Depths of alienation (2003)

Book Review from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Culture of Make-Believe. Derrick Jensen, New York, Context Books, 2002

The Future of Success. Robert B. Reich, New York, Knopf, 2001

The stream of books coming out of America on the Holy Global Empire of capitalism continues unabated. The tale is of two classes: arrogant winners and collateral losers, private wealth and public poverty, triumphalist insecurity for the elite and traumatic insecurity for the mass. The system is enthusiastically praised, superficially criticised, but never seriously opposed. There Is No Alternative - or, if you prefer the sporting metaphor, capitalism is the only game in town.

With Derrick Jensen's 700-page blockbuster you get more or less what it says in the blurb: “the atrocities that characterise so much of our culture - from . . .  modern slavery and corporate misdeeds to manufacturing disasters, death squads in developing nations and the destruction of the natural world”. The text is discursive, even gabby. There is no index, which suggests that the author wants you to read it as a novel for entertainment, not a polemic for study.

To give Jensen his due, he's good on slavery:

“. . . the power relationship between slaveholders and slaves can be broken into three components. The first is social, and involves the use or threat of violence by the slaveholder to control the slave. The second is psychological, and has to do with convincing the slaves to perceive their slavery as actually being in their own best interests. The third is cultural, and has to do with transforming force into a right of the powerful and obedience into a duty of the powerless. . .”

He can't bring himself to explicitly oppose wage slavery and the capitalist system of which it is an integral part. Instead he seeks to shock us with the revelation that his solution is to get rid of civilisation. On the last page we get a sanitised biblical story: the appropriately-named Ham, rather than being condemned to perpetual enslavement, feels a happy, fecund sense of freedom.

As an economist, Robert Reich is more upfront about capitalism, which he takes for better and for worse. The good news is for consumers, who can "shift allegiance with the click of a mouse" because they live in "the age of the terrific deal". But the bad news is about quality of non-consuming life: more frenzy, less security, loss of time and energy for friendship, community and self.

Reading through Reich's prose, with its chapter heads like “Of geeks and shrinks” and “The sale of the self”, gives the impression that the author is writing about and for people very much like himself. Of the 6 billion people in the world only perhaps a billion or so have regular employment, and by no means all of those worry about their CV and how they present themselves at interview. Yet Reich asserts that:

“In the new economy, you get ahead not by being well liked but being well marketed… Talented people are even selling shares in themselves… Once, the worst thing that could be said of someone was that he had sold out. Now the worst thing that can be said is that he's not selling”.

By this reckoning, capitalism has plunged depths of alienation that Marx could only have had nightmares about.

Stan Parker

The War - Capitalism does it again (2003)

Editorial from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The organised slaughter has begun. It is now clear that this was always the intention of Bush, the nominal head of US capitalism, and his British counterpart, Blair. They cynically allowed the diplomatic wrangling to go on at the UN so as to buy them time to get their forces massing on the borders of Iraq up to full fighting strength. This done, diplomacy was discarded and the military given the go-ahead.

This war is not being fought simply to overthrow a brutal dictator – though this will surely happen. Nor even to stop the spread of chemical and biological weapons – even though countries like the US and Britain are anxious to maintain their monopoly of such weapons. It is being fought over a key energy source – oil, of which Iraq has the second biggest reserves after Saudi Arabia. The chief aim is to secure future supplies of such energy resources, essential to their political and economic demands.In other words, this war is no different from any of the wars that have taken place in modern times. It's a business war. Capitalism is driven by the competitive struggle for profits between corporations and states. Conflict, economic, political and, as a last resort, military is built-in to capitalism over sources of raw materials, investment outlets, markets, trade routes, and strategic points to control and protect these. When a state judges that its “vital interest” is threatened – e.g. needing to secure access to a key raw material, trade route or military outpost – it goes to war. Iraq did this when it invaded Kuwait in 1990 and America is doing this now in invading Iraq.

Capitalism breeds war, though most people would prefer to live in peace. Consequently massive propaganda exercises are employed by the state to stoke people's fears and anxieties that stem from their material poverty and insecurity. Invariably these also endeavour to present it as being in some way humanitarian. This is because people have a healthy horror of war. They know war means death and destruction. Death not only of the soldiers on both sides, but also of women, children and old people as “collateral damage” – who make up four-fifths of casualties of modern war – and destruction not only of military installations and hardware, but also of bridges, roads, power stations, ports, hospitals and other socially-useful constructions.

