The Parkrun – an Inkling of socialism? (2026)

From the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 13 June this year, the 13 runners and 5 volunteers who set up the first parkrun ever in 2004 at Bushy Park, London, celebrated one million parkruns worldwide since then. On that day runs were taking place in 2,800 places across 23 countries. In an interview with the i newspaper, one of the original parkrun organisers, Paul Sinton-Hewitt, said that the success of the event was ‘clearly down to the simplicity … the fact it is for everybody, inclusivity, the nature of that, the fact that it’s free’. Another of the founders, Andrew Lane, said he’d originally predicted that, if the event got going, participation would peak at 200 runners per time, otherwise the course would be too crowded. But at the 1,000th Bushy Park run in 2024, there were over 6,000 participants.

Clearly people didn’t mind being crowded together with others and, since they weren’t competing with one another as in a conventional race, getting a clear unimpeded run wasn’t a priority for most. At best if people were there to compete, it was against themselves, ie, trying to improve their personal best time. Lane went on to say that he’d also predicted, wrongly again, that there would be a lack of volunteers coming forward to do the organising and this would hold growth back. But, as he put it, ‘I failed to realise … how much volunteering would become a great pleasure and destination in itself’.

Interesting words

There are some interesting words here: ‘inclusivity’, ‘free’, ‘volunteering’, ‘pleasure’, for example. Interesting because they describe a voluntary, cooperative, communal kind of activity enjoyed by large numbers of people and going directly contrary to the ethic of a society, the one we live in, based on me-first competition, beggar thy neighbour and the gaining of personal wealth and status. A society too in which we often hear of how people have become alienated, disconnected from one another (‘atomised’ is the word often used) and bereft of any clear sense of purpose. In the parkrun, however, we have an activity that is entirely cooperative and purposeful, where money doesn’t enter into any part of the equation and which is pursued by increasingly large numbers of people, whether as run participants or organisers. And clearly the ‘non-runners’ too experience a sense of community as well as a perception that they’re doing something useful, as well, no doubt, as enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.

Social animals

Should we be surprised? Well probably not, because regardless of the way current society is organised with its massive economic inequality, its ever-present wars, the stresses and frustrations of its employment system, human beings are fundamentally social animals who, given even small opportunities, are ready and willing to work together to carry out activities and achieve ends they consider worthwhile. Apart from our common everyday experience where, in a whole host of situations and pursuits, humans display cooperation and empathy with one another, a plethora of studies, sociological and anthropological, many of which have been discussed in the pages of the Socialist Standard  continue to illustrate and confirm this.

This year’s World Happiness Report by Gallup, which rates countries according to the level of ‘happiness’ of their citizens, concludes unequivocally that what makes individuals feel most happy is ‘being generous and volunteering’, since it gives ‘a feeling of belonging and sociality’. A recent discussion on the Gallup report on BBC radio reiterated this, with the broadcaster Evan Davis, one of whose specialities is business and economics, stating that ‘money matters to a certain extent for the agency and control it gives you’, but that ‘the main individual thing is to be generous to other people and to volunteer [and] you will make yourself happier’.

Another recent study carried out by a team of scientists from American and Australian universities entitled ‘Altruistic, not reputational concerns, drive human prosociality, values and aspirations across the world’, studied anonymous survey responses from almost 1 million individuals spread over more than 100 countries, taking into account different cultural contexts, age ranges, socioeconomic levels, and time periods. The researchers found that the vast majority of people reported performing acts of altruism because they were interested in the well-being of others, not because these acts benefitted them directly. They concluded that people are more likely to want to be remembered for making a difference, helping others, and improving the world, and to value things like caring over status or personal gains. The way a review of this study put it was ‘people really want to be good’ .

Cooperation or ego?

Another new piece of research, this time from the fields of archaeology and anthropology and published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, provides evidence that it has been humans’ ability to empathize and relate to one another that has allowed our species to thrive and build complex cultures over the whole planet. It points to how the archaeological record illustrates the capacity of early humans to make long-term commitments to one another’s well-being, to tolerate frustration, to plan collectively, to make sacrifices, and to trust others. In many instances, for example, archaeologists have unearthed remains of disabled and elderly humans who could not possibly have survived alone.

A review of this study on the IFL Science website concludes that yet again we have evidence that ‘one of humanity’s greatest strengths was never just ego or ruthlessness, but profound emotions and our extraordinary ability to turn those feelings into cooperation’. Of course we see ‘ego’ and ‘ruthlessness’ around us too, we see displays of non-cooperation and lack of sympathy and understanding for others. But, perhaps contrary to appearances, we see this much less frequently than the opposite. But precisely because it is less common, it attracts greater attention and becomes more ‘newsworthy’.

Purpose and enjoyment

What has all this got to do with socialism? Put quite simply, socialism – the moneyless, wageless society of common ownership and voluntary work with free access to all goods and services which we campaign to see established – can only work if human beings are able to cooperate freely and willingly to produce and distribute everything that is needed to provide a comfortable, purposeful life for all. And what we learn from the kinds of research mentioned above, from everyday experience and from voluntary on-the-ground activity such as the parkrun is that we are geared, we have the capacity, to organise ourselves and our society in that way.

We learn too that the dog-eat-dog mentality that we also see around us and can set people against one another, often in ugly and irrational ways, arises not from any ‘natural’ human inclination but from the conditions of life in the society we live in, from the very nature of the competitive, profit-driven system we call capitalism – a system effectively described by one commentator as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’. We draw from all the evidence that such behaviour and such conditions can be overcome if we are willing to take the bull by the horns and decide, via collective and democratic political action, to establish and organise a society in which volunteering and cooperative, communal activity is the norm in every facet of life. Of course, despite the constraints of capitalism, a vast amount of such activity already takes place, not only in parkruns but across a whole range of endeavours. But socialism will provide the opportunity for us to fulfil our potential for cooperation not just in our spare time but as a way of organising the whole of society efficiently and effectively and giving us all lives that are enjoyable, meaningful and fulfilling and satisfy our deep-seated need for social interaction.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Helicopters over Helvellyn (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world sees its first paper trillionaire while food prices rocket and existential crises loom on all sides. Have you concluded that capitalism has become a parody of itself, with psychopathic zombies in charge? Yup, and you know what else? You need a break!

If you’re a) reasonably fit and b) have the resources to get out into the countryside, the great outdoors might just save your sanity. It’s not just nature’s quiet grandeur, or the comforting knowledge that it will all still be there when today’s cardboard Caligulas are long gone. If you look closely, you’ll realise something important about people, even when there’s nobody in sight.

You may notice a general absence of litter. There is a thing called ‘broken windows syndrome‘, in which visible signs of neglect, litter and vandalism tend to encourage more of the same. There is a flipside. ‘No Littering’ signs don’t work half as well as there being no litter in the first place. The more pristine the environment, the more people try to keep it that way.

As you meander along your country paths and hilltop trails you will also notice how many have been flagged, stepped, safety-railed, bordered and gravelled. That’s all done to help you, and protect the landscape too, by people you will never meet and never be able to thank. And here’s the thing. They do it for nothing. No wages, no perks, no stakeholder shares or investment opportunities, no title deeds, no face-in-the-paper or picture-on-the-pub-wall. Mountain Rescue, those anonymous heroes of the high passes, rescue people from mountains. These volunteers rescue mountains from people.

For example, volunteers are currently repairing some of the high paths on Helvellyn, in the English Lake District, as part of a three-year project involving helicopters, hard work and hundreds of tonnes of stone. This is necessary because the paths are worn down by up to 19 million visitors a year. Says one local Ranger: ‘We are privileged to have such a great bunch of volunteers who are willing to head out into the hills in all weathers to clear blocked drains, build paths and engage with people all across the Lake District… We certainly couldn’t monitor and maintain all 400 paths each year without this vital contribution’.

