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

Exhibition Review: In the Wild (2024)

Exhibition Review from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Manchester Museum (part of the University of Manchester) underwent a sizeable redevelopment last year. One result of this is a much larger space for temporary exhibitions, which is currently occupied by ‘Wild’, a display on until June next year.

It is a thought-provoking exhibition, featuring paintings, animals as taxidermy mounts, and information displays that focus on specific projects concerned with rewilding (‘letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes’, rewildingeurope.com). An interesting concept is the baseline, a time when an ecosystem was healthier, though this can be subject to various interpretations.

Beavers were hunted to extinction in the UK about four hundred years ago, but they are now being re-introduced, as they build dams and so on, being ‘natural engineers’. In Yellowstone National Park in the US, the last wolves were deliberately killed in 1926, but this led to there being too many grazing animals, and wolves were re-introduced in the 1990s.

Knepp in West Sussex (knepp.co.uk) is the first major rewilding project in England. Its soil made it unprofitable as a dairy farm, and from 2001 it was transformed into a naturalistic grazing system with a range of habitats and herds of cattle, ponies and pigs. But, of course, it still has to make a profit, and this is achieved by means of safaris, accommodation such as yurts, and selling meat. It has been criticised as not truly being rewilding, as the landscapes are not in any real sense natural.

The Isle of Arran off the west coast of Scotland now includes the South Arran Marine Protected Area (arrancoast.com), aiming to ‘protect and restore a diverse, abundant and beautiful marine environment’. In Lamlash Bay this includes a No Take Zone, where no fish or shellfish can be taken from the water, seabed or shore. This is intended, among other things, to protect beds of maerl, a coralline pink seaweed that forms a space where small species can find food and hide from predators.

The exhibition makes the point that there can be a contradiction between rewilding and using land for housing and food. At the end, three possibilities are set out: prioritise nature and leave it to do its own thing; prioritise the relationships between humans and nature; or prioritise nature for the benefits it provides to people. These are hardly mutually exclusive, and different ones could be applied in different areas, rather than there being a single global policy. But issues such as this may well form part of democratic discussions and decision-making in a socialist world.

Paul Bennett

Engels on Human Evolution (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Links to Part 1 and Part 2.

Engels followed the impact of Darwin’s ideas more closely than Marx. He may even have read Darwin's “The Descent of Man”.

Unlike Marx, Engels continued his interest in Darwin and things Darwinian beyond the initial general public furore created by the publication of Origin. Apart from references to Darwin in his correspondence with Marx and others, the first major piece of work Engels produced was the notes for the unfinished The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, written between May and June 1876, over five years after the publication of the Descent.

This speculative, but interesting, work which includes a strong element of Lamarckism (but even Darwin had to resort to a version of Lamarck), can be seen as a Marxian response to the “Man’s place in nature” debate in at least two important ways. First of all, it attempts to show in what way humans are different from other animals. Unlike Darwin, who was eager to point to the similarities across species, to indicate the origins of typical human behaviour in a simpler form in other species, and that humans were only quantitatively different from animals, Engels was adamant in showing both the difference and similarities between humans and other animals. Whilst speculating in how human labour activity had evolved from earlier forms along with the evolution of physical organisation, and therefore within the Darwinian explanatory framework, he was also wanted to show how human labour differed from that of lower animals. Following the same line of argument he and Marx had arrived at thirty years previously in The German Ideology, he wrote:

“Animals…change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them…But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally. The further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards preconceived ends” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, volume 25, p.459).

“In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction” (ibid., p.460).

In addition to this evolutionary explanation of the difference between human and animal labour, Engels’s argument can also be seen as a materialist response to Wallace’s “unseen spirit” explanation of the difference between humans and animal. Furthermore, Engels also opposed the mental materialism of Darwin, who based the difference between humans and other animals in the more developed and complex mentality of humans; a form of idealism that had dominated Western philosophy since the rise of Christianity:

“All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the brain. Man became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognize the part that has been played therein by labour.”

Did Engels Read The Descent?

Engels seems to have kept up with the Darwinian literature on human evolution, making reference to T.H. Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, John Lubbock Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, although it is not always clear which of their works he is referring to. So it is somewhat surprising that there is no explicit reference to The Descent or to what Darwin wrote on the matter. But seeing that he had read all these other authors, who had made their contribution before 1871, and that Darwin was the most important figure in this group, it would seem unusual that Engels would not read The Descent. Also, he had five years to read him before he started work on The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man in May 1876.

There is, however, some textual evidence that Engels did read The Descent. In the second paragraph of his pamphlet, Engels writes:

“Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors of ours. They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in trees.”

This description attributed to Darwin comes in part from The Descent. In Chapter 6, “On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man,” Darwin writes:

“The early progenitors of man must have been once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were probably pointed, and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having proper muscles”

(Darwin The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871; Penguin edition 2004, p.188).

The reference to “they lived in bands in trees“ too seems to have come from The Descent, as Darwin writes:    

“We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.” (p. 678)

Therefore, unless Engels got these from another author, these two separate references provide adequate justification for thinking that Engels did read The Descent.

From Darwin to Marx: From Biology to History

Human beings possess a dual character, as both biological and historical beings, in a radically different way from any other animal.

For non-human animals, the biological, structural determination of their activity is dominant. As they get more biologically complex, they acquire the capacity for their activity to be modified by previous interactions with the world, but they live in the “now”; their activity is concerned with adjusting to the immediate circumstances they are interacting with. They have a blind past, as a species and as individual organism, but not a history.

Only humans have history. Through their linguistic ability and social co-operation, human beings have over centuries achieved (it is not nature-given) a greater degree of purpose and agency than any other species. As a result, they not only have a history, but can make history. But making history requires that the impersonal, law-like relations of the capital relationship, of production for profit, be destroyed and replaced by a free association of producers who create a world in their own interests and their own purpose. Only then will humanity shift from a determined pre-history to a determining history.

Ed Blewitt

(concluded)

Letter: Naked bonobos? (2007)

Letter to the Editors from the February 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naked bonobos?

Dear Editors

I agree with much of “Bonobo Fides” (Pathfinders, January), but I would like to take issue on a few significant points.The author follows the sources on which he relies in placing too much emphasis on the power of the “combined females” as a deterrent to male violence. Bonobos of both genders keep the peace mainly by using friendly activities – grooming, play and sharing food as well as frequent sex – to soothe the tensions that might lead to violence. (They don’t “run off into the bushes,” by the way, but have sex in plain view of others. Here the author is mixing up bonobos with humans.) It also helps that with bonobos, unlike chimps, the males can’t tell which females are ovulating, so they are unable to compete to sire offspring.

Bonobos may “live largely as vegetarians,” but they do have a taste for meat. “Like chimpanzees, they are ready to grab and eat small antelope infants. They eat flying squirrels and sometimes earthworms” (Demonic Males, p. 216).

Unlike chimps, however, they never eat monkeys. Instead, bonobos play with monkeys as though they were pets. Monkeys are terrified of chimps but show no fear of bonobos. Apparently, this reflects a cultural taboo against killing and eating fellow primates, and such a taboo may be one reason why bonobos rarely attack and never kill one another. (Local humans have a similar taboo against hunting bonobos.)

