Running Commentary: Human nature (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human nature

We watched them go about their daily affairs as the television narrator quietly described aspects of their way of life. “Here”, we are told, “No man or woman has authority over any other man or woman . . . wealth is shared communally, if one person manages to catch many fish the whole community benefits including those who are not able to work. or who have not worked on that particular day . . . they operate on the basis of 'from each according to his hunting ability, to each according to his hunger' . . . the land, forests and rivers are owned by nobody and no one works for anyone else." Worlds Apart (BBC2 10/9/ 82) was examining the lifestyle of the Panare Indians of Venezuela, with a lot of well presented evidence to repudiate the myth that it is “Human Nature" to be acquisitive, uncooperative and to wish to live in societies with hierarchies of wealth, power and status.

Here were people, physiologically the same as everyone else, who displayed none of the behavioural characteristics which have sometimes been labelled as immutable features of human beings. Through its historical stages, property society has cultivated people to think and behave in selfish and acquisitive ways. Although cooperativeness has always been a striking feature of mankind — as people are social animals and we cannot organise any society without working with each other — in capitalism we have had to cooperate with each other under coercive conditions.

In some parts of modern society with a long history of property, vicious aspects of human behaviour like the barbarism of war are offered as proof of brutal human nature. But war, and people’s behaviour in it, are products of a social environment not a natural propensity to violence. Property society pits people against each other.

An owner can say “This is mine, it is not yours, we have different interests". If the object is a factory the owner can say, “Because this is mine, you will have to spend your life working in it to produce wealth for me, and because the levels of my profits are inversely related, we will be in a constant struggle". The Panare have no notions of property and consequently no notions of competition. They have no competitive sports and those which are played in neighbouring areas, which do put people or beasts against themselves, are looked on as meaningless.

The Panare live in a small tightly-knit community which is a little suspicious of outsiders and does not use much modern medicine or technology. Such communities illustrate the behaviour that homo sapiens are capable of enjoying.

However, civilisation is marching into the forests of Venezuela with its Deeds of Land Ownership in one hand and its police forces and prisons in the other. New roads and a huge bauxite mine will soon disfigure the regions inhabited by the Panare for, as the television narrator observed, “to the investors and entrepreneurs the communities who presently occupy the forests are obstacles to progress". Curiously, in The Investors' Dictionary, the word “progress" is spelt profits.

Parker’s pen

The bookshops will not be troubled by long, disorderly queues of people desperate to buy a copy of Father of the House — the political reminiscences of John Parker, Labour MP for Dagenham. Parker is the longest-sitting Member — he has been in Parliament for 47 years — and that is how he qualifies for this fatuous title. And he has become a strangely tedious man, liable to pass over events of historic importance in some ill-considered laconism.

But it was not always so. Parker was once at the centre of an incident vital enough to reveal the true unsavoury character of the Labour Party. In 1945. Attlee appointed him Under Secretary at the Dominions Office which, as the Secretary of State was in the Lords, put Parker in charge of the affairs in the Commons.

His ministerial career did not last long. Parker refused to intervene over the death sentence passed on a Boer farmer in the (then) South African protectorate of Swaziland who had killed his girl friend. Of course only black people were hanged in South Africa: at that time a white man had not been executed for 15 years. The South African Prime Minister appealed to Attlee to help maintain this racist version of “justice" and the Labour Prime Minister was ready to oblige. Parker was sacked and never offered a job in a Labour government again.

This episode did nothing to reduce Parker’s ardour for the Labour Party. A quirk of his was that he often agreed to take part in public debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain. His defence of the Labour government’s desperate attempts to organise British capitalism was unconvincing but no matter how many times he was floored by the SPGB, Parker persistently got up for more.

In his old age. does he reflect now on these instructive experiences in his political life — on the practical and theoretical destruction of the case for the party to which, through thick and thin, he gave his misguided loyalty?

Jaws

A ten-year-old boy was recently killed by an automatic exit barrier at an underground station in Newcastle on Tyne. It happened very simply and very suddenly. The boy jumped, or tripped, into the barrier, which snapped its jaws about his neck. It took a long time to free him and he was dead by the time they got him to hospital.

Anyone who has had a thoughtlessly trailing piece of luggage bitten by these barriers knows how aggressive they are, with that malevolently watchful eye to trip them into action. The barriers are installed, in places like Newcastle and London, to stop people travelling without paying a fare — to stop them using the railways as a means of travel instead of as a means of yielding a profit to the owners. They are not designed to distinguish between those who are evading paying a fare and those who are just not totally alert to the instantaneous demands of electronic ticket checks.

