How we live and how we might live - Part 7 (2025)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

Among those who criticise the idea of a society of free access and voluntary association are people who insist that human beings are naturally lazy and must be induced to work. Capitalism’s wages system, they say, is just such an inducement. Without it, or something similar, our ‘natural’ preference for leisure would dramatically reduce the time we spent on producing the goods we need, threatening our quality of life, and possibly leading to social collapse.

This reasoning rests on yet another version of our old friend ‘human nature’, which can be adapted, independent of evidence, to justify pretty much any required conclusion. In some versions of this argument we humans are so naturally workshy that without incentives forcing us to produce we would all, in the words of one pundit, rush to the coast, unpack our mats and inflatable lilos, and spend our days lying on the beach. And if we pushed this reasoning to its rarely acknowledged conclusion, it is there that our slowly starving bodies would be barbecued by the sun because no one was at work growing food or manufacturing sun block. These kinds of arguments should lead us to question whether those who champion them have ever bothered to look around themselves at the way capitalist society works. Have they not noticed, perhaps, that the vast majority of working people not only prefer to work rather than starve or live on derisory welfare benefits, but prefer to work even under the oppressive conditions of a capitalist wage relation? Even the least observant are surely capable of realising that if we really were suicidally lazy by nature or preferred penury to work, that introducing a wage or some kind of rationing system would do nothing to alter that.

But let’s stop there and come down to earth. Are human beings genuinely lazy? The answer is, yes, we are. To a degree. Biologists tell us that laziness is part of our evolutionary inheritance. Natural selection has designed us not to squander our energy unnecessarily, so the desire to slouch on a couch or relax on a beach when our other needs have been temporarily satisfied is part of our survival strategy. There is, however, more to survival than conserving energy. Idleness will not feed and clothe us, or keep us safe: threats to our wellbeing produce anxiety; hunger and thirst nag at us to find food; cold drives us to seek shelter; we desire sex and social activities; physical movement is invigorating; success and achievement are exhilarating. And too much of doing nothing is frankly boring. The motivating desires that drive us to provide for our needs are built into us, and no extrinsic social arrangements like wages systems are needed to force us to do what we do naturally. Historically, exchange relations like wage systems did not enter into our societies until about 3,000 BCE. If we needed them to ensure our survival, then our species would have become extinct millennia ago.

What about the free rider?

The viability of a society based on common ownership and free access does not turn on questions of ‘human nature’ but on those of social organisation. Some animals like our evolutionary cousin the orang-utan are solitary and live largely self-sufficient lives. Each animal acquires its own food and consumes only what it has individually acquired. We humans, however, are a social species. We produce what we need collectively and then share it out according to some system. A genuine question therefore arises: if, in a post-capitalist society, work is voluntary, but individuals are free to take from the common store, what is to stop lazy or antisocial individuals among us living off the work of others to some degree, or perhaps even entirely? This is the free rider argument, one that we hear a good deal of from conservative apologists for capitalism. So we have to ask, would socialism encourage free riders? And if so, would it then become unsustainable?

When job seekers apply for capitalist jobs, the wage offered is a definite factor in their calculations. In a society where a worker’s quality of life, status, power and even survival are all closely related to monetary income, then, other things being equal, who would not take a better-paid job over a lower-paid one? Once the job contract is signed, however, and an income is secured, multiple lines of research show that neither the motivation to work nor the quality of the work done bear any relation to the wage paid. In fact, there is evidence to show that when higher extrinsic rewards are offered in the form of bonuses, productivity and the quality of work falls, not rises.

So, what is going on here? It seems that once our basic needs are met and our lives are somewhat secure, at least for the moment, what really motivates our actions are not extrinsic ‘inducements’ like money, but intrinsic rewards that come from engaging in the activity itself and from the pro-social conditions under which it is performed. In the 1990s, for instance, labour shortages in the high tech industries gave workers sufficient bargaining power to determine their own working conditions. They chose to eliminate bonus schemes which set individuals in competition with one another, demanded hands-off management and arranged to work in non-hierarchical, self-organising teams.

And this is entirely in line with the evidence. Research in social psychology has repeatedly shown that what motivates us are tasks that are interesting, that are purposeful and engaging, that give us a significant degree of control over them, and that allow us to apply and master our skills. Beyond a basic minimum, most of us dislike competitive stress, and we resist being controlled by others. These are conditions that, while generally unmet under capitalism’s competitive and profit-maximising property system, are built into the basic structure of a society of free access and free association, or can be easily achieved within it. A self-governing society of this sort therefore has all the qualities required to engage us in productive activity and minimise our resistance to it.