Would chimps adopt bonobo behaviour in a bonobo environment and vice versa, “given long enough”? I think this is an exaggeration. Bonobos are a distinct species, not a kind of chimpanzee. (“Pygmy chimp” is a misleading term that dates from the time when this  was not yet recognized.) To the extent that bonobo sociality is a product of genetically  determined characteristics like large sexual organs and always being on heat, environmental change can affect it only to a limited degree. Over a period long enough  for evolution to occur the bonobo might lose these characteristics, but then it would no longer be a bonobo!

Especially for socialists, the good news about the bonobo is how close it is to man. We have 98.7 percent of our genes in common with the bonobo. That’s the same figure as for the chimpanzee, but in numerous respects we – and also, according to physical anthropologist Adrienne Zihlman, our proto-human ancestors living in Africa 3 to 5 million years ago – are closer to bonobos than to chimps. This applies, for example, to bodily proportions, facial appearance (look at the photos in Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape), posture (bonobos walk upright much of the time, along trails that they make themselves), and of course sexual functioning. In 1967 Desmond Morris gave ammunition to the “human nature” objectors to socialism by “exposing” man as The Naked Ape. It’s not quite so bad if we change that to “the naked bonobo”!

Only a few thousand bonobos are left, all of them in the war-torn Congo. Their extinction would be a tragedy for man too, not least because they are living proof of the positive side of our evolutionary heritage.

Stephen Shenfield (by e-mail)

Pathfinders: Bonobo Fides (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the human genome was first effectively sequenced in April 2003 and the surprise discovery made that humans have only 30,000 genes, scarcely more than other primates, some people were encouraged to suppose that the nagging debate between nature and nurture might be solved once and for all. Humans could not be genetically disposed toward all the multitude of obnoxious acts they committed,  because they had no stock of extra genes with which to be so disposed. The seductive conclusion is that any human behaviour not found among primates must therefore be a simple matter of environment.

Not necessarily. As the developing field of epigenetics has begun to demonstrate, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Combinations of genes can produce phenomena that could not be predicted by analysis of the characteristics of the  individual genes. A piano in the hands of a baboon or a human still has 88 keys, but the baboon will give us a cacophony whereas the human may give us a concerto. The discovery, last month, that humans are more genetically diverse than anyone expected, has done even more to throw the ‘nurturists’ back into turmoil, and given the bio-determinists extra room for manoeuvre.

Reading the language of the genes may help us stamp out certain inherited illnesses for good, but it is debatable whether it can ever say anything meaningful about who we are. Studies of identical twins separated at birth show interesting variations in behaviour, yet the results remain essentially random and open to interpretation, because it is not possible, or ethical, to raise one twin in a strictly controlled and sealed environment.

Why this matters so much is of course to do with humanity’s perception of its own potential for a better world. If men were really savage rapists held under control only by the repressive laws of a coercive hierarchical state, one could hardly expect women to support the socialist case for abolishing such coercive machinery. Similarly, if warlike aggression is built into us, as some anthropologists have claimed, the case for cooperation and common ownership suffers a major and possibly fatal reverse.

Some paleoanthropologists, and many Marxists, take the view that war did not exist before the development of agriculture, because the conditions giving rise to war did not exist. It is true to say that there is no hard evidence of war before settled communities began to defend their land from predation, but as Carl Sagan was fond of saying, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We are not able to point with certainty to 200,000 years of harmonious and peaceful human behaviour and say ‘there, that is our real nature.’ We can only look at this vast period of human activity, twenty times longer than all of recorded history, and say ‘they had no landed property, so it’s hard to see what they could have found to fight about.’

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) democratic elections have recently drawn to a close an appalling civil war that claimed four million lives. Ironically, in the dense forest of DRC, new studies have emerged which have done something to swing the nature-nurture pendulum back in the direction of the nurturists. Chimpanzees, once the lovable rogues of Tarzan films, have lately been receiving a rather bad press, with documentaries concentrating on their brutal behaviour both within and between tribes, including rape, murder and cannibalism. A genetically very close relative and Congolese next-door neighbour is the Bonobo or pygmy chimp, and this primate has always been something of a curiosity. When chimp troops meet, we are told, war and murder are invariably the result. When bonobo troops meet, a love-fest takes place, with the females of one troop running off into the bushes with the males of the other. There is no male hierarchical organisation among bonobos, plenty of casual sex of both hetero and same-sex varieties, and if any male exhibits any rare violent behaviour this is swiftly stamped out by the combined females.

This startling difference in behaviour between the two primates has led some anthropologists to a depressing conclusion. Human females, argue Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson in their book Demonic Males (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), need to emulate the bonobo and take a more active political role in order to offset the male killing instinct. This is Thomas Hobbes territory again, and the same assumptions about nasty and brutish male violence which the authors use to argue for greater female political participation can of course also be used to justify the continuation or even extension of state repression.

What was deemed peculiar about the bonobo was that they inhabited the same forest as chimpanzees, albeit in a naturally secluded area which arguably protected them from the nasty and brutish chimps. On the face of it, bonobos seemed to lead a peaceful and communally supportive lifestyle simply because they liked it that way. Now it turns out that not all jungles are equal, and food supply has a lot more to do with it than was previously thought. The bonobo habitat just so happens to contain all the right vegetable nutrients to allow them to live largely as vegetarians and spend very little effort acquiring food. Chimp forests conversely offer much leaner pickings, with low-nutrient vegetation, high tannin content which requires much peeling and shelling, and a competition over resources which necessitates the organisation of meat hunting and aggressive defence of territory. As New Scientist observes: “Put bluntly, bonobos are nice because the environment they live in is nice” (December 2, 06). Not all anthropologists agree, citing the fact that in identical captive environments, bonobos and chimps continue to exhibit different behaviour. Nonetheless, give them long enough, and behaviour is likely to change. It is well known that primates can learn new behaviour and pass it on to descendants, as in the famous case of the Japanese macaques, who all learned to wash potatoes in the sea after watching one juvenile female do it first. In a chimpanzee environment, bonobos would begin to exhibit chimpanzee behaviour, and vice-versa.

The emphasis on the division between the bonobo ‘good guys’ and the chimpanzee ‘bad guys’ does chimpanzees a disservice, however. Little attention has been focussed in the TV documentaries on the fact that supposedly ‘inevitable’ violent behaviour is uncommon among young chimps and even among adult chimps in other locations in the Congo. Indeed, studies undertaken by anthropologists at the University of Saint Andrews in Edinburgh show that, even without ecologically explicable circumstances, there is more variation in chimp behaviour, no less than 39 different cultural patterns, than in any other animal studied in Africa.

The debate about primate behaviour informs the debate about human behaviour, and is not likely to be settled just yet. But humans, in displaying the most amazing array of behaviour patterns found in nature, can take comfort from the fact that, whatever the genes say or don’t say, there is one talent we have developed to a greater degree than any other animal, and which opens the door to a new form of society. Primates can learn to be different, and none better than us.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Calorie counts and pet scans (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Calorie counts and pet scans

Hail the season of good capitalist cheer which will soon be upon you, while you’re on holiday from your lack of job and looking forward to the Christmas repossession and credit collection letters. Since you’re not likely to be merry and you can’t afford to buy presents or drink, let Pathfinders at least assure you that you can eat crap food because the scientists have got all their calorie intake levels wrong by about 16 per cent (‘Rethink for calorie eating levels’, BBC Online, 14 November).