The cause of profit making is greater than all others, in the morality of private property society. Truly, it is greater than any human being, or of any collection of them. In this cause it is permissible to herd long suffering workers, probably trying to get to and from the places where they are to undergo the indignities of being exploited by their masters, into canyons of electronically controlled discipline. To stray deliberately from the canyon could mean that they are punished — fined, imprisoned — and if they do this by accident they may even be killed.

In many ways — some trivial, some substantial — capitalism informs the working class that they are socially inferior, exploited, degraded. This information is sometimes emphasised in episodes of bitter tragedy, which would not have happened but for the class divide of capitalism, or for the production of wealth as commodities, or for the poverty of the majority of people, or for some other essential feature of capitalist society.

Such an incident was the death of the boy in Newcastle. There will be an inquest, which may decide that it was an accidental death. A better verdict — simpler, straighter, more accurate — would be that Capitalism Kills.

Blogger's Note:

"A quirk of his was that he often agreed to take part in public debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain." 

According to the SPGB debates wiki page, Parker only debated the SPGB once, in June 1948 at Fulham Town Hall. (The SPGB speaker was Clifford Groves.) My guess is that the wiki page is incomplete, and that Parker did debate with the SPGB on more than one occasion. He was a Fabian intellectual in his early political career, and such types had a tendency to debate again and again with the SPGB.

What we say (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human beings have very complicated systems of communication; a facility for spoken and written language. What is language? One helpful analysis describes it as a code that we develop to organise, interpret and communicate our experiences to each other. Human languages have developed historically in a way which is related to what we have experienced. Although languages, including people's native language, are taught formally in schools, we always learn the first and most important aspects of our language by listening and experiential learning. Babies are generally not taught the basics of language with a grammar book.

Because language is rooted in experience, it usually makes little sense to describe particular accents or dialects as superior or inferior. They are simply different. We are traditionally taught that a particular variety of the English language is superior to all other varieties. The grammar must be the sort which is described as Standard English and the pronunciation should conform to a style known as Received Pronunciation. This is the sort of English used by newscasters. The reason this brand of English became elevated to the status it now occupies are historical and geographical, not linguistic. London became a key location because of the suitability of its ports for commercial and military purposes in relation to Western Europe. With the growing strategic importance of London from about the fifteenth century, various governmental, military, commercial and financial institutions settled in that city. These were the factors which endorsed the type of language which was used by the Establishment, although at that time a very different sort of language was used including a form of court French. If Liverpool or Newcastle-upon-Tyne had been a more advantageous base for the ruling class, then Standard English would have evolved in a different fashion.

Although we are taught otherwise, it is pointless to judge the inherent qualities of one grammar, accent or vocabulary. There are many examples in English which illustrate this point. The regional accents in English which stress the letter “r” when it comes after a vowel are by formal standards looked on as rural and inferior, for instance the way a person from the West country might pronounce the word “cart”. The same stressed “r”, however, in some North American dialects is regarded as refined. Linguistically, Standard English is no better or worse than Cockney or Geordie, no more so than French is better or worse than Italian. All languages and dialects are complicated, rule-governed systems whose rules are known to and used by their speakers.

The fact that languages arise from experience is significant. Many contemporary aboriginal communities live on the basis of sharing the work they need to do and then sharing the product of their work according to need. They have a word to express the idea of all that they have, common property (naolimba) but no vocabulary for “tax- man”, “UB40” or “neutron bomb”. Similarly with another contemporary group, the Panare Indians. The lifestyle of this group in Venezuela is characterised by the principle of cooperation and sharing. Apart from the enjoyment they find in their work they thrive on a great variety of songs, dances, drinks and festivals. They completely reject the principles of the commercial system and are free from all of the neuroses it produces in the people who suffer such a society. An American evangelical organisation, the New Tribes Mission, which recently attempted to convert the Panare and to make them become meek, fearful and obedient wage-slaves, met with some difficulty. There is no vocabulary in Panare to describe “guilt”, “sin”, “punishment" or “redemption". Nor, because these ideas are outside their social experience, was there any adequate way of paraphrasing these notions. Tragically, some of the Panare have been converted through some peculiar guile from the missionaries. The fables in the Bible were rewritten in Panare casting the ancestors of the Panare as the killers of Christ. The missionaries then said that unless the Panare were obedient to their every instruction they would be burnt alive in hell forever.

