If we were to be asked what, in this world and all that in it is, men understand least, we should be tempted to reply—men themselves. This may seem a little astonishing when we observe the great advances made by men so far as the non human side of nature is concerned. Physics and chemistry can show a worthwhile, even spectacular progress. With it have gone notable technical achievements. In the field of biology reliable evidence has been built up about man considered as an adaptable organism. Yet, when we view men from the most fundamental stand-point, that is their social relations with each other, only then does their knowledge about themselves seem meagre, distorted and even mystical. Their power to utilise natural forces is quite unmatched by their power to control and plan their social lives.
Not that men have not sought to explain themselves. They have never ceased to do so. From time to time they have entertained notions of themselves as the darlings or the playthings of the gods; the unwitting victims of fate or kismet; 'the sports of chance, or even the splendid products of cosmic design. What men, by and large, have never significantly understood is themselves as men. They have never appreciated at its true level, the fact that, as men, they are the offspring of historical forces; the heirs of certain socially determined conditions as well as the initiators and begetters of all social change.
It will have been noticed perhaps, that we have used the term “men” rather than individual man. The choice is a deliberate one. There is no scientific evidence to support the view that men have lived their lives as isolated specimens of the human genus without knowledge or experience of others of their kind; as “lone wolves” pursuing solitary productive activity. The notion of the bare individual with no social reference is something which cannot be adequately defined. It certainly cannot constitute the starting point of any investigation into the concrete behaviour of actual men existing at any particular time. In living fact we are always confronted with a man who exists in a social organisation with the other men; a self whose identity is established by his relationship with other selves in a social framework. We do not begin our lives with self consciousness. It is acquired at a later stage of our mental development. Our consciousness of self coexists with consciousness of other selves. Before there is a man, there are men. If an infant were to be deposited in the heart of the African jungle, and assuming it could live, it would never achieve self consciousness. It could never acquire language, culture, a code of ethics or anything which is distinctly human. It could only be an animal, and one poorly equipped to survive, among other animals.
The institutions of men, their culture and ideas, are not part of their biological structure but an outcome of social organisation. The birth of a baby as an organic being is a natural fact. Human beings are however born in society not outside of it. It is society which enables and ensures that their genetic potentialities can be actualised into something specifically human; i.e. the acquiring of speech, self consciousness, social skill and techniques, which includes not only the using of tools but the making of them. In short, it is society which makes possible the possession of those human attributes which mark men off from the animal kingdom.
Individuals are not then self-existing, self-sufficing atoms who arbitrarily come together for purposes of temporary experience but people who can only live by making demands on others and having demands made upon them in turn. People can only fulfil their own needs by fulfilling the needs of others. The products of labour by which a man lives cannot be exclusively his own, but are the result of communal effort. Because labour is social labour, that is men working together in a definite way, every man is dependent upon the social skill and techniques which he, in common with others, socially inherits. Even a man working on his own has much more than his own efforts going into the work he produces. Strip a man of his social dependencies or attempt to abstract him from the complex of his social environment and nothing which is uniquely or recognisably human is left.
The individual is not than a prerequisite, but a result of society. While society is composed of individuals, these individuals work and live in a mutual dependence upon each other. That is why different societies produce different types of individuals. They even produce different notions of what constitutes individuality.
If the individual man cannot exist apart from society how then did men enter into productive cooperation with each other? The answer is that our gregarious sub-human ancestry were forced by brute necessity to involuntarily enter into a primitive form of economic co-operation. It was this primitive productive process, not known to other animals, that finally forced them into becoming men.
The things that bind men together in a thousand and one social ties are not abstract notions of self interest or eternal mental attributes but primary human needs indispensable to man’s existence:—that is food, clothing and shelter or as Engel's says “the production and reproduction of life itself.” This holds good for past society, for present society and society for all time. The basic social bond between man and man is not spiritual or psychological. It is practical. Men need each other's bodies in order to live before they need each others minds in order to converse. As Marx points out, speech is consciousness and speech arises from the concrete practical needs of social intercourse.
We have so far spoken of man as distinct from nature but the distinction is of course only a relative one. Men live in nature and through nature. Men act upon nature and are acted upon in turn.
“He (man) opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway."
(Capital Vol. I P.P 156-157 Swan Sonnenschein.)
It is this interaction between men and nature that constitutes economic production. Human nature, so far from being a constant in terms of fixed instincts, innate capacities and desires is, within its organic limits, something which can be changed by men’s historical and productive activity. ‘‘All History,” says Marx, “is the progressive modification of human nature.”