You’ve heard that saying, ‘no such thing as a free lunch’. It’s a capitalist saying, which reflects a bitter capitalist mindset. In reality, ‘ordinary’ people are perfectly willing to give their cooperative labour for free if it adds something useful to the general commonwealth. Even when it’s at considerable risk to themselves. Mountain Rescue volunteers jeopardise their own lives because dopey urban types are daft enough to go swanning up a peak without a map, wet weather gear or a compass. Lifeboat volunteers plough grimly through heavy swells to rescue party-boat people who didn’t bother to check tides or a weather forecast. Socialists know all this very well. What we don’t understand is why so many people don’t know this. Instead they believe humans are vile and antisocial, therefore a post-capitalist cooperative society is impossible, and we deserve to be ruled by super-rich tyrants.

Another thing you might spot, on garden walls or gates, are eggs for sale, or jams or chutneys, with a little honesty box next to them. Sure, it’s all a bit twee, and most jam makers aren’t depending on the income. But now a whole cottage industry in baking has sprung up, with cake sheds ‘packed with cookies, brownies, old-school sprinkle cakes or lemon drizzle… for which you are trusted to pay through an honesty box system’. So successful have cake sheds become that local killjoy councils are considering stepping in to insist on trading licences, public liability insurance and health and safety certificates. With some bakers making £1,000 a week, trust has its limits. Those entrepreneurs have installed CCTV.

A recent sciencex.com article has this to say about trust: ‘Social trust is shaped largely by personal experiences of navigating the world, as well as by how strongly people believe others are likely to act honestly or dishonestly in everyday life.’ The article reports a recent Norwegian study of over 8,000 people which ‘shows that we often overestimate others’ dishonesty and that people are more honest than we think.’ Perhaps more surprising is that when study subjects were told that they had identified dishonesty where none existed, many promptly adjusted their expectations accordingly. Mistrust, it seems, is not ingrained. If better evidence comes along, we can change our minds and become more trusting.

Mistrust is the central and irreducible problem, not just in capitalism, but in any property society that relies on trade, even barter. Why? Because private ownership of property introduces a conflict of interests between buyer and seller. The seller has an incentive to rip off the buyer, so the buyer can never really trust the seller. The mistrust at the heart of the trade transaction then scales up to the whole society, rewards the biggest liars and con artists, and reinforces a mutual suspicion that affects and infects all human relations. It’s the broken window syndrome again. Lies and dishonesty beget more lies and dishonesty. Democratic sharing and free lunches? Don’t be so naïve!

In a gift economy, which is socialism, there is no central conflict of interests. The donor gains no material advantage by making the gift, so has no incentive to lie about it. Likewise, the recipient has no reason to distrust the donor. The trust at the heart of the gift economy scales up to the whole society, and reinforces a mutual respect and confidence that pervades everything. Truth and honesty beget truth and honesty. Just like the unspoilt countryside, we will collectively strive to keep it that way.

Still, you don’t have to go yomping up a mountain to see decent, selfless behaviour in action. It’s all around you, every day, in spite of ‘common sense’ and received wisdom. It’s why socialism will work.

Paddy Shannon

Avoiding the elephant (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Invisible Rivals. How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World. By Jonathan R. Goodman. Yale University Press. 2025. xv+236pp.

This is a wide-ranging book. Written in a jargon-free and eminently accessible style, it is basically a work of evolutionary psychology, but it also steps into a number of other fields of knowledge and investigation, for example biology, anthropology, history, politics and economics. Its fundamental themes, as suggested in its title, are cooperation and competition and the part they play in human society.

As the author points out, this has been a hot topic of study for specialists in various fields over many years, and even more so in recent times. For most of these, the old idea of humans as red in tooth and claw, deep-down selfish and wicked and with social interaction dictated by an ethic of everyone for themselves has been superseded by an understanding that homo sapiens is capable of a wide range of behaviours according to the life conditions and experience of each particular individual and social group.

Many recent studies have emphasised that, if circumstances and social environment allow, human beings are likely to behave in generous and empathetic ways towards others, since we are essentially flexible creatures with behaviour shaped by the society into which we are born and become part of. It follows from this that, if life takes place under adverse systems and conditions, this can provoke negative reactions in which communities are divided among themselves and people may be inclined to seek their own advantage at the expense of others. Some studies stress the ‘positivity’ element more strongly and see human beings as an instinctively kind and associative species, ‘pro-social’ or ‘super-cooperators’, whose default, whose natural inclination is to share and be cooperative and mutually supportive. In this view, only when conditioned from the earliest years to compete and pursue personal ‘success’ and reward, as in today’s capitalist system, do humans shift away from sharing and towards selfishness and personal gain. But both these positions espouse the idea of humans as eminently flexible and adaptable creatures and often draw on evidence that, for the vast majority of the 300,000 years or more of human existence, we lived in sharing egalitarian societies with no rulers or ruled, no resource domination and relatively little conflict. That was when we were hunter-gatherers, and the argument continues that, only when that lifestyle was replaced by one of settled agriculture starting around 12,000 years ago, (the ‘tiny speck in our history’ referred to in this book) did hierarchies and states come into being and result in struggles for power, development of classes and the existence of rulers and ruled, provoking predatory behaviours and setting people against one another.

All this of course fits in nicely with the socialist advocacy of an egalitarian society, which, via modern technology, could guarantee a more secure level of existence than hunter-gatherer societies and could be based on free and equal access to all goods and services, with no buying and selling, no wages or salaries with cooperative endeavour aimed at satisfying human needs rather than seeking profit. So nothing in ‘human nature’ would prevent this. Indeed, if human beings are either ‘naturally’ cooperative and inclined to share or even sufficiently flexible to welcome such a lifestyle as being in both the collective interest and their own, then surely it will fit them like a glove.

However, the author of this book sees things rather differently. He presents what one commentator has called ‘a highly nuanced account of human competition and cooperation’. According to this, though we are capable of being either selfish or altruistic, the selfish side tends to prevail, something we may not even always be aware of ourselves. In other words, in most of our dealings, the motives we present to others may be different from what they believe and indeed from what we ourselves believe. In this view, a human tendency for self-interested manipulation is seen as fundamentally present. As the author puts it, ‘selfishness and double dealing are basic human traits to be found in everyone, including themselves’ and ‘deception and exploitation are deeply rooted in our natures’. So selfish goals are seen to be hidden under a cloak of apparent altruism or selflessness. Thus the ‘invisible rivalry’ of the book’s title.

But what about humankind’s approximately 290,000 years of apparently egalitarian and conflict-light hunter-gathering? The writer does not neglect this but argues that, in terms of equality and conflict, things were more nuanced and not necessarily as one-sided as presented by many studies of anthropology and palaeontology, pointing rather towards his more ambiguous take on ‘human nature’. His verdict is that, though we commonly share and reciprocate, this does not make us innately cooperative. It just makes us ‘animals capable of cooperation’. Here it is noticeable, however, that, though he draws on a wide range of sources which point in favour of his thesis, other key sources providing widely recognised evidence for the ‘highly flexible’ or ‘ultra-cooperative’ idea, some of which have been reviewed in this journal, are notably missing. There is no mention whatever, for example, of the work of widely recognised experts in this field such as John Gowdy or R. Brian Ferguson. So it is difficult not to see a certain amount of ‘cherry-picking’ in what is presented here.

As for the writer’s take on the current state of humanity and the economic system that dominates it – capitalism -, he clearly does not consider that the equivocal view of humanity he presents prevents change or improvement and he does acknowledge the possibility and importance of cooperation. He states unequivocally in fact that human society could not have survived ‘without intense cooperation, and this is implicit in the support he expresses for what might be called ‘progressive’ social policies and developments, ie, more openness, democracy and equality. He refers to a need for ‘the political will to enact policies that upend the modes of exploitation we have normalized and the cultures of inequality we allow to thrive’ and for this to happen via ’cooperation at the local and global levels’. But he sees any such changes entirely in the context and through the lens of the existing system, thereby avoiding the elephant in the room, ie, that system’s imperative to keep on existing and producing for the profit of the tiny minority. We, on the other hand, would regard any attempt to bring about change or improvement within its framework as tinkering at the edges, a sort of ‘moving the deckchairs on the Titanic’.