This particular war may be over quickly. The Iraqi armed forces are no match for the US army and its awesome weapons of mass destruction. It is, however, going to be followed by chaos and massacres throughout the region, as Bush and Blair well know but have dismissed as “a price worth paying” to secure control of oil supplies.

Many people's gut reaction is simply that war is crazy. Socialists share this anti-war sentiment. It is one of the reasons why we are Socialists – real Socialists that is, not supporters of the sort of state capitalist dictatorships that failed in Russia and Eastern Europe, but advocates of a united world community without frontiers based on all the Earth's resources, natural and industrial, becoming the common heritage of all humanity and being used to satisfy people's needs instead of for profit. We have concluded that capitalism means war and that therefore to get rid of wars and the threat of wars – and the constant preparation for war represented by maintaining armed forces – you have got to get rid of capitalism.

That voices are raised against the war, millions of voices, shows that there is hope. That workers – whose experience of life stems from using their energies and talents to co-operatively solve problems and achieve goals; who realise the potential for mutual dependence and support; who enjoy some security of life won through the class struggle – are determined to oppose the war shows that opposition to war has its basis in material reality rather than mere moral condemnation.

War is completely unnecessary. We are living in a world that has enough resources to provide plenty for all, to eliminate world poverty, ignorance and disease, to provide an adequate and comfortable life for everyone on the planet. Yet under capitalism resources are squandered on armaments, of individual as well as of mass destruction, and, as now, in actual war. Even in times of peace – as the armed truce between wars is called – capitalism's pursuit of profit pollutes and plunders the planet and upsets the balance of nature with potentially devastating consequences. The economic law “no profit, no production” applies implacably, resulting in millions dying of hunger and related diseases every year simply because it is not profitable to produce the food to feed them and, in fact, often while the food that could feed them is destroyed so as to maintain prices and profits.

As World Socialists, who are opposed to war and to capitalism which breeds it: 

• We place on record our horror that capitalism has once again provoked the orgy of death and destruction known as war.

• We extend the hand of friendship to our fellow workers in Iraq who our political masters have designated as targets for destruction.

• We pledge to do all within our means to bring the slaughter to an immediate end.

• We pledge ourselves to continue to work for the establishment of a world socialist society of peace and cooperation.

• We call upon fellow workers everywhere to join in the struggle for World Socialism.

One World, One People! Unite for World Socialism!

The Executive Committee,

The Socialist Party of Great Britain,

Companion party of the World Socialist Movement.

Alien America (2003)

From the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twentieth century American culture – the media context of my generation. Rock n' roll, jazz, blues, soul, hotrods, superheroes, fast food and, of course, Hollywood. Monsters, gangsters, westerns and science fiction; I have loved them all. That all of this was and is generated by the profit system which exploits us is only part of the story. To see our generation as purely the victims of a remorseless marketing campaign is to overlook the dialectical forces that lie beneath the empty glamour and desperate novelty of American culture. Human imagination itself is defined by its economic context and the capitalist context is rich in deep and unresolvable contradictions. Hollywood's fantasies are powerful examples of the need to both defend and celebrate its cultural values and also to escape from them.

To illustrate this let us consider the science fiction genre and its escapism which, in its better incarnations, is always combined with a political/cultural narrative. These themes are sometimes personified in the character of the 'alien'. Star Trek was a series that began as a TV drama in the sixties and subsequently spawned many movies and other TV spin-offs. Its menagerie of aliens can be seen as expressions of American characteristics; the naïve 'gung-ho' Klingon warriors, the inhuman logicians of Vulcan, the business greed of the Ferengi and, not least, the fascistic militarism of the Borg. Most intriguing of all is the alien 'Q' who is an omnipotent tragic fool (God in man's image). All of these aliens are contrasted with the crew of the 'Enterprise' (the future Americans) who, amazingly, have no money, no gods and no prejudices! It is as if this is one of the few arenas where Americans can truly see themselves, not as the human characters but as their alien incarnations. This perverse identification does not stop there; it has evolved into a full blown 'post-modern' cultural synthesis aided in no small part by the high priest of alien iconography – Steven Spielberg.