But please stop feeding the leftovers to the damn dog, who’s probably clinically obese. One in three household pets in the UK, about 7m animals, is overweight (Vetpulse Blog ) while in USA it’s 50 per cent (Pet obesity facts)

The fact that pooch has got a paunch in a dog-eat-dog world where 750m people eat nearly nothing is no surprise to socialists, however Fido and Tiddles-lovers in the top 10 cat and dog-owning countries might be surprised to learn that it takes six and a half times the land area of New Zealand to provide the petfood. And in a delicious knife-twist to any self-righteous organic dog-owning vegan climate-protestors at Copenhagen this month, it turns out that for the eco-pawprint of an average sized dog you could instead drive not one but two SUVs 10,000 kilometres over a year (New Scientist, 24 October and Guardian, 13 November). In fact, for the price of an overweight small Scottie dog you could even run an Ethiopian or a Vietnamese human.

Once you’ve eaten the dogfood and the dog you can always resort to drugs, now that the debate has been satisfactorily resolved and we can reliably tell how to assess the relative safety of any drug. Oh, you didn’t know? Well it’s simple. If the government says nothing at all about it, it will most probably kill you, whereas if they swear blind it’s dangerous and what’s more do their Nutt and sack any scientific advisor who dares to disagree with them, you know you can party!

 

Crystal balls-ups

No doubt many readers have come to regard Pathfinders as their infallible technical and scientific guru, and one is of course reluctant to disabuse them of such notions, however in positively the last anniversary item of 2009 it might be fun to reflect on the fate of pundit predictions from 20 years ago. The following comes from the book Towards 2001 – A consumer’s guide to the 21st century, by Malcolm Abrams and Harriet Bernstein (Angus, London, 1989). Quite what qualified these two journalists to write this book is unclear, however they probably did about as well as Pathfinders would have done.

• Correct (if late): Flat screens, pocket computer, CDRs, digital cameras and hearing aids, impotence pills, sat-nav, supermarket self-checkout.
• Wrong (or not heard of): walking TV, self-weeding gardens, bark-stopper dog collar, flying car, potato ice-cream.
• Not predicted (stand by for a shock): pen-drives, DVDs, small mobile phones, text messaging, World Wide Web, PDAs, lithium-ion batteries (making small portable electronics possible).

What do we learn from this? Not much, apart from never believe what gurus tell you. The list of things they signally failed to predict accords eerily with the most revolutionary changes in our culture, which is a kind of reverse trick-shot. Hope for socialists, perhaps, since people are always telling us socialism will never happen. But Pathfinders can hardly stand by and laugh without entering the fray, so here are a few modest offerings for the next ten years:

They won’t find a graviton or a Higgs boson; they won’t understand what they do get; the LHC will break down anyway because somebody sneezed; somebody will announce the overthrow of Einstein (again); most of the heat from the Caderache nuclear fusion plant will be generated by rows over money; Dawkins will get baptised a Catholic.

 

Things that go Plod in the night

Modern detective work is a serious and scientific business, apparently. Only not in Wales, whose police force embarked on a £20,000 investigation into a suicide after being told that the man’s ghost had visited psychics and told them he had been poisoned (Guardian, 7 November). Learning that the words ‘lion’, ‘horse’ and ‘fox’ were significant, the police set off to visit every pub with one of those names in its title, and one with a statue of a horse outside. The case was closed only after a second post-mortem revealed no trace of any poison. “We are a laughing stock,” complained one police source. Perhaps, but spirits were doubtless apprehended in several of those pubs.

Competition results

If you interrogate your 140 character memory you will recall that Pathfinders attempted, back in September, to raise the level of debate on Twitter by holding a competition to find the best SMS-length rendition of the socialist case. To say that there was a tsunami of enthusiastic responses might be a slight exaggeration (ask a socialist whatever you like, but don’t ask them to be brief!) however some notable entries deserve honourable mention (the prize is that we keep your name out of it).

Most rallying: Society marches on its belly; give us the land, farms and the bakery not the crumbs! 4 1 world socialist community! (FA)

Most exact: From each according to ability, to each according to need. Free labour, free access. That’s Socialism. (SJW)

Most poetic: The essence of capitalism is the stench of cordite and blood. The essence of communism is the flavour of fulfilment. (JN)

Most McGonagall: The essence of capitalism is wages and profit. The essence of socialism is how to get off it. (ALB)

Most conversational: Think outside the box of capitalism and make the world a pleasurable place to inhabit. Work for the benefit of society, not your masters. (JV)

Most economical: I vote to end capitalism X (PM)

Most toddler-friendly: world socialism – for a world without war, want, wages and the fat controller. (DON)

Most street-hip: Banish the gods from the sky, the capitalists from the earth and the chuggers from the high street. (DON)

Thanks to all those who contributed. Due to postal difficulties the prize Seychelles tickets regrettably cannot be mailed out. Pathfinders will return in January. With a tan.

Paddy Shannon

Monkey Business (2005)

From the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the New Scientist (5 November) some monkeys can be taught to be captivated by capitalism. The research is gleefully popularised in the Daily Mail (3 November). The reports don't actually talk about capitalism but the message is clear — the money system is not only embedded in human nature, it also goes back to monkey nature.

Apparently scientists at Yale University conducted experiments on capuchin monkeys showing that they can be taught how to use money and even master the art of shopping for bargains. They learned to use silver discs as coins to buy pieces of apple and cucumber from the researchers. When the apple slices were made "cheaper" than cucumber — meaning more apple was offered for the same amount of money — they opted for the better-value apple.

The monkeys then resorted to underhand tactics to hold on to their cash — by hiding the real coins and offering up "counterfeit" coins made of cucumber. They also showed a gambling streak. enjoying a game which enabled them to win or lose prized grapes on the flip of a coin.

Fascinating stuff. But the New Scientist report didn't tell the whole story. Some of the more intelligent monkeys went on to figure that they were living in an animal class society The human experimenters possessed all the means of production and distribution: the laboratory, the stockpile of silver discs, the food rations for the workers. All the monkey-workers could do was earn a precarious living by doing various tricks to please their masters in return for food portions.

So the class-conscious monkeys got together and decided the only way to achieve their emancipation was to mount a revolution. They conveyed to the researchers where they could put their silver discs. Instead of access to the means of life only by earning discs, they decided to build a new and classless animal society in which all monkeys and researchers would stand equal in regard to the means of wealth.

The experimenters didn't like the prospect of being dispossessed of their wealth and privilege. They threatened to use armed force to put down the revolution. Fortunately this turned out to be an idle threat. Although a few lumpen-monkeys briefly took the side of the experimenters, the vast majority saw that the new system of production for use and free access was in the best interests of all animal-kind.

Stan Parker

Pathfinders: Nothing but animals (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the more depressing clichés that socialists hear, especially in response to outbreaks of homicidal violence like that in Israel and Gaza, or Ukraine, is the lazy claim that humans are just wired that way – just look at chimpanzees.