Howard Moss

Violence and war: Are they inevitable? The long view (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

It’s become widely accepted that, for well over 200,000 years, hunter-gatherers, humans like us, lived in egalitarian societies. So why, beginning around 12,000 years ago, did most of them, within a relatively short period of time, give up that lifestyle for settled agriculture and, in so doing, move to a different way of life and new social structures, where a dominance hierarchy of the few began to take over from equality for all, leading to exploitation, slavery, violence and war?

The invention of scarcity

The answer to that is multi-faceted. But, broadly speaking, such a transformation can only have come about as a result of environmental factors pushing people into the imagined greater security that the longer-term and more abundant supplies of food and other materials derived from farming would have been capable of producing. The trouble is that, once that happened, there was no obvious going back, as it brought with it the creation of hierarchies and states and rule by those few who in previous societies would have been considered anti-social for their dominating tendencies. That minority would now have much freer rein for their deviant behaviour, resulting in struggles for power, the development of classes and rulers and ruled, and the emergence of what came to be considered natural orders headed by kings, emperors, pharaohs and high priests, with the majority living at a lower level of subsistence than as hunter-gatherers (‘the invention of scarcity’, it has been called). This in turn gave rise to full-scale predatory social systems (first slavery, then feudalism, and now capitalism) where the majority have been kept in check by tiny, privileged minorities either by the threat of violence from higher authority and/or by ideological constructs or smokescreens such as tribal loyalty or nationalism.

Original sin and the free market

In the lens of recorded history the result of these dominance structures and of the conflicts over wealth and resources that have arisen between the privileged ruling minorities has been (and still is) large-scale violence and continual wars. And over most of this history, the explanation for this found in writings, both secular and religious, has been that conflict between humans is the natural state of things. Christianity, for example, expressed this through the idea of ‘original sin’, while commentators not dependent on religious doctrine tended to come to similar conclusions. For example, the 16th century Italian political writer Machiavelli, in his famous essay The Prince, stated that human beings were ‘ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, hypocritical, cowardly and greedy’ and ‘never do anything good except out of necessity’. Similar views were expressed in the following century by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, which argued that human beings are greedy by nature and that human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’. The following century, the economist Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, also famously insisted that private interest (or ‘self-love’) was ‘natural’ human behaviour, justifying a society based on the ‘free market’, where everyone seeks their own self-advantage regardless of the social and economic inequality that goes with it. Some questioning of these views did begin in the 19th century with the writings of Charles Darwin and early practitioners of the science of anthropology such as Lewis Henry Morgan. But it was only in the 20th century, with the increased flowering of anthropology and the new science of archaeology, that serious doubt was cast on the belief that human beings were deep-down selfish, wicked and aggressive, as new perspectives emerged from growing evidence of how people had lived and interacted in the pre-farming era, the overwhelmingly longest period of human existence on earth.

Not that the traditional ‘fixed human nature’ view simply went away. It continued to be expressed in much popular writing in particular. Examples of this between the 1950s and the 1970s were books like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and imaginative fiction like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (and arguably George Orwell’s Animal Farm too). It also carried on coming from some ‘scientific’ sources, for example Richard Wrangham’s 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence and, most recently, Richard Overy in Why War (2024). Such writers tend to see war as having been constant throughout the whole of human history, suggesting that humans are war prone and have what Overy calls ‘a psychological predisposition for warfare’. And this leads that writer to conclude that ‘if war has a very long human history, it also has a future’.

But, overall, the last 30-40 years have marked a significant shift in perspectives both among social commentators and scientific experts. Among a slew of studies on this and allied topics (some of them reviewed in this journal), titles like Beyond War, The Human Potential for Peace, Team Human, Survival of the Friendliest, and Ultra-Social tell their own tale. The majority of these writings conclude from their authors’ investigations not that human beings are non-violent and non-prone to war per se but rather that violence and fighting are not their most natural inclination, even if they are capable of being driven to it by circumstances. Even the widely read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, though often cited as supporting the idea of innate human selfishness, on close examination does no such thing. In fact it is largely a book about altruism and cooperative behaviour. Even its writer is on record as saying that its title may have been an unfortunate one and that perhaps a different title such as ‘The Immortal Gene’, or even ‘The Altruistic Organism’, might have been more appropriate.

Highly flexible or pro-social?

Highly relevant in this connection too is the work of anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, who has spent 50 years researching the origins of war and has been called ‘the greatest living scholar of human warfare’. In an article in Scientific American in 2018, entitled ‘War is not part of human nature’, Ferguson notes that the overwhelming evidence on war, which he defines as armed conflict and killing sanctioned by society and carried out by members of one group against members of another group, suggests that it was not always present among humans. Instead it began as a result of societal changes at varying times in different locations but with its earliest signs appearing around 12,000 years ago – so closely coinciding with humankind’s first experiments with agriculture. In a later article (2023) in the journal Public Anthropologist, he states: ‘Our species is not biologically destined for war. War is not an inescapable part of social existence’; and ‘Obviously, we are capable of war and often choose it. The question is whether evolution tilts us in that direction. I say no.’ His findings, he says, show that: ‘egalitarian mobile hunter foragers generally don’t make war’ and that ‘agriculture and states went along with more war’. His most recent book, Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill? (2023) reiterates this with the conclusion that ‘Men are not born to kill but they can be cultivated to kill’.

This is a perspective also echoed by Yuval Noah Harari in his best-selling book Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (2014). Here Harari makes a clear statement about humans as essentially flexible creatures, insisting that human behaviour is shaped by the society into which we are born and become part of. He goes on to say that, if our social arrangements were determined simply by our biology, then there would never have been the wide gamut of behaviour patterns, relationships and cultures which we know about and which can also be witnessed in what we see around us now.

Some studies go even further than this, seeing humans as naturally ‘pro-social’ beings with cooperation not competition, peacefulness not violence as their intrinsic default. In such studies, qualities such as kindness and empathy are seen as existing ‘naturally’ in the overwhelming majority of humans, as long as overwhelming forces don’t get in the way of it. The historian Tine De Moor, for example, in The Dilemma of the Commoners (2015), claims that ‘history teaches us that man is essentially a cooperative being, a homo cooperans’, that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and that ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’. This kind of outlook is echoed by Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind. A Hopeful History (2021) in which he presents arguments many have found compelling that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal and cooperative and that the outstanding feature of human behaviour is the desire to act together and to display tolerance and mutual support even if circumstances are dire. As part of the evidence for this he points to the plethora of everyday gestures of help, cooperation, solidarity and compassion people in all societies all over the world show to one another on a daily basis without any prospect of gain or reward. John Gowdy’s Ultra Social. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (2021), though in most ways a quite different kind of book from Bregman’s, echoes a similar message with statements like ‘Our current predicaments are not gene-based. They have risen out of the material base of human economies and the associated cultural adaptations and supporting institutions’ and with an insistence that, if we have a ‘nature’, it is a ‘pro-social’ one, a natural inclination, to be empathetic, associative and cooperative.