Men’s adaptation to nature is not an organic adaptation to external conditions. It is a social adaptation carried out by socially organised labour in order that men may live. Birds fly and fish swim as the result of biological adaptation to external conditions. Men travel through air and water better than birds or fish but they do it, not as individuals responding to external stimuli but as an organised social body acting on nature in a planned and purposeful way.
Men’s language, science, art, techniques and skills are not adaptations to nature. They are adaptations inside society and through society, which acts as an organised force upon nature in certain specific ways. Men in this way are able to change the face of nature and utilise its forces in a way unknown to the rest of the animal world. Thus, while man has biologically changed very little over thousands of years, his social evolution has been continuous and remarkable. Men, socially, are able to manipulate and change nature-given material, i.e. by building cities, roads, means of transport, machinery, etc., and in changing their environment, the changers are changed themselves. In addition, men, by changing their environment gain a deeper insight into the causal nature of reality. By increasing their knowledge of nature and society they enlarge their views and change their conceptions of reality. They thus change their conception of themselves as part of this reality. It is the development of the social productive relations which makes the culture of chattel slavery different from that of modern capitalism. This difference lies in the different social environment. This different environment as a result produces different men.
To-day we no longer have the Egyptian Pharaoh, the Greek gentleman, the Roman patrician. The feudal lord has gone and the mediaeval knight is buried with his battle-axe. Not only have they disappeared as men but with them has passed, a whole way of life. A whole way of social thinking and acting has disappeared down the irreversible stream of time. Today men are not born into the social relations of slave master and slave, or overlord and serf. They are born as employer and wage-earner. Today a different social system has produced a different subject class and with it a different individual. Today the modem workers must be educated in the arts, the crafts, the technologies and the sciences. Collectively they must perform all the complicated functions necessary to run a complex system. Their acquiescence to Capitalism must be sought in a thousand different ways via the schools, press and radio. Today they have the vote. Tomorrow, class knowledge behind that vote can sweep the capitalist system into the limbo of social antiquities. By understanding the class struggle, men can end it and usher in a social classless era and a classless man.
The nature of social man then is to change. The collective history of men reveals a vast and shifting multitude of men in different social systems; each system with its different civilisations, institutions, culture, technology and its peculiar religion and philosophy.
Social changes occur because men find that their needs cannot be adequately satisfied within a given social order. The forerunners of the present capitalist class brought about the destruction of the old feudal order because productive development had made possible new needs which the old system, based on less efficient methods of wealth production, could not satisfy. In the course of these social changes men changed themselves.
Today the needs of the working class are the class-conditioned needs of an exploited section of the community. Their needs are determined not by what they produce but by how much is necessary to keep them in efficient production and reproduction of their working energies. Thus in a profit economy like capitalism the social well-being of the class that owns is dependent upon those who toil. There is an ever growing disparity between what the worker actually gets and what the productive capacity makes possible.
The capitalist class has carried the process of the division of labour to a point which has increased the productivity of labour and cheapened labour costs. For the capitalist it has meant vastly increased profits. For the worker it has had the most harmful results. The capitalist system has fragmented much of the productive capacities and working faculties of men into multifarious impersonal automatic processes. In this way Capitalism compels many to be chained to exclusive spheres of repetitious productive activity which cripples their natural endowments. Capitalism wherever possible seizes on every trade and craft and seeks to convert it into an ever increasing number of detailed processes and repetitive operations. The capitalist in demanding excessive specialisation compels the worker to sacrifice all other faculties. In this way capitalism cripples and deforms human nature and forces it into dehumanising activities. The worker does not work for himself or for a common communal activity in which the exercise of the special capacities of all may be made available for all. He works under orders in an appointed way at an appointed time. As Marx has said, he works merely for money which has nothing to do with work itself. Today man is no longer a productive animal working for the pleasure that the exercise of his productive faculties gives him. He is only half a man or half the man he could be in the exercise of his genuine human potentialities.
The outworn cliche, “You can’t change human nature,” is still in vogue. It serves to perpetuate the notion that “human nature” being what it is, capitalism is the only system possible. Through the ages a motley crew of priests, pundits and politicians has echoed and re-echoed it. The pity is, not that they have said it but that the multitude, to whom they have said it, has, without understanding what it means, accepted it.
Human nature has changed and is still changing. Its most fundamental change is dependent upon the vast majority becoming socialists. Only when men have realised socialism will the opportunities for man to come of age be realised.
Ted Wilmott