A recent online comment stated that ‘chimps are our direct ancestors, closer than bonobos’, two untrue statements that could easily have been checked. Bonobos and chimps are actually so closely related they can interbreed, and both share around 98 percent of their DNA with humans, making them equally close cousins. Yet their behaviour is markedly different, which ought to prove right away that behaviour is not dependent on genetics.

Bonobos are famous for being egalitarian and promiscuous, but chimpanzee violence is what usually gets all the attention. However, according to Jane Goodall, chimps are not the incorrigible hooligans people think: ‘ … it is easy to get the impression that chimpanzees are more aggressive than they really are. In actuality, peaceful interactions are far more frequent than aggressive ones… and serious, wounding fights are very rare compared to brief, relatively mild ones’ (tinyurl.com/4x864sx3). In fact, serious and wounding fights are very rare in all species. There’s a lot of posturing (what’s called ‘agonistic behaviour’), but animals are generally not daft, and know when to call it a day.

Ethologists, who study animal behaviour, are always learning interesting things. For instance, that animals are very far from being heteronormative. A group of Spanish researchers have recently reviewed previous studies of same-sex sexual behaviour (SSSB) in 1,500 vertebrate and invertebrate species, and come up with interesting conclusions (tinyurl.com/3p7yvmwv).

It seems that SSSB is widespread and nearly equally frequent in males and females, appears to have arisen many times, spontaneously and independently, and is more often found in social species. It’s been found in 261 mammal species, and 51 primate species, from lemurs to great apes. Other studies report similar findings in birds, reptiles, frogs and fish (tinyurl.com/yhxdxj42). Nobody is sure why it happens, but many hypotheses exist. In sum, anyone claiming that human violence is natural but homosexuality is not, has a big problem.

Or take inequality. Human society is naturally unequal, runs the argument, just look at the animal kingdom. Clue’s in the word ‘kingdom’.

A new study published by the Royal Society gives the lie to this too. Data for 66 mammal species suggest that ‘mammalian societies run the gamut from egalitarian to hierarchical’ and that while sexual and resource competition are often drivers of inequality, strategies for combating inequality are also common. These include sharing, cooperation, conflict resolution and organised insurrection. It turns out that scientists have extensively studied the evolution of animal hierarchies but paid little attention to the evolution of ‘fairness’ and how it works. The researchers argue that ‘mammals rely upon a suite of mechanisms to balance the costs and benefits of equality for group living, and evolution does not necessarily favor hierarchy… The evolution of fairness has played as big a role in the evolution of mammal species … but it has been understudied’ (tinyurl.com/49zvhh9a). Could capitalistic bias be the reason for this oversight?

In addition, what’s called ‘hierarchy’ isn’t a monolithic construct, but more of a dynamic and shifting gradient, going from the harsh and tyrannical at one end to the mild and benevolent at the other. Primate hierarchies, including chimpanzees and gorillas, generally occupy the middle ground. There is a dominance hierarchy, but it is offset by countervailing trends: ‘Factors that work to promote fairness among mammals include food sharing and adoptions, revolutionary coalitions, conflict resolution, and an aversion to inequality’.

Vampire bats share blood-food with weak and infirm relatives, chimpanzees share the produce of a hunt with the whole troupe, and elephants adopt orphaned young. Lionesses gang up on male lions to stop them killing their young. Even baboons, axiomatic as primate Nazis, have been known to adopt more peaceable and egalitarian lifestyles if their circumstances change, as observed by Stanford primatologist Robert Sapolsky in the 1990s (tinyurl.com/bdd4s5ya).

The Royal Society report adds that many species, particularly primates, have a sense of fairness, or ‘aversion to inequality’. Capuchin monkeys who have to work to get a reward are liable to go on strike when they see other monkeys getting the same reward for doing nothing. This behaviour makes sense in terms of social species who have to get along together, and has also been observed in dogs, rats and corvids.

It has been fashionable for a century or more to regard animals as remote and unknowable, and any attempt to identify human-like behaviour in animals as vulgar anthropomorphism. This may be a relatively modern phenomenon though, the result of an increasing alienation caused by mass urbanisation as well as by the industrial factory farm system, which encourages a view of animals as ‘mere meat’. Darwin however had no problem seeing human morality as an extension of similar social behaviour amongst animals, and the well-known Russian anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin produced volumes of evidence to show that cooperation was as important a driver of animal evolution as competition, indeed he argued in Mutual Aid (1902), more so.

But still, it may be argued that animals are animals, and humans are, well, different. And indeed, it’s fine to argue that humans are not bound by what other animals do. That means that if we want to establish a cooperative world society of shared resources and mutual aid, there’s nothing in our genetic heritage to prevent us. But what our detractors can’t do is cherry-pick their arguments, basing human behaviour on animals when it suits them, and ignoring other known animal behaviours when it doesn’t.

Paddy Shannon

Walking with Beasts (2002)

Book Review from the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Walking with Beasts’ by Tim Haines. BBC Worldwide, 2001

The Walking with Beasts television series was one of the BBC’s success stories towards the end of last year. The accompanying book is equally as visually impressive. In particular the section on Pliocene Africa (relating to Australopithecines) provides a useful and easily digestible summary of the current knowledge of very early human ancestors. Such knowledge is particularly important when we consider “human nature” and its being an alleged barrier to achieving socialism. The section on chimpanzees is rather useful in this respect. Socialists are familiar with the old chimp argument: chimpanzees having an aggressive, male-dominated society, therefore such behaviour must be innate in humans too, the “evolved chimpanzees”. As Haines rightly points out, the bonobo (so-called “pygmy” chimp”) is equally closely related, yet has a completely different social structure – a matriarchy based on promiscuous sex. There are several other useful little snippets of a similar nature. It also makes a good bit of light-hearted entertainment.

Kaz.

The Blind Will Yet See (1949)

From the July 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Leader magazine (23/4/49) carries a fascinatingly descriptive article, "World of the Bat,” by Brian Vesey Fitzgerald, naturalist. The author has kept eleven of twelve species of British bats for many years as pets to try to discover the explanation for many habits and instincts which have puzzled scientists for many years.

The bat, though it can distinguish a worm held within an inch before its eyes, is so shortsighted that to all intents and purposes it is blind. Despite this the bat can travel at great speed in irregular flights and can avoid harmful objects by a fraction of an inch by a lightning swerve or a series of swerves in a fraction of a second. The bat has been observed to fly at lightning speed at a wall, pull itself up within a quarter of an inch of the wall, and at the same time distinguish in the minutest time a spider on the wall and grab it for its food. An Italian scientist, two hundred years ago, put out the eyes of some captive bats and released than in a darkened room in which had been strung many strands of black cotton, each strand bearing a little bell. The eyeless bats flew happily up and down the room and never once touched a strand of cotton or rung a bell. And, we are told, how they did it remained a mystery until—"radar” was discovered. It is now known, it is stated, that the bat finds its way about by the same method. “They utter squeaks, and b£ picking up the echo from the squeaks know exactly where they are. The method is known as 'echo location.’ We can, if our hearing is good hear the ordinary squawk of the flying bat but the squeaks used in echo location are supersonic far above the range of human hearing.” By the aid of an instrument the supersonic squeaks can now be picked up and, the author says, a great deal is now known about them. The bat gains its information from the squeaks it emits. At rest it emits a supersonic squeak about ten times to the second, as it rises to wing it emits about thirty to the second, the faster the bat approaches an obstacle the faster becomes the rate of squeak, rising to fifty or even sixty a second, dropping to normal as soon as the obstacle is passed. Thus does the bat gain its "information” from "echo location.” 