Capitalism: work as sacrifice

Does that mean there will be no ‘lazy’ people or free riders in such a society? Probably not. Research in social psychology also shows us that the capacity for sustained work varies widely between individuals. If this is true, then the question we must ask is this: would supporting a percentage of people who choose to make little or no contribution to society pose a problem?

Even asking this question is likely to raise some hackles. We know how resentment can be stoked by stories of ‘benefit scroungers’, or of individuals who don’t pull their weight and shift the burden of work onto others. Even when complaints of this kind are misdirected, as they can often be, they are psychologically understandable. Humans have very sensitive antennae for what they perceive to be unfair practices or behaviour. Game theory has shown repeatedly that individuals across many cultures will often act against their own best interests in order to punish others whom they believe are acting unfairly.

So why exactly do we become so exercised about free riders? In a capitalist system where everyone is forced to live in economic isolation from one another, each in their individual property bubbles, there is a severely diminished sense of communal purpose and communal achievement. We do not contribute our labour as part of a community of people engaged in community projects. Instead, we compete with one another as isolated individuals to sell our ability to work in exchange for the ability to live. And our ability to work, once sold, is no longer ours. We must relinquish control over it and over our lives to employers whose interests and purposes are not our own and who stand in relation to us, not as an ‘us’ but as a ‘them’.

Under this system our ability to work is equated with money, and money is the necessary means by which, in a capitalist world, we secure not just our survival and that of our family, but also our comfort, our social status, our security (minimal as it often is) and our ability to participate fully in our social world. Capitalism transforms most of the population into employees and turns the expenditure of their mental and physical energies into precisely quantified labour-time. Our individual work ability acquires the status of a valuable commodity to be sold to another in exchange for life. Work becomes a sacrifice. Any loss in our labour power or what we can get in exchange for it compromises our ability to support ourselves and our families. So the idea that other workers are living off our labour is therefore perceived as a threat or as a form of theft. Under capitalist conditions, our resentment of free riders is explicable, but it is not universal.

Everybody entitled to a share

We can gain insight into this by looking at how people relate to one another in societies where there is no property system, no enforced work regime, and no external incentives like wages. Immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are as old as humanity itself. In our remote past, they were widespread and perhaps universal. A few have persisted down to today and have been well studied by anthropologists since the middle of the 1960s. Even though returning to their way of life would be neither possible nor desirable for us today, the structure of their societies has elements of free access, and they can teach us significant lessons about human behaviour under these conditions.

Free riders are not unknown in these societies, but they are few and, more importantly, their existence is neither concerning to them nor is it stigmatised. Everyone has an absolute entitlement to a share of what has been collectively produced irrespective of their individual contribution to producing it. This is a wholly different mindset from the one we find in our own property-directed society. The same attitude can also be seen operating from an opposite perspective. Hunting bands will often include one or two exceptional hunters, who day after day, year after year will bring back a majority of game to the camp where it is shared out among whoever is present. They do this with no discernible sense of resentment or any sense that their work is being exploited by others.

This is partly because among these peoples, work is not a commodity; it is not a bargaining chip to be exchanged for necessities like food and shelter. Hence, they make no distinction between work-time and leisure-time. Their productive and non-productive activities shade seamlessly into one another as constituent parts of their daily life. And because their social lives are not fragmented by isolated and competitive private property relations, their ordinary productive activities are experienced not only as a means to an end, but as social values, worthwhile and enjoyable in themselves.

Next month

Last month we saw that the structure of social relations of a free access society lacks the conditions that tend to promote greedy behaviour. Here we see that the same structure maximises the conditions that make productive activity attractive in its own right and encourages people to act cooperatively in the common interest. Next month we will unpack these ideas in more detail, examining many of the specific ways in which the fundamental structure of a free access society promotes productive activity (‘work’) and turns laziness into leisure and leisure into a social virtue.

Hud.

Film Review: Hacksaw Ridge (2025)

Film Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hacksaw Ridge is a 2016 film about Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who served as a U.S. Army medic during the Second World Slaughter. He saved 75 lives during the Battle of Okinawa and became the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honour (the U.S. version of the Victoria Cross). The title refers to the cliff the U.S. Army climbed over to attack the Japanese during that battle.

