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

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.)

Pathfinders: Dark factors and dodgy populists (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

With all the far-right demagogues, mad dictators and murderous wars in the news, people may be inclined to lean into their own confirmation bias and say ‘What do you expect? People are just evil’. You can’t make a silk purse or a functional liberal democracy, much less world socialism, out of a sow’s ear. But a new Copenhagen study of nearly 2 million people across 183 countries, as well as all 50 US states, concludes that people are more likely to be nasty, or in the terminology, display ‘aversive, “dark” personality characteristics such as selfishness or spitefulness’ if they happen to live in ‘prior aversive societal conditions’ (ASC), which is to say ‘societies characterized by corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence’.

According to the research authors, there has been a lot of previous work on the various types of aversive behaviour, and ‘Recent advances in personality research have provided strong evidence for the existence of a single disposition underlying all aversive traits.’ They define this disposition, which they call ‘The Dark Factor of Personality’, or ‘D’ for short, as ‘the general tendency to maximize one’s individual utility—disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others – accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications’.

Thus, D is ‘the essence of aversive (“dark”) personality traits such as narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism’, so the study looked at data from multiple countries and states in combination with individual behavioural questionnaires. It found higher ‘D’ levels in high-ASC countries, ie, ‘in societies where rules are broken without consequences and where the conditions for many citizens are bad’, such as Indonesia and Mexico, and interestingly also Louisiana and Nevada. D was correspondingly lower in countries or states perceived to have better societal conditions, for example Denmark and New Zealand, and US states such as Utah and Vermont.

They go on to discuss the various ways that this correlation reinforces itself, through ‘customs, daily practices, norms’, ‘situational affordances and demands’, and ‘state-behaviour feedback loops that reinforce or discourage certain behaviors’.

So the society you grow up in is a strong influential factor on your character. Well, ‘duh’, you might say. Everyone knows that a badly treated dog is more likely to be savage and dangerous than a well-treated one. Even those hippy chimps, bonobos, have been known to turn violent when confined in zoos. But from a socialist perspective, this study is worth noting. Last month’s Socialist Standard cover feature dealt with that favourite go-to of the anti-socialist, human nature, and the received wisdom that the human ‘inner demon’ is only kept in check by authoritarian rule. If that were really true, socialism would be impossible.

What the Copenhagen study shows is that humans have what it calls ‘adaptive phenotypic plasticity’, which is to say that we model our behaviour on our social surroundings. So the correlation of high state-level ‘corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence’ with high individual levels of anti-social traits must be largely causative too. Individuals wouldn’t be antisocial if the society they live in wasn’t also antisocial. Even so, couldn’t the causation be the other way around, ie, that antisocial people make for an antisocial society? This hardly seems likely, given that antisocial personality disorders are estimated to affect only around 1-4 percent of the population . Mind you, the capitalist rich elite are probably only 1-4 percent of the population, and they are a walking, talking antisocial disorder.

None of this constitutes empirical proof, of course. The problem with personal questionnaires is that one can’t be certain how truthful the respondents are being. Are people in ‘nasty’ cultures generally more prone to being nasty, or are they simply less inhibited about admitting it, compared to ‘nice’ cultures where such behaviour is presumably frowned upon and thus potentially more covert? This is the same subjectivity problem that plagues ‘Happiness Index’ and many other such lists. A 2016 list of the 63 most and least empathetic countries, based on the same kind of personal questionnaires, revealed that Ecuador was the most empathetic, and Lithuania the least. This is bafflingly counter-intuitive. Ecuador has experienced years of ‘iron fist’ authoritarianism, and high levels of drug-related gang violence, whereas Lithuania has low crime, affordable living costs and a high standard of healthcare. Even stranger is the fact that Saudi Arabia, notorious for public executions and judicial maimings, scores second place, and the UAE, another authoritarian monarchy with no democracy and little press freedom, scores fifth. One might attempt an intellectual contortion by proposing that workers in violent or repressive states are more likely to stick together. But Denmark, once again near the top at number 4, is very hard to explain, while its not wildly dissimilar neighbours Sweden, Norway and Finland wallow deep down in the low forties and fifties, along with the UK. Can one really learn anything useful from such studies?

Perhaps more encouraging for socialists and others is a recent Basel study which looked at 30 years of data from 26 European countries to determine the stability or otherwise of populist governments, or those including a significant populist element. They focused on governments whose ‘term of office ended prematurely’, interpreting this ‘as a sign of instability.’ The study found ‘that cabinets with populist parties break up more often and sooner—regardless of the type of coalition’ and that ‘The probability of early government dissolution is about 60% to 65% higher for alliances involving populist parties than for those without.’ This wasn’t about the specific left or right-wing ideologies though, it was about how populists tend to operate. They have a strong centralised leadership, with little internal democracy, and they adopt radical and uncompromising positions that no other groups can work with. ‘Populism proved to be a constant indicator of government breakdown throughout the study period, irrespective of other influencing factors such as economic crises’.

To sum up, there is evidence that a prosocial society like socialism fosters prosocial behaviour, and that populist governments tend to collapse. Take that, Nigel Farage.

Paddy Shannon

Human Nature and Socialism (1953)

From the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from the previous issue.

Numerous undesirable social conditions have been and still are explained away or justified by the glib remark that “you can’t change human nature/’ Yet the science of anthropology shows these conditions to be cultural acquisitions, subject to change, and not the inevitable result of something inherent in man. Let us try to see, then, the particular ways in which human nature is supposed to be unchangeable, and what follows from thinking in this way.

Human nature is held, by opponents of Socialism, to be unalterable in certain respects that effectively prevent any conscious improvement in social conditions. Men, it is said, will go on acting in the same old ways, and so inevitably bring the same problems that have “always” faced them. Of course, if this were the case then it would be useless even to try to improve things; we might as well face the “inevitable” now. But those who hold this view obstinately refuse to have the courage of their convictions, and they are often found taking very active measures to avoid a fate, such as grinding poverty, that they forecast for others.

What are the reasons for holding and propagating the idea that “you can’t change human nature”? From the point of view of those seeking too justify Capitalism, there are many reasons. People are unemployed because they are “naturally lazy”; fight wars because they are “naturally belligerent"; cheat, injure and bankrupt each other because they “naturally act on the profit motive.”

There are many variants of these arguments, and not all are put as directly as the examples quoted. Sometimes the objector to social change will try to coat the bitter pill that he forces himself to swallow. “Of course, it would be a good thing if people could always live in peace, but until we get a new race of human beings I am afraid this will be impossible.” He wants social change, but only provided that certain impossible conditions can be fulfilled—which amounts to not wanting social change at all.