Truly, a remarkable illustration of adaptation to environment in the non-human animal kingdom. An example of the application of scientific theory without knowledge of the theory or the powers of abstract reasoning which enables man to understand the processes of nature.

And what lessons might be drawn from the nature lesson? The bat does not learn from its environment in the sense that man learns. Millions of years of evolution reside in the animal instincts of self-preservation. The animal possesses no powers of abstract reasoning to assist it in escaping the dangers of environment. It acts upon the accumulated experiences of millions of years. Man has succeeded, through his powers, in gaining mastery over his environment and has organised himself into human society. Man faces little danger from nature. Man faces danger from the social problems in the society he has developed and organised; the problems of poverty and war, of want in a world which can produce plenty, of armed conflict which threatens vast destruction of life and social wealth.

Man endeavours to escape the dangers of society as inevitably as the animal endeavours to escape the dangers of its environment. Man, human animal, possesses with the rest of the animal kingdom the instinct to escape. He possesses also the powers of reasoning. He has the ability to learn and understand the workings of society, to modify and to change it.

Break down the abstraction "man” into the realities of the world in which we live and we have men and women organised into classes on the basis of possession of the means of production. We have, in short, the capitalist class and the working class—the former, the minority in society and the class that owns, and the latter, the majority, the class that is dispossessed. And because the working class are the majority of the men and women organised in capitalist society the main driving force to escape the problems that society throws up must, and will come from them. Throughout the entire capitalist world the idea of Socialism is shaping itself. This is so because man has more than the animal instincts of self-preservation possessed by the whole animal kingdom he has the power to reason and learn from experience. Under the pressure of the problems that capitalism creates and cannot solve, the working class will learn that Socialism alone provides the escape from these problems. It will learn from its accumulated experiences of capitalism and by simple deductions from those experiences. It will learn as inevitably as the animal evolves the instinct of self-preservation in the struggle for life. And in learning a great many working men and women may never hear of scientific socialist theories. The bat applies the scientific theories of Radar in its struggle for existence instinctively, but the workers learn from practical experience.

It is true that the half-shaped ideas of Socialism require more experience to bring them to maturity. Capitalism aggravates and accelerates its contradictions and provides the driving force to Socialism.

Capitalism is its own gravedigger.

The blind will yet see.

Harry Waite

Socialism and nature (1992)

From the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We publish below a criticism from a Marxist viewpoint of the so-called “Deep Greens” or “Deep Ecologists” who see nature as a force to which humans must submit.

Our ecological crisis, say the “deep” Greens, stems from a fundamentally unhealthy relationship between society and nature. In this relationship, inherited from attitudes and philosophies developed during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, we regard ourselves as separate from and superior to nature. We think we can constantly change, develop and destroy it for material benefit. Such alienation and exploitation result, Deep Greens say, from human arrogance and greed, which are displayed equally in capitalism and socialism.

They argue that a healthy, holistic, organic relationship with nature would, by contrast, regard humans as part of it, not separate from it—subject, like any other species, to the same ecological laws. We therefore must observe the natural limits on human activity imposed by finite resources. We should respect, celebrate and revere nature in its own right (the “bioethic”)—regardless of its use value to us. This means abandoning materialism and “living lightly on the earth”, while conserving virtually all species from highest to lowest.

Socialists, too, condemn Western attitudes to nature. However we relate them not to human “sin” but to the specific workings of capitalist economics (state or private). We reject the Deep Ecology approach in favour of a dialectical Marxist one.

Dialectical approach

A dialectical view of the society-nature relationship says, first, that there is no separation between them. They are part of a unity. There is not a self-contained “humanity” counterposed to a self-contained “non-human” world. The two are so un-self-contained that you cannot define one without the other (try it!). They are really aspects of one another: what humans do is natural, while nature is socially produced.

Second, as they develop they constantly interact to change each other, in a circular, mutually affecting way. “Non-human” nature, and human perceptions of it, affect and change human society. The latter then changes nature, which, changed, affects society to further change it, and so on.

Underlying human interactions with nature is the process of production, which is a defining characteristic of being human. In production we change nature with forethought, into forms more useful to us than in their “natural” state. Labour incorporates our essential human forces into nature, which therefore gains social quality in the form of use values. Under capitalism, of course, the value of nature is not judged simply by its use, material or aesthetic. It is expressed as exchange value: the value which its products realise when bought and sold in a market place.

Over time, our work on a nature which existed before humans were present—a “first nature”—has produced the material creations of society together with its institutions, ideas and values—a “second nature”. Here, we should recognise something which most Deep Ecologists do not (or if they do, they do not welcome it—see Bill McKibben’s Death of Nature). This is that wherever there are humans it is no longer meaningful to distinguish between first or second nature: everything is the latter. Marx certainly recognised this:

Animals and plants, which we are accustomed to consider as products of nature, are, in their present form, not only products of, say, last year’s labour, but the results of a gradual transformation, continued through many generations, under man’s superintendence and by means of his labour. (Capital Vol. I).

The nature that preceded human history . . . today no longer exists anywhere . . .

(German Ideology).

In these days of concern about ubiquitous global atmospheric modification the truth of these observations becomes clear upon a moment’s reflection. Even “wilderness” areas and wildlife preserves are not “natural”. They have been artificially segregated from normal development processes by human decisions.

Because socialists accept all this with equanimity, Deep Ecologists often accuse them of sharing with capitalism an arrogance towards the rest of nature. And, indeed, Marxism was, like liberalism, born of the Enlightenment view that saw nature as something to be understood in order to use its laws, principles and resources for the material benefit of humans.

But the society-nature dialectic does also acknowledge human dependence on non-human nature as well as vice versa. This is fundamental in the recognition of nature as one of the forces of production: a recognition which should beget, in socialists, sensitivity to the objective existence of ecological laws. It should also beget kindness and humane (i.e. like humanity) treatment of animals. For, if in changing nature we change ourselves, then acts of cruelty to animals create cruel humans.

This all means that as the productive forces of technology develop, what it is to be human and to be “natural” both change. In production

Man sets 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. (Marx. Capital).

So through learning how to farm nature’s products we changed ourselves from nomadic hunter/gatherers to sedentary humans. Through learning how to manufacture things we changed ourselves to an industrial society. As our ability to use resources has grown we have developed new needs: housing, energy, telecommunication. As we have changed our power to do things (e.g. via transport and computers) we have changed the things we want and need to do (e.g. travel).

This interaction is not just material. Through changing nature and making things, we have changed ourselves into creatures who appreciate the beauty of what we create: buildings, machines, art, landscapes. Included in all this are our intellectual senses. As we transform nature, we get to know nature’s laws in order to do it more effectively and usefully. As this happens we develop our own intelligence.