Desmond Doss was a Seventh-Day Adventist (a Christian who believes the sabbath is Saturday instead of Sunday) who decides to join the Army as a combat medic (because he wants to save lives instead of take them). However, his training requires him to learn how to use a rifle, which he refuses to do. His refusal to hold a weapon forms the main conflict of the film. This is a spoiler-free review, so I won’t go into the specific reasons why Doss refuses to hold a weapon (although it’s connected to the 6th biblical commandment of ‘thou shalt not kill’).

Firstly, I must mention that the writing, filmmaking, and acting are all marvellous. The violence in this film is gory, but not too gory. Vince Vaughn gives an especially great performance as the sergeant of Doss’s unit (this is helped by the character being semi-comedic). IMO, the best part of the film is when Doss saves the life of a wounded Japanese soldier, because it shows that he regards the Japanese soldiers as human (and not as the ‘enemy’, contrary to war propaganda).

However, there are three quotations from this film that socialists would take exception to:

1. Early on, Doss’s brother joins the army (to serve in WW2) much to the disappointment of their parents; especially their father who served in the First World Slaughter and lost all his friends in that conflict. In that scene, their mother mentions the 6th commandment to his brother, to which he replies: ‘It’s not killing if it’s a war’.
2. When Doss is explaining to his superior officer why he refuses to hold a weapon (because of the 6th commandment), the latter replies: ‘Most people take that to mean don’t commit murder’.
3. Finally, in that same scene, the superior officer says: ‘What we’re fighting is worse than Satan’. A socialist response to the first two quotations is that killing is killing (it doesn’t matter whether it’s sanctioned by the state or not). With regards to the third quotation, I would understand (in a way) where he was coming from if they were fighting against Nazi Germany, but to call the Japanese worse than Satan is blatant brainwashing.

In conclusion, despite the war propaganda, this is a good film about an incredibly brave man who did the right thing but for the wrong reason.

Matthew Shearn

Italian history (2025)

Book Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Shortest History of Italy. By Ross King. Old Street Publishing, 2024. 262pp.

This is the latest in a series of ‘Shortest History’ books with other topics that include Europe, Germany, England, war, democracy, India and Greece. Readers of the Socialist Standard will have seen last November’s review, scathing to say the least, of the one on economics. Is this one any better? The enthusiastic endorsements by various journalists and historians on its back and inside covers certainly make it seem so (‘vibrant’, ‘admirably clear and often wryly amusing’, ‘terrific … a lucid riveting history’, ‘effervescent and entertaining guide’).

Are such comments justified? Well, yes, at least in part. The author’s sparkling prose and his ability to vividly overview tumultuous events and periods in Italy’s history succeed in giving us vivid insights into certain key developments. Examples of this are: the transformation of the city state of ancient Rome into a predatory inter-continental empire; the rebirth in culture, the arts and commerce in the 15th and early 16th century that marked Italy’s rise to European prominence (ie, the Renaissance); the making of Italy as a single nation state in the 19th century, partly at least as a result of the machinations, rivalries and interests of neighbouring European powers; the 20th century phenomenon of fascism that thrust the country into a dictatorship and delayed its growth as the European economic power it eventually became after the collapse of fascism and the unleashing of advanced capitalist development.

But it must also be pointed out that this book does not entirely escape the top down, history-from-above approach that the ‘shortest history’ format lends itself to. This is noticeable here in, for example, the relative lack of examination of the economic forms that drove the machinery of Italy’s various historical stages (ie, slavery under the Roman Empire, feudalism in the Medieval period, and, more recently, capitalism, first mercantile then industrial). Above all it would have been useful for the author to give some prominence to the fact that Italy’s development on the capitalist scene (referred to by another historian as its ‘spluttering bourgeois revolution’), late as it was, was hampered by its division into small independent state units, preventing the development of a national market and militating against advanced, large-scale commodity production. This disunity, reflected as it was in striking language differences across its land mass as well as in political division and economic underdevelopment, only started to be transformed slowly and painfully (and this is covered effectively by the author) by the unification process of the second half of the nineteenth century (the ‘Risorgimento’), which then stretches into the first half of the 1900s, even though there continued to remain a social and cultural gulf between the North and the South of the country (and there still are notable differences), as Italy seriously took on the homogenised, nationalistic model of the Western nation state.

