Prosocial (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Conflict Resolution. By Douglas P. Fry. Edward Elgar. 2026. 121pp.

‘Nomadic foragers, as we all used to live, were socialist, prosocial, egalitarian societies’ (Douglas P. Fry).

In this distillation of long years of fieldwork and scholarship, the world-leading anthropologist Douglas Fry draws upon his knowledge and experience to propose means of resolving conflicts between individuals or groups as they might arise in contemporary contexts. Its analysis and recommendations are underpinned by the author’s accumulated understanding of how human beings have related to one another throughout the 300,000 years of our species’ existence. And it is precisely this that makes it of particular interest and relevance to socialists.

To be specific, a central plank of his arguments is how entirely fallacious are the oft-repeated claims that war, aggression and greed are rooted in the human psyche. All the evidence, he insists, is that such forms of behaviour, far from being somehow embedded in our nature, are, when they occur, an outcome of social conditioning and that our evolutionary history shows that we have just as much potential for, and indeed a much more natural bent, towards attachment, caring partnership and cooperation.

Drawing on decades of his own research and with evidence from various different fields of study, he demonstrates how over the approximately 290,000 years of prehistory (the Palaeolithic era), the overwhelming principle of existence among human groups was (and still is today among indigenous populations he has investigated across the world) non-violence, cooperation and egalitarianism, characterised by sharing food, caring for the vulnerable and maintaining social bonds. This the author sums up as ‘community solidarity and harmony’, reinforced by ‘socialization and social control mechanism geared toward promoting prosocial values and behaviors’. Not that violence, greed or attempts to monopolise necessities would never have occurred in Palaeolithic societies or never occur in modern indigenous cultures, but in such circumstances ways are usually found to resolve the conflicts caused via ‘restorative’ methods or by reconciliation, eschewing violence and seeking to practice ‘fairness’ in the eyes of the individuals most directly affected and of the collectivity. But in the rare cases where this is not possible, it may be necessary to apply sanctions to ‘wrongdoers’, probably via some form of social ostracism or banishment. As for large-scale organised killing, the author echoes the now widely accepted view that this has been largely a feature of the last approximately 10,000 years. Starting then, hunter-gatherer life (referred to in this book as ‘nomadic foraging’) gave way to settled agriculture with social hierarchies and control and domination of wealth by small groups of people developing and eventually becoming the norm. Later, of course, the industrial production of capitalism took over from agricultural society, but that society continued to manifest, as it still does, those same basic features: power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, leaders and led, and a willingness of the many, via social conditioning, to sacrifice themselves in the interests of the privileged few.

This book is one of many in the field of anthropology, archaeology and a gamut of other disciplines which have contributed to exploding the enduring myth that violence, competition and selfishness are somehow ‘locked into’ human interaction, that there exists inevitably some kind of ‘war of all against all’. Douglas Fry’s stark opposition to that idea is summed up in his statement that ‘on the basis of cross-cultural data … humans have a universal inclination to resolve conflicts and restore normal patterns of harmonious social interaction’ and that ‘the normal state of social affairs is to exchange good deeds, to feel gratitude, to be generous and appreciate the generosity of others. Overall, people strive to maintain positive interpersonal relations with others through mutually beneficial exchanges’.

All this is serious grist to the mill for socialists, providing as it does a powerful response to those who argue that the cooperative society of voluntary endeavour and free access to all goods and services which we call socialism is impossible because it is against what is usually referred to as ‘human nature’. We cannot but agree with the author’s plea that ‘the human potential for resolving conflicts without violence should be fully acknowledged, nurtured, and further elaborated by the people sharing one small planet in the vastness of space’. At the same time, however, though this plea is expressed, as all else in this book, in truly engaging fashion, it is difficult to see how its substance can be realised within the framework of the current social system of class division and production for profit. Rather, the environment for it to come to fruition has to be a society of economic equality and production for need.

Howard Moss

Human behaviour (2002)

Book Review from the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect’. By Paul R. Ehrlich. Island Press.

This is the same Paul Ehrlich who, thirty years ago, irritated Socialists by his shrill claims that it was “overpopulation”, rather than capitalism’s production for profit, that caused environmental deterioration and other ecological problems. However this, his latest book, will go a long way to restoring his reputation.

He sets out his intention without ambiguity in the preface. It is to refute

“the erroneous notion that people possess a common set of rigid, genetically specified behavioral predilections that are unlikely to be altered by circumstances. ‘After all’, we’re often told, ‘you can’t change human nature’. The notion that there is one such nature to change allows us to be painted in the popular mind as instinctively aggressive, greedy, selfish, duplicitous, sex-crazed, cruel, and generally brutish creatures with a veneer of social responsibility. Our better selves are seen to be in constant battle with a universal set of unchanging, primitives ‘drives’, which frequently break through the veneer and create many of the serious ills that afflict humanity. It is a view as dismal as it is wrong, considering what is actually known about our behavior”.

The basic answer he gives to the “human nature argument” is that there is no such thing as a single, unchanging human nature but, insofar as behaviour is the public display of our nature, there are and have been many different human natures (hence the book’s title) which change over time. This is a different approach from ours which distinguishes between a more or less unchanging biologically-determined human nature and human behaviour which is socially and culturally determined and which can, has and does vary depending on the type of society people were brought up in or live in. But this is essentially only a different of terminology to arrive at the same conclusion that our behaviour is not narrowly determined by our genes but that, on the contrary, one of our biologically-inherited characteristics is precisely the capacity, as a species, for behavioral flexibility and adaptability.

Ehrlich sets out the current state of scientific understanding of the issue which confirms that our behaviour is predominantly determined not by our genes but by our cultures (“socially transmitted behaviors, beliefs, institutions, arts, and so on”). Culture is transmitted by non-genetic means, basically by learning (which assumes of course a genetically-inherited capacity to learn), and is different at different times and in different places. Hence the great variety of behaviors exhibited by humans. Such complicated and changing behaviours, says Ehrlich, could not possibly be governed by our genes since aren’t enough of them. Writing before the first results of the human genome project Ehrlich quotes a figure of 100,000 for the number of human genes. The human genome project suggests a figure less than half this, so reinforcing Ehrlich’s “gene shortage” shortage argument against biological determinism.