Today the social experience of most people takes place in capitalism—the social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods and services are in the hands of a minority. In capitalism goods are produced as commodities. Things are produced primarily to be sold on the market. In this system the abilities of the majority of people are commodities (or prospective commodities) because they are bought and sold on the jobs market. It follows that capitalism is a global system existing in state capitalist areas like the Russian Empire as much as in avowedly commercial places like the United States of America. Because capitalism puts the need for profits before human needs the system is constantly creating social problems. The lives of most of us are made unnecessarily miserable and difficult because of the social system which we live under.

Language is directly related to ideas and ideas to language. From the time when we are very young and begin to receive and develop ideas about the world in which we live, we are fed with words and ideas in a way which generally encourages us to make serious misjudgements about society. Two of these misjudgements, if we do not correct them, create a distorted view of society. The first is that we are encouraged not to see the organisation of society as a system. The state of society we are born into is just “the way things are". The fact that humankind has developed through a series of different social systems, like slave society and feudalism, is presented in such a way as to make it seem that our development has now stopped and that the basic principles of the profit system are correct forever. According to this fallacy it becomes acceptable to question the desirability of various aspects of capitalism but not to question the necessity of capitalism itself.

The other perversion we are encouraged to accept is dependence on leaders and employers and politicians to run society in a way that will be best for the majority. All the useful work in society—the design. manufacture, servicing and distribution of goods and services and all of the supplementary work needed to run society — is daily carried out by men and women who are not investors, financiers, politicians or economic experts. The process by which we are indoctrinated to lack confidence is a subtle one. The picture of the world we form from the words directed at us by parents, comics, schools, colleges, churches and the communications media all contribute to this process.

In his novel Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell described the Newspeak principle of “doublethink” as

the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them . . . The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

In criticising some of the emergent contradictions Orwell saw in 1948 he chose to have the three Party slogans plastered everywhere in his 1984 society as:

WAR IS PEACE 

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

We notice the type of contradictory thought signified by these slogans around us today. "Join the Peace Movement” the banner headline proclaims from a newspaper advertisement. The small print beneath the headline informs us that the Peace Movement referred to is. in fact, the Army (The Guardian, 25 November 1983).

What of Freedom?
We are all linked by a common belief in freedom and in Britain's greatness. (The Conservative Manifesto 1983)
We urge the British people to reject the Tory drift to catastrophe and to support our alternative strategy for peace, jobs and freedom (Labour’s Call to the People, NEC. 1980)

In these contexts the idea of freedom is bound up with wage-slavery. The freedom to be given employment and to be used to make a profit for a minority. It means freedom in a society of governments and armies and prisons and police forces. The idea of nationalism and of making sacrifices for “Britain" is first installed by the acceptance of a set of false assumptions about property. The vocabulary of possession is instrumental in the inculcation of this myth. We are bombarded with talk about "Our country . . . our need to stimulate trade ... our investment overseas ...” For most people this "our” business is quite inappropriate. It should be "their”. In Britain, according to the Inland Revenue Statistics, the top 2 per cent of the population own 64 per cent of all the land and the top 13 per cent of the population own 91 per cent of all housing.

The idea that ignorance is strength is again one which is repeatedly pul to us in the form of exhortations to trust leaders and politicians and bosses. The notion is that by harnessing your mind to that of a leader you will divest yourself of great responsibilities and, with many people transferring their power to the same leaders, those leaders will become very powerful and the better placed to run society efficiently. Minority power exists by consent because power is always, if only potentially, with the majority. We have only to get up off our knees.

Although language and ideas can influence the majority to be acquiescent in capitalism and to regard change as undesirable or impossible, the dynamic, changing nature of society can never be arrested by language. Socialism will entail a society without nations, armies, the rivalry which causes war, employment, money and all of the paraphernalia needed to support the profit system. The idea of socialism is thus born out of capitalism. When people’s experiences clash with the prejudices they have acquired, they can either reinterpret their experiences to conform with their prejudices or allow their experiences to refute their prejudices. Human history, including the development of the sciences, of technology and of language is evidence that experience is mightier than myth.