Lewis Mumford described aspects of this dialectic, in Technics and Civilisation. He argued that creating machines produced new moral values in Western societies. These elevated practicality, thus favouring a meritocracy which swept aside a feudal caste system. And new cultural values were created. Nature was transformed into a human work of art: its beauty and wonder being augmented by the quantitative and analytic appreciation which a machine culture induces. The human imagination has also been enlarged by scientific, technological fantasising, and by a new machine aesthetic: a second nature of cranes, skyscrapers and microscopes. Cubism was the first style to reflect the beauty of the machine. Photography enhanced our appreciation of pure form in nature, while films brought distant environments near, recreating symbolically a world beyond our immediate reach.

This unfolding society-nature dialectic is an evolutionary process. In it, industrial, technological society is not some unnatural aberration, but a natural stage in social development and a social stage in the development of nature. It follows that changing our nature changes our needs. If most needs are thus socially produced, so too are the resources to fill them. Coal, oil, quartz, then, are not fundamental, basic resources: they did not become resources until we developed the technologies to use them. So we should be less concerned about whether they are going to run out. Rather, we should ask whether we wish to fulfil needs for energy, transport and telecommunication through these particular resources or others. Alternatively, we may wish to change our view of what we need; consequently our view of what constitutes “resources”. The point is that the choice is ours: we are not the helpless playthings of natural or economic forces that Greens sometimes would have us believe.

We should appreciate that this dialectical perspective is profoundly holistic. It contains no dualism of society and nature, but a monism in which both are defined by each other and are constantly co-cvolving:

Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. “Man lives on nature” means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature . . . (Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).

As Fritjof Capra, the Deep Ecology physicist who is not a friend of Marxism, has conceded, this is a deeply ecological view of the society-nature relationship.

Alienation from nature

The socialist conception of nature, then, is not as a mere stock of economic goods (capitalism), nor as a source of intrinsic worth or good (deep ecology), nor as an endangered ecosystem (tragedy of the commons survivalism). It conceives of nature as a social category: though there was an “objective” nature it has been reshaped and reinterpreted by one aspect of itself, human society.

Since alienation means separation from aspects of the self, then alienation from nature means a failure to realise that it is an aspect of the self, i.e. a social creation. This implies that the environmental crisis results from failing to see nature as our own creation and to understand that we can exercise conscious social control over this creation in order to make it a more desirable environment. Instead, we tend to view change towards unpleasant environments as substantially inevitable—a result of economic and technological forces (like the market and mechanisation) that are (we imagine) largely beyond our control. Reformist environmentalists and politicians try to wrestle with such forces, introducing taxes and legislation to soften their environmental impact. But they consider that a truly socialist society—an egalitarian, productive community of society and nature in which both are mutually benign—is quite beyond their reach.

For Deep Greens, “alienation” from nature means something quite different. It means asserting the naturalness of humans by “living in harmony with nature”, i.e. effectively conceding that natural laws (c.g. carrying capacity) have immediate determining power over us. Nature is seen as the source of worth (it “knows best”) and we endanger it unless we follow its rules. This view, says Steven Vogel, by seeing human activity as encroachment on or violation of nature

seems to be curiously guilty of just the sort of dualism it ascribes to the project of dominating nature. Somehow the activity of humans in transforming their environmcnt, alone of all other species, is ‘‘unnatural". ("Marx and Alienation from Nature", Social Theory and Practice, Vol 14, No3).

Vogel might well be thinking of Greenpeace's 1990 recruiting leaflet, which accuses “man” of multiplying “his numbers to plague proportions . . . and now stands like a brutish infant, gloating over this metcroric rise to ascendency".

Deep Ecologists would have us revere nature, preserving it to acknowledge our “one-ness” with it. But, as Murray Bookchin suggests, such worship mystifies nature, actually placing humanity far apart from it. It is a "Supernature with its shamans, priests, priestesses and fanciful deities". Reverent mystification really separates us from nature: we the “impotent and terrified mortal before a jealous and angry god", Gaia as an inhuman force we cannot change but to which we must adjust for our survival.

So Deep Ecology’s view of alienation from nature really rests on a dualistic conception of the human-nature relationship: a conception it is supposed to reject. The socialist dialectic, however, is not dualistic, and therefore, as Vogel says, “the question is not whether what we do ‘accords with nature’, it is whether we like what we have wrought”. And, as Reiner Grundmann says, in communism (socialism) humans will “dominate” nature but only in the sense of being in total control of their relationship with it. This in fact is the precondition for avoiding ecological crises.

David Pepper

About Books (1954)

Book Review from the April 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1952 Victor Gollancz, Ltd., published that excellent book by Josué de Castro, “The Geography of Hunger.” In the early chapters Mr. de Castro points out that, although there have been innumerable books on the subject of war, that other great human tragedy, hunger, has seldom called forth a book. He lists for us the few books on the subject; the novels “Hunger” by Hamsun and “The Grapes of Wrath” by Steinbeck; Istrati describing his experiences in Rumania, George Fink in the suburbs of Berlin, and Felekov and Neverov describing hunger in Russia. That is Mr. de Castro’s complete catalogue.

There is now another, a most excellently written book, that can be added to the list. "The People of the Deer” by Farley Mowat, published by Michael Joseph in 1952 at 15s., with drawings by S. Bryant and maps.

Farley Mowat developed what he terms “the disease of the arctic,” which is a longing to spend his time in the wide open spaces of the Canadian North West Territory. He learned of a little-known group of Eskimos who occupied the inland somewhere west of Hudson Bay and he decided to find them. Others had set out on a similar expedition before him and had perished in “The Barrens,” that terrifying territory north of the Canadian timber line and west of the Hudson.

Mr. Mowat made his first trip alone, contacting an old trader who had hung on in the inland country and getting to know the few remaining Eskimos of the Ihalmiut people. After a brief interval of a few months back in Southern Canada, Mr. Mowat returned to the Ihalmiut Eskimos in 1948 with a student of zoology, a Mr. Andrew Lawrie, as his companion. He set to work to learn the language and to study the history and customs of these people.

The story of these northern people is a tragedy. It tells of a once comparatively numerous people reduced by 1951 to about forty individuals. Mr. Mowat tells how, winter after winter, during the past fifty or sixty years, the ranks of these lovable folk have been decimated by starvation and disease—starvation and disease that was unknown till white men in search of profits probed their way into the northern lands.

These people live entirely by the caribou: they eat it, clothe themselves from its skin and build their lives around it and its habits. For generations they have hunted it for its meat, its fat, its bone, its horn, its hide and its fur. Without it they die, but in the days when the vast herds of these deer roamed their land there was little fear of dying from that cause.

The Ihalmiut have few possessions but no man claims exclusive ownership of even the tools of his own creation. Their tools, weapons and boats are the work of skilled craftsmen and they were once wonderful hunters. They hunted the caribou, killing just enough to supply their requirements.

Then came the white man in search of furs. The Eskimos were contacted and offered rifles, ammunition, kettles, tobacco and a variety of knick-knacks in exchange for furs. They gave up hunting the caribou in favour of the white fox, they laid aside their spears in favour of rifles, they gave up their deer meat in favour of white flour and tinned food. Things went well for years. Then the 1914-1918 war killed the fur market. The traders withdrew from their northerly stations and when the Eskimos trekked south with their furs they found the traders’ huts empty. They couldn’t understand it. They waited thinking the white man must come back, he still must need the furs.