Ehrlich writes as a member of the American school of “cultural evolutionists” which is not too far from Marx’s materialist conception of history. In fact, he refers at one point to “the great political economist Karl Marx”. He also takes a materialist approach to the mind: “consciousness, thinking, reasoning – activities of the ‘mind’ – are all centred in the brain and are phenomena as natural (and as material) as the legs’ actions of standing, walking, running, and kicking”.

So, a very useful book, even if Ehrlich does ramble on a bit in the last few chapters.

Adam Buick

Letter: Engels (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engels

Hello

There’s a certain irony in being accused (Pathfinders, February) of not having read Engels when my point (very much a side point) was that Engels’ arguments were based on no evidence of how people organised themselves in prehistory. My main point was that no, prehistory was not a feminist utopia, but there was a huge diversity of relations between men and women of which, until recently, we were completely ignorant. My reason for not including Engels in Further Reading was not that it was old hat, though perhaps even the author of this piece would agree that Engels’ ideas have been around a while, but that the rule for that particular section of The Guardian’s books pages is that it should be inspired by recent thinking and recent books – which are then cited in Further Reading. If this author were himself better read, he would know that I’ve written on this subject in greater depth, with a less restrictive word count, for New Scientist – written and he would, I hope, feel a little ashamed of his groundless (rather like Engels’) statements.

Best wishes,

Laura Spinney

Reply from the writer

As a New Scientist subscriber for twenty years I’ve appreciated many of your interesting articles, but I must have missed the one you wrote on Engels. You say there’s no evidence for his hypothesis on the subjection of women (actually derived from pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan), even calling it ‘groundless’. This seems a little harsh given that whole theoretical edifices are sometimes constructed based on one finger bone. The evidence of patriarchy is all around you and everywhere in history. Is the alternative origin story simply that ‘it’s complicated?’ To discuss Engels’ argument while omitting the crucial role of emerging property relations is a bit like discussing gravity without mentioning mass, or Newton, or relativity. That’s why your representation of Engels came across as woolly, hence the speculation that you might not have gone to the source. Angela Saini, as the article points out, instead takes the argument and runs with it in a way that sheds further light rather than confusion on the subject.

PJS

Avoiding the elephant (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Invisible Rivals. How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World. By Jonathan R. Goodman. Yale University Press. 2025. xv+236pp.

This is a wide-ranging book. Written in a jargon-free and eminently accessible style, it is basically a work of evolutionary psychology, but it also steps into a number of other fields of knowledge and investigation, for example biology, anthropology, history, politics and economics. Its fundamental themes, as suggested in its title, are cooperation and competition and the part they play in human society.

As the author points out, this has been a hot topic of study for specialists in various fields over many years, and even more so in recent times. For most of these, the old idea of humans as red in tooth and claw, deep-down selfish and wicked and with social interaction dictated by an ethic of everyone for themselves has been superseded by an understanding that homo sapiens is capable of a wide range of behaviours according to the life conditions and experience of each particular individual and social group.

Many recent studies have emphasised that, if circumstances and social environment allow, human beings are likely to behave in generous and empathetic ways towards others, since we are essentially flexible creatures with behaviour shaped by the society into which we are born and become part of. It follows from this that, if life takes place under adverse systems and conditions, this can provoke negative reactions in which communities are divided among themselves and people may be inclined to seek their own advantage at the expense of others. Some studies stress the ‘positivity’ element more strongly and see human beings as an instinctively kind and associative species, ‘pro-social’ or ‘super-cooperators’, whose default, whose natural inclination is to share and be cooperative and mutually supportive. In this view, only when conditioned from the earliest years to compete and pursue personal ‘success’ and reward, as in today’s capitalist system, do humans shift away from sharing and towards selfishness and personal gain. But both these positions espouse the idea of humans as eminently flexible and adaptable creatures and often draw on evidence that, for the vast majority of the 300,000 years or more of human existence, we lived in sharing egalitarian societies with no rulers or ruled, no resource domination and relatively little conflict. That was when we were hunter-gatherers, and the argument continues that, only when that lifestyle was replaced by one of settled agriculture starting around 12,000 years ago, (the ‘tiny speck in our history’ referred to in this book) did hierarchies and states come into being and result in struggles for power, development of classes and the existence of rulers and ruled, provoking predatory behaviours and setting people against one another.

All this of course fits in nicely with the socialist advocacy of an egalitarian society, which, via modern technology, could guarantee a more secure level of existence than hunter-gatherer societies and could be based on free and equal access to all goods and services, with no buying and selling, no wages or salaries with cooperative endeavour aimed at satisfying human needs rather than seeking profit. So nothing in ‘human nature’ would prevent this. Indeed, if human beings are either ‘naturally’ cooperative and inclined to share or even sufficiently flexible to welcome such a lifestyle as being in both the collective interest and their own, then surely it will fit them like a glove.

However, the author of this book sees things rather differently. He presents what one commentator has called ‘a highly nuanced account of human competition and cooperation’. According to this, though we are capable of being either selfish or altruistic, the selfish side tends to prevail, something we may not even always be aware of ourselves. In other words, in most of our dealings, the motives we present to others may be different from what they believe and indeed from what we ourselves believe. In this view, a human tendency for self-interested manipulation is seen as fundamentally present. As the author puts it, ‘selfishness and double dealing are basic human traits to be found in everyone, including themselves’ and ‘deception and exploitation are deeply rooted in our natures’. So selfish goals are seen to be hidden under a cloak of apparent altruism or selflessness. Thus the ‘invisible rivalry’ of the book’s title.