We can now see where all these arguments lead. It is toward the prevention of future change through the spread of a philosophy that justifies present evils. If men can be persuaded that what they want is impossible to achieve then they will give up struggling for it. Instead, they will content themselves with whatever crumbs they can pick up within the present set-up, in the knowledge that all social evils from which they suffer are “natural,” and therefore unavoidable.

"Incurably Selfish”

There are two main ways in which human nature is said to be unalterable. One is that men are supposed to be universally and incurably selfish, and the other is that mankind is mostly stupid and unteachable, and that intelligence is the prerogative of a few “born” leaders.

Let us examine these statements to see what truth they contain. If men were really incurably selfish, then there could never have been any sort of stable society, because no one would have co-operated with anyone else. If men were really so stupid by nature, then they could never have overcome previous obstacles to the development of their productive forces, and Capitalism could never have grown out of Feudalism.

When we take a closer look at the “incurably selfish” argument, we see that it rests upon the assumption that everything that men do involves loss or sacrifice for other people. Now there is no question that some of the things men do have that effect. But there is equally no question that society depends for its very existence on the fact that there is co-operative behaviour, and that people do work at things which are of no immediate benefit to themselves.

We may infer from this that behaviour which benefits other people is at least as consistent with human nature as that which harms other people. Nevertheless, granting all this, it might still be true that selfishness exists in human nature side by side with social-mindedness, and that therefore it cannot be eradicated. Or, to put it more concretely, there are some things which men need so badly that they will injure other people in order to get them.

The answer to this is that, though such behaviour exists and may even be the general rule in property society, it is not natural to human beings. The fact that there is unselfish behaviour means that selfishness is not inherent in man. People only act selfishly or anti-socially when they can see no other way of obtaining what they desire (by co-operation, for instance) then there is no reason to suppose that they will not choose it when they see that it is better to do so.

Justification for Behaviour

It is important not to confuse selfishness with self-interest. Self-interest is the satisfaction of one's desires; selfishness is the satisfaction of one's desires at the expense of someone else. Self-interest is an integral part of human nature, but selfishness is not—unless it is assumed that everything we do is at someone else's expense. But we continually do things without detriment to other people, and the satisfaction of some of our desires, such as companionship and love, involves the satisfaction of other people's. Any selfish, anti-social behaviour that is present cannot therefore exist in the desires themselves, but only in the way they are sometimes satisfied.

Having seen that there is nothing in human nature that necessitates men's injuring one another, we must conclude that there is nothing in human nature that necessitates war. War can occur under certain conditions, but as far as human nature is concerned these conditions need not exist

There is one contradiction in the argument of “selfish human nature” that we must point out. If it really is selfish then all men must share an equal guilt and it is a case of one sinner condemning another. But those who use the argument give the lie to it themselves, because they impute incurable selfishness only to others and never to themselves. We have never met the objector to Socialism who seriously maintains that if an article were freely available he would still fight someone for his share.

The real reason for the doctrine of human selfishness is not hard to discover. It is a justification for the anti-social behaviour that a highly competitive society produces. The employer blandly counters the accusation of “selfish profiteering” with “selfish wage demand,” and the worker who is not class-conscious falls for the trick. In reality, all the antagonisms result from the nature of the system that all except socialists support, and not from the selfish natures of either capitalists or workers.

“Stupid and Unteachable”

The other way in which human nature is commonly said to be unalterable is that people are, on the whole, stupid and unteachable. Human intelligence is supposed to be too weak to enable people to solve the complex problems that face them—they must fight a losing battle with ignorance. The particular form in which we usually meet this argument is that most people are incapable of understanding Socialism. Allied to this is the assertion that ordinary folk would never be able to run society in their own interest.

It must be noted that, although most people are supposed to be incapable of understanding what are sometimes called the abstruse principles of Socialism, the understanding of such complicated matters as the balance of payments or the American electoral system is assumed to be quite within their power. Propagandists for Capitalism never tell us that we are too stupid to understand the tortuous arguments used, for instance, to prove that the way to preserve peace is to prepare for war. The point is not that arguments either way are too complicated and therefore beyond universal comprehension, but that the will to learn is actively discouraged when its threat to the continuation of Capitalism becomes apparent.

From the unwarranted assertion that most people are stupid flows the equally unwarranted assertion that therefore they must always have leaders. And why must they have leaders? Because those who are in the position of having a following do not wish to lose their privileged position. The existence of leaders and “the led" implies that the former have the power to make decisions, whereas the latter have not. In co-operative enterprises the concept of leadership is foreign, since all the participants have a common purpose. When you know what you are doing you do not need somebody else to "lead” you to do it. The leader is thus the reflection of “the led,” and the measure of their ignorance (not stupidity), and both disappear when people know what they want and how to get it.

As we saw in the first article, human nature is strictly what is common to the natures of the vast mass of all human beings. It has nothing to do with possession or non-possession of knowledge, which is governed by environmental factors, such as whether the particular knowledge is available to people.

The varying capacity for acquisition of knowledge (which is sometimes called the intelligence factor) means nothing more than that some people learn certain things quicker than others, and does not prove that some are incapable of learning. Language—the expression for all communicable experience—is the possession of humanity as a whole, and it is the crassest prejudice to suppose that its fruits are beyond the reach of any individual or section of society.

Stan Parker

(Next Article: The Role of the Socialist.)

Is kindness enough? (2025)

From the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Various publications have come into being in recent times focusing on the idea that we humans are a fundamentally kind and considerate species. I myself subscribe to a quarterly magazine called Positive News, which aims to produce ‘constructive journalism’ and stories ‘about what’s going right’. The current issue carries well-produced and illustrated articles on, for example, a ‘safe house’ in Ghana that rescues and rehabilitates trafficked child slaves, a community energy project in South-East London, and a holiday company that offers ‘sustainable walking holidays at a reasonable price’. It also has a 15-page section of short what it calls ‘energising’ pieces of ‘good news’.

Then in the city I live in, you can pick up The Swansea Positive free of charge, with the stated purpose of highlighting ‘the very many positive and encouraging activities that are happening in Swansea’s diverse communities’. It describes its contents as ‘good news stories which are not printed in currently available media and so go unnoticed’, providing, it says, ‘a healthy alternative to the many negative and depressing headlines’. Its most recent editions have carried articles on topics and events such as a local community farm, the Swansea Chinese community, an Air Ambulance fundraiser and the regular Saturday morning park run.

It’s certainly true that what’s most likely to ‘make news’ more widely are negative, uncooperative and, especially, violent forms of behaviour, while caring, cooperative activities tend to get taken for granted and often go unmentioned. And this can reinforce in many people’s eyes the common idea that human beings are by nature selfish, uncooperative and even cruel and violent, and so any attempt at establishing a world of social harmony and free of conflict is doomed to failure.