        

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was my first encounter with the subsequently ubiquitous 'grey' aliens. Whether or not it was Spielberg who actually invented them, his mystical insect-eyed, monochromatic, androgynous extra-terrestrials have come to dominate the science fiction of the past few decades. Countless books, movies and TV dramas have featured this species of alien all over the world – yet another example of US cultural imperialism. No longer confined to 'fiction' they now feature in the symbiotic cultural phenomena of alien abductions. One is reminded of the appearance of witches and demons to people immersed within the Christian cultures of the past. Surrounded as they were by paintings, sculptures and stained-glass representations of angels and devils we can see that such media inspired experiences are nothing new. Even the Christ himself seems to have been inspired by Old Testament prophecies of the coming of a Jewish 'messiah'. But, some might legitimately inquire, how do we know that at least some of these events are not 'real encounters' instigated by the activities of extra terrestrials? This is precisely the subject of Spielberg's latest TV series.

Taken is the story of alien abductees and their struggle to be taken seriously. These characters are continually thwarted in this by the conspiratorial activities of a US government agency. With references to previous media versions of this story within the narrative we have a series that feeds on both its own predecessors and the cultural experiences they helped to create. Just as religion was once 'the opiate of the people' now it is the media that provides the escapism from the day-to-day realities of the class struggle. It also provides that other ingredient so crucial for successful escapism – justice. No other culture has been so obsessive in its zeal for 'freedom and justice' and so fearful of its reality as America. In the character of the child-alien in the series we have yet another example of a messianic figure complete with miracles. Why does the land of technological miracles need the super-natural variety as well in its stories? Only because technology has failed to deliver the human necessity of social justice in its capitalist context. As with religion these stories are a projection into another realm of this basic human need. The greys and their 'hard-ware' represent both the fear and disappointment associated with technology and its still unfulfilled promise of a better world. It is hard not to conclude that the greys are the actual cultural incarnation of man's alienation from his own technical creations. Socialists are often told to just enjoy the story and stop analysing everything – but to us this is the story. Once you've seen the world through the lens of a new consciousness you cannot see the 'Emperor's new clothes' ever again. Although the owners of the media allow the telling of these stories, they do so because of their popularity and so profit potential. Quite possibly they are as unaware as their public as to the underlying political/dialectical reasons for its success. Where the politically naïve see evidence of aliens, socialists see evidence of alienation – I leave it to the reader to decide which is more plausible.

Andrew Westley

Our peace policy (2003)

From the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

It requires no crystal ball, no advanced degree in foreign affairs, to observe that the “healthy competition” of capitalist rivalry has become more vicious and ruthless recently. The increase in US military expenditure this year is greater than any previous year ever, signalling not only that there are profits to be had, but that they will be fought over. The current US-led military campaign for control of Iraq's oil is just part of a wider game plan for the Western corporate elite.

The foolish and the fearful might delude themselves that this new weaponry might never be used, that it is defensive. The reality is that the US arsenal of the 21st Century is being built for use, and the reasons for its use are increasing with new challengers, armed with their own weapons of mass destruction, fast arriving on the scene. It is only a matter of time before capitalism turns very nasty and threatens to blow us all up. The ticking of this potential time-bomb is all too audible to those whose fingers are not placed tightly in their ears. The world is a dangerous place

All of the major parties have “defence” policies which are really war policies. Even if they are opposed to an attack on Iraq, as the Liberal Democrats were, they are more than ready to give a nod to a different war elsewhere. Or, to be blunt about it, they all have strategies for killing large numbers of people. That is what they are doing when they ask you to vote for their “defence” policy: choose their strategy for murdering people you have never even met in preference to that of the next party. To vote for these parties is to become a willing accomplice in the preparations for mass murder. The current and absurd deterrence strategy is best described by the dictum, “If you want peace prepare for war”. That is the policy accepted by most of the parties aiming to run capitalism. It is like saying if you want virginity among teenagers build brothels in the schools. You do not achieve peace by preparing for its opposite: if you prepare for war there will be a war.