But what about humankind’s approximately 290,000 years of apparently egalitarian and conflict-light hunter-gathering? The writer does not neglect this but argues that, in terms of equality and conflict, things were more nuanced and not necessarily as one-sided as presented by many studies of anthropology and palaeontology, pointing rather towards his more ambiguous take on ‘human nature’. His verdict is that, though we commonly share and reciprocate, this does not make us innately cooperative. It just makes us ‘animals capable of cooperation’. Here it is noticeable, however, that, though he draws on a wide range of sources which point in favour of his thesis, other key sources providing widely recognised evidence for the ‘highly flexible’ or ‘ultra-cooperative’ idea, some of which have been reviewed in this journal, are notably missing. There is no mention whatever, for example, of the work of widely recognised experts in this field such as John Gowdy or R. Brian Ferguson. So it is difficult not to see a certain amount of ‘cherry-picking’ in what is presented here.

As for the writer’s take on the current state of humanity and the economic system that dominates it – capitalism -, he clearly does not consider that the equivocal view of humanity he presents prevents change or improvement and he does acknowledge the possibility and importance of cooperation. He states unequivocally in fact that human society could not have survived ‘without intense cooperation, and this is implicit in the support he expresses for what might be called ‘progressive’ social policies and developments, ie, more openness, democracy and equality. He refers to a need for ‘the political will to enact policies that upend the modes of exploitation we have normalized and the cultures of inequality we allow to thrive’ and for this to happen via ’cooperation at the local and global levels’. But he sees any such changes entirely in the context and through the lens of the existing system, thereby avoiding the elephant in the room, ie, that system’s imperative to keep on existing and producing for the profit of the tiny minority. We, on the other hand, would regard any attempt to bring about change or improvement within its framework as tinkering at the edges, a sort of ‘moving the deckchairs on the Titanic’.

Howard Moss

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

Free for all? (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people considering the SPGB’s case for the first time are staggered by the implication that when Socialist society is established there will no longer be private property or its manifestations. “Surely that’s absurd, everything free, no money, invoices, tax returns, banks. People would go mad taking things which they couldn’t afford—why would anyone work if not for wages? Everyone would rely on someone else to do things for them.” So goes the argument, and yet very often the same people who raise this objection also throw up the obstacle of “human nature” stopping the establishment of Socialism. We are all apparently too selfish, greedy, warlike and generally steeped in original sin to be capable of establishing Socialism (desirable though it sounds).

It comes as a shock, therefore, to people who react in this way to learn that for the most part in the development of human society the concept and consequences of private property did not exist. Capitalism itself (about 200 years old) conditions workers to regard it as permanent, unchanging and the only possible form of society, so that people are indeed jolted to hear about what anthropologists call “primitive communism”.

However, if we are to accept that nature, stars, planets, rocks, the atmosphere, life and man are all the products of evolution, then it is unreasonable to regard human society as being something immutable. L. H. Morgan was one anthropologist who discovered and described the workings of early society including the “communism in living” he observed among Iroquois Indians. One of the reasons for the violent academic backlash against Morgan’s theories was that they upset the notion of the permanence of private property. But Morgan was not the only one to note the lack of property relations among “primitive” peoples. A few illustrations are worth mentioning. G. Taplin talking of Australian tribes wrote: “In the clan there can be no personal property—all implements, weapons, etc., belong to members collectively, every individual regards them as possessions of his clan and to be employed for its welfare and defence as occasion may require. If he has a weapon, or a net, or canoe which is in some sense his own, he knows that his property in it is subject to the superior rights of the clan. Every man is interested in his neighbour’s property and cares for it because it is part of the wealth of the family collectively.”

Also writing of the Australian aborigines the Rev. W. Ridley said: “Real and personal property in individuals is rendered impossible by their systematic communism.” Darwin wrote of Fuegian tribes: “Even a piece of cloth given to one is torn in shreds and distributed, no one individual becomes richer than another.” Of the Eskimos H. W. Klutshak wrote: “In small things and in great, whatever is to be found in an Eskimo village in the way of provisions and tools is the common property of all. As long as there is a piece of meat in the camp it belongs to all.” L. A. de Bougainville wrote: “ . . . it seems that as regards the necessaries of life there is no private property, and everything belongs to everybody” (of Tahiti). Even Lowie, who was a vehement opponent of Morgan’s evolutionary view, had to grudgingly admit: “With respect to certain forms of property there is often what virtually comes to communism notably in connection with the procuring of food.”

The general Socialist argument about private property is that it gradually developed as man became more proficient at regularly producing surpluses which could then only be exchanged with other tribes for other produce. Concepts such as money, insurance, accounts, etc., could only arise from private property, which in turn depended on production surplus to the tribe’s needs. Property is a social phenomenon and not a biological one. It was Engels who pointed out that we must thank the ancient Greeks for that wonderful invention called the mortgage.

Those who object to Socialism on the grounds of “human nature” being incompatible with common ownership must explain why human nature changed. Or if it did not change then, what did change to give us the current situation?

Whilst human nature has not changed, man’s social organization and his behaviour have changed. These changes have occurred because man has continually improved his means of subsistence, i.e. of staying alive, and this has resulted in the development of property and wealth. The time is long due when man should use his means of production as a common instrument for all rather than for the benefit of a minority, the capitalist class.

Tony D'Arcy

Letter: "Mother-right" (1980)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Mother-right"

Dear Editors,

The article “Battered Wives” in the July Socialist Standard follows Engels’ view in “The Origins of the Family” that mother-right was the general position before male-dominated, property, class institutions became established. Agreed: the position of women relative to men drastically deteriorated with the advent of private property, but it is open to question whether primitive societies were essentially matrilinear. Some were, others were definitely not. Why? is the subject of much controversy in anthropology. While the 19th century founding fathers of anthropology had precise, straightforward answers on how primitive humanity’s life was structured and functioned, present day anthropologists seem less certain of the meaning of the mass of data that has accumulated. I will quote just one of them—Leslie A. White a cultural evolutionist in the grand, system-building tradition of L. H. Morgan. His is by no means the last word, but at least he puts order into the question, and writes clearly.

