'Socialism will never work. They [socialists] always forget about human nature!’
Playing the ‘human nature’ card is one of the most common attempts to short-circuit discussion about the viability of socialism. Those who lay it are generally coy about saying what exactly they mean by this phrase. How does ‘human nature’ function? How is it expressed? What – if anything – triggers it? When challenged on these issues, critics generally become vague or inarticulate or wave their hands about a good deal. If pressed further, many of them come up with a vision of human beings as pre-programmed automatons. Others, less reductive, picture us as biological pressure cookers that periodically overheat. Others still, shake their heads and speak of moral degeneracy or believe in something akin to magic or original sin. When, however, they are asked to describe what they believe to be the concrete manifestations of ‘human nature’ they perk up. They become suddenly explicit – and very much more concise. Human beings, they say, are greedy, lazy and violent. And that pretty much settles the matter. ‘Next question.’
Human beings are not born as blank slates. We do have a specific ‘nature’, unique to us, and this has consequences when we interact with the environment. We are a social species, so we have a biological need for human contact and association. It is why we live in communities and have economies. We have autonomic reflexes which protect us from harm. We involuntarily fixate our attention on perceived threats, for instance. Similarly, our nervous systems will remove our bodies pretty sharpish from accidental contact with extreme heat – all without consulting our brains or waiting for us to decide how to act. These reactions seem hard-wired into us, yet even they can be overcome by our conscious awareness or social learning.
Biological mechanisms are complex and subject to ongoing debate among scientists, so few of us are qualified to pronounce upon them. What we can do, however, is to leave ‘human nature’ to one side and turn our attention to something much more graspable: human behaviour. When discussing socialist society, it is human behaviour and the external conditions that influence it that tell us what we need to know. We know, for instance, that, in the scientific jargon, our human behaviour is ‘plastic’: that is, it is extremely variable and adapts itself to different environments, physical and social.
The primary goals of humanity: obtaining food, clothing, and shelter; and finding ways to relax or engage socially with others, are necessary to our survival. They do not change with place or time. The way we organise ourselves to obtain these goals, however, varies considerably from society to society. So, while these goals remain the same, the way we have to act to meet them changes according to the nature of our social environment. The organisation of society is like a maze, and different mazes require us to take different routes to arrive at the same goal. Yet not all of our goals are universal. Some arise out of the particular way a society is organised and are specific to it. The need to accumulate capital, for instance, is an essential goal of capitalism, though one not found in other societies.
Apart from autonomic reflexes and a few other neurological mechanisms, human actions are always purposeful. If a certain course of action fails to deliver our goals, then it will cease to motivate us and lose its value. In this way, changes in forms of social organisation bring with them changes in attitude and values. So, when socialists argue that human beings would think and act differently in a socialist society, they are not imagining humanity has undergone a mysterious change of heart or that some unlikely alteration has taken place in ‘human nature’, but only that people have made a practical adaptation to changed circumstances.
Capitalist apologists who claim that human beings are intrinsically greedy, lazy and violent rarely make much effort to justify their assertions. These claims though are useful. By turning them on their heads, we can use them to explore how a socialist society of common ownership and free access would function and, by comparing it with capitalism, throw light on the functioning of both societies. Last month we made a start by looking at greed. We can now take that forward.
What about the greedy person?
Human lives are mutually dependent. We live in dwellings, eat food, walk pavements, wear clothes, use tools made by hands other than our own. Almost everything we do is made possible by other people’s labour. Yet our direct awareness of this social dependence is obscured by the way capitalism reduces our relationships to the impersonal and seemingly objective business of monetary exchange. In capitalist society the effects of the employer/employee property system ripple out among us, influencing everything we experience and everything we do. Individuals, families and groups locked into their property bubbles are economically isolated from one another and forced to compete on multiple levels. Capitalism’s system of economic isolation divides us, breaks our sense of connection and removes the safety net of communal support. It leaves us insecure. Economic isolation and insecurity together lead us to prioritise our own needs in ways that are careless of the needs of others. The system makes us greedy.
For businesses to survive in a competitive capitalist marketplace they must constantly outguess and outperform one another. Market competition demands ruthlessness, and it ‘rewards’ greed. Competition between businesses for the money in consumers’ pockets results in psychologically sophisticated marketing and advertising campaigns which impose a relentless pressure upon us to buy and consume. As communities break up and human connection dissolves further into the market scrum, an insatiable inner emptiness opens up inside us which we try helplessly to fill with more and more purchases. Greed becomes social, a way of life.