Nobody should be taken in for one minute by the Labour Party lie that they are, by acting pre-emptively against Saddam, presenting a more peaceful policy. On the contrary, theirs is an alternative war policy—a policy dependent on conventional methods of mass murder, while at the same time remaining in loyal alliance with the NATO nuclear murder gang. It is like a gang of muggers saying that in the future they will give up using knives and will rely on beating up the same people with wooden sticks. But at the same time they will remind their victims that their friends in the bigger gang still have knives. If anyone sides with the warmongers of New Labour in the belief that conventional weapons are about decent warfare they should go and talk to the conscript soldiers of Iran and Iraq, or the victims of the Falklands war.

Wars are not the result of workers in Iraq, Russia or China falling out with workers in the USA. Most of the British workers who unthinkingly accept Labour's line that “we must defend ourselves effectively” do not have any enemies in Moscow or Baghdad or Beijing or Pyongyang. Most workers in Britain have never met an Iraqi, let alone fallen out with one sufficiently to want to blow them up. Most Iraqis have never met an American. If you repeat a lie often enough people may begin to believe it and so they keep telling us that we must be defended against Iraq and other errant Islamic countries. After a while “Iraqis” are seen as monstrous, threatening, inhumane begins, blind followers of a mad dictator fit only to be killed. And to many Moslem workers, indoctrinated by the same lies from their owning class, workers in the West are perceived similarly as a wicked enemy, often a satanic enemy. What you must never forget – because then you have been finally brainwashed – is that there is nobody out there you need to kill and there are no enemies out there with a grievance against you. War is not about our interests, but those of the bosses who rob us so that they can be rich and powerful. War is about the competition between capitalists. If we are to die it will be for them. Ponder that as the masters of war ask for your support in the coming weeks.

Capitalism is the cause of war in the modern world. The Socialist Party is unequivocally opposed to the world-wide capitalists system. We are opposed to it in the Middle East as much as in Britain, Africa or the USA. The rivalry over profits, trade routes, markets and raw materials which is generated by capitalism makes war inevitable. It follows from this that you cannot simply oppose war unless you are out to end capitalism. Sadly, all too many workers, who are sincere in their belief that war is an outrage, nevertheless unwittingly support capitalism's conflicts by simply voting for capitalist politicians at election time, by remaining within political parties which are out to defend the capitalist system in its various forms and guises. It is futile to try to remove an effect without removing its cause. Thus campaigning against war now, whilst not objecting to capitalism, simply means that you will be out again protesting when the next war breaks out.

Workers have no country. Nationalism is based on the lie that workers have their own country; that the British have an obligation to Britain and likewise with the workers of the USA and Iraq. Workers who do not own or control Britain have no obligation to the bosses who do own and control it. Our sole interest is in co-operating with our fellow workers across the world who similarly have no country. Why should we die defending what is not ours and which we will never benefit from? On the contrary, our object is to obtain what is not now the possession of our class - the earth and its natural and industrial resources. The only war that need concern us is the class war between the parasites who possess and the workers who produce over the ownership and control of the Earth's resources. But to win we need not initiate the violence which is characteristic of capitalism's wars.

What we advocate is a war on war to be waged on the battlefield of ideas—for the hearts and minds of the world's people. And once we unite there will be no force that will stop us taking the Earth into our common possession.

Socialism will allow humanity to co-exist in peace. There is nothing natural about war. Are we born with a desire to kill people who speak a different language or who have a different skin hue? No! In fact, peaceful co-operation is more fitting for human beings, who are potentially rational beings. Once we live in a world of common ownership and democratic control of resources there will simply be no reason to kill one another. No Empires to build or markets to expand or profits to increase. Socialism will be a social system in which war will be pointless. Peace will be the norm. There will be no socialism without socialists to bring it about, just as there will be no capitalism or war without workers to support such insanity.

Stop and think the next time you hear Bush and Blair present their case for this war, the next time you read a tabloid headline supporting the government line and praising “our boys”. Think of the peace which could come about and think of the screams which are the human sound effects of war, and for your own sake, think hard!