When the worst of the winter weather was on them the Eskimos had plenty of furs but no ammunition for their rifles. They had lost the art of their primitive form of hunting. They had reduced their resistance to the cold by eating food of the white men instead of deer meat and fat. They had contracted white men’s diseases and they died by the hundred.

This story was repeated between the wars. When the fur trade boomed the traders went north with the weapons and gew-jaws to exchange with the simple people who were prepared to obey their every wish. When trade slumped, without warning the traders left and the Eskimos died. This is a sorry story of the effect of capitalism when it comes in contact with primitive people. The rifle and the demand for furs urged the eskimos to kill in excess of their living needs and the hordes of caribou have become as decimated as the people themselves. The caribou is in danger of passing away like the buffalo of the American plains.

If there are any of these people left in 1954, and if they are ever rescued from their plight, the solution of capitalism will be to either provide charity or to use them to work to produce wealth for exploiters. If it is a matter of helping them to re-adapt themselves to their environment, and there is no profit to be made in the process—well, maybe some charitable organisation will lend a hand. Or, more likely, as Mr. Mowat indignantly tells us, excuses will be made for doing nothing about them.

In addition to presenting us with this interesting sociological work Mr. Mowat is a first class author and his writing makes his book enthralling. He has neglected no aspect of study of the Ihalmiut people and he kept our noses glued to the pages of his book till we reached page 316 and the final word.

W. Waters.

Biodiversity loss and the capitalist economy (2021)

From the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

 

The Dasgupta review: 600 pages on how capitalism destroys nature, with no mention of capitalism.

In February a 600-page review commissioned by the Treasury titled ‘The Economics of Biodiversity’ was published. The author — Sir Partha Dasgupta, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge — set out to analyse the effect of the economy on nature, describing how, at current rates of consumption, the loss of biodiversity will soon be too expensive and may likely be catastrophic, and suggested that the way-out of the crisis is to give up GDP as the measure of economic progress.

Global warming enjoys a lot more attention than biodiversity loss but, as beneficial as slashing greenhouse gas emissions is, underestimating the likely impact of biodiversity loss could prove to be a deadly mistake. As the Dasgupta Review points out, many ecosystems, including tropical forests, wetlands and coral reefs, have already been degraded beyond repair, which, according to Dasgupta, ‘could have catastrophic consequences for our economies and wellbeing’.

Humanity’s impact

Humanity’s impact on the natural world is severe: animal populations have dropped by around 70 percent since 1970, and only 4 percent of the world’s mammals are wild; in effect, we are living during the sixth mass extinction of life on the planet. And it is not only about living beings: according to the Review, only in the last two decades, the stock of ‘natural capital’ per person fell by 40 percent. What Dasgupta means by ‘natural capital’ is not only the share of animals and plants per global citizen, but also their share of breathable air, drinkable water and soil in which to grow food; so the rapid reduction of these most basic prerequisites for life is truly alarming. Fringe high-tech solutions or short-term financial fixes that do not tackle this problem head-on would just squander the valuable resources we urgently need for our very survival.

The Review states:

  ‘Our economies and well-being depend on our most precious asset: Nature. Our demands far exceed Nature’s capacity to supply us with the goods and services we rely on, so that to keep the present rate of consumption, we would need 2 to 4 Earths by 2050 (depending on the speed of population growth). Once an extinction tipping point is reached, it is exceedingly expensive or impossible to reverse the damage, which fundamentally puts under question the prosperity of future generations.’

So far so good, and these are all valid and important points. But what does the Review say about what lies at the heart of the problem, and how to solve it? According to Dasgupta, 

the problem is two-fold: the first part is the market failure, as most natural assets are undervalued or even free, and so we do not invest in them; in addition, it is an institutional failure because governments subsidise the destruction of Nature (for example by supporting fossil fuel companies) at the rate of US$4 to 6 trillion per year, while giving only US$68 billion (or about 1 percent of the ‘destruction fund’) for its protection.

This formulation of the main problems, however, raises several questions. It assumes that the market is somehow unable to cope with this particular problem, so it needs to be regulated by governments, and that the governments in turn are not doing their jobs well — which is why we have this crisis on our hands. Calling this a market failure means assuming that the market normally takes into account real costs of materials and services. Yet in our globalised economy, where one person’s wages are hundreds of times higher than another’s; where you can get millions for making your computer perform incredibly complex calculations (like bitcoin mining) that help nothing or nobody at all and require enormous amounts of electrical power; where it is cheaper to ship ‘sustainable’ clothes from around the world, only to trash them into ‘recycling’ containers that will be shipped all the way back to never get recycled; where the price of oil went negative last year — in this economy, undervalued assets are not an error or an exception. In fact it is rather a common occurrence that we must acknowledge if we want to understand the forces influencing the current crisis.

Of course, government subsidies to fossil fuels facilitate exploitation of Nature, but Dasgupta fails to see that what drives this exploitation — the motivational principle at the very foundation of the economic system is making a profit. It is simply profitable to exploit Nature, and this is why it is being exploited. Yet somehow professors of economics and company CEOs go out of their way to make up excuses, thinking up complex theories and explanations — all this only to avoid facing up to the truth. As long as we have a monetary, for-profit economic system that makes growth and accumulation of capital the biggest impetus for productive activities, we will continue to be plagued by wastefulness, perverse luxury, inequality, dehumanisation, and yes, rapacious exploitation and loss of the very natural environment that gives us life and nurtures us.

Set up to fail

What should we do then in order to solve this “market and institutional failure”, according to the Review?

Dasgupta notes that ‘the very first step is to understand that our economies are embedded within Nature, not external to it.’ The almost exponential economic growth in the last 100 years, with all the resources it has been devouring, does not seem very likely to be sustainable for much longer, as we would run out of forests to burn and fish to catch. Dasgupta is aware that capitalist theory has been debating a way out of this conundrum by devising various schemes to reroute almost all economic growth from resource-intensive activities such as heavy industry into the virtual and services areas (like software development, entertainment, etc), so that it would get decoupled from resource use, and we would be able to happily continue to invest in the market and make more and more money, ad infinitum.

He takes a bold step in his Review when he explains, with some calculations and copious literature citations, that this is not likely to be possible. Simply put, increased profits inevitably lead to increased spending, and that almost always involves the use of raw materials. Even virtual activities are not ‘free’. For instance, data processing centres require increasingly large amounts of energy (for perspective, Bitcoin has a carbon footprint comparable to that of Argentina), and over 60 percent of the world energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. 

Dasgupta emphasises that the current path presents extreme risks, and that truly sustainable development would need a ‘different path, where our engagements with Nature are not only sustainable, but also enhance our collective wealth and well-being, and that of our descendants’. He offers three broad recommendations of solutions, not one of which, however, directly addresses the clear logic of capitalist, for-profit destruction of Nature.

Ineffective recommendations

The first recommendation is to reduce demands on Nature by increasing efficiency and utilising so-called ‘quantity restrictions’ rather than pricing mechanisms. In other words, Dasgupta advises against relying on the market, even with the usual interventions of price controls, as it is unlikely to work. What will work now, according to him, is to ban certain practices, for example to fence off more and more natural habitats and prohibit any kind of commercial activity there. While it is encouraging that the Review acknowledges that markets are not the key to solving this problem, government regulation — even though there are several examples of successful species recovery or habitat restoration — will not be able to reverse the effects of the overall economic system that is fundamentally based on the principle of resource consumption and growth. Such restriction measures are akin to attempts to stop the flow of a river with an obstacle — the water (or money) will inexorably find its way around, as we have seen happen time and time again.

