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

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

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

The invention of scarcity

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

Original sin and the free market

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

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

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

Highly flexible or pro-social?

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

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

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

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

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

Cooperation or competition?

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

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

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

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

Human Nature: What Is It? (2021)

Book Review from the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In any conversation about a different kind of society organised on principles of cooperation rather than competition, of common rather than private ownership of the means of living, the subject of human nature inevitably arises. To those who support a society of from each according to ability to each according to need, the answer is often given that it could not work, since human beings are by nature selfish, possessive, competitive and always wanting more. It’s not an easy argument to combat, as all around us, in present society, we see examples of this kind of behaviour both on a personal and a collective level.

It is backed up furthermore by much written ‘authority’. As early as the 16th century the Italian political writer Machiavelli, in his famous essay The Prince, stated that human beings are ‘ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, hypocritical, cowardly and greedy’ and ‘never do anything good except out of necessity’. This view of humans has often been quoted since, as has the similar idea expressed in the following century by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan that human beings are greedy by nature and human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’. For Adam Smith too in his late 18th century Wealth of Nations, private interest (or ‘self-love’, as he also put it) was the basis for his argument for the free market. Though, in the two centuries that followed, the rise of views contesting the inevitability of the market and the social and economic inequality that went with it saw some questioning of the fixed human nature theory, it is only in very recent times that such questioning has come to the fore and now seriously contends with the ‘original sin’ idea, whether religious or secular, of human beings as deep-down selfish, wicked and aggressive.

This change in perception (though not yet a sea change) has come about partly through the arguments put forward by organisations such as the Socialist Party arguing for a cooperative society of common ownership, but more widely through a slew of publications, especially over the last few decades, by thinkers and writers from a variety of fields. The latest of these is a remarkable book entitled Humankind. A Hopeful History (Bloomsbury, 2020) by the Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman. This work has already received praise from many quarters and it isn’t difficult to see why. It comes at ‘human nature’ with in-depth scholarly research from a whole variety of areas (an ‘immense sweep’, as one reviewer put it) and is unfailingly informative, instructive and thought-provoking. At the same time, for the informal ‘in your face way’ in which it’s written, it manages to be highly and consistently entertaining, a page turner in fact. So a real ‘good read’ for absolutely anyone.

Bregman’s main line of approach is to examine the evidence presented for what he refers to as the ‘veneer theory’ of human nature and to show it as severely flawed. By veneer theory he means the widespread idea that the civilised, communal behaviour which characterises many of the normal day-to-day interactions of human beings only take place because of the pressure social and political authority puts upon us to behave in a civilised way and not tear one another to pieces. But, the theory goes on to say, the pressure that this authority creates is only a thin layer (a veneer) and as soon as it is relaxed or things go wrong, our true savage individualistic nature manifests itself and we are revealed for what we are – self-centred, individualistic and even savage. So, according to this notion (referred to by the writer as ‘the zombie that keeps coming back’), evil simmers just beneath the surface in us all. He looks at the various writings and life events that are used to support this theory – e.g: the immensely successful novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding about children stranded on an island turning savage; the story of the supposed cannibal inhabitants of Easter Island; the famous ‘shock machine’ experiment by Stanley Milgram, anthropological works by ‘big name’ writers such as Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari – and proceeds to drill down into the reality of these and show us new perspectives.

So, for example, the only real-life instance known of children being lost on a tiny island (which he calls ‘the real Lord of the Flies’) shows those children to have set up a friendly cooperative way of living before being rescued rather than establishing some kind of cruel hierarchy as depicted in the novel. In the same way Milgram’s experiment, which purportedly showed volunteers willingly administering increasingly powerful electric shocks to people in obedience to an authority commanding them to do so, is shown, when examined closely, to have encountered significant resistance from those taking part and the outcome to have been reported in an unbalanced, one-sided way. Again, amidst the carnage of the First World War, Bregman provides evidence that very few soldiers in the trenches actually fired their weapons at members of the enemy they could see and many deliberately fired into the air. Likewise, during the Second World War he quotes research showing that only a very small percentage of soldiers actually managed to fire their guns when they came into direct contact with the enemy despite being under orders to do so. Other real-life extreme situations such as the impact of aerial bombing on populations are also seen in a light rarely considered. For example, one of the expectations of aerial bombing by both sides in the Second World War was that it would cause social chaos with people turning on one another. But, in fact, just the opposite happened. Despite the extreme circumstances and the casualties, there was no breakdown of morale. The communal spirit was actually greater than before. In Britain there was the ‘blitz spirit’ and in Germany the mass bombing of civilians towards the end of the war resulted in people working harder than ever and actually increasing production of food and other necessities as well as war equipment. The numerous examples he cites of this kind of thing allow him to state that ‘catastrophes bring out the best in people’ and to regard the ‘bad’ behaviour frequently seen in human beings and their societies as aberrant. He dates it back to the invention 10,000 years ago of settled agriculture, seeing it as a ‘mismatch’ that did not fit the human psyche. Yet it became a game-changer in destabilising and stratifying populations that had previously lived in relative harmony and equality and had not been plagued by the idea of scarcity or the constant desire for more which agriculture introduced.