Such considerations about human behaviour have been accompanied – and often confirmed – by the more detailed and scientific studies of primeval hunter-gatherer societies that modern technological methods have made possible. A recent study, for example, analysing evidence of traumatic injuries in 189 individuals from 25 different sites revealed healed bone treatment, suggesting a story of mutual aid, patience and dedication among those people (Victoria Romano and others, ‘Bone trauma and interpersonal care among Late Holocene hunter-gatherers from Patagonia, Argentina’, International Journal of Paleopathology, December 2025, pp.10-24). It has been estimated that around one in five hunter-gatherers would have been likely to suffer some kind of injury or disability and while most wounds would have been the predictable bruises and fractures of daily life requiring only a short break from everyday activities, others were likely to have been worse, leaving individuals unable to hunt, gather, grind plants, craft tools, etc, for months, or perhaps a lifetime. Here we are presented with evidence that those suffering in this way would have been cared for by the community, even if they were not economically ‘useful’. Such research, therefore, lends weight to the ‘pro-social’ arguments many are making about a fundamentally benign human nature.

But in the end, whether humans are intrinsically ‘pro-social’ or simply highly flexible, the evidence is that, while violence and war are certainly possible forms of human behaviour as both history and the present show, coexistence without violence or war also presents itself as another possible form of human behaviour. This was a reality recognised as far back as 1985 in Unesco’s ‘Seville Statement on Violence’, in the following terms: ‘Biology does not condemn humanity to war … It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature’. And the undeniable fact is that the vast majority of interactions that take place in daily life between human beings are co-operative, peaceful and harmonious, not rude or cruel or anti-social. We do not normally expect to have arguments or experience serious friction with our fellow humans in the course of our daily activities, and most of the time we don’t. And, on the relatively rare occasions when that does happens, it stands out – precisely because it is rare.

Cooperation or competition?

The broader point here is that, while we do not say that the kind of society socialists advocate and regard as eminently possible will be entirely argument or conflict free (no human society could be), we do say that the scope for argument and conflict will be far less than in the competitive, insecure society we live in under capitalism. This society, in both its ethic and its organisation, runs directly contrary to the ‘normal’ human tendency to help and cooperate with others. It drives people to compete with others, to try to get the better of them and even to do them down. It does this by tempting people with the lure of gain or reward, often financial, so pushing them to behave in ways that divide them from their fellow humans and often making the ‘success’ of one into the ‘failure’ of others. Given this reality, what is truly remarkable and significant is that, despite the overwhelmingly powerful pressures capitalism places on people to get the better of others and so not be ‘kind’ to them, in so many of the actions and connections and competitive situations created for us in our daily lives, most of us still manage to be largely kind to others, to cooperate with them and to share. In a new kind of egalitarian society, one of free and equal access, with no buying and selling or wages or salaries, with co-operative endeavour, and with technology and the abundant resources of the planet used to satisfy need and not for profit-making ends, is it far-fetched to believe that such behaviour will come fully into its own?

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Books mentioned in the article that have featured elsewhere in previous Socialist Standards

• Sep 1969: A review of The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris.
• Aug 1993: A review of Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
• Nov 2015: A review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
• May 2021: A review of Humankind. A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
• Sep 2022: A review of Ultrasocial. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future by John Gowdy

Co-operation makes sense (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you a sucker? Do you cheat? Or are you one to bear a grudge? For biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1978). such questions impinge on a subject of great importance: what is the most effective behavioural strategy to ensure survival in evolutionary terms?

By the title of his book, it seems that, for Dawkins, this was a foregone conclusion — that natural selection would tend to favour, above all. behaviour that was nasty and ruthlessly competitive. As he says himself: 

The selfish gene view follows logically from the accepted assumptions of neo-Darwinism. It is easy to misunderstand but, once understood, it is hard to doubt its fundamental truth. Most of the organisms that have ever lived failed to become ancestors. We that exist are, without exception, descended from that minority within every earlier generation that were successful in becoming ancestors. Since all we animals inherit our genes from ancestors rather than from non-ancestors, we tend to possess the qualities that make for success in becoming an ancestor rather than the qualities that make for failure. Successful qualities are such things as fleetness of foot, sharpness of eye. perfection of camouflage, and there seems no getting away from it ruthless selfishness. Nice guys don't become ancestors. Therefore living organisms don't inherit the qualities of nice guys (The Listener, 17 April 1986).

Yet Dawkins is at pains to disassociate himself from the rather pessimistic implications of such views for society. Interestingly, in the Horizon programme on television (on which the above article is based) called Nice Guys Finish First he related how, after the publication of his book, he was wooed by various people of right wing persuasion who saw his book as a vindication of their belief in a system of cut-throat competition. Conversely. he found himself under attack from the left, one critic going so far as to suggest that the impact of The Selfish Gene was partly to blame for the subsequent election of the Thatcher government.

But Dawkins insists that both sides had misunderstood the point he was trying to make. Paradoxically, the pursuit of self interest is not necessarily incompatible with being "nice" — that is, co-operative. This is what is confusingly referred to in socio-biological circles as "reciprocal altruism". Since altruism implies the genuinely intended sacrifice of one's interests, it is difficult to see how this fits in with the idea conveyed by the term "reciprocal altruism", that if you scratch my back I will scratch yours and both will benefit as a result. It would be more accurate to call this "enlightened self interest": no "sacrifice" is involved.

Nevertheless, to show how this might operate. Dawkins refers to game theory — in particular a game called The Prisoner's Dilemma:

In the simplest version of this game, two players have each to choose between two moves. Co-operate and Defect (hereafter C and D). Unlike in chess or ping pong, the players don't move alternately but simultaneously, in ignorance of the other's simultaneous move. If you and I both play C we get more (say £3) than if we both play D (say £2). If one of us plays C and simultaneously the other plays D. the D player gets the highest possible score (say £4) and the C player gets the "sucker's payoff" (say £1). So. from my point of view, the best outcome is that I play D and you play C. But if I calculate this, and play D accordingly, you are just as capable of working out the same thing and playing D yourself In this case we both only get the low payoff. If only we'd both played C. we'd both have got the comparatively high payoff of £3. But, if I work this out and play C you do even better if you choose D. Therefore, rational players will always play D and will always obtain the low payoff of £2. But — here is the paradox and maddening dilemma — each rational player simultaneously knows that, if only he and his opponent could somehow manage to enter into a binding contract to play C. both would do better (ibid).

Here Dawkins provides an example of how this situation could arise in real life. Take a group of friends who like to eat out at a restaurant and split the cost of the meal equally between them. There will always be the temptation for any one of them to order a little more than the others, knowing that the extra cost will be equally shared. Conversely, any one of them will realise that if they do not order as much as the others they will be subsidising their friends. Therefore, there will be a built-in tendency for each of them to order as much as they can get away with.

The worst that can happen in such a situation is that some of them will benefit at the expense of the others and perhaps as a consequence they will fall out with each other. Come what may there will be both winners and losers. But it is possible to imagine a situation — even to point to real life examples such as the destruction of the herring industry through over-fishing in the early part of this century — in which this same competitive logic can result in everyone losing out.

In such a situation, no-one actually intends that as a consequence of each of them competing against one another they should eventually all lose out. Yet they are obliged, even in full knowledge of the fate that could await them, to continue with the very actions that will make that fate a reality.

This situation has been described by the American biologist, Garrett Hardin, as the Tragedy of the Commons (Science vol 162 13 December 1968). As he puts it:

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximise his gain Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1. The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of - 1

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination towards which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in the commons bring ruin to all.

Hardin's solution to this tragedy of the commons is "mutual coercion". An appeal to conscience, he argues, is altogether futile. Mutual coercion can be effected through, as it were, enclosing the commons and instituting a system of private property which will enforce a sense of responsibility among herdsmen as to the appropriate number of cattle their land can provide for without resulting in overgrazing. Since they cannot encroach on land owned by other herdsmen, the consequences of keeping too many cattle will be exclusively borne by them. This knowledge will therefore deter them from acting irresponsibly in the first place.

The problem here is that Hardin has quite obviously got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It is not the "inherent logic of the commons" which "remorselessly generates tragedy". The "commons" simply provides the setting in which this tragedy is played out. It does not embody the cause of the tragedy itself — that is, the overgrazing of the land by too many cattle.