As a general proposition we may say that prominence or predominance of men in the mode of life of the (primitive) society will tend to produce patrilinear lineages; prominence or predominance of women will tend to form matrilinear lineages. Thus a culture in which warfare, hunting or herding is an activity of paramount importance will tend toward patrilineal lineages because these occupations tend to be masculine pursuits. In systems where woman’s role in subsistence, house building and ownership, or in some handicraft, puts her in a position of considerable importance as compared with men in the mode of life, there will be a tendency toward matrilineal lineages. (The Evolution of Culture)

White adds that although this statement is sound enough, it could easily mislead because of the complexity of numerous, diverse factors at work in specific situations making for small to great variations.

S Lion

London, SE24

Human Nature and Socialism: 4—Capitalist Patterns of Behaviour (1953)

From the August 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from the previous issue.

4—Capitalist Patterns of Behaviour

In previous articles we have seen that, although men do, in a very real sense, make history, they are nevertheless also products of conditions and creatures of circumstance. Since we are primarily concerned with the possibilities of change that exist today, we should discover as much as we can about the sort of human behaviour that is produced by Capitalism. Provided that we bear in mind the limitations of the phrase, we may enquire what sort of "human nature” has resulted, so that we may more adequately see the respects in which change is both possible and desirable.

Every society, no matter the form of its social relationships, presupposes that men engage in productive activity. The way in which they come together to produce wealth (the economic aspect) is the key to all the other aspects of society. The basic question to ask, then, is: how does man work under Capitalism?

The outstanding feature of present-day labour is that the bulk of it is undertaken, not primarily to satisfy a human need, but to satisfy something interposed between production and consumption called a market. Everything is dominated by the basis of the system which recognises only motives of material gain. A tailor, for example, can no longer appeal to society’s need of clothing as a justification of his existence. He has to say^that tailoring is one way of “making a living.” He Is considered a “successful” tailor, not because he makes good clothes for people, but only when he achieves an income remarkably large for a tailor. The cash nexus, not need, is the determining factor, since, without money, access to both the means and the fruits of production is denied.

False Separation

There are a number of consequences of this economic set-up that constitute a condemnation of present arrangements and a challenge to make better ones. First, there is the separation of the individual’s interests from those of the community as a whole. The objective of the employee in selling his working abilities is to receive a pay-packet "for himself.” The objective of the employer in buying those abilities is to reap a profit “for himself.” Both may, of course, form temporary alliances with others of their class but, within Capitalism, each worker is a potential (if not an actual) rival to every other worker seeking employment, and each capitalist a rival to every other capitalist seeking profit.

Production under Capitalism is social, not individual, yet the worker does not labour primarily because in doing so he renders a service to the community. Lacking access to the means of production, he is compelled to become "gainfully” employed. He gets back in wages part of the value of what he produces, and the employer gets his profit out of the remainder. The conflict between "capital” and "labour” arising out of the capitalists’ ownership of the means of production and distribution constitutes the class struggle. It is entirely out of place to apportion blame to either capitalist or worker for their "selfish” conduct. Nor is it helpful to suggest a reconciliation between classes while consenting to the continuation of a system that makes the gain of one class the loss of another.

Capitalist division of labour is objectionable because it makes harmful separations in the productive process. Production is separated from consumption, enjoyment from work, mental labour from physical labour. These separations lead to antagonisms, and the function that should be an integrated whole is divided against itself. Thus the producer of wealth who demands more wages is castigated for making the "consumer” suffer higher prices. The worker who takes his ideas from capitalist propagandists is encouraged to vent his frustration as producer on to the consumer, and his frustration as consumer on to the producer—and the underlying, but real cause of the trouble is ignored.

The aim of the employer is to make the human labour power that he has bought as productive as possible. All kinds of aids to intensified exploitation are introduced, so that the maximum amount of profit is achieved in the shortest possible time. It is a matter of little concern that the conditions of work are such that all joy is taken from it, and the worker comes to look upon it as an evil necessity. The remedy applied, under Capitalism, for this deplorable state of affairs is not, as one might reasonably hope, the adjustment of the work to the needs of the worker as a human being, though industrial psychology whitewashes its economic motives by pretending to do this. Instead a substitute —leisure—is found for the satisfaction that is lacking in capitalist employment. Tied to unpleasant, boring and socially useless jobs, people are encouraged to make their non-working hours the centre of their lives, the part that they "look forward to.” But you cannot switch on a human being as you can a machine, and so the way in which the hours of employment are spent inevitably has its effects on the ways of spending leisure. Regimented and controlled at the factory or office, the worker tends to lose the desire to participate actively in his own amusement, and all to often relies on mass-produced entertainment to be sold to him. 

Impersonality and Excessive Specialisation

As a consequence of the commodity function placed upon human labour power, personal worth is reduced to exchange value. Everyone has his price, not only for what he does but for what he is. Human relationships are regarded as the subject of calculated business transactions ("what does he want in return?”) and are lacking in all dignity. The situation is well described by Hortense Powdermaker in "Hollywood— The Dream Factory”:—

“Man has become increasingly lonely. Although people live in close physical contact, their relationships have become more and more depersonalised. We have a sense of being with people, and yet do not feel in any way related to them. The technique of business and many other organisations in trying to personalise their selling relationships, such as by announcing the name of employees to customers, really fools no one. The fact that the name of the post office clerk, the bank teller or the person who handles complaints in the department store, is posted does not really influence their relationship with customers. The market place is still basically impersonal."

Perhaps the greatest denial of human characteristics is the excessive specialisation of function that Capitalism has developed. In earlier societies man was able to combine in one person many different functions and, in relation to his society, his development was many-sided. The craftsman in feudal times had the satisfaction of making whole articles, and his work held interest and pleasure for him because he could clearly appreciate the social value of what he produced. Today the worker rarely makes a whole article or gives a service that is wanted, not for business, but for its own sake. He is part of a machine for producing wealth and, like all machines, he must be made to function as "efficiently” as possible. Thus the multifarious operations required in the production of a motor-car for competitive sale must, as Ford has shown, be broken down into their simplest component parts; so that the ultimate aim is that the worker shall make only one movement as frequently as possible.

Throughout the whole range of capitalist employments the accent lies on paying attention almost exclusively to a small section of the whole economic process, which involves a failure to comprehend that it forms a segment of a much wider field. Few men have first-hand experience of any productive activity outside their own jobs—they come to rely more and more on the services of “ specialists.”

