What is human nature? (1999)

Book Review from the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxism and Human Nature. By Sean Sayers. Routledge. 1998.

There are two ways of answering the objection that “you can’t change human nature”. One is to say “oh yes you can” and to point to how humans have been different in different times and in different places. The other is to say “we don’t need to change human nature; it is only human behaviour that needs to change” and to point to how humans’ behaviour has been determined by the sort of society they live in and has varied with this while their biological make-up has remained unchanged.

Marx, who came to socialism via philosophy, adopted the first approach. We in the Socialist Party, with the benefit of the findings of biological and anthropological research since Marx’s day, have adopted the second. Not that the two are incompatible. Both refer to the same facts and draw the same conclusion—that an unchanging human nature is not a barrier to socialism working—but what is meant by “human nature” is different.

In the one case it is the traditional philosophical idea of “what underlies and determines human behaviour” (and in German the term is “human essence” rather than “human nature”). In the other a distinction is drawn between “human nature” as the biological, or natural, make-up of humans and “human behaviour” as the way humans behave, with the former underlying but not determining the latter, with in fact a key part of humans’ biological make-up being precisely the capacity to adapt to a wide variety of behaviour patterns.

Even though Marx gave its content a historical and so changing character, the philosophical definition he inherited still has some problems even with this amendment. How do you describe the features of human nature in this sense? How can you tell what it is at any particular time in human history? In what sense can it be said to determine human behaviour? Is it in fact any different from human behaviour? Why use (in English) the term “nature” when what is being referred to is not natural in the sense of being determined by nature but is admittedly socially-determined?

Sayers ignores, not to say rejects, the contribution that science has made to the question of human nature. He only mentions two anthropologists: the title (Man Makes Himself) of a book he likes by V. Gordon Childe and Marshall Sahlins and his Stone Age Economics. In fact he doesn’t really give any clear definition of what he means by “human nature”; you have to gather from the text that he means something like “human needs and powers”. But this is so vague that it leaves the door open to all sorts of unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable speculations as to what human nature might be.

Sayers’s contribution to this debate (which anyone can join in) is to lay down that the need to be employed is now a part of human nature. We don’t think this is quite what Marx had in mind. After all, it would mean that his key demand for the abolition of the wages system would go against human nature.

Adam Buick