Though other writers too have presented arguments for seeing ‘human nature’ in a positive light (a recent example is Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff), Bregman goes further than these in a particularly striking way. Like him, most of them reject the notion of an innately self-serving, potentially evil human species, explaining anti-social behaviour as the reaction of hugely adaptable and flexible beings to conditioning and circumstance. Bad circumstances can make us bad people. But Bregman goes a step further. He looks beyond that idea to claim that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal, kind-hearted and cooperative, to the extent that he attaches to humans the label Homo puppy. This may seem sweeping or extreme and perhaps the jury is still out, but his arguments are certainly compelling. He sees as the main driver of human behaviour the desire to act together even in the most dire circumstances, leading to tolerance and mutual support even when things seem to be falling apart. Apart from the ‘blitz spirit’ in Britain in the Second World War, he also gives the surprising example of the apparently inexplicable dogged resistance shown by the vastly outnumbered and outgunned German forces as the Nazi regime was falling apart towards the end of the war. They found it impossible not to continue cooperating with one another. More generally, the author points to the plethora of everyday gestures of help, cooperation, solidarity and compassion people in all societies all over the world show to one another on a daily basis and quotes approvingly the statement by historian Tine De Moor that ‘History teaches us that man is essentially a cooperative being, a homo cooperans’. Another way he puts it is that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’.

On violence too, after presenting the evidence put forward by war historian Samuel Marshall in his book Men Against Fire that ‘the average and normally healthy individual (…) has such an inner usually unrealised resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life’, the author expresses agreement with sociologist Randall Collins that ‘Humans are hardwired for (…) solidarity (…); and this is what makes violence so difficult’. In view of all this, it is perhaps unsurprising that one reviewer has seen Bregman’s analysis as leading to ‘a new understanding of human nature’ and lighting ‘the path to a brighter future’ and another as ‘a devastating demolition of the misanthrope’s mantra’.

This is truly myth-busting stuff and all good news for socialists who have always argued that there is no ‘human nature’ obstacle to a society of common ownership and democratic organisation based on from each according to ability to each according to need. But what about any political conclusions or prescriptions by the author from the wealth of evidence he presents? Well, he expresses strong support for ‘participatory democracy’, even if with no clear explanations of its content, and recommends people associating with one another as closely and directly as possible as ‘the best remedy for hate, injustice and prejudice’, since, once they come into close contact, their Homo puppy nature, their innate friendliness, will dissipate any hostility, prejudice or lack of empathy. He doesn’t go much further than this, and he had already done that in a previous book, his best-selling Utopia for Realists (reviewed in the August 2017 Socialist Standard). In political terms that book roundly criticises the market system for its ‘bullshit’ jobs and the waste of skills and energies it engenders and sees a remedy for this in various reforms such as a shorter working week, a basic income scheme (here now renamed ‘a citizen’s dividend’), increased taxes on wealth, and open borders. From the socialist point of view, though Humankind is an impressive and important book, it’s a pity he didn’t go any further, since the changes he recommends, apart from being unlikely to happen given the nature of capitalism, would clearly not, even if enacted, get to the root of the problems caused by the money and profit system with its imperative to produce come what may for profit rather than for need.

There is, however, one point in Humankind in which the author does seem to make an argument against the money system by pointing out that in capitalist society, even of the Western democratic kind, ‘the threat of violence is still very much present, and it’s pervasive. It’s the reason families with children can be kicked out of their homes for defaulting on mortgage payments. It’s the reason why immigrants can’t simply stroll across the border in the fictions we call ‘Europe’ and ‘the United States’. And it’s also the reason we continue to believe in money (…) Money may be a fiction, but it’s enforced by the threat of very real violence’. Yet in the end, disappointingly, money and the violence behind it are not something he seems to want to look outside of. As in his previous work, he fails to go beyond recommending anything beyond what would in practice be relatively minor reforms to capitalism, easily withdrawn if the going got tough for profit making. Indeed, he’s on recent record as saying that ‘sometimes markets work best, sometimes the state has the best solution’. This is a pity, given that he expresses an unequivocal liking for the kind of non-hierarchical social arrangements which characterised the pre-agricultural past of our ancestors, people who were ‘allergic to inequality’ and ‘universally – and all but obsessively – concerned with being free from the authority of others’. What is the objection, therefore, to such arrangements – without the market and without the state and at a secure level of technology – for our own future now?