The second recommendation is to ‘change our measures of economic success’ from GDP, which does not take into account things you don’t directly use for profit-making, like rare animal species or human happiness, to something Dasgupta calls ‘inclusive wealth’. This new measure of economic success would include natural assets, so if you gain a monetary profit while decreasing the pool of available natural resources, your overall measure of wealth would not grow. This new concept, however, is proposed as a means to improve national accounting systems. What happens when you eat into another country’s natural wealth? It is common practice nowadays that developed countries import raw materials for their technologically sophisticated exports from poorer countries that have little else to offer the globalised market (and trade agreements and IMF loans make sure it stays that way). To really work, this system would have to have all countries in the world agree to it, and so far even a seemingly straightforward worldwide tax agreement that would help alleviate the burden of tax evasion seems beyond reach. Maybe the reason it has been so elusive thus far is this very disconnect between the powers-that-be, on the one hand, demanding a fair distribution of wealth and, on the other hand, actively promoting and rewarding the accumulation of capital.

In his third recommendation, Dasgupta proposes the creation of supranational institutional arrangements to charge for the use of Nature and to then use this money to support these arrangements. He calls on businesses and financial institutions to integrate Nature-related considerations into their strategies. Finally, he suggests that the ultimate responsibility for sustainability lies with us as individuals.

Conclusion

All in all, there are definitely many valuable points in the Review, especially considering that they come from an established economist. At the same time, the proposed conclusions and recommendations show that, functioning for so long within the system, Dasgupta is unable to see beyond its borders, to think outside the box, and so is oblivious to the underlying imperative of capitalist logic that demands profits above all else, and at the expense of everything else, and which is leading us all on the march to devour the planet itself. That would explain why in the 600 pages of the Review the word capitalism is only mentioned once, and even that referred to a description of some academic economics theory that had nothing to do with our current biodiversity crisis or its underlying processes.

In his article ‘The Non-Monetary Economy’ Edgar S. Cahn estimated that, if valued in monetary terms, non-monetary components of the economy, such as household labour and civic activity, would be equivalent to almost 50 percent of GDP (Link). This shows that, as social and intelligent animals, we are happy to work for what we believe is necessary and will help our loved ones and our communities, even when we are not getting paid.

If we are serious about surviving and leaving our planet to our descendants in a liveable state, without a huge environmental debt impossible to settle, what we really need is not just to abandon GDP as the measure of economic success, but to urgently abandon altogether the monetary, for-profit economy itself and to embrace the socialist system of resource administration as the truly humane, sustainable and fair system of social and economic organisation that respects nature and the scientific principles of its management.

Roy Auss

Dogs, Cats & Wage Slaves (1996)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the August 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dogs, specifically the domesticated kind, are nature’s sycophants. They beg. They perform tricks upon command. Their tails wag upon the merest pat from their masters. They are ever loyal. They know their place.

Dogs do not reject their masters. As a canine Lenin might have observed, the dog is incapable of reaching an independent consciousness. Urging dogs to stand up for their dignity is as pointless as distributing cleanliness manuals to rats.

Cats, on the other hand, are remarkably sensitive to their own needs. These are nature’s materialists, ever heading to where food and shelter is available and there settling for as long as their needs are satisfied and their human providers leave them alone. Try as they might, humans will fail to train cats to beg or jump through hoops or pretend to sing the national anthem. Cats purr when they get what they want and they depart when they don't. You will rarely see a cat on a lead.

Now, with all due excuses in advance for the implied anthropomorphism of all this, there is a conclusion which merits a few moments of the reader’s political contemplation. Capitalist culture is based upon the expectation that the working class can be turned into dogs. The good wage slave is essentially a well-trained pup whose loyalty to the master who holds the lead is undying and whose bark is reserved for anyone threatening to invade the masters’ property. Workers are educated as pups are trained, with a few bones on offer to the graduates best able to jump to the appropriate orders of their future bosses. BBC’s One Man And His Dog could well be a documentary about job training, except for the obvious fact that most “job-seekers” (as the unemployed have now been reclassified) are denied such splendid rural scenery as the backdrop for their exploitation-seeking. In capitalist culture the tail-wagging wage slave, content in a squalid kennel, running to fetch the slicks which the master throws and fearful of the stick which the master wields, is the most ideal of dehumanised creatures of the profit system.

Of course, some capitalists tend to become strangely sentimental when it comes to pet dogs in ways that rarely extend to their employees. The billionaire inhabitant of Buckingham Palace, for example, is reputed to have quite a soft spot for a corgi with a belly-ache after eating too much lunch (which is perhaps why she reserves the British beef for visiting heads of state), but is not known for her concerns about workers dying as they wait in queues for hospital appointments. Other capitalists patronise charities concerned with animal welfare (usually excluding the welfare of the defenceless suckers whom they chase and shoot for sport) while resenting every penny they are forced to pay towards the welfare of their wage slaves. Cruelty to domestic pets is a crime. If the dogs of the rich and famous were transported in conditions which have become customary for rush-hour users of the buses and underground trains there would soon be a campaign formed to put an end to it.

Now, the great unconscious fear of the bosses is that workers become rather more like cats. At the very least, cats are like high-class prostitutes, sitting on their owners’ laps and purring, with one eye on the smoked salmon and the other on their claws should the would-be owner make a single false move. At their best, cats are animals who know their place in a way that dogs never will: in the sun, near the food and drink, never far from the open air and long leisure hours of idle roaming, peaceful napping and hot sex. What characteristics do capitalists less admire in their workers than those?

Dogs are pack animals. Humans (with the exception of Millwall supporters and marching Orangemen) are social, but not pack animals. In short, we are socially interdependent, but we have sufficient consciousness to survive and prosper alone as well as in groups. Dogs survive either by total dependence upon the pack or by domesticated submission to an owner. Cats are not pack animals and are never quite owned by those who imagine themselves to be cat-owners.

The revolutionary socialist is the lion of the capitalist jungle. Not content to hunt the pack or be trained into the domesticity of wage slavery, the socialist looks at the world from a position of strength. There are more workers than there are capitalists. We are stronger than them. We are the ones they depend on to protect them as a class from one another and, above all, from us. We are intelligent enough to know’ our way round the jungle and find our way out to the other end. And our capacity to rise up scares the hell out of those who would like the working class to be forever weak and bowed.

Freedom does not depend upon humans becoming more like cat — just less like dogs. Like cats, we might learn that there is more dignity in walking away from tyranny into the unknown than putting up with lousy treatment forever. But the message of this rather strange piece is not that SOCIALISTS SAY WORKERS SHOULD BECOME MORE LIKE CATS. Rather, SOCIALISTS SAY WORKERS SHOULD BECOME MORE LIKE HUMANS. This means refusing to adopt the political posture of the dependent canine and resting satisfied with the reformers’ offers of bigger bones. Instead, let those who think they can own us learn soon that our bite is as bad as our bark — and our bark can become a roar.

Steve Coleman