Symptoms of Maladjustment

What sort of cultural “superstructure” arises from this falsely separated, depersonalised and excessively specialised mode of production? In the short space of this article we can only touch upon a few aspects of present society, and show that they are given their character by the capitalist system. We read, for example, in Margaret Mead’s ‘“Male and Female,” of 

“ . . . the cultural meaning of prostitution and promiscuous homosexuality, venereal disease, acute alcoholism, and sex crimes. These all occur, and their form and frequency are indices of the maladjustment that exists in the United States, as in every modern society. They are symptoms of the state of society, just as the phobias and compulsions of the patient are symptoms.

“They are systematically related to the culture.” 

When we compare this approach to the one that seeks to lay blame for society’s ills on the individual’s wickedness, we can see how much more rational the former is. The solution, we perceive, is not to complain that there are “problem” people in the world who must be reformed, but to tackle the cause of the problem in the world itself. The dualism that characterises everything under Capitalism—buyer and seller, employee and employer, competition and monopoly, work and leisure—is perhaps most apparent in the gulf between the theory of what should be and the practice of what is. This is aptly illustrated by Bergen Evans in “The Natural History of Nonsense”:—

“We are brought up to expect rewards for certain kinds of behaviour and then thrown into a world in which none of the signals works. We are taught as children to be kind, self-sacrificing, and helpful, never to to be greedy or aggressive. Then we must five in a ruthlessly competitive economy. We are taught to be honest, in preparation for a world in which honesty is often penalized, and dishonesty, in a thousand forms, is often rewarded. Our ambition is stimulated and we are assured of success if we will onty ‘apply ourselves,' when actually, by the very nature of things, nine out of ten must be disappointed, and chance carries as much weight as merit.

“ The result is mass frustration and despair.”

#    #    #    #

Such is the capitalist environment into which we are born. Yet, in spite of it all, people do, on the whole, manage to be kind, unselfish, helpful and honest, and their greed and aggressiveness is mostly the reaction to unfortunate circumstances. It is certain that if such a disunited, contradictory, and anarchical system as Capitalism can hold people together in society, then one which is designed to harmonise with their needs will not fail because of the frailty of human nature.

Stan Parker

(Next Article: We Learn From Social Scientists.)

Human nature (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It’s a good idea, but it’ll never work. You can’t change human nature, you know.” So runs a common argument against Socialism. A society where people would own the world’s resources in common and work together co-operatively to satisfy man’s needs is frequently rejected on the grounds that man’s nature makes it impossible. Selfishness, greed, aggression, competitiveness, are declared to be inevitable human characteristics which render any form of social organization other than today’s unworkable.

What evidence is advanced to back up this view of man? Usually not very much. Generally, some examples of contemporary human behaviour coupled with the vague assertion that Man “always has been" and therefore “always will be” like this. That so many people hold this view of human nature is a striking commentary on the nature of the education most people receive. It leaves them completely unaware of the findings made in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc., over the last 40-50 years. These all show that “man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of his environment, from other human beings.” (p.9, Man and Aggression, ed. M. F. Ashley Montagu).

Men and women sleep, eat, drink, and reproduce. The relations they enter into to accomplish these ends and the general organization of society, are social factors. When people are born they have the ability to think and act but at that time they have no views or attitudes. These they can only acquire through interacting with their environment: parents, school, the media, other people, etc. As the Open University social science textbook puts it: “To breathe, eat, drink, rest, are inborn drives; to achieve, dominate, submit, acquire, belong are learned or social drives.”

Looking at history we can see how man’s social relationships, have changed tremendously over time. Behaviour which is now considered to be basic human nature at one time was virtually unknown. Tribal societies who lived by gathering and hunting are the first known form of human social organisation. Anthropologists reckon that Man has lived in that way for all but the last 10,000 years of our 1-1½ million-year existence on earth. These societies had very different values from today’s. Their meagre resources were owned communally, there being no privileged class among them who had more power or wealth than the rest. Co-operation rather than competition was the norm, with the tribe having a harmony of interests. However the development of Man’s productive ability (beginning of agriculture, domestication of animals) and the consequent economic surplus led to the formation of privileged ruling classes who expropriated this surplus for their own benefit. The advent of private property changed Man’s social values. The pursuit of riches has bred murder, cruelty, fraud, enmity and other anti-social behaviour.

Private property society has now reached its ultimate in industrial capitalism. In this system the vast majority can only live by selling their ability to work to the few who own and control the factories, land, transport systems, and other means of wealth production. The driving force behind the production of goods is not the meeting of human need but the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few. It is a society of constant conflict. Workers and capitalists are always fighting over wages and conditions. Worker is pitted against worker, first to obtain employment, then in 'the promotion rat-race; rival capitalist firms and countries continually compete against each other for increased power and profits. The organized telling of deliberate lies (advertizing) and the killing and maiming of human beings (the “professionals”) are respected occupations. People tend to be judged by the goods they have managed to accumulate, success being measured in terms of pounds and pence. Greed, selfishness, and ruthlessness are the qualities needed to “get on". Is it any wonder that people, born into such a system and subjected to strong social pressures, should often act in an anti-social manner?

However even under capitalism there are many occasions on which people act in a co-operative, even self-sacrificing, manner. Whenever a natural disaster strikes thousands of volunteers rush to help. People donate blood without monetary reward. And if Man is naturally aggressive its strange that in almost every war conscription has to be used. These examples alone are sufficient to disprove the “Human nature” argument. For if there was a bad human nature as claimed, it would have to apply to all people at all times.

Thus, the Socialist case against the argument that social evils can be explained by some kind of innate depravity or original sin has three main points —

1. Non-Socialist social scientists state that aggression, peacefulness, greed, generosity, etc. are social characteristics and cannot be transmitted genetically.
2. For hundreds of thousands of years Man lived co-operatively and harmoniously with communal ownership of resources.
3. Even under capitalism people continually act in a helpful and co-operative way.