That cause lies elsewhere, in the dynamism of competition which compels each herdsman to increase his herd beyond the carrying capacity of the land since his own livelihood is directly dependent on the number of cattle at his disposal. Had the cattle. like the land, been the communal possession of the herdsmen then it would have been possible to make a rational decision about the total number of cattle. In that case, the livelihood of each herdsman would be directly dependent on their collective wellbeing, which in turn would rest on securing an optimum ratio of cattle to land. As it was. each was obliged to make what was the only rational decision open to him within an irrational framework of decision-making, with inevitably tragic consequences. So much for the view expounded by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations that the individual who "intends only his own gain" is "led by an invisible hand to promote the public interest".

"In a reverse way", argues Hardin, "the tragedy of the commons re-appears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons but of putting something in". Just as in the case of the herdsman, a factory owner will be "locked into a system" that will ensure that the commons are treated as a convenient cesspool for the disposal of waste products. The owner will see that it will pay to avoid the costs of purifying the pollutants by simply dumping them in the environment because the saving this represents far exceeds the environmental cost the factory may have to bear though others bear it as well. Rational self interest will therefore demand pollution.

Following Hardin's suggestion let us assume that the commons have been enclosed. In theory, this would mean that anyone could prevent their neighbour from polluting their land just as the herdsmen could prevent their neighbour's cattle from straying onto their land. Anyone who chose not to purify their pollutants would be obliged to contain them within their own property and bear the total costs such pollution entailed. But what sounds fine in theory will prove quite unworkable in practice since what we mean by the "commons" embraces not just the land but the air and water surrounding us. These, as Hardin concedes, "cannot readily be fenced".

A simple example will make this clearer. Suppose my neighbour decided to build a factory alongside a stream into which were pumped the factory's effluents Suppose I delighted in fishing but now with all the fish killed I could no longer pursue my interest. What could I then do? I could of course purchase the right of ownership of that section of the stream that flowed past my back door but my neighbour, upstream of me. could do the same and argue plausibly for the right to use that section of the stream as they chose. Of course, the consequence of my neighbour's decision to site a factory on their property need not be confined to this. Its visual impact on the neighbourhood could depress the price of residential properties all around. The constant noise might disturb my sleep. The lorries carrying the raw materials it processed may congest the roads making commuting to work a hazardous slog.

If I were to grant my neighbour the absolute right to dispose of their property as they chose, it would be inconsistent of me to complain of the consequences. If, on the other hand, I sought to restrict the ways in which my neighbour could use their property then I would be asserting the need to retain the "commons" as an entity in one or other respect — the tranquillity of the neighbourhood or the right to fish in an unpolluted stream. We cannot live in a cocoon. Even capitalism itself, the most competitive and atomistic form of society that has ever evolved, cannot afford not to make some concession to this stark fact.

We see this in the way conventional thinking approaches the problem of pollution. Hardin himself points out that while (according to him), "our particular concept of private property deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth" it actually "favours pollution. The solution which he and many others suggest is the direct intervention of the state in the form of legislation to temper the excesses of competition committed by private citizens. "Mutual coercion", apparently, will not suffice.

The weaknesses in this approach are twofold. It does not strike at the root cause of the problem at the competitive advantage to be gained by minimising costs — in this case, the costs of purifying and disposing of pollutants in an ecologically acceptable manner — incurred by capitalist enterprises. It blandly assumes that the state is a more or less autonomous institution which presides over society and legislates in the interests of the whole community. But in fact the state is a class institution, financed through taxation by the very enterprises whose activities it seeks to regulate. Legislation is a matter of finely balancing the losses and gains that accrue to the capitalists themselves. Too lenient an approach might be politically unacceptable and excessively ruinous to the health of the workers who create the profits for the businesses that employ them. Too punitive an approach, on the other hand, can erode profit margins and drive investment into other parts of the world where regulations are more lax. And all the time, the dividing line between what is acceptable and what is not shifts as the economic climate itself changes: the more desperate the plight of business, the more lenient does the law become.

This brings us back to Richard Dawkins. What does he think is the way forward? Political scientists tend to see so much of life as a Prisoner's Dilemma. Many would argue that we therefore need to have some authority to take more of the decisions out of our hands — rather like the way the state supposedly denies the option to a capitalist enterprise to release its toxic wastes into the environment by declaring this illegal. But as we have seen things don't happen that way. The state, too. is enmeshed in the irrational framework that is capitalist competition.

Dawkins would set rather more store by the Law of the Jungle than the Law of the State as a model for encouraging co-operative behaviour. Suggesting that we have a lot to learn from the animal world around us, he gives the example of gulls which need to groom themselves in order to remove parasitic ticks. The difficulty arises in grooming their heads; which requires the co-operation of another gull. Gulls that cheated on other gulls would soon drive the suckers into extinction. But cheats themselves would eventually follow the suckers since there would be no gulls left willing to groom them.

What are the implications of this for society? Dawkins argues that we saw evidence of a tit-for-tat strategy developing in the trenches of the First World War. Soldiers would deliberately fire above the heads of their "enemies" to signal their desire to cooperate in minimising the mutual damage they could inflict upon one another. Their alleged enemies would respond in kind. Such was the extent to which the "disease of peace" took hold that after two years of this, the generals were eventually forced to completely re-write their battle plans turning instead to surprise tactics which served to destroy the unspoken trust that had been built up on both sides.

Though the insights that game theory has to offer are valuable, their possible application in the sort of society we have today — as the above example makes clear — is limited. We live in a world in which the means of living are monopolised by a small minority. Just as the hierarchical structure of an army invests a general with the power to command his troops so capitalist society itself can only ever be run in the interests of that capitalist minority. But the great majority of the population, the working people, whose interests are constantly thwarted by the dictates of capital, cannot do much to redress the balance within a social system which requires that we remain compelled to prostitute our working abilities for capitalist exploitation.

Real co-operation can only flourish on the foundations of social equality. Until then, for the great majority at least, we remain suckers with good reason to bear a grudge.

Robin Cox

Blogger's Note:

Yes, before you ask, that was the original accompanying picture for the article in the November 1986 issue of the Standard. Yes, I don't get it either. It's a still from the 1971 Ken Loach film, Family Life. The young woman in the picture is Sandy Ratcliff and the old bloke is Bill Dean. Both better known for being in soap operas in the 1980s. (EastEnders and Brookside.)

Is kindness enough? (2025)

From the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Various publications have come into being in recent times focusing on the idea that we humans are a fundamentally kind and considerate species. I myself subscribe to a quarterly magazine called Positive News, which aims to produce ‘constructive journalism’ and stories ‘about what’s going right’. The current issue carries well-produced and illustrated articles on, for example, a ‘safe house’ in Ghana that rescues and rehabilitates trafficked child slaves, a community energy project in South-East London, and a holiday company that offers ‘sustainable walking holidays at a reasonable price’. It also has a 15-page section of short what it calls ‘energising’ pieces of ‘good news’.

Then in the city I live in, you can pick up The Swansea Positive free of charge, with the stated purpose of highlighting ‘the very many positive and encouraging activities that are happening in Swansea’s diverse communities’. It describes its contents as ‘good news stories which are not printed in currently available media and so go unnoticed’, providing, it says, ‘a healthy alternative to the many negative and depressing headlines’. Its most recent editions have carried articles on topics and events such as a local community farm, the Swansea Chinese community, an Air Ambulance fundraiser and the regular Saturday morning park run.

It’s certainly true that what’s most likely to ‘make news’ more widely are negative, uncooperative and, especially, violent forms of behaviour, while caring, cooperative activities tend to get taken for granted and often go unmentioned. And this can reinforce in many people’s eyes the common idea that human beings are by nature selfish, uncooperative and even cruel and violent, and so any attempt at establishing a world of social harmony and free of conflict is doomed to failure.