When we think of greedy people, it is often those with an abundance of wealth that we call to mind. And research in social psychology confirms the validity of this perception. Despite all the pressures of capitalism, people with little wealth often find ways of being remarkably generous, a quality rarely included in the list of attributes drawn up by those who promote the idea of ‘human nature’.
A good place to find a capitalist (or wannabe capitalist) in all his unabashed glory is in the world of neoliberal or so-called ‘libertarian’ ideologues. These folk (predominantly male) can be found hovering around the websites of capitalist think tanks like The Mises or Cato Institutes in the US or the Adam Smith Institute in the UK. They will tell you unapologetically that what they want out of life is a 20-bedroom mansion and a luxury ocean-going yacht. (It is nearly always a mansion and a yacht – visible capitalist icons of wealth and status.) They like to ask, mirthfully, how in a society without private property or money anyone would prevent them from simply taking these things for themselves? We could tell them that nobody needs to and that the social relations of a socialist society would do the job for us. We could tell them, but they would be unlikely to listen.
A capitalist society puts no obstacles in the way of anyone who wishes to live in a 20-room mansion – on the sole condition, of course, that they have sufficient wealth to pay for it. In capitalism a poor person can be greedy, just like a rich person, but they have no chance of being greedy on quite such a grand scale. So, let’s for now grant some wealth to our wannabe advocate of greed. And let’s watch as, in a capitalist society and in the full expression of his ambition, he occupies his 20-bedroom mansion. Once installed he immediately uses his wealth to employ others who, lacking any other means of support, must sell their labour power wherever they can. In return for a wage they will work under his orders and act in his interests, maintaining his property, cooking, cleaning, shopping for him, and attending to his every whim in satisfaction of his desire for luxury living.
Who will clean the 20-bedroom mansion?
Now change the social scenery and consider the same individual acting with the same greedy intent in a society of common ownership and free access. In this scenario the capitalist employer/employee property system is now only a historical memory. Our greedy person requires no exclusive wealth to obtain their property, and indeed, they have none. Their aim, though, as before, is to live a luxurious lifestyle in a 20-bedroom mansion. As promised, we will not apply any force to try to stop them.
Almost immediately they notice a difficulty. Their 20-bedroom mansion is rather large with high ceilings and elaborate mouldings and with corners where dust can settle. It requires a great deal of cleaning and tidying and maintenance. So who will do this for them? With all those around them now having open access to what they need, they are genuinely free to contribute their labour only as they choose. ‘Self-interest’ has now given way to personal autonomy. If others are to tend to the greedy person’s needs, they must do so voluntarily. Yet who will volunteer their labour to pander to his or her whims and desires? They no longer possess personal wealth, neither the power, nor the mystique of power, nor the status that goes with it. Without any of these things, they are now a free person with a 20-bedroom-sized headache.
If they cling to their desire for their mansion, it seems that they now have two options. They must spend inordinate amounts of their time performing housework, doing shopping and maintaining their property, or they must live in squalor. Neither of these options we can assume add up to their conception of luxurious living. Nor will their occupancy of a large property bring them new power or status or admiration. Quite the reverse. They may well find that their greedy, and now frankly eccentric, behaviour will win them nothing but laughter and social opprobrium. The same can be said of any other exceptional or ‘greedy’ demands they might wish to make, like wanting to possess several private residences. Perhaps they will still dream of possessing a Jeff Bezos-style ocean-going yacht. Or maybe they will begin to realise that no-one is going to donate their labour to build, crew, maintain and fuel it. Will such a society even build yachts of this kind?
Not an expression of biological programming
Greedy behaviour is not simply a direct expression of biological programming called ‘human nature’. It emerges when the satisfaction of fundamental human needs is thwarted by external conditions. In capitalism, those conditions take the form of economic isolation imposed by the employer/employee property system. When that economic isolation and the insecurity it creates are eliminated and replaced by a system of common ownership, free association and free access the motivation for the kind of greedy behaviour that could endanger the stability of the system, vanishes into thin air.
‘Human nature’-type objections to socialism are almost always based on a poorly conceived notion of what socialism is. More often than not the confusion arises because the critic is projecting onto a socialist society many of the limiting features of capitalism. This may tell us something about our current world, but it tells us nothing about its socialist replacement.
Next month we will continue to explore the nature of socialist relations and address a number of questions that they inevitably throw up.
Hud.
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