This is an idea that has been expressed or implied in much that has been said and written over the years, both in commentary on human behaviour and in writings of fiction. As far back as the sixteenth century, Machiavelli in The Prince insisted that ‘all men are evil’, an idea taken up again in the following century by Thomas Hobbes who argued in his Leviathan that human beings are greedy by nature and human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’, and then by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, where private interest or ‘self-love’ is seen as the primary mover of human action. This view of humanity was later echoed in the twentieth century by writers with more ‘scientific’ pretentions such as Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative), Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression) and Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape). And it seemed to receive confirmation in widely read works of fiction such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and, according to how you interpret it, George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

However, in more recent times the tide does seem to have turned. Opinions have moved far more towards support for Albert Einstein’s statement of over 80 years ago that ‘human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate’. This has been reinforced since by a slew of studies with titles like A Cooperative Species. Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, Survival of the Friendliest, Team Human and Ultrasocial. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future. These have drawn the conclusion that not only are human beings capable of manifesting peaceful and cooperative behaviour rather than being hostile and competitive with one another but are overwhelmingly likely to behave in that way if conditions allow it. According to these findings humans are eminently flexible beings who will prefer to make common cause with their fellow creatures unless they are driven into doing otherwise by conditioning or situation. And they will behave in a cooperative way both because it is likely to benefit them in a practical way (ie, one good turn is likely to deserve another) and also because it is natural for human beings to derive satisfaction out of being of assistance to others and to enjoy the approbation this is likely to bring from their fellow creatures.

A survey via online questionnaires called The Kindness Test, commissioned in 2021-22 by the BBC in conjunction with psychology researchers from the University of Sussex, came up with similar findings. It concluded that human beings are a kind species generally prepared to cooperate with and help one another in their daily lives and activities and that, if we consider all the interactions we have with other people on a regular basis and over a period of time, the vast majority are likely to be of a kind and collaborative nature, even if we do not necessarily notice this or register them as such.

More recently the Vegetarian Society magazine, The Pod, carried a feature entitled ‘How to Live Kindfully’, an interview with ‘wellbeing expert’ Anna Black about her book A Year of Living Kindfully. She quoted an Oxford University study which found that ‘seven days of kindness activities significantly boosted people’s levels of happiness’ and then went on to suggest 10 ways of being kind in your everyday life. These included being less judgmental of others, cleaning up litter outside your home, volunteering in the community, listening closely to others and being ‘kind to the environment’.

It’s easy of course to be critical of attempts to encourage ideas on behaviour and activities which are socially and humanly desirable. It might be said that, in the context of the massive problems the society we live in throws up such as inequality, insecurity, war, poverty and racial prejudice, such steps are surely no more than small beer, which can’t even touch the edges of those problems. On the other hand they do at least help to spread the idea – well attested as it is now – that humans are a species capable of cooperating with and helping one another in their daily lives and activities and generally prepared to do so.

Of course, publications like Positive News and A Year of Living Kindfully don’t (and can’t) override the ‘bad news’ that we hear about every day and that many experience in their daily lives. But what they do illustrate is that, despite the overwhelmingly powerful pressures the society we live in puts on people to get the better of others and so not be ‘kind’ to them, in so many of the actions and interactions of our daily lives, and even in some of the ‘competitive’ situations that are created for us, we can still manage to be kind to others and to cooperate with them.

The question that naturally arises from this is why is it that the society we live in (ie, capitalism) militates against people being ‘positive’ and ‘kind’ to one another all the time? The simple answer is that capitalism is, by its nature, a competitive society with an ethic that runs directly contrary to the human tendency to help and cooperate with others. It encourages people to compete with one another, to try to get the better of them and to do them down if that seems necessary. It does this in various ways, but in particular by tempting people with the lure of gain or reward, often financial, and so pushing them to behave in ways that divide them from their fellow humans, often making the ‘success’ of one into the ‘failure’ of others.

Another aspect of this is society’s basic division into two classes, with one of them (the owning class) exploiting the other (the working class) for wealth and profit. So, given that an inbuilt feature of the capitalist system we all live in is that we are constantly driven to compete with others in a variety of ways, as long as that system continues such divisions are bound to continue. So while those who wish to encourage us to be ‘positive’ and ‘kind’ can only be applauded for their efforts, they are in a sense – sadly – on a hiding to nothing if they leave the whole system unquestioned.

But how do you question the system? It can only come through the majority of wage and salary earners – who we call the working class – using democratic political action to establish a society organised in an entirely different way from the current one. In such a society – which we call socialism – people will be able to operate in the harmonious and cooperative way that we know to be most fundamental to humans and beneficial to the species. In such a society, one of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and democratic organisation, the human tendency to share and cooperate will truly come into its own. People will be free to express their talents and creativity in ways that will vastly outstrip the limitations laid upon them today by the need to conform to the rules of a society with the overriding preoccupation of promoting competition between all humans as a way of realising profit for the few.

Howard Moss

How we live and how we might live (concluded) (2025)

From the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

In a voluntary society without a monetary incentive, who would choose to do the dirty work? Wouldn’t people avoid it (surely that’s human nature)? And wouldn’t that have serious consequences for society?

Talk to an apologist for capitalism and you will almost certainly be told at some point that the system’s competitive private property structure is well adapted to meet the demands of ‘human nature’. According to capitalist apologists our ‘nature’ is self-interested and competitive. How do they know this? Well, they say, look around at the way people actually do behave. Competitive and self-interested behaviour is to be found everywhere. As socialists, we have no disagreement with that. In property-based societies like our own, selfish and competitive behaviour is ubiquitous.

But does that define our ‘nature’? In reality, we know this simple model of ‘human nature’ leaves a lot out. We can begin by drawing our apologist’s attention to Douglas Adams’s parable of the puddle: one rainy morning a puddle wakes up in a large pothole. It scans the world around it and is delighted to discover that the pothole is exactly the right shape to accommodate it, and the same is true for its companion puddles and their potholes. The puddle therefore concludes that the world has been designed specifically for the needs of puddles. We can apply this analogy to our current society and ask whether capitalism’s private property system has been designed to accommodate an intrinsically selfish and competitive ‘human nature’ as the capitalist apologist claims, or, on the contrary, whether the competitive and selfish behaviour we see around us, is a learned strategy for surviving in capitalism.