This is an idea that has been expressed or implied in much that has been said and written over the years, both in commentary on human behaviour and in writings of fiction. As far back as the sixteenth century, Machiavelli in The Prince insisted that ‘all men are evil’, an idea taken up again in the following century by Thomas Hobbes who argued in his Leviathan that human beings are greedy by nature and human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’, and then by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, where private interest or ‘self-love’ is seen as the primary mover of human action. This view of humanity was later echoed in the twentieth century by writers with more ‘scientific’ pretentions such as Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative), Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression) and Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape). And it seemed to receive confirmation in widely read works of fiction such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and, according to how you interpret it, George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

However, in more recent times the tide does seem to have turned. Opinions have moved far more towards support for Albert Einstein’s statement of over 80 years ago that ‘human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate’. This has been reinforced since by a slew of studies with titles like A Cooperative Species. Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, Survival of the Friendliest, Team Human and Ultrasocial. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future. These have drawn the conclusion that not only are human beings capable of manifesting peaceful and cooperative behaviour rather than being hostile and competitive with one another but are overwhelmingly likely to behave in that way if conditions allow it. According to these findings humans are eminently flexible beings who will prefer to make common cause with their fellow creatures unless they are driven into doing otherwise by conditioning or situation. And they will behave in a cooperative way both because it is likely to benefit them in a practical way (ie, one good turn is likely to deserve another) and also because it is natural for human beings to derive satisfaction out of being of assistance to others and to enjoy the approbation this is likely to bring from their fellow creatures.

A survey via online questionnaires called The Kindness Test, commissioned in 2021-22 by the BBC in conjunction with psychology researchers from the University of Sussex, came up with similar findings. It concluded that human beings are a kind species generally prepared to cooperate with and help one another in their daily lives and activities and that, if we consider all the interactions we have with other people on a regular basis and over a period of time, the vast majority are likely to be of a kind and collaborative nature, even if we do not necessarily notice this or register them as such.

More recently the Vegetarian Society magazine, The Pod, carried a feature entitled ‘How to Live Kindfully’, an interview with ‘wellbeing expert’ Anna Black about her book A Year of Living Kindfully. She quoted an Oxford University study which found that ‘seven days of kindness activities significantly boosted people’s levels of happiness’ and then went on to suggest 10 ways of being kind in your everyday life. These included being less judgmental of others, cleaning up litter outside your home, volunteering in the community, listening closely to others and being ‘kind to the environment’.

It’s easy of course to be critical of attempts to encourage ideas on behaviour and activities which are socially and humanly desirable. It might be said that, in the context of the massive problems the society we live in throws up such as inequality, insecurity, war, poverty and racial prejudice, such steps are surely no more than small beer, which can’t even touch the edges of those problems. On the other hand they do at least help to spread the idea – well attested as it is now – that humans are a species capable of cooperating with and helping one another in their daily lives and activities and generally prepared to do so.

Of course, publications like Positive News and A Year of Living Kindfully don’t (and can’t) override the ‘bad news’ that we hear about every day and that many experience in their daily lives. But what they do illustrate is that, despite the overwhelmingly powerful pressures the society we live in puts on people to get the better of others and so not be ‘kind’ to them, in so many of the actions and interactions of our daily lives, and even in some of the ‘competitive’ situations that are created for us, we can still manage to be kind to others and to cooperate with them.

The question that naturally arises from this is why is it that the society we live in (ie, capitalism) militates against people being ‘positive’ and ‘kind’ to one another all the time? The simple answer is that capitalism is, by its nature, a competitive society with an ethic that runs directly contrary to the human tendency to help and cooperate with others. It encourages people to compete with one another, to try to get the better of them and to do them down if that seems necessary. It does this in various ways, but in particular by tempting people with the lure of gain or reward, often financial, and so pushing them to behave in ways that divide them from their fellow humans, often making the ‘success’ of one into the ‘failure’ of others.

Another aspect of this is society’s basic division into two classes, with one of them (the owning class) exploiting the other (the working class) for wealth and profit. So, given that an inbuilt feature of the capitalist system we all live in is that we are constantly driven to compete with others in a variety of ways, as long as that system continues such divisions are bound to continue. So while those who wish to encourage us to be ‘positive’ and ‘kind’ can only be applauded for their efforts, they are in a sense – sadly – on a hiding to nothing if they leave the whole system unquestioned.

But how do you question the system? It can only come through the majority of wage and salary earners – who we call the working class – using democratic political action to establish a society organised in an entirely different way from the current one. In such a society – which we call socialism – people will be able to operate in the harmonious and cooperative way that we know to be most fundamental to humans and beneficial to the species. In such a society, one of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and democratic organisation, the human tendency to share and cooperate will truly come into its own. People will be free to express their talents and creativity in ways that will vastly outstrip the limitations laid upon them today by the need to conform to the rules of a society with the overriding preoccupation of promoting competition between all humans as a way of realising profit for the few.

Howard Moss

The Passing Show: Free blood (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free blood

You walk in and sit down. You are called to a table, where a man in a white coat pricks your finger for a test. Then you lie on a bench and hand the bottle you've been given to a nurse. About twenty minutes later they have a pint of your blood in the bottle and you are drinking a cup of tea. Not long after that you're back at work (that's the worst part of it—the rest is not at all a bother).

This is the typical routine at a blood donor session, and such is the demand for blood, that your pint may be used within a matter of hours. This is one of the sobering facts surrounding the National Blood Transfusion Service in England, and probably one which prompts many workers to give their life fluid every few months.

In this country there is no money in it for you. merely a small certificate or badge in recognition of your services. Equally there are no strings attached or compulsion, yet thousands of people donate at regular intervals and give it no more thought than going to bed or any other day-to-day function. No doubt the prospect of an hour off from the monotony of their work and the chance to see other faces are factors, but I think there is something more to it than that.

Here is perhaps just a faint glimpse of human beings doing something for each other without the prospect of "gain" in the sense that it is meant today, but equally without fear of injury to themselves in the process. Under such conditions is it too much to feel that perhaps many of them get a real sense of satisfaction such as they rarely encounter in their workaday lives? The eagerness with which they give their blood suggests maybe a sense of relief at being able to act for a brief spell without the normal restrictions which capitalism imposes, although they are not conscious of its reason.

Peace time war training

It is about as near to a "harmony of interests" that capitalism will ever let you go, because apart from odd moments like these, you are in constant competition with your fellow man. And even in this sphere, capitalism has a degrading effect, for as fast as blood is collected in one place, it is shed even faster on the roads at home and in places farther afield like the trouble spots of Malaysia. Cyprus and Aden.

This is the background against which to view the efforts of the devoted doctors and nurses of the blood bank. It seems you just can't win while capitalism is with us.

Capitalism causes wars, big and small. That is a simple statement of fact, but it has many implications. You should not, for instance, run away with the idea that war is something which bursts like a thunderclap over a largely unprepared and unsuspecting world, for such are the conditions of modern capitalism that there is plenty of suspicion between the powers, even while they are professing undying friendship, and they are never entirely unprepared.

They are constantly training their forces and developing their weapons of death and destruction, and where they get the chance, they will give them a tryout under operating conditions. Thus they gain valuable data for future modifications in time for the bigger showdowns to come. .Such was the case during the Spanish Civil War for example, when some of the major powers sent arms and "volunteers" to one side or the other and noted their effects. Then there was the Korean episode, when the British Centurion tank was in action and later underwent alterations as a result.

Now this is not to say that Spain and Korea were just glorified weapon testing grounds. Obviously there were very real capitalist interests at stake which caused the flareups and put the men and weapons there in the first place. But they are also regarded as useful training grounds, although this is not something that statesmen and politicians will normally care to admit. However, sometimes we may get a glimpse of cynical candour as one or another of them shoots his mouth off, like Lord Mountbatten, thus:

This is war, but is a very small form of war . . . We are being shot at but really it is the most marvellous training that our forces ever had . . . (speaking on the Malaysian situation in New Zealand March 4th.)