John Bissett

Pawn move (2003)

The Voice From The Back column from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pawn move

We are constantly being told what a wonderful society modern capitalism is and how it has solved the problems of poverty that used to occur in the “bad old days”. So what have me to make of the following information in the Business Section of the Times(18 February)? “With many banks suffering from rising bad debts and margin pressures, pawnbrokers have emerged as one of the few sectors of the finance industry expected to see strong growth in 2003. Experts yesterday predicted that Britain's pawnbroking industry would expand as much as 15 per cent this year to achieve record turnover of more than £85 million, almost triple the amount seen five years ago . . .The business is not helped, it says, by its perception as a “Dickensian institution” and the existence of annual interest rates of more than 100 percent.” Despite two Labour governments it seems that some of us have still got to go down to the pawn. We know how you feel. Sometimes we get skint.

Crawling to work

When Chelsea Clinton, daughter of the ex-president, was offered a job at McKinsey management consultants, starting at £40,000 a year, The Guardian ran a feature on this long established firm. It revealed some of the slavish attitudes that capitalism engenders. “Among things that McKinsey stands for is consistency of presentation. Until the early 1960s, that meant all McKinsey men were expected to wear hats because their chief executive clients did so. When one executive realised that fashion had changed and turned up for work bare-headed one day, colleagues reacted warily. “Should we all give up our hats?” asked one. “I'd wait six weeks,” a partner replied. “It may be a trap.” The Guardian (21 February) It is easy to sneer our critics may say. We reply how many arses would you lick for 40 grand a year?

There be dragons

“A panel of Church of Scotland ministers and psychiatrists has been formed to revisit the controversial area of exorcism for the first time in 15 years. It follows concerns the Church is not doing enough for people some believe have been possessed by devils.” The Herald (4 March) In their leaflet “Dealing With Darkness” the church claims that signs of this demonic possession can be “revulsion from Christian ideas”. It seems more likely to us that this revulsion could spring from christianity's awful record of torture, sexual suppression, misery and mumbo-jumbo like exorcism.

Another Great Man speaks

As if to prove that the US President isn't the only one of the US capitalist's representatives to speak in a less than lucid fashion. Donald Rumsfield, the US Secretary of Defence has come up with a couple of gems to rival his boss. When asked why such heavy bombs were being used in Afghanistan he uttered this profundity. “They are being used on frontline al-Qaeda and Taleban troops to try and kill them.” And when asked about Bin Laden, “We do know of a certain knowledge that Bin Laden is in Afghanistan. Or in another country. Or dead.” The Times (13 March) Bombs being used to kill people? Bin Laden is either alive or dead? Its good to know that such sages are in charge, isn't it?

T-shirts of mass destruction

That war hysteria breeds irrational behaviour is surely proven by the case of Stephen Downs, who was arrested and charged with trespassing at a New York mall. His crime? He was wearing a T-shirt that said Peace on Earth and Give Peace a Chance. “I was confronted by two security guards and ordered to either take off the T-shirt or leave the mall”, said Stephen Downs. Newsweek(17 March) What such guardians of New York malls will make of our comrades in Canada who have been distributing for some years T-shirts proclaiming “Abolish the wages system” is left to your imagination.

A fishy tale

Members of the world socialist movement base their ideas on science. So of course we were extremely interested in the way-out happenings that recently occurred in New York .”According to two fish-cutters at the New Square Fish Market, the carp was about to be slaughtered and made into gefilte for Sabbath dinner when it suddenly began shouting apocalyptic warnings in Hebrew.” The Observer (16 March) “Many of the 7,000 Skver sect of hasidim in New Square, 30 miles north of Manhattan, believe God has revealed himself in fish form.” Next time you buy fish and chips listen to the God instead of eating the cod. What a load of nonsense. All religious ideas are.

Human nature and human behaviour (2003)

Book Review from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Steven Pinker is a leading representative of the school known as "evolutionary psychology". Their basic position is that humans today still have, not just the same physical brain as the first members of homo sapiens (which is uncontroversial), but also the same mental make-up, i.e. that we think and react as if we were still primitive hunter-scavenger-gatherers living in small bands on the open grasslands of East Africa (where, again, it is generally agreed our species first evolved). In fact, they go further and argue that Darwinian principles apply just as much to these psychological traits as to our physical anatomy and physiology and that they, too, evolved through natural selection - the survival of the most fitted - out of those of that particular line of ape-like creatures from which homo sapiens is descended. Hence their name of "evolutionary psychologists".