Wide range of capacities

If we look at human behaviour with a more inclusive eye, we can see that even in a capitalist society, people’s behaviour is not solely competitive and selfish, but is often deeply co-operative and generous. Modern capitalism itself consists of huge businesses which employ thousands of people all co-operating together. In our domestic lives, family members support each other, they help out friends with time and money, and they give generously to charitable causes at home and abroad. Donald Trump’s withdrawal of USAID, for example, while applauded by his ideological supporters, has also generated a large backlash as evidence builds of the deadly effects of withdrawal on the populations USAID previously supported.

Human beings are capable of self-interested and competitive behaviour, and also co-operation, kindness and generosity. Rather than ‘human nature’, it would be more accurate to speak of a wide range of ‘human capacities’. We then have to ask what determines which of our capacities predominates in an individual or in a particular society, and under what circumstances. Research in social psychology points to the fact that though we have a capacity for both co-operation and competition, both are socially learned behaviours. If a society is organised on the basis of property relations that isolate individuals and set them in competition with one another, then the best way for its members to survive in such a system will be to behave competitively. If society is organised to produce what we need co-operatively and without private ownership or the profit motive, then this is how things get done, and everyone learns and values much more co-operative behaviour.

At this point our apologist will still insist that even if we have a wide range of capacities, without externally imposed incentives like money wages, individuals will ‘naturally’ gravitate to doing pleasant or interesting tasks and to avoid unpleasant ones. If you ask most people would they rather do something they enjoy than something they don’t, we can probably guess the answer. But dirty work is not necessarily unenjoyable. Many people in the UK and elsewhere do dirty jobs for low wages. It is also the case that all actions have consequences. And those consequences may in themselves be pleasant or unpleasant. Very often actions we find pleasant to do have unpleasant consequences that we want to avoid and vice versa. Humans are not robots, but conscious beings that can estimate consequences and judge how they act on that basis.

Psychological needs

According to research in social psychology, humans have three psychological needs which motivate us strongly to act. We have a need for ‘relatedness’ with our fellows, a need for autonomy and a need to obtain mastery over our environment.

Relatedness: Human beings have never lived isolated lives. We are social creatures and we seek to act and live our lives in collaboration with others. Moreover, we commit ourselves to looking after those we identify and bond with. In capitalist society where the property-based employer-employee relationship divides us economically and forces us to compete, we do not go to work to provide for society in general, but for a wage in order to support ourselves and our families. Our ability to expend time and resources to care for others outside our narrow circle of family and friends is necessarily limited, and if it cuts into the time available for employment, comes at a cost to ourselves. In a socialist society of common ownership and free access, productive activity is not carried on directly to meet our own needs. Our needs are met freely, and we freely give our time to meet the needs of the community of which we are a part. In such a society the circle of those we act for and identify with widens dramatically. And because we have free access to the things we need, the time we give to others never affects our entitlement.

Autonomy: We are motivated to seek relatedness, but we are also motivated to seek personal autonomy, the ability within society to freely make our own choices and decisions. Autonomy is different from ‘independence’ which is a powerful buzz-word in capitalist apologetics. ‘Independence’ has to do with not relying on others. This means that autonomy, the freedom to choose, is compatible with our human need for relatedness, but independence is not. Although capitalist ideology often likes to deny it, our lives are wholly dependent on others, from our first breath to our last. Human beings as we know from experience have a capacity to dominate others. But we also have a powerful drive: a capacity to resist domination. We do not feel comfortable when others exercise power over our lives. People can only dominate us, however, if our society is organised in ways that allow some individuals to stand in the way of our access to the means of life, as occurs in capitalism’s wages system. Dominance hierarchies of this kind limit our freedom and control. A voluntarist society like socialism which is organised without a dominance hierarchy allows us much more autonomy (freedom) and relatedness.

Mastery: Human beings in general are strongly motivated to seek mastery. It may be that we want to become a better guitarist, to produce better carpentry joints, to write better poetry, to bake fancier breads, to become a better astronomer, to invent new technologies. Our drive to achieve mastery in our skills and knowledge often provides good illustrations of the activity/consequence relation discussed earlier. In order to achieve mastery of the guitar for instance, many people are prepared to put themselves through hundreds of hours of a monotonous and often frustrating learning process while painfully developing the calluses on their fingertips which allow them to play their chosen instrument. Satisfaction may be the end goal of our activity, but it may not at all be a feature of the activity itself.

Extrinsic motivators like money tend to suppress our intrinsic motivations for relatedness, autonomy and mastery. In a voluntaristic socialist society without dependence on an employer, we become free to make our own decisions about how we act and how we develop our skills. Without the blinkers of the wages system, which subordinates our actions to a narrow self-interest, we develop a much broader concept of our mutual interdependence. To the extent that some work, therefore, remains ‘dirty’, our much-extended sociability and a shared identity allows us to find value and meaning in contributing to the communal process of meeting our collective needs. And because we have much extended choice, there is also much we can do to eliminate ‘dirty’ work altogether or to make it more attractive.

Questions to ask

1. Is the ‘dirty’ activity necessary? Maybe we are happy to live with the consequences of not doing it. The consequences of certain mining activities for precious jewels, for instance, we might choose to live without.

2. If we can’t live with the consequences, is the work really that unpleasant? We often exaggerate how unpleasant some work is. Many people happily do work that others find ‘dirty’. The dirtiness of ‘dirty’ work is often an exaggerated response to a society that identifies ‘cleanliness’ with status so that we respond to this kind of work with exaggerated disgust. Some people find pleasure in hard physical work, even if it is in ‘dirty’ conditions.

3. If we cannot live with the consequences of not doing the work, and the work is genuinely unpleasant, can we do it a different way? In a socialist society, providing for human need means looking after ourselves in all our roles including that of producers.

3a) Can we make the work ‘cleaner’? A significant amount of ‘dirty work’ in capitalism is only dirty because it is more profitable to organise it that way than to clean it up.

3b) Can we mechanise the work, wholly or partly?

3c) Can we make it pleasanter, by providing, for instance, a better environment, better tools or better protective equipment?

3d) Can we share ‘dirty work’ around more, so that no one does it as a full-time occupation unless they want to?

3e) Can we make the task more sociable, obtaining satisfaction through working together as part of a self-managing team for a common social goal.

3f) Can we find resources and means of having fun while doing it? This may seem like a flippant suggestion, but, if so, ask yourself why? Human beings are a playful species. Under capitalism’s system of employment, time and productivity mean money for the capitalist, so we are taught to be serious in our jobs, to work hard, and to keep our heads down. In socialism, we decide how to balance the effort or unpleasantness of production against how much we think we need.

3g) Can we make the work creative or instructive so that those doing it can advance their knowledge and skills?

Capitalism or socialism?