Out of the horse’s mouth indeed. Obviously Lord Mountbatten does not think that the “marvellous training" will be wasted. No doubt it will come in handy to protect British capitalism’s interests elsewhere when this little crisis blows over, and for that very reason then as now, workers will get killed or horribly maimed. It’s a man’s life in the Army.

Infernal combustion engines

A friend of mine runs a small shop on the outskirts of Watford. Apart front his shop and a few others, the road is lined with houses on both sides almost for its entire length. Most of the houses and shops have been there for many years, so there has keen little change in the size or appearance of the road in all that time. But there has been one big change in another respect which terrifies the wits out of me every time I walk along that road.

Time was when the shop door could be left open on a warm day in Summer. But that was some years ago, before the road became a feeder to the M.1. Now, the stink and deafening noise of huge lorries and countless cars have made a nightmare of the place, especially in the rush hour. So, Winter and Summer alike, the shop door stays closed and if you walk along the narrow pavement (laid long before the car became the monster it is today), you need eyes in the back of your head to get you home in one piece. Probably all that has saved the road from complete destruction is the construction of M.1 extension into London a few miles away, due for opening in the near future.

The problem of the roads was growing before the second world war, but it is in the post war years that it has threatened to get out of hand and has been such a headache for the capitalist class of Britain and other countries. One gets the impression that some of them would like to see some sort of restrictions imposed, but the car industry has now assumed such importance in modern capitalist economy, that they will not attempt anything to hamper its growth to any great extent. What this holds in store for us in terms of ripping up the countryside and the deterioration of already ugly places remains to be seen.

It is of course very convenient in many ways to have a car nowadays, but more than that—for many workers it is a positive necessity by the very nature of their employment. It is indicative of the demand to move ever faster in the world of capitalist competition, where time is money and every second counts.

So the politician who takes over the administration of modern capitalism will have to make big allowances for the automobile in his electoral calculations, whatever his personal feelings. Greater London Council Member Mrs. Peggy Jay (wife of Douglas) may shout about proposed “box” of motorways for London, and tell of the destruction of living space, and about ten thousand trees, which it may well entail, but she will not get much support from the electorate at large. For the system which she supports has produced the motorised worker of the sixties, dominated by his machine and hating anyone who denies him the right to drive it where he likes, even in some places onto the sea shore to the very edge of the waves.

Crackpot? indeed yes, but just another of those problems that only a private property system can produce.

Gaspers

”. . . The Conservative Party should not be afraid of inequality.” (Mr. Du Cann, Tory Party Chairman, 27.3.65.)

“ This is not an attack on profits.” (Mr. Brown, defending Labour Government's budget 7.4.65.)

“ My first job is to maintain political stability and if 1 have to detain ten or twenty thousand, I will do it.” (Dr. Banda at a Blantyre rally on 4.4.65.)

“The days of nuclear war are gone." (Mao Tse Tung to Arab Leaders in Peking, reported 6.4.65.)

"Businessmen have more hope of making progress and money under a Labour Government than they had before.” (Mr. Brown in an interview with the editor of Director, Institute of Directors Journal, April 1965.)

"We do not care what colour a person's skin is. It is just that we do not want any more coloured people in Marshall Street.” (Mrs. Groves of Smethwick after a deputation meeting with the Housing Minister 8.4.65.)

Eddie Critchfield

Proper Gander: Realistically altruistically (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage has clocked up 32 series of ‘witty, irreverent’ conversations on science-related subjects, helmed by physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince. A recent edition asked ‘How selfish are we really?’, although the panellists focused on the flipside of selfishness: altruism, discussing the notion through the frameworks of psychology and evolutionary biology. Psychologist Matti Wilks and comedian Jo Brand give our usual definition of altruism as someone making an effort to be kind to another person with no expectation of anything in return.

Steve Jones, a professor of genetics, defines it in a more Darwinian way as an act which reduces someone’s fitness to survive (by using their time and energy on something they don’t directly gain from) and which increases someone else’s fitness. Superficially, it could seem counter-intuitive to do this, but as Steve clarifies, our genes will spread if we benefit our group overall, and our brains are wired to get a positive feeling when we behave in a nice way. In day-to-day life we don’t tend to think about altruism like this, and run with a general inclination to be helpful with a background assumption of ‘reciprocal altruism’, that if we act altruistically towards someone, then in future they will act similarly.

The panel ponders the extent to which this exists across the animal kingdom, particularly among our distant relatives. Steve says chimps engage in reciprocal altruism by picking lice off each other, although they also fight more than homo sapiens, which is why we’ve had the evolutionary advantage. Our ancestors went from living and collaborating in extended families to larger groups, and he adds that reciprocal altruism was later embedded by religions which have ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ among their principles, with problems arising because as he says wryly, religions hate each other. He mentions that the structure of The Bible and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species are ‘remarkably similar’, both starting with describing origins and ending with ‘mysterious stuff which you don’t understand’.

Psychologists have aimed to explain altruism through research into our views and behaviour. Matti refers to studies which found that people are prone to empathise with and be altruistic to those they feel akin to, such as Americans giving money to victims of the California wildfires rather than to people in need elsewhere. Children have been understood to also be ‘parochial’ in their ethical outlook, although Matti’s own research has shown they can be more likely than adults to say we should help people in faraway places. This may be because they haven’t yet been socialised to see some people as ‘other’.

The programme doesn’t consider how the type of society we live in shapes relations between people and therefore how we behave altruistically, although it gives numerous examples of this happening. There is the ‘identifiable victim effect’, shown in tests when people gave more money to a charity which used a picture of one person in need than when a picture of several people was shown. While this ostensibly demonstrates that we find it easier to be empathetic and altruistic to individuals rather than groups, the effect depends on there being a context of scarcity and charity, and possibly notions of ‘otherness’ too. Any conclusions drawn about altruism in these studies only apply to this societal situation, rather than necessarily being basic truths of what it is to be human. Further research has found that we’re less altruistic towards large groups, and this could also be socially conditioned. When Matti is asked how altruism expands from small groups (where its benefits are most obvious) to bigger ones, she replies that psychology hasn’t done a good job of illuminating this. To give a socialist perspective not explored in the programme, perhaps wide-scale altruism happens when people see through the divisions between groups which capitalism encourages and recognise our common humanity. This may also explain something else which Matti says psychologists haven’t been able to sufficiently account for: ‘extraordinary’ altruists, those who are exceptionally altruistic to strangers without expectations of reciprocity, such as kidney donors.

Steve cites blood donation as a familiar example of a ‘purely’ altruistic act, at least in the UK, where the only payment the donor receives is a cup of tea and a biscuit. In America, people receive money for their blood, and commodifying the process at this point has meant that to minimise additional costs to profit-hungry healthcare companies, inadequate checks have been done to avoid infected blood being passed on. Matti says that elsewhere, introducing payments to donors has led to a reduction in people coming forward, as the ‘intrinsic motivation’ for doing so had gone when it became monetised.

Economic considerations with altruism are also acknowledged by Matti when she says that it’s a ‘position of privilege’ to be altruistic, meaning that people often can’t afford to give to others if they lack enough goods themselves. This isn’t a blanket rule, though, as levels of trust and compassion in a group affect the extent that altruism is the norm. To try and measure how much altruism there is, researchers have compared which groups have more or less expansive ‘moral circles’, which contain things considered to have moral concern. Trying to quantify these qualities is ‘not as pure a metric’ as comparing countries on their GDP, as Matti says. Asked which country is the most altruistic, Steve jokes that it might be Norway because there’s nothing else to do there.