The barrier to a better world lies not in any natural evil of Man, but in a lack of political consciousness which leads the majority to accept today’s private property system. However the contradictions in capitalism — social production and private ownership, great wealth existing alongside miserable poverty — result in more and more of the working class rejecting it and starting to work to establish an alternative.

—From a leaflet.

Engels on Human Evolution (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Links to Part 1 and Part 2.

Engels followed the impact of Darwin’s ideas more closely than Marx. He may even have read Darwin's “The Descent of Man”.

Unlike Marx, Engels continued his interest in Darwin and things Darwinian beyond the initial general public furore created by the publication of Origin. Apart from references to Darwin in his correspondence with Marx and others, the first major piece of work Engels produced was the notes for the unfinished The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, written between May and June 1876, over five years after the publication of the Descent.

This speculative, but interesting, work which includes a strong element of Lamarckism (but even Darwin had to resort to a version of Lamarck), can be seen as a Marxian response to the “Man’s place in nature” debate in at least two important ways. First of all, it attempts to show in what way humans are different from other animals. Unlike Darwin, who was eager to point to the similarities across species, to indicate the origins of typical human behaviour in a simpler form in other species, and that humans were only quantitatively different from animals, Engels was adamant in showing both the difference and similarities between humans and other animals. Whilst speculating in how human labour activity had evolved from earlier forms along with the evolution of physical organisation, and therefore within the Darwinian explanatory framework, he was also wanted to show how human labour differed from that of lower animals. Following the same line of argument he and Marx had arrived at thirty years previously in The German Ideology, he wrote:

“Animals…change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them…But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally. The further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards preconceived ends” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, volume 25, p.459).

“In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction” (ibid., p.460).

In addition to this evolutionary explanation of the difference between human and animal labour, Engels’s argument can also be seen as a materialist response to Wallace’s “unseen spirit” explanation of the difference between humans and animal. Furthermore, Engels also opposed the mental materialism of Darwin, who based the difference between humans and other animals in the more developed and complex mentality of humans; a form of idealism that had dominated Western philosophy since the rise of Christianity:

“All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the brain. Man became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognize the part that has been played therein by labour.”

Did Engels Read The Descent?

Engels seems to have kept up with the Darwinian literature on human evolution, making reference to T.H. Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, John Lubbock Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, although it is not always clear which of their works he is referring to. So it is somewhat surprising that there is no explicit reference to The Descent or to what Darwin wrote on the matter. But seeing that he had read all these other authors, who had made their contribution before 1871, and that Darwin was the most important figure in this group, it would seem unusual that Engels would not read The Descent. Also, he had five years to read him before he started work on The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man in May 1876.

There is, however, some textual evidence that Engels did read The Descent. In the second paragraph of his pamphlet, Engels writes:

“Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors of ours. They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in trees.”

This description attributed to Darwin comes in part from The Descent. In Chapter 6, “On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man,” Darwin writes:

“The early progenitors of man must have been once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were probably pointed, and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having proper muscles”

(Darwin The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871; Penguin edition 2004, p.188).

The reference to “they lived in bands in trees“ too seems to have come from The Descent, as Darwin writes:    

“We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.” (p. 678)

Therefore, unless Engels got these from another author, these two separate references provide adequate justification for thinking that Engels did read The Descent.

From Darwin to Marx: From Biology to History

Human beings possess a dual character, as both biological and historical beings, in a radically different way from any other animal.

For non-human animals, the biological, structural determination of their activity is dominant. As they get more biologically complex, they acquire the capacity for their activity to be modified by previous interactions with the world, but they live in the “now”; their activity is concerned with adjusting to the immediate circumstances they are interacting with. They have a blind past, as a species and as individual organism, but not a history.

Only humans have history. Through their linguistic ability and social co-operation, human beings have over centuries achieved (it is not nature-given) a greater degree of purpose and agency than any other species. As a result, they not only have a history, but can make history. But making history requires that the impersonal, law-like relations of the capital relationship, of production for profit, be destroyed and replaced by a free association of producers who create a world in their own interests and their own purpose. Only then will humanity shift from a determined pre-history to a determining history.

Ed Blewitt

(concluded)

The Influence of Property in the Civilisation of Man. (1907)

From the January 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It is impossible to over-estimate the influence of property in the civilisation of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and Semetic nations out of barbarism into civilisation. The growth of the idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in becoming its master passion. Governments and Laws are instituted with primary reference to its creation, protection and enjoyment. It introduced human slavery as an instrument in its production ; and after the experience of several thousand years it caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that a freeman was a better property-making machine. . . The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim ; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy is the next higher plane. It will be a revival in a higher form of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.”

—Ancient Society MORGAN.

"The growth and spread of civilization . . ." (1963)

From the June 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The growth and spread of civilization has gone on with a serene indifference to racial lines. All groups who have had an opportunity to acquire civilization have not only acquired it but also added to its content. Conversely, no group has been able to develop a rich or complex culture when it was isolated from outside contacts."

Ralph Linton, The Study of Man

The nature of human nature (2008)

From the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cultural anthropologist Ashley Montagu once said that what cultural anthropologists were really interested in was “the nature of human nature”. So what do they think it is?

Today, all humans are members of the same species, homo sapiens. We know what our main features are: upright position freeing our hands, stereoscopic vision allowing us to see things in three dimensions, a long period of growing up, the anatomical ability to utter a wide range of sounds, and, last but not least, a powerful brain as the centre of our nervous system. These are all genetic features, inherited via our genes, and are what distinguishes us, genetically, from other animals and living things.

Before us there were other species of homo (Man) but which are now extinct. The most well-known of these was Neanderthal Man which only became extinct about 30,000 or so years ago. Then there were the likely direct ancestors of our species: homo habilis (which Richard Dawkins translates as “handy Man”) and homo erectus or upright Man. The currently available evidence suggested that the first Man, as distinct from the last Ape-Man, emerged about two million years ago.