So, what conclusions have we drawn in this series of articles? We have argued that capitalism is a system based on the employer/employee property relationship which isolates individuals economically from one another and forces them to compete at all levels of society, and that competition frequently spills over into all kinds of conflict, from domestic disputes to gigantic, mechanised world wars. It is the source of poverty, climate crisis, pollution and loss of species diversity.

Socialism, by contrast, is a system of free access, free association and common ownership of the means of production by the whole of society. It extinguishes the profit motive and wasteful competition, undercuts the private ownership of capital and releases a vast amount of labour power tied up, for instance, in the management of capitalism’s monetary system. It undercuts the motivation for greedy behaviour, turns work into productive activity, and laziness into leisure. It also eliminates the need for extrinsic incentives such as money and provides genuinely human motivations like relatedness, autonomy and mastery.

Hud.

Proper Gander: Realistically altruistically (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage has clocked up 32 series of ‘witty, irreverent’ conversations on science-related subjects, helmed by physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince. A recent edition asked ‘How selfish are we really?’, although the panellists focused on the flipside of selfishness: altruism, discussing the notion through the frameworks of psychology and evolutionary biology. Psychologist Matti Wilks and comedian Jo Brand give our usual definition of altruism as someone making an effort to be kind to another person with no expectation of anything in return.

Steve Jones, a professor of genetics, defines it in a more Darwinian way as an act which reduces someone’s fitness to survive (by using their time and energy on something they don’t directly gain from) and which increases someone else’s fitness. Superficially, it could seem counter-intuitive to do this, but as Steve clarifies, our genes will spread if we benefit our group overall, and our brains are wired to get a positive feeling when we behave in a nice way. In day-to-day life we don’t tend to think about altruism like this, and run with a general inclination to be helpful with a background assumption of ‘reciprocal altruism’, that if we act altruistically towards someone, then in future they will act similarly.

The panel ponders the extent to which this exists across the animal kingdom, particularly among our distant relatives. Steve says chimps engage in reciprocal altruism by picking lice off each other, although they also fight more than homo sapiens, which is why we’ve had the evolutionary advantage. Our ancestors went from living and collaborating in extended families to larger groups, and he adds that reciprocal altruism was later embedded by religions which have ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ among their principles, with problems arising because as he says wryly, religions hate each other. He mentions that the structure of The Bible and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species are ‘remarkably similar’, both starting with describing origins and ending with ‘mysterious stuff which you don’t understand’.

Psychologists have aimed to explain altruism through research into our views and behaviour. Matti refers to studies which found that people are prone to empathise with and be altruistic to those they feel akin to, such as Americans giving money to victims of the California wildfires rather than to people in need elsewhere. Children have been understood to also be ‘parochial’ in their ethical outlook, although Matti’s own research has shown they can be more likely than adults to say we should help people in faraway places. This may be because they haven’t yet been socialised to see some people as ‘other’.

The programme doesn’t consider how the type of society we live in shapes relations between people and therefore how we behave altruistically, although it gives numerous examples of this happening. There is the ‘identifiable victim effect’, shown in tests when people gave more money to a charity which used a picture of one person in need than when a picture of several people was shown. While this ostensibly demonstrates that we find it easier to be empathetic and altruistic to individuals rather than groups, the effect depends on there being a context of scarcity and charity, and possibly notions of ‘otherness’ too. Any conclusions drawn about altruism in these studies only apply to this societal situation, rather than necessarily being basic truths of what it is to be human. Further research has found that we’re less altruistic towards large groups, and this could also be socially conditioned. When Matti is asked how altruism expands from small groups (where its benefits are most obvious) to bigger ones, she replies that psychology hasn’t done a good job of illuminating this. To give a socialist perspective not explored in the programme, perhaps wide-scale altruism happens when people see through the divisions between groups which capitalism encourages and recognise our common humanity. This may also explain something else which Matti says psychologists haven’t been able to sufficiently account for: ‘extraordinary’ altruists, those who are exceptionally altruistic to strangers without expectations of reciprocity, such as kidney donors.

Steve cites blood donation as a familiar example of a ‘purely’ altruistic act, at least in the UK, where the only payment the donor receives is a cup of tea and a biscuit. In America, people receive money for their blood, and commodifying the process at this point has meant that to minimise additional costs to profit-hungry healthcare companies, inadequate checks have been done to avoid infected blood being passed on. Matti says that elsewhere, introducing payments to donors has led to a reduction in people coming forward, as the ‘intrinsic motivation’ for doing so had gone when it became monetised.

Economic considerations with altruism are also acknowledged by Matti when she says that it’s a ‘position of privilege’ to be altruistic, meaning that people often can’t afford to give to others if they lack enough goods themselves. This isn’t a blanket rule, though, as levels of trust and compassion in a group affect the extent that altruism is the norm. To try and measure how much altruism there is, researchers have compared which groups have more or less expansive ‘moral circles’, which contain things considered to have moral concern. Trying to quantify these qualities is ‘not as pure a metric’ as comparing countries on their GDP, as Matti says. Asked which country is the most altruistic, Steve jokes that it might be Norway because there’s nothing else to do there.

Steve’s contributions from the perspective of evolutionary biology tell us that we’re primed to act in an altruistic way because this has been evolutionarily advantageous. Some sort of altruism is essential for us to be able to live in groups, especially harmoniously. How altruism is manifested, and how psychology attempts to explain it, are moulded by society’s structures. In capitalism, we are conditioned to view some groups as ‘other’, and behaving altruistically happens through the constraints which a market-driven, divisive society imposes.

Mike Foster

How We Live and How We Might Live - Part 6 (2025)

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

'Socialism will never work. They [socialists] always forget about human nature!’

Playing the ‘human nature’ card is one of the most common attempts to short-circuit discussion about the viability of socialism. Those who lay it are generally coy about saying what exactly they mean by this phrase. How does ‘human nature’ function? How is it expressed? What – if anything – triggers it? When challenged on these issues, critics generally become vague or inarticulate or wave their hands about a good deal. If pressed further, many of them come up with a vision of human beings as pre-programmed automatons. Others, less reductive, picture us as biological pressure cookers that periodically overheat. Others still, shake their heads and speak of moral degeneracy or believe in something akin to magic or original sin. When, however, they are asked to describe what they believe to be the concrete manifestations of ‘human nature’ they perk up. They become suddenly explicit – and very much more concise. Human beings, they say, are greedy, lazy and violent. And that pretty much settles the matter. ‘Next question.’