In itself this hypothesis is unobjectionable. Insofar as psychological traits are inheritable (and some will be) then they would have a physical basis (in the brain) and so would have been subject to the same evolutionary selection as the rest of our bodies. The argument is about precisely which psychological and behavioural traits might be heritable. However, geneticists and neuroscientists are nowhere near discovering the mechanisms by which any personality traits would be inherited, let alone which are and which aren't. So any claims in this area at the moment are highly speculative.

Not that this deters Pinker and his fellow thinkers from indulging in the wildest speculation (but psychology has always been prone to this). For instance, as he repeats in his latest book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, humans all over the world like pictures of "open grassland dotted with trees and bodies of water and inhabited by animals and flowering and fruiting plants" because they have inherited through their genes "a search image" of what was, when we first evolved, "the optimal human habitat". This of course is a claim that certain specific ideas can be inherited. It is a revival of the old idea that humans are born with certain ideas; that certain ideas are innate. Which is highly controversial.

According to Pinker, the Blank Slate is "the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves". He interprets this as meaning that there is no such thing as human nature as it implies that there are no biological limits to how humans can be taught or can learn to behave. This is "the modern denial of human nature" that he sets out to criticise.

The ignoble savage
His tactics, however, are not that honest since he claims that the Blank Slate theory has two "companion doctrines": the Noble Savage and the Ghost in the Machine. The first is associated with the 18th century French philosopher, JJ Rousseau, and holds that pre-civilised humans were innately "good". The second is the view, held by all religions, that mind and matter are two completely different things and that the mind is to be equated with the "soul" which exists in a quite different dimension from the body. This view tends to see humans as inherently sinful, i.e. "bad".

What is dishonest about Pinker's approach here is that there is no link between the theory of the Blank Slate - which, presumably, holds that human nature is neither good nor bad but dependent on external circumstances - and theories which hold either that human nature is good or that it is bad. Pinker's main enemy is in fact not so much the Blank Slate as the Noble Savage. To back up his particular speculative explanation of current human behaviour he has to defend the opposite view - that of the Ignoble Savage whose males go around seducing or raping as many females as possible and killing without compunction rival males, just so that their particular set of genes will survive.

Pinker does, however, write as an open materialist and atheist and the best part of his book is where he demolishes the dualist theory of the mind and shows that the mind is both a product and a part of the rest of the material world.

His main argument, however, is not with the Ghost in the Machine brigade but with a rival materialist school, the American Behaviorists, whose founder, JB Watson, notoriously wrote in 1924 that he would like to be able to cl..

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talent, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors".

Pinker attributes this view to Marx but only on the basis of the views of Zedong, Pol Pot and O'Brien in Orwell's 1984. He also attributes it to the school of Cultural Anthropologists, as represented by writers such as Margaret Mead, Ashley Montagu and Leslie A White, which did so much work in the 1940s and 1950s to throw light on human behaviour.

The straw man
We are not required to defend everything that Marx or the Cultural Anthropologists said or did. However, neither thought that the mind had no structure or that there was no such thing as human nature.

Both Marx and the Cultural Anthropologists rejected Blank Slatism for one of the reasons Pinker advances for knocking down his straw man who believes in it: "That the mind can't be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything". Precisely. The brain is not just a passive receptor of sense-impressions (experience) but plays an active role in organising these impressions so as to make sense of them (understand them). This capacity to organise sense-impressions is part of human biological nature.

Clearly, before humans could develop culture - "accumulated local wisdom: ways of fashioning artifacts, selecting food, dividing up windfalls, and so on", as Pinker defines it, which is learned and passed on by non-biological means - they had to have brains capable of learning and of using language and of thinking abstractly with symbols representing parts of the outside world. These brains had to have evolved and are just as much a part of "human nature" as walking upright and stereoscopic colour vision. So, there's no denial of human nature here.

As to Marx, of course Mao Zedong and Pol Pot as state-capitalist dictators were the opposite of everything Marx ever stood for and can in no way be considered as exponents of his point of view. Marx's views on "human nature" were mainly expressed in his philosophical writings in the 1840s. At that time, although human anatomy and physiology were fairly well understood, neither how this had evolved nor the functioning of the brain were. Darwin was still digesting the notes made during his voyage on The Beagle and some comrades of Marx and Engels in the Communist League of Germany felt there might be something in phrenology, the theory that bumps on the head were a guide to someone's personality.