But this is partly a question of definition since biologists distinguish the first Man from the last Ape-Man by brain size – an inevitably arbitrary, genetic distinction. Anthropologists have introduced another but non-biological distinction: the generalised making and use of tools. While the ability to make tools depends on biology (free hands, good eyesight, more powerful brain)  the actual making of the tools – and what they were and how they were used – does not; it is learned not inherited and, as such, part of what anthropologists call “culture”.

It is now generally accepted that the evolution of homo habilis  (toolmaking Man, if you don’t like Dawkins’s translation) into modern humans was not just a question of biology but also of culture; that it was a biological-cultural co-evolution. That, as Man made and used tools, natural selection favoured those with a more powerful brain and so a greater ability to learn and, crucially, to think abstractly (i.e. of something not present to the senses). Since abstract thinking and language are probably indissolubly linked, this depended on the development of the vocal cords and other parts of our speech organs. The end-result was us, some 150,000 years ago, on the savannah, or open grasslands, of East Africa.

Since then the most noticeable biological change was the development of the different varieties of our species – sometimes mis-called “races” – as isolated groups of homo sapiens adapted biologically through natural selection, over many thousands of years, to the different physical environments in which they lived.

Otherwise human adaptation has been cultural rather than biological: humans making use of their biological capacities, to build-up a social tradition so as to better adapt to their environment, which is then passed on to a new generation through teaching and learning rather than through genes.

“Cultural anthropology is concerned with the study of man’s cultures. By ‘culture’ the anthropologist understands what may be called the man-made part of the environment; the pots and pans, the laws and institutions, the art, religion, philosophy. Whatever a particular group of people living together as a functioning population have learned to do as human beings, their way of life, in short, is to be regarded as culture” (Ashley Montagu, Man: His First Million Years, 1957).

Culture allows humans to adapt to a new or changing environment much, much more rapidly than biological adaptation through natural selection ever could. Cultural adaptation is measured in decades while biological adaptation is measured in tens of thousands of years. Other animals do have a culture in the sense of a tradition of behaviour that is passed on through learning, but none can vary and develop it as humans can. So, the capacity for adaptation through cultural change can be said to be a distinguishing feature of our species. It is of course a biologically-determined capacity, dependent upon in particular a powerful brain and the capacity to speak and on the extended period of childhood during which culture can be learned.

This is “human nature”: the set of biological capacities enabling humans to learn, teach and develop culture, which is a non-biological means of adapting to the environment in which they find themselves. Faced with a new environment, humans can and do adapt their behaviour not their biological make-up. Because culture is non-biological and not fixed, the cultural anthropologists emphasised that educability, behavioural adaptability and flexibility was the key feature of human nature, what made us human:

“The most notable thing about human behaviour is that it is learned. Everything a human being does as such he has to learn from other human beings. From any dominance of  biologically or inherited predetermined reactions that may prevail in the behaviour of other animals, man has moved into a zone of adaptation in which his behaviour is dominated by learned responses. It is within the dimension of culture, the learned, the man-made part of the environment that man grows, develops, and has his being as a behaving organism” (Ashley Montagu, Man and Aggression, 1968).

This biological capacity for culture, for learning behaviour and passing on to other humans and to other generations, was clearly an adaptive advantage and it is this that has allowed our species to spread and survive in all parts of the world, despite the widely differing environments. Much less of the behaviour of other animals is learned (and what is learned is essentially repetitive from generation to generation) and much more is governed by what used to be called “instincts”.

This is a word that has long fallen out of favour in scientific circles, but it would simply denote a fixed response to a given stimulus – like the literal knee-jerk reaction in humans. Or moths flying into lights. Another, more complicated response would be squirrels reacting to the shortening of periods of daylight by going into hibernation.

What the brain does is to allow a period between the stimulus and the response. The more developed the brain the wider the range of possible behavioural responses that the organism can make on the basis of its own past experience. We are the animals with the most developed brain and it is one that allows us the greatest choice of behavioural responses. So much so, the cultural anthropologists argued, that it can be said that we don’t really have any instincts. According to Montagu, any “instincts” that might have existed in the pre-human ape-men from which we evolved would have disappeared in the course of evolution:

“Instead of leading to fixed responses to the environment, man’s evolution has been such as to make him the least behaviourally fixed and most generally educable or plastic of all living creatures. It is this very plasticity of his mental traits that confers upon man the position he occupies. The acquisition of this capacity freed man from the constraint of the limited range of biologically predetermined responses that characterises all other animals” (Human Heredity, 1963 edition)

“ . . . man is man because he has no instincts because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of his environment, from other human beings” (Man and Aggression).

The scientific consensus that was established in the 1940s, 50s and 60s was that it was “human nature” to be able to have a wide range of  behavioural responses to the environment; that human behaviour was learned not innate; that it was culturally not biologically determined. This was confirmation that there is nothing in the biological nature of humans that would prevent us living in the co-operative, non-hierarchical, society of self-motivated individuals that socialism would be.

Since then the biological determinists have regrouped and counter-attacked, claiming that there still are “biologically predetermined responses” in humans. They have made some headway in that biological determinism is more intellectually acceptable than it was fifty years ago. People like Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker  – none of them anthropologists – have been able to achieve some popular success. But they have only done this by playing to the gallery, exploiting the fact that most people have a negative view of human nature – inherited from the Christian dogma of original sin and innate human depravity – and knowing that they could sell their books by pandering to this prejudice. Ardrey, Morris and Pinker also appealed to anti-intellectualism to ridicule and marginalise the scientific findings of the cultural anthropologists by painting them as an arrogant, liberal elite.

But they have failed to show how genes could determine human behaviour (as opposed to setting limits to it). Basically, genes are self-replicating codes for the production of the proteins in the cells of which we (and all other life-forms) are made. What they govern is the development and renewal of our physical, material bodies. They don’t govern behaviour – that depends, as the cultural anthropologists have established, on our social and cultural environment.

The biological determinists hoped that advances in genetics would back up their case, but it is proving to be their undoing. Molecular biologists are making huge advances in identifying and discovering the effect of individual human genes. And they are not discovering genes for any behaviour, only for how the human body develops and renews itself – and what happens when a gene is faulty or abnormal or unusual. In which case the person concerned will suffer some, usually crippling bodily defect, but which genetics holds out the hope of someday being able to correct.