Gary Jay

Chains link (1983)

From the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do most people associate with the name William Wilberforce? Probably if they had been fed on the usual diet of school history books, it is the abolition of slavery. We are told by one common text, for instance, that "Wilberforce sacrificed the prospect of a great political career to devote his whole life to humanitarian causes" (Modern Britain 1783-1964, D. Richards, J. W. Hunt). In fact, when it came to the majority, the working class—also known as the Rabble—Wilberforce's attitude was less than philanthropic. From the close of the eighteenth century until his death in 1833, as the MP for Yorkshire and a prominent politician, he fought a constant crusade to keep the workers in their place. Along with Dr. John Bowdler he founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion. The message this type of organisation gave to the poor was summarised by Edmund Burke: "Patience, labour, sobriety, frugality and religion should be recommended to them; all the rest is downright fraud".

Wilberforce was himself a member of the owning class and took the view that a religious worker is a meek and docile profit-creator, acquiescent in poverty. If you could teach them, he thought, to forget about their hardships in life and to look forward to a better state of affairs once they were dead, workers would carry on in poverty producing the wealth and handing it over to the capitalists. Meanwhile the rich people would spend the occasional hour in church intoning hypocrisies and wondering whether they could purchase any sufficiently large needles for camels to pass through. Perhaps he was considering the state of his own mind and the sort of company he kept when he wrote: "Remember that we are all fallen creatures, born in sin and naturally depraved. Christianity recognises no innocence or goodness of heart" (A Practical View of Christianity).

Wilberforce's comprehension of human nature (or more accurately human behaviour) was not particularly well-informed. When we are born we have a brain but no mind. We learn a certain language and code of behaviour depending on where and when we enter society. A baby has no innate notions of sin. Sin and all the mental injury and inhibitions that go with it have to be instilled into the child by warning and punishment. In fact some societies today, existing outside the commercial system of wages and capital, have no concept of this sort of superstitious guilt. One such community is the Panare Indian settlement around the Orinoco basin in Venezuela. They organise their production and consumption on the basis of the principle "from each according to ability, to each according to need". They have no leaders or bosses. They have refused to be employed by anyone. They have no inequality of class, sex or age. Ironically they are being evangelised by a civilised horde of American missionaries (The New Tribes Mission) who want to force them, with fear of hellfire, to stop drinking alcohol and enjoying themselves, to work in the local mines for wages and desist from Sin. The trouble was that in the Panare language there was no word for "sin" or "guilt". The idea was not within their social experience. What were the missionaries to do? The method they chose to manufacture guilt among the Panare—upon which repentance and salvation depended—was to re-edit that Middle Eastern book of fables, the Scriptures, so as to implicate the Panare in Christ's death. To avoid divine retribution for this murder the Indians would have to become as mentally lame as the missionaries. Wilberforce's contention that human beings are born with Sin is contradicted everywhere by simple evidence.

In any event, he did have some interest in children. He was in favour of child labour and had small children working for himself. He was a firm opponent of legislation to outlaw such exploitation. His main concern seems to have been that capitalism should be permitted to function without any stroppiness or backchat from those who produce the wealth. In 1797 he expounded the "great law of subordination" and laid down his "articles for the management of the poor" in which he said

that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the contest. (A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians)

Even his campaigns against the slave trade were not quite as simple as they are often made out to be. A factor not entirely out of Wilberforce's consideration when opposing the importation of slaves to Britain was the fact that many industrial capitalists were having their goods undercut in the market by goods which had been produced with slave (unpaid) labour owned by capitalists who had easy access (mostly near the ports) to this workforce. The abolition of the slave trade would put rival capitalists on a more equal footing.

Wilberforce was energetically opposed to Trade Unionism in a fashion which would inspire Norman Tebbit, General Jaruzelski and Andropov. He devised the 1799 Workmen's Combination Bill which completely prohibited the formation of any association which was, or could be possibly construed as, a combination of workers. This year is the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his death. At a commemorative service in Westminster Abbey held in July, Margaret Thatcher read the lesson. Like the sanctimonious Wilberforce, Thatcher had some disapproval for shackle slavery, while advocating that in the servitude of wage-slavery the workers are milked for as much as the wage-slave-owning bosses can get. We are tethered to a life of working for the boss or living off the dole; of boring routines and consuming, if we are fortunate, bland, second-rate goods and services; of being screwed up by the dehumanising effects of relating to each other so often on the basis of buying and selling. We are only really tethered to this social system because of the mentality of wage-slavery. The consent of the majority which the minority needs to keep its system going. We must unite to change society. We have nothing to lose . . .

Gary Jay