So Marx's approach was inevitably philosophical. For him, human nature was the "normal" mode of behaviour and mental outlook in any given society at any given period and, being determined by external material circumstances (physical but above all social), varied over type of society, time and place.

For him, then, human nature was not fixed, but variable. Actually, what he was talking about was what we would now call rather "human behaviour". Thus, when he wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847 that "all history is nothing but the continuous transformation of human nature" he was really talking not about human nature in the biological sense but about human behaviour.

To say that human behaviour is variable is not to say that it is infinitely malleable. Nor that it is passively determined. To accuse Marx of attributing a purely passive role to the mind/brain is to demonstrate a complete ignorance of where he was coming from. Marx was brought up in the German philosophical tradition which attributed a very active role to the mind. He took this over and purged it of its idealism, while keeping an active role for the mind in ordering experiences in order to understand them. This, in fact, this is his criticism of some of his contemporary materialists such as Robert Owen who could be seen as having a passive, blank-slate theory of the mind. Here, for instance, is his 1845 criticism of "contemplative materialism" as he called it:

"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism -- which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such" (Theses on Feuerbach).

The defender of capitalism
Once a distinction is made between human nature (biological, and which can hardly have changed since homo sapiens evolved) and socially and culturally determined human behaviour (which has changed throughout pre-history and history), then the issue becomes clearer. It can be seen, not to be about whether or not there is such a thing as biological nature which is inherited and determined by genes (of course there is, so there's "no denial of human nature"), but about the extent of this and in particular whether or not it includes specific ideas or behaviour patterns.

Pinker, who is a specialist in the psychology of language acquisition, himself inadvertently brings out the distinction between human nature and human behaviour. He only claims that humans inherit, through the genes that govern the structure and physiology of the brain, a capacity to learn a language. He does not claim that humans inherit the ability to speak a particular language. In other words, the capacity is biologically determined ("nature" if you like) but the content arises from learned experience ("nurture" if you like). The same can be said about culture: the capacity to acquire and develop it is biological but the content is learned.

So what's the argument all about then? Basically, about how many of these various biologically inherited "capacities" there might be. Pinker wants to go much further than most neuroscientists and argue that there are separate biologically inherited capacities for a whole range of things, such as a capacity to seek social status or a capacity for aggressive behaviour or a capacity for men to seek to have as many children as possible. Even if true, their content - how they were expressed - would still be determined by learning, by culture, by the specific form of society in which humans were bought up and lived.

But is it true? In the end, this is a question about the precise nature and structure of the human brain; which is a matter of scientific research. There are two schools of thought amongst neuroscientists. Pinker writes that "many cognitive scientists believe that human reasoning is not accomplished by a single, general purpose computer in the head". The word "many" disguises the fact that just as many, if not more, take the opposite view, i.e. that the brain is "a general purpose learning device". We will have to let neuroscientists settle this themselves as their researches advance.

Pinker, however, is not really writing as a scientist. His book is a work of moral and political philosophy rather than biology. He wants the one school of neuroscientists to be right rather than the other because, otherwise, his whole case collapses for a biological human nature that does not allow human behaviour to be sufficiently flexible to allow a socialist society to work.

For Pinker is writing as a clear opponent, not just of Russian or Chinese-style state capitalism but also of socialism properly understood. On two occasions he criticises the idea that society could function on the basis of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", once explicitly rejecting it in favour of Adam Smith and the profit motive. He argues that society can only function on the basis of equal exchange, which he calls "reciprocity" but which Marxists call "the law of value". In other words, he's an ordinary defender of capitalism in its present form as the best, and in fact the only possible, form of society.

Not that he has properly understood what socialism is about. He seems to think that it means state-imposed equality and criticises this for not recognising that people are not equal in capacities. But whoever said they were? The very socialist slogan he criticises recognises that individual humans differ in both abilities and needs. Socialism is not a society where we would all be issued with equal rations, but one in which we would all be considered of equal worth and be able to have an equal say in the way things are run; and in which we recognise ourselves as members of an interdependent community where different people perform different functions and where everybody, irrespective of their function, has access to what they need to live and enjoy life just because they are members of the human race. And this doesn't require us to be any less selfish or more altruistic than we are today - it's not about changing human nature but about changing the basis of society.

Adam Buick