Hive Consciousness is upper stage communismid say Spoiler alerts, but the series came out in the 1990sIn the episode of Star Trek: Voyager, “The Thaw” (season 2, episode 23), the crew of the voyager come across a planet destroyed by a solar flare, where some of the survivors are in suspended animation/stasis, their minds hooked up to a simulated reality. Some of the crew members enter the reality to find it is controlled by a sadistic clown, who it turns out was was the holographic manifestation of the fears of five individuals who were part of a linked neural network. The Clown was created by the sleeping colonists, and is a product of their minds, but at the same time has control over their lives and the ability to kill them at any time, all whilst keeping them alive and hostage in his demented virtual-reality circus. This is a can be interpreted as a metaphor for capitalism itself. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx says
>“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”Capital itself is like an organism, a hive-mind, a lovecraftian entity which’s only goal is to survive whilst vampircally subsisting off humanity, much like “the clown”.
Hive MindsWhen the question of incentives and higher stage communism comes up. Marx comes from the tradition (partly) of continental philosophy, where, from the tropes of the ancient philosophers, from the Stoics to Plato, and the neo-platonists, to Spinoza, to Hegel, there is no evidence that Marx ever abandons or disavows a monist ontology. Being is a sigma-monad, simultaneously both being and in the process of becoming. There is a reason capital is analyzed holistically, rather than a mere collection of individual parts, but unlike rationalist-monists like Spinoza and Hegel, Marx sees the one being in material terms. Unlike in eastern religions where separateness is a spiritual illusion, Marx contextualizes this in both time and space, as part of the historical-epoch of capitalism. The idea that we are all separate beings with competing interests is part of the false consciousness of the proletariat.
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