Introducing the WSM
Dear Editors,
Thank you very much for Introducing the World Socialist Movement and the accompanying literature you sent in response to my e-mail. Having read through it, it seems that our goals and assessments of the global situation are virtually identical.
I was pleased to see that you tackle the “human nature” argument in the “Objections to Socialism Answered” section of the booklet. It’s an argument I’ve come up against on numerous occasions and I have some thoughts of my own on what “human nature” is (as distinct from “animal nature”, derived from the genetic imperative to breed);
- We’re gregarious; humanity is obviously a social species
- We’re sentient; not to say that all animals aren’t, but we know for a fact that humans are capable of complex abstract analyses
- We’re communicative; we’ve developed intricate languages to express our thoughts and feelings to each other
- We’re compassionate; our capacity to empathise with others is nothing short of amazing and is surely the key to our unity and social order. Why would we do things to others that we wouldn’t want done to us? If our so-called “leaders” rediscovered their empathy, imagine the impact on their treatment of refugees and their policies allowing people to starve while food rots in warehouses. (Have you ever noticed, whenever “our” politicians are asked “why don’t we just ship our food surpluses to the people who need it?”, they always seem to reply “it’s not that simple”? It is that simple—people are dying . . .)
If the above points are true, why on earth would they present a barrier to socialism? If anything, they suggest that we’d be good at it. It’s not like we’re stupid—if we can do capitalism, we can do socialism and we’d all be a lot better off for it, I’m sure. Even our former plutocrats would learn to live in a world where human achievement in science and technology were unfettered by competition, profit margin and political expediency.
Phil Salter,
Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs
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