Human beings are not born as blank slates. We do have a specific ‘nature’, unique to us, and this has consequences when we interact with the environment. We are a social species, so we have a biological need for human contact and association. It is why we live in communities and have economies. We have autonomic reflexes which protect us from harm. We involuntarily fixate our attention on perceived threats, for instance. Similarly, our nervous systems will remove our bodies pretty sharpish from accidental contact with extreme heat – all without consulting our brains or waiting for us to decide how to act. These reactions seem hard-wired into us, yet even they can be overcome by our conscious awareness or social learning.

Biological mechanisms are complex and subject to ongoing debate among scientists, so few of us are qualified to pronounce upon them. What we can do, however, is to leave ‘human nature’ to one side and turn our attention to something much more graspable: human behaviour. When discussing socialist society, it is human behaviour and the external conditions that influence it that tell us what we need to know. We know, for instance, that, in the scientific jargon, our human behaviour is ‘plastic’: that is, it is extremely variable and adapts itself to different environments, physical and social.

The primary goals of humanity: obtaining food, clothing, and shelter; and finding ways to relax or engage socially with others, are necessary to our survival. They do not change with place or time. The way we organise ourselves to obtain these goals, however, varies considerably from society to society. So, while these goals remain the same, the way we have to act to meet them changes according to the nature of our social environment. The organisation of society is like a maze, and different mazes require us to take different routes to arrive at the same goal. Yet not all of our goals are universal. Some arise out of the particular way a society is organised and are specific to it. The need to accumulate capital, for instance, is an essential goal of capitalism, though one not found in other societies.

Apart from autonomic reflexes and a few other neurological mechanisms, human actions are always purposeful. If a certain course of action fails to deliver our goals, then it will cease to motivate us and lose its value. In this way, changes in forms of social organisation bring with them changes in attitude and values. So, when socialists argue that human beings would think and act differently in a socialist society, they are not imagining humanity has undergone a mysterious change of heart or that some unlikely alteration has taken place in ‘human nature’, but only that people have made a practical adaptation to changed circumstances.

Capitalist apologists who claim that human beings are intrinsically greedy, lazy and violent rarely make much effort to justify their assertions. These claims though are useful. By turning them on their heads, we can use them to explore how a socialist society of common ownership and free access would function and, by comparing it with capitalism, throw light on the functioning of both societies. Last month we made a start by looking at greed. We can now take that forward.

What about the greedy person?

Human lives are mutually dependent. We live in dwellings, eat food, walk pavements, wear clothes, use tools made by hands other than our own. Almost everything we do is made possible by other people’s labour. Yet our direct awareness of this social dependence is obscured by the way capitalism reduces our relationships to the impersonal and seemingly objective business of monetary exchange. In capitalist society the effects of the employer/employee property system ripple out among us, influencing everything we experience and everything we do. Individuals, families and groups locked into their property bubbles are economically isolated from one another and forced to compete on multiple levels. Capitalism’s system of economic isolation divides us, breaks our sense of connection and removes the safety net of communal support. It leaves us insecure. Economic isolation and insecurity together lead us to prioritise our own needs in ways that are careless of the needs of others. The system makes us greedy.

For businesses to survive in a competitive capitalist marketplace they must constantly outguess and outperform one another. Market competition demands ruthlessness, and it ‘rewards’ greed. Competition between businesses for the money in consumers’ pockets results in psychologically sophisticated marketing and advertising campaigns which impose a relentless pressure upon us to buy and consume. As communities break up and human connection dissolves further into the market scrum, an insatiable inner emptiness opens up inside us which we try helplessly to fill with more and more purchases. Greed becomes social, a way of life.

When we think of greedy people, it is often those with an abundance of wealth that we call to mind. And research in social psychology confirms the validity of this perception. Despite all the pressures of capitalism, people with little wealth often find ways of being remarkably generous, a quality rarely included in the list of attributes drawn up by those who promote the idea of ‘human nature’.

A good place to find a capitalist (or wannabe capitalist) in all his unabashed glory is in the world of neoliberal or so-called ‘libertarian’ ideologues. These folk (predominantly male) can be found hovering around the websites of capitalist think tanks like The Mises or Cato Institutes in the US or the Adam Smith Institute in the UK. They will tell you unapologetically that what they want out of life is a 20-bedroom mansion and a luxury ocean-going yacht. (It is nearly always a mansion and a yacht – visible capitalist icons of wealth and status.) They like to ask, mirthfully, how in a society without private property or money anyone would prevent them from simply taking these things for themselves? We could tell them that nobody needs to and that the social relations of a socialist society would do the job for us. We could tell them, but they would be unlikely to listen.

A capitalist society puts no obstacles in the way of anyone who wishes to live in a 20-room mansion – on the sole condition, of course, that they have sufficient wealth to pay for it. In capitalism a poor person can be greedy, just like a rich person, but they have no chance of being greedy on quite such a grand scale. So, let’s for now grant some wealth to our wannabe advocate of greed. And let’s watch as, in a capitalist society and in the full expression of his ambition, he occupies his 20-bedroom mansion. Once installed he immediately uses his wealth to employ others who, lacking any other means of support, must sell their labour power wherever they can. In return for a wage they will work under his orders and act in his interests, maintaining his property, cooking, cleaning, shopping for him, and attending to his every whim in satisfaction of his desire for luxury living.

Who will clean the 20-bedroom mansion?

Now change the social scenery and consider the same individual acting with the same greedy intent in a society of common ownership and free access. In this scenario the capitalist employer/employee property system is now only a historical memory. Our greedy person requires no exclusive wealth to obtain their property, and indeed, they have none. Their aim, though, as before, is to live a luxurious lifestyle in a 20-bedroom mansion. As promised, we will not apply any force to try to stop them.

Almost immediately they notice a difficulty. Their 20-bedroom mansion is rather large with high ceilings and elaborate mouldings and with corners where dust can settle. It requires a great deal of cleaning and tidying and maintenance. So who will do this for them? With all those around them now having open access to what they need, they are genuinely free to contribute their labour only as they choose. ‘Self-interest’ has now given way to personal autonomy. If others are to tend to the greedy person’s needs, they must do so voluntarily. Yet who will volunteer their labour to pander to his or her whims and desires? They no longer possess personal wealth, neither the power, nor the mystique of power, nor the status that goes with it. Without any of these things, they are now a free person with a 20-bedroom-sized headache.

If they cling to their desire for their mansion, it seems that they now have two options. They must spend inordinate amounts of their time performing housework, doing shopping and maintaining their property, or they must live in squalor. Neither of these options we can assume add up to their conception of luxurious living. Nor will their occupancy of a large property bring them new power or status or admiration. Quite the reverse. They may well find that their greedy, and now frankly eccentric, behaviour will win them nothing but laughter and social opprobrium. The same can be said of any other exceptional or ‘greedy’ demands they might wish to make, like wanting to possess several private residences. Perhaps they will still dream of possessing a Jeff Bezos-style ocean-going yacht. Or maybe they will begin to realise that no-one is going to donate their labour to build, crew, maintain and fuel it. Will such a society even build yachts of this kind?