The findings of the cultural anthropologists still stand. All human social behaviour has to be learned and so is culturally not biologically determined. A key distinguishing feature of our species is behavioural adaptability. Human nature is not a barrier to socialism.

Adam Buick

How society changes (1954)

From the October 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anthropology has always been an interesting subject to Socialists. Morgan's Ancient Society and Engels’ Origin of the Family, are only two of the books which have helped us to see how society has changed and developed in the past, and therefore gives us an indication of how it is likely to change in the future.

This process of change is very clearly shown in a report by Dr. Ralph Linton, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, which appears in the book "The Individual and His Society," by Kardiner and Linton.

The report derives from Linton's own field work among the Tapala and Betsileo tribes in the island of Madagascar, and relates how a simple change in the mode of production revolutionised a whole tribal society. 

The Tanala

On a forested mountain plateau live the Tanala. They are an agricultural tribe, living mainly by rice cultivation. They grow the rice “dry"—that is, like an ordinary cereal. Only one or two crops can be raised on any one piece of land by the methods which they use; after that the land has to be allowed to grow up in jungle and left for ten to fifteen years.

At the beginning of the season the elders of the lineage arrange the heads of the families within that lineage along the edge of the land to be cleared for that year’s crop, and assign to each family a strip of given width. The men of each family then clear their strip as far back as they consider necessary to meet their rice needs for the year. This assignment is made equitably—if a family gets poor land one year it will be given good land the next. Each family has full rights on the strip which it has cleared while crops are actually being grown; after that it reverts to the general lineage property.

There are no ceremonies or magic connected with food, except for a small family offering made to the ancestors at harvest time. Everything except land is individually owned, but there is little, if any, difference between rich and poor in living standards, and there are no social classes.

Wet Rice

Such a description is far from complete, of course; but it does give one a picture of the sort of society which Linton found still existing among the Tanala. It was a society which consisted of a number of independent mobile villages, where money was unimportant, where a large degree of social equality prevailed, and where anxiety about property was very largely absent. But even while Linton was there, important and far-reaching changes had been brought about by a gradual change from dry rice to wet rice cultivation. The latter is the ordinary type of rice growing found in India, China, etc., where permanent paddy-fields are used. To the ordinary observer, this change might seem trifling, but to a Socialist it is far from insignificant, because it affects the economic basis of the society. Let Linton take up the story from here:—

“ [Wet rice cultivation] was at first an adjunct to dry rice carried on by individual families. Before the new method was introduced on a large scale, there were already rice swamps of permanent tenure, which never reverted to the village for reassignment. But land favourable for this use was very limited, because of natural factors. Thus there gradually emerged a group of landowners, and with the process came a breakdown in the joint family organization. The cohesiveness of this older unit was maintained by economic interdependence and the need for co-operation. But an irrigated rice field could be tended by a single family, and its head need not recognise any claim to share it with anyone who had not contributed to its produce.

“This group of permanent rice sites formed the nucleus of a permanent village, because the land could not be exhausted as was the land exploited by the dry method. As land suitable for wet rice near the village was presently all taken up. the landless households had to move farther and farther away into the jungle. So far away would they be that they could not return the same day. These distant fields also became household rather than joint family affairs . . . (p.282) 

“The mobile villages had been self contained and endogamous. The settled villages were much less so . . . Intermarriages became common. In this way, the transformation from independent villages to a tribal organization took place 

“The process brought further changes in the patterns of native warfare. The old village had to be defended; but not at so great a cost nor with the necessity for permanent upkeep. When the village became permanent the defences had to be  of a powerful kind involving big investments and permanent upkeep.

“Slaves who were of no economic significance in the old system, now acquired economic importance. . . .  Thus the tribal organization grew in solidity, and with the change the old tribal democracy disappeared. The next step was a king at the head who exercised control over the settled elements but not over the mobile ones." (p.283.) There were now real differences between rich and poor. Poverty and oppression became known for the first time among the Tanala.

The Betsileo

Now let us look at the Betsileo, near neighbours of the Tanala, whose society has been based for a long time on wet rice cultivation. There are more swamps and valleys in their part of the country, and they have also taken up irrigation. But from all indications, their original set-up was the same as that of the Tanala. Basically, “we can regard Betsileo as the Tanala culture, after all the changes consequent upon wet rice had become consolidated, organized, and institutionalized. We are therefore observing an important experiment in the dynamics of social changed (p. 284.)

Among the Betsileo there is a rigid system of ground rent, paid by a proportion of the produce. There is a rigid class system, with a king, nobles, commoners and slaves. The powers of the king are absolute over the life and property of everyone. “In short, here was a feudal system of a kind” (p. 285.)

The power of the father in the household became supreme, particularly in the sense of ownership. Unlike the Tanala system, among the Betsileo all household property belongs to the father except his wives' clothes and gifts to his wife and children. Children not infrequently desert their parents—a thing unknown among the Tanala.

There is much more emphasis on the supernatural. “ The Betsileo make a clear distinction between life and soul. Life ceases with death, the soul continues.” (p. 288.) Much of this interest has to do with apprehensions over losing money or position.

The Process of Change

Here, then, we see social change in action. We see changes in the mode of production causing changes in types of ownership. We see these new types of ownership causing changes in the relations which one person can have to another. We see new attitudes arising out of these relations. We see new institutions arising out of these attitudes. (We see these new institutions causing further changes of attitude, and so on). We see, as Linton has already pointed out, the dynamics of social change in action.

Here is another clear and valuable example of a process which is going on daily and hourly around us here in the world today. Let no one say that the Materialist Conception of History is a mere empty theory when we can see it justified up to the hilt in such a practical example as this.

The whole book is of some interest to Socialists, since the main author. Dr. Abram Kardiner, openly acknowledges the great debt which social anthropology owes to historical materialism. Here is another example of the way in which ideas long put forward by Socialists are being today painfully rediscovered by the academic world.

J. C. Rowan