The Slavic community: Beyond formations

He article was conceived as a search for a solution to the global problem of the reboot of modern capitalism in the Slavic community. The author summarized five fundamental/enduring properties of the Slavic community: common ownership of production means (land, primarily); common labor, with the obligatory personal labor contribution of a member of the community; common faith “in verity, in the truth, in God” (according to K.S. Aksakov); sobornost “as a need for mass gatherings, meetings, co-existence of community members” (according to B.A. Rybakov); and the smoothing of differences between social estates. The author considers all these properties of the Slavic community in the context of the concept of dynamic equilibrium, when changes in some properties affect changes in others and the phenomenon as a whole. Sobornost is interpreted as a feature of a cyclic nature, periodically suppressed by oppressive factors (the reforms of Peter the Great, market reforms in the recent history of Russia), but restored on a renewed soil. Common ownership is described through the search for a harmonious relationship between personal and common property (with the condition of its preservation, without the pursuit of maximum profit) both in the land sphere and in the sphere of modern home ownership. The description of common labor and the smoothness of differences between social estates focuses on the respect for physical labor on the part of different classes of the population (on the examples of the tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great) and is opposed to the modern devaluation of labor as a primary factor of production. The dynamics of these five properties of the Slavic community is analyzed in relation to a number of empirical community phenomena: a land peasant community, an Old Believer community, a communal factory, a commune, an artel/cooperative, collective gardening, households, and apartment buildings in modern Russia. The author shares the opinion of domestic and foreign researchers about the non-formational nature of the Slavic community and concludes that these five fundamental properties of the Slavic community are capable of determining the country's perspective economic image.

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