Not an expression of biological programming

Greedy behaviour is not simply a direct expression of biological programming called ‘human nature’. It emerges when the satisfaction of fundamental human needs is thwarted by external conditions. In capitalism, those conditions take the form of economic isolation imposed by the employer/employee property system. When that economic isolation and the insecurity it creates are eliminated and replaced by a system of common ownership, free association and free access the motivation for the kind of greedy behaviour that could endanger the stability of the system, vanishes into thin air.

‘Human nature’-type objections to socialism are almost always based on a poorly conceived notion of what socialism is. More often than not the confusion arises because the critic is projecting onto a socialist society many of the limiting features of capitalism. This may tell us something about our current world, but it tells us nothing about its socialist replacement.

Next month we will continue to explore the nature of socialist relations and address a number of questions that they inevitably throw up.

Hud.

Cash or cachet? (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1860s, William James, one of the founding fathers of psychology, declared that ‘the most deep-seated need in human nature is to be appreciated’. Of course, ideas about ‘human nature’ are many and varied and socialists would argue that there is actually no fixed human nature but simply ‘human behaviour’, which is highly flexible and varies enormously from place to place, person to person and time to time according to the circumstances in which human beings find themselves and the pressures and influences upon them. But whether we call it ‘human nature’ or anything else, there can be little doubt that human beings are, as William James observed, prone to caring deeply about their standing in the eyes of others, about what a recent series of BBC radio programmes called Status.

Ultra-social

The author and journalist, Carl Honoré, who presented the ‘Status’ programmes, traced this tendency to the fact that humans are a highly cooperative species (‘ultra-social’, it is often called) who, had they not been ‘wired’ to cooperate, could not have survived the various different stages of social development they have been through. He pointed in particular to the most long-lived of these stages, the hunter-gatherer one, where survival was based on close collaboration among members of the group in which they lived and where those who excelled at bringing back food to be shared by the tribe were those who would earn the most prestige or ‘status’. This, he went on, was the ultimate reward and, as a driving force, has been fundamental to all the various different forms of human society that followed. So, despite the fact that those societies – and in particular the current one, capitalism – have laid ever-increasing emphasis on competition, this has not prevented cooperation continuing alongside it and at the same time, without which in fact we could not carry on living and working together. And a crucial reason for that, according to Carl Honoré, is that we are built to care intensely about what other people think of us – even if we may not openly admit it. In fact, it is one of the key experiences creating in us feelings of what we know as ‘happiness’.

Of course, modern capitalist society, with its winner-take-all mindset, often frustrates this natural tendency to contribute to the wellbeing of others and the community and the welcome esteem and appreciation it generates for us. This was something emphasised by the programme’s presenter, when he referred to ‘the economic insecurity baked into global capitalism’ as a significant factor preventing us from fulfilling our role as social animals and preventing us from creating ‘relationships and communities that make everyone feel valued’. In capitalism we focus on making a living for ourselves, because we need to, often to the detriment of working together with others, of ‘helping the tribe’ and achieving the satisfaction that creates. Not of course that we never experience such satisfaction. Our natural ‘ultra-social’ urge to help and to be of use to our fellow humans manifests itself in all manner of small ways in our lives more or less every day, helping to offset the ‘zero-sum’ experience that capitalism tends to make of life.

Seeking happiness

In the last of his five programmes, Carl Honoré, called for ‘a political earthquake to fix an economic system that denies basic dignity to so many’ and the need ‘to build a world where everyone thrives’. These ideas sound very much like what the Socialist Party has advocated and campaigned for throughout the 120 years of its existence. He further stated that ‘the first step to settle a problem is to lay it out on the table’ and that too is precisely what we have never stopped trying to do during that period. But it is of course up to workers as a whole, including Carl Honoré, to break free from the current system, to grasp the nettle of that problem and to take the necessary democratic political action to solve it. What is certain – and emerges clearly from what the presenter lays out – is that the natural human tendency to cooperate will be a perfect instrument for the establishment and operation of a moneyless, wageless society of voluntary work and free access based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. In such a society our ‘craving for status’, our desire for the approbation of others, will have full scope for satisfaction, contributing both to the wellbeing of our fellow human beings and to our own personal happiness.

Howard Moss

Letter: Food and sex, then and now (2001)

Letter to the Editors from the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food and sex, then and now

Dear Editors,

I welcome your discussion of neo-Darwinism/evolutionary psychology. Your Paul Bennett is fairer than Adam Buick who slightly misrepresents the idea by implying that it says only competition is natural. Nature is not “red in tooth and claw”. It is both competitive and co-operative.

As male individuals we compete to form the peck order which reduces fighting, and gives the winner access to the most desirable females. We then co-operate as a group to defend our food-producing territory. We then compete with neighbouring groups to enlarge our territories making food collection easier. (In our anonymous society we agree to decide the peck order by how much money we have-conspicuous consumption. The bigger the car, the better the girl. And the bigger the population, the harder we have to compete. Your Andrew Westley showed a good understanding of the significance of status, i. e., peck order).

Competition is as necessary as co-operation. We share within the group and compete with outsiders. By over-emphasizing co-operation the SPGB is less persuasive when everyone can see the competitive reality, as well as the co-operation.

Richard Hunt, 

Oxford

Reply: 

If we were birds, then what you write might make some sense, but we’re not. We’re humans, and one of the distinguishing features of humans, compared with all other animals, is the virtual absence of the sort of innate behaviour patterns that have been observed in birds. As humans, our behaviour is not innate but acquired from the society in which we are brought up in and live, and from its culture. We have no innate “territorial imperative”, to take up a term coined by Robert Ardrey in his notorious 1966 book of that title. We can be competitive or co-operative or, at different times, both; that depends on the social conditions.

If you want to argue that what is valid for birds is therefore automatically valid for humans, you’ll have to do a lot more than merely assert it. You’ll have to show why, and how, this is so, but no serious student of anthropology shares your views. Ardrey was a Hollywood scriptwriter; Konrad Lorenz an expert in animal not human behaviour; Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, was also an expert on bird behaviour; while EO Wilson, founder of “sociobiology”, specialised in ants. Their views on human behaviour are worth no more than the man (or woman) propping up the bar next to us. But here’s what the anthropologist, MF Ashley Montagu, wrote in reply to Ardrey and Lorenz:

“The notable thing about human behaviour is that it is learned. Everything a human being does as such he has had 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” (in Man and Aggression, edited by MF Ashley Montagu, OUP, 1968, p. xii, his emphasis).