Howard Moss

What is money? (2018)

Book Review from the June 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Money’.  By Yuval Noah Harari. (Vintage Minis. 130 pages. £3.50)

This short book is made up of extracts from two books by Harari, though only the first section, from his best seller Sapiens, is on money.

He makes the point that money is not just a thing – something you can exchange for whatever you want – but that it is also a social relation between those producing different things for sale within the context of the division of labour. However, he confuses the use-value and the exchange-value of the various things – silver, gold, cowrie shells, metal and paper tokens, electronic data – that have served as money over time.

He writes that ‘the silver shekel had no inherent value’ and that the value of silver and gold is ‘purely cultural’.  Their use-value, apart from serving as money, as ornaments and status symbols does indeed depend on culture, but they do have an ‘inherent value’ in the sense of an exchange value  when bought and sold or used as money. This is as a result of being the product of work; which allows them to be exchanged with other products which took the same amount of labour to produce. The same applies to cowrie shells which were used for trade in parts of Africa and Asia; besides as ornaments they could be used as money because amounts of them were easily divisible and not too bulky and, being rare, labour was required to find them.

So, money does not rely simply on trust, as Harari argues. Originally, it was a product itself, one  that could be exchanged for any other product of equal exchange value. Today, when the things that are used as the medium of buying and selling are practically worthless metal or paper tokens, trust is more involved but more important is the backing of the state that issues them and decrees them ‘legal tender’.

When it comes to banking, Harari is confused. He writes:

  ‘Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90 per cent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.’

It is true that (in the US) 90 percent of total bank accounts is not covered by cash, but not for the reason he states. It results from banks lending only $9 of every $10 deposited and retaining $1 as cash.

The second part of the book, taken from his Homo Deus, is speculation about future possible interactions between Artificial Intelligence and humans. It is not all that imaginative as it assumes the continued existence of capitalism. In a book on money you might have expected that the possibility be considered that the widespread application of AI might lead to abandoning the use of money rather than to mass unemployment.

Adam Buick

Not So Wise (2015)

Book Review from the November 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind', by Yuval Noah Harari. Vintage £8.99.

This is not a book to consult for a century-by-century chronicle of what happened in history. Rather, it provides an overview, focusing on some significant events and on what Harari sees as important trends and principles. It is a good place to look, for instance, for a summary of recent research on the origin of Homo sapiens and our relation to other kinds of Homo. And it is instructive to learn that since 1500 the global population has increased about fourteen times, but the value of goods and services produced well over two hundred times.

The Agricultural Revolution about twelve thousand years ago led to a dramatic increase in population but was responsible for worse diets and harder work for most people. Hunter-gatherers were in less danger of disease and starvation than farmers, but it is not clear that this warrants describing the Agricultural Revolution as ‘history’s biggest fraud’.

One point made several times is the crucial role played by co-operation. Humans are social animals and it takes a number of people to raise a child (single parents don’t do so in isolation). We can co-operate in lots of different ways with large numbers of people. Yet Harari also argues that it is money that promotes trust and co-operation, ignoring the fact that there are plenty of instances of co-operation not involving money (such as mountain rescue, Wikipedia and the Socialist Party). And capitalism, with its wages system, involves coercion rather than co-operation.

Though he is well aware of the extent of suffering in both past and present, he is uncritically accepting of the current social set-up: ‘The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension’. But this is only because the state and the market are part of the dominant economic system, capitalism, and almost all production currently has to rely on them. It is human labour that provides food, homes, clothing and so on, not the state and the market.

In some cases his explanation for historical events is purely idealist. In the sixteenth century the Spanish invaders conquered the Aztecs and then the Incas, supposedly because the Incas had a purely parochial outlook and were unaware of the fate of the Aztecs. Nothing to do, then, with the fact that the Spanish had guns and horses, which they did not (horses not being native to the Americas).

Unfortunately, when he discusses economics and anything related to Marxism, Harari goes well astray. For instance, he believes that any factory worker who buys some shares thereby becomes a capitalist. He gives an astonishingly simplistic presentation of the idea that banks can create credit. He sees the ‘Soviet Union’ as an attempt to implement the principle ‘From each according to ability, to each according to need’. As this last example suggests, he unquestioningly accepts that Marxism means Bolshevism, and he sees Communism as a religion (defined as ‘a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order’). This ‘superhuman order’ is some unspecified ‘law of nature’ allegedly discovered by Marx, Engels and Lenin. Communism, he asserts, does not call itself a religion but an ideology: this is quite wrong, though, since for Marx an ideology is a theory that offers a distorted view of reality (such as the view that workers are paid in wages the full value of what they produce).

So this is an interesting and stimulating read, but it also contains much that is misleading or just plain wrong.   

Paul Bennett