As for the author’s portrayal of today’s Italy, it would have been helpful, from a socialist point of view at least, for him to have explained that the many different governments and parties which have administered the country since the end of the Second World War have all actually been engaged in the same fundamental undertaking – administering and ensuring the continuation of the capitalist system with its mass ownership of wealth by a tiny minority of the population and compulsory wage work for the majority. He might also have mentioned that, though parties calling themselves ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ have had involvement in this, their programmes and policies have borne no resemblance whatever to the concept of socialism (or communism) put forward by the Socialist Party of a moneyless, wageless world society of free access to all goods and services based on from each according to ability to each according to need. But the author would no doubt have considered that to do this would have exceeded his ‘shortest history’ brief. And it may not correspond anyway to the view of the world that he himself holds.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: Starmer gets it (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Our job is to work with businesses to create the best environment that allows them to thrive’. So wrote Starmer in an article in the Times (29 January). This describes perfectly one of the key roles of government under capitalism. Since businesses thrive by making profits and since business investment for profit drives the capitalist economy, the government has to do what it can to create and maintain good conditions for profit-making — and to avoid doing anything that might run counter to this.

Starmer understands that this is the logic of capitalism and, in office, is openly striving to apply it. It inevitably means putting profit-making first. Governments have to do this on pain of making things worse. Any party in office has to be the ‘party of business’ that the Labour Party said it was even before it was voted in.

Starmer’s understanding contrasts with the illusions of his left critics inside and increasingly outside the Labour Party. Here, for instance, is what Counterfire (an SWP breakaway) claimed in its January issue:

‘A genuine radical left government could make real changes now, by taking measures that both the centrist establishment and the hard right reject, such as taxing the super-rich, controlling rents and energy prices, and investing in infrastructure. The left can win the argument that society can, and should, do better’.

Of course society can do better, but not as capitalist society. The reference to the continued existence of the super-rich and rents and prices show that Counterfire is assuming that capitalism continues. So, it is in effect arguing that a government can make capitalist society better for workers. The left certainly has not won that argument. Left governments that have tried to do this — to put meeting people’s needs before maintaining the best environment for profit-making — have failed. In fact, they have tended to make things worse, and then be voted out of office.

Taxing just the ‘super-rich’ but not the profits of capitalist corporations, as essentially a tax on the consumption of the capitalist class, need not worsen the environment for profit-making. But if ‘taxing the rich’ extends beyond this to higher taxes on profits, the source of business investment that drives the economy, then the prospect of an economic downturn emerges. This is the point at which most left governments perform a U-turn. Otherwise they crash the economy.

Controlling the price of energy to consumers would bring some respite but, since governments don’t and can’t control the world price of energy, this could only be maintained through subsidies that would have to be paid for by increasing taxes. Whatever the government invests in infrastructure would have to come from taxation too, to repay any money borrowed and the interest on it. The higher taxes on, or passed onto, businesses would worsen the environment for profit-making.

Rent control might not crash the economy but it would create other problems. Businesses and individuals investing in letting houses and flats would invest less and spend less on maintaining their properties, with the longer-term consequence of fewer places to rent and deteriorating accommodation.

The lesson is clear. If you want better, better get rid of capitalism and not try to make it work in a way that it can’t.

SPGB 2025 Summer School: What is Marxism? (2025)

Party News from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) gave us a method for explaining how society functions, based on materialist principles and analysis of the economic framework within which goods and services are produced. This body of work has been summed up as ‘Marxist’. Since the 19th Century, these theories have been interpreted by countless historians, economists, sociologists, philosophers and political theorists and activists. Their work too has been called ‘Marxist’. Where does an interpretation become a misinterpretation, and how can we judge what’s accurate?

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion considers how Marxism has developed and its influence today, and the extent to which it is an essential part of the case we put for a marketless, stateless society of free access and production for use that we call socialism.

The Socialist Party’s Summer School 22nd-24th August 2025

Our venue is the University of Worcester, St John's Campus, Henwick Grove, St John's, Worcester,WR26AJ.

Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £150; the concessionary rate is £80.

Book online at worldsocialism.org/spgb/summer-school-2025/ or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. Day visitors are welcome, but please e-mail for details in advance. Email enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.