are now more than two dozen of us, living in several cities. Many people joined the NCC builders’ community not long ago (NCC = Noosphere Communist Culture). The diversity of our initial circumstances has made it vital to have a “School” that each of us undergoes. At the School, everyone has to overcome everything that interferes with the common deed and prevents them from breaking with the person of the present to become the person of the future. The School aims at three basic qualities that are necessary to build NCC (and, we are convinced, are peculiar to the complete person of the future):

  • the quality of an “uneasy heart” in the present unsettled world. This is associated with the understanding that people live wrongly, that they should not live as they live now, that “in each of the child the Mozart is murdered”. It is a feeling of anguish, in which it is impossible to forget about the “milliards of clear-flashing eyes that look at the world and do not know about the evil and sorrow that fill it”, about senseless existence, either in poverty or in the satiety of consumerism. This understanding must not only be a part of a world-view but also lie in the basis of a person’s motivation and define their real behavior;
  • the quality of a “self-aware-person”: that is, a person who thinks independently of the prevailing currents of opinion, who reflects deeply upon the mechanisms of their psychological make-up, and who acts both with care and, by seeing their activity as coterminous with their personhood, also with full responsibility for all of the consequences of their behavior;
  • the quality of a “collective person”, a person who realizes their sociality, and who overcomes individualistic stereotypes. This person is capable of collective analysis and action based on their “open doors” to the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others in the group, and on their ability to “let them in” and to act on the basis of this «having the others inside». These collective persons, by this “sharedness”, are mutually responsible for the happiness of one another.

Today there are not many of us, so we welcome everybody who wishes to join us to act together. We welcome a dialogue with your own ideas as well.

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