Steve’s contributions from the perspective of evolutionary biology tell us that we’re primed to act in an altruistic way because this has been evolutionarily advantageous. Some sort of altruism is essential for us to be able to live in groups, especially harmoniously. How altruism is manifested, and how psychology attempts to explain it, are moulded by society’s structures. In capitalism, we are conditioned to view some groups as ‘other’, and behaving altruistically happens through the constraints which a market-driven, divisive society imposes.

Mike Foster

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Billionaire wealth has risen by more than 1,000 percent since 1989, with the number of billionaires tripling to 164 since 2010. Over the same period, the average worker lost £10,200 through wage suppression enforced through record-low strike activity policed by the trade union bureaucracy. One-fifth of people in the UK live in poverty, and 25 percent of all children. Nearly 3 million rely on food banks. For the poorest 10 percent of UK households, living standards have fallen by 20 percent compared with 2019–20—a drop in income of £4,600. 

(WSWS, tinyurl.com/mjajcj6m)

Pastor Mboro is a self-styled prophet with thousands of followers across South Africa. He has claimed to perform miracles such as healing people during sermons and delivering a fish from the womb of a pregnant woman. 

(BBC tinyurl.com/58t68xuj)

The book begins with a poignant reminder that we are all migrants: ‘Even if you are not a migrant, your ancestors were. If they had not migrated, you would not be alive’. 

(Impact Investor, tinyurl.com/4xuemy6c)

I meet Najwa Abdul Awa, holding an image of her dead son. I ask her if she’s scared about what might be around the corner. ‘Of course not’, she replies with a smile. ‘I sent my first son for martyrdom with pride. And I’m willing to send my second and my third son too. We will not stop, she says, until Israel vanishes’. 

(Sky News, tinyurl.com/mxx8rm33)

The pro-Palestinian organizers gathered for ‘coffee with comrades’ …The main speaker, a University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD candidate, took the stage. He donned a keffiyeh and a Cuban Communist Party cap emblazoned with a red star, and began discussing readings by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leila Khaled, a former Palestinian militant and first woman to hijack an airplane. ‘Our political system is falling apart’, William Chaney, the PhD candidate, said in an interview just before his lecture began. ‘If we want to leave the world better, we have to look back and learn lessons’.

 (Boston Globe, tinyurl.com/5ductrb3)

In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care and 68,000 die a year because they can’t afford healthcare. 

(Common Dreams, tinyurl.com/wptkejj2)

… the great lie of nationalism: the fact that there is no organic bond between an ethnic group and a specific terrain, that no stretch of soil belongs by divine or natural right to those who speak a particular language or have a certain skin-colour. The country was never yours to claim back. Immigrants haven’t robbed you of what was never your property in the first place. 

(UnHerd, tinyurl.com/2d8a9ah2)

In general, human beings are remarkably altruistic. Rather than feeling destructive impulses, most of us feel a natural impulse to help others, to nurture their development and alleviate suffering. 

(The Conversation, tinyurl.com/2u85xn4w)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Life and Times: What An Example! (2023)

The Life and Times column from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A short time ago I was trying to park my car in a shopping area near where I live when things didn’t entirely go to plan. What happened is explained in the message that I subsequently posted on the local community Facebook group I’m a member of. My post read as follows:

What an example! 

Yesterday I was involved in a slight road accident at the beginning of Beechwood Rd just after the Car Wash. I won’t go into details except to say that it was a real 50-50 thing between my car and another one, ie, you couldn’t say that either of us were really to blame. The young chap in the other car had a couple of scrapes on his bumper and so did I. He didn’t seem angry (and neither was I), but he told me he’d just had the bumper replaced. So a difficult situation. Then the young fellow from the Car Wash (some of you must know him) came up and said: ‘No point involving the insurance. Just wait a second’. He came back armed with a cloth and what I can only describe as some miracle stuff which he used on the scrapes and somehow completely removed them – and they haven’t come back. The other driver and I were both happy. We shook hands and agreed to leave it at that. What a relief! But now comes the big thing. I offered £20 to the young Car Wash man and he said no. I tried to insist, but he still absolutely refused. He said: ‘Look, next time you need a car wash, come here.’ All I can say is what a brilliant human being. 

Most readers will know that local community Facebook groups are normally populated with messages about lost pets, badly parked cars, yoga classes, street lighting, rubbish collection, activities in the local park, etc. My news was a little bit different, but it still seemed a good forum to let the local community know about a fantastic example of human togetherness unsullied by the idea of gain or material reward. It was also a way of my thanking the Car Wash fellow for being such a decent individual (and also maybe giving his business a bit of publicity).

But what I didn’t anticipate was what happened next. Within less than half an hour of my posting, there’d been over 70 replies – either ‘likes’, ‘loves’ or messages. After that the numbers only multiplied and by the following day there had been over 600 responses from people expressing approval, admiration, and various other kinds of thumbs-up. Examples of the various things people wrote were:

You are a good man and your company and workers are wonderful members of the community

I will take my car there next time, just for his kind gesture

Next time I need the car washed I’ll go there too. What a brilliant man!

My chariot is long overdue for a wash, I’ll have to bring it down

How fantastic

A little kindness goes a long way

Yes, I was nearby and witnessed the incident and was struck by the decency and generosity of the people involved. Surely a great example of how wonderful humanity can be when we choose to cooperate with each other. Thumbs up to the young man

There is kindness around us. We just need to look

Aww how lovely …. my next car wash will be there too!

Nothing compares to human kindness, well done young man x

What a lovely story, and what a kind person. When I need a car wash, I’m goin there!

What a great outcome,,,made me a bit tearful

What a lovely thing to do

I witnessed yesterday, wow I’m impressed

He is awesome

There are still lovely humans in the world

Gives such hope in our fellow human beings. If only it was normal behaviour

The Car Wash man responded too: ‘Thank you for your kind words. It honestly meant a lot. I could see the situation was getting a bit stressful, so I thought I’d help the situation. More than welcome anytime’.

What to say about this? Well, the fact that around two thirds of the 900+ members of the Facebook responded in this way was nothing if not heartening. How strongly it militates against the view we often hear expressed that looking after number one and the greed, selfishness and competition that goes with it is somehow all there is to ‘human nature’. That’s an idea expressed in a lot of what has been said, written and published over much of human history. Yet the tide seems to have definitely turned now with many studies coming to the opposite conclusion, ie, that not only are human beings capable of manifesting peaceful and cooperative behaviour rather than being hostile and competitive with one another but are more likely to behave in that way if conditions allow it. It all depends on the circumstances. This view sees humans as eminently flexible beings who will prefer to make common cause with their fellow creatures unless they are pushed into doing otherwise by conditioning or situation. Of course empathy and cooperation may not ‘make news’ as effectively as negative, selfish or uncooperative behaviour, but that’s largely because caring cooperative activities are so everyday, so common, far outnumbering negative behaviours, and so tend to get taken for granted and go unmentioned.

All this was borne out by a recent study (2021-22) based on online questionnaires (‘The Kindness Test’), carried out by psychology researchers from the University of Sussex in collaboration with the BBC. Its ‘take home’ was that, despite the competitive ethic of current society, human beings are fundamentally a kind species generally prepared to cooperate with and help one another in their daily lives and activities. This was manifested in apparently banal but obviously important findings such as most people being readily prepared to do favours for others, helping strangers to pick up things they’d dropped, or having concerned feelings for people less fortunate than themselves. A further finding was that people who regularly carry out kind acts or even just notice that other people are carrying out kind acts also have higher levels of well-being.

And doesn’t the ‘Car Wash’ story back this up? A person who was prepared to do what he saw as ‘the right thing’ to help total strangers. And most other people, as shown in the Facebook responses, admired him for behaving in this way. Isn’t the implication that, in a society organised in an entirely different way from the current capitalist one (the one that we call socialism), people would not have the slightest problem in operating in a harmonious and cooperative way most if not all of the time. In such a society, one of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and democratic organisation, the natural human tendency to share and cooperate will surely come into its own.

Howard Moss