Even on your own terms, your argument is absurd. Where do you produce your food? Where is your food-producing territory? Today, under modern technical conditions of production, all production is social; all the things we consume, including food, is produced as the collective effort of producers all over the world. Just think, next time you have a meal, where the food you’re eating is likely to have come from, and where the machinery, fertilisers and means of storage and transport to grow it and get it to your table would have come from. Today, for humanity, “our food-producing territory” is virtually the whole world. It’s certainly not the areas where we live, or even the national-state we live under. And most people do their “food collection” at the local supermarket, hardly a place, we would have thought, for you to play out your fantasies of being an alpha male.

Maybe, at one time, our remote hominid ancestors did live like you suggest (though we doubt that the relations between the sexes would have been as crude as you make out, and from what we know from the Stone Age societies that survived into historical times marriages were arranged between reciprocal clans). But that would have been then, not now. Today, even under capitalism, things are vastly different, and are changing. Now, many more women go out to work than ever before and so don’t need to be as dependent on men for a meal ticket. In fact, in Britain, more than half the employed working class are women. All this is already affecting relations between the sexes.

Things will change even more in a socialist society, when every single man, woman and child will have free access as of right to the things they need to live and enjoy life. In other words, no woman will be dependent on any man. We say it is perfectly possible for such a state of affairs to exist because how we humans behave depends on the social conditions we are brought up in, not on our genetic make-up. Humans can live like you say they did, and presumably think they should, but they can-and have-lived in other ways, and could adapt to the conditions of socialist society. Biologically-inherited brains capable of versatile and flexible behaviour and so being able to adapt to different environments, that’s “human nature”, and it’s no barrier to socialism.

The “evolutionary psychologists” you admire have a slogan “our modern skulls house a stone age mind”. You seem to be in the same position, but don’t worry, it’s not innate but something you acquired, probably from too much uncritical reading of Ardrey, Lorenz and Desmond Morris. 

Editors.

Hunting, Gathering and Co-operating (2001)

From the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is a change in the basis of society from one of minority class ownership to one of common ownership against human nature?

Are human beings naturally lazy, aggressive, hostile to one another? Or are we by nature friendly and co-operative, ready to help others when they are in trouble and share what we have with them? Or alternatively, does it make little or no sense to say that we are anything very specific “by nature”, since the society and culture we live in play a great part in determining how we behave? Questions like these have been around for centuries, and they are important for the socialist case, for if people are bound to behave aggressively and take more than their fair share, then a socialist society, based on equality and co-operation, is presumably impossible.

The questions we raised above are part of the debate on human nature. One recent academic contribution to these issues is the theory of evolutionary psychology, which attempts to apply Darwin’s way of explaining biological evolution to human behaviour and psychology. Darwin’s theory of natural selection explains how organisms change by adapting to their environment and so becoming more fitted to survive and reproduce. Evolutionary psychology uses the same kinds of arguments in attempting to account for human behaviour and the nature of the human mind which underlies this behaviour. In the words of leading evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works:

“The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world. The modules’ basic logic is specified by our genetic program. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve the problems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history.”

This, to take one of Pinker’s own examples, according to evolutionary psychology our disgust at unpleasant food is not due to any innate dislike for particular tastes. Rather, it would be an adaptation that emerged as a safety device: we don’t eat things unless we are pretty sure that they are unlikely to harm us; thus we stand a good chance of avoiding foodstuffs that may well be poisonous—an invaluable trait in a world where humans relied on hunting and gathering but were surrounded by masses of potentially toxic plants and animals.

Hunting and gathering (sometimes known as foraging) is the way that humans lived for 90 percent of our species’ time on earth. People lived in smallish tribes, moving frequently from place to place, gathering wild plants and hunting animals. Money did not exist, nor did any form of government, and there was no distinction between rich and poor. The rise of settled agriculture about ten thousand years ago put an end to hunting-gathering communities in most parts of the world, though some are still just about surviving nowadays.

A lot would seem to rest, then, if the evolutionary psychologists are right, on the nature of hunting-gathering society: if it was essentially peaceful and based on sharing, then the human brain and mind would have evolved to fit in with a peaceful way of doing things, whereas if hunter-gatherers were often violent, then (on the evolutionary psychologists’ view, anyway) our minds are adapted to survive in a violent world. Let’s quote Pinker again, as he makes the political issues here quite explicit:

“One of the fondest beliefs of many intellectuals is that there are cultures out there where everybody shares freely. Marx and Engels thought that preliterate peoples represented a first stage in the evolution of civilization called primitive communism, whose maxim was ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ . . .

Foraging peoples, to be sure, really do share with non-relatives, but not out of indiscriminate largesse or a commitment to socialist principles. The data from anthropology show that sharing is driven by cost-benefit analyses and a careful mental ledger for reciprocation. People share when it would be suicidal not to . . . warfare itself is a major fact of life for foraging tribes. Many intellectuals believe that primitive warfare is rare, mild and ritualized, or at least was so until the noble savages were contaminated by contact with Westerners. But this is romantic nonsense. War has always been hell.”

Most work in evolutionary psychology takes a similar view, that hunting-gathering society was built around—or at least marked by—power and aggression, and that therefore the human mind has evolved along lines designed to enable us to cope with power and aggression.

More recently, however, an alternative has begun to emerge within evolutionary psychology itself. Andrew Whiten of St Andrews University has argued that egalitarianism, sharing and lack of domination were the most prominent features in hunter-gatherer societies, and that it is this is that lies behind human psychological evolution. In papers such as “The evolution of deep social mind in humans” and “Egalitarianism and Machiavellian intelligence in human evolution” (the latter co-written with David Erdal) he has presented a very different picture from that offered by most evolutionary psychologists. At a recent conference in Edinburgh, Whiten argued that our ancestors evolved through sharing and co-operation in line with socialist ideals, a claim that was even noticed in the press (Times, 19 August). Let’s look a little more closely at his ideas.

Examination of a wide range of studies of present-day hunter-gatherers shows that they share food, especially meat, and that this sharing takes place even when food is scarce. This sharing, Erdal and Whiten argue, occurs because it reduces the risk for all individuals, enabling them to get by on unlucky days, secure in the knowledge that some time soon they are likely to be successful in their own hunting. Sharing means that nobody has priority of access to food, and this ties in with the fact that hunter-gatherer societies lack any kind of dominance or rank. There are no permanent leaders, and anyone who has ambitions for dominance is ridiculed or ostracised. Co-operation extends beyond food-sharing and countering would-be chiefs, as it also involves co-ordination, such as the organisation of hunting expeditions and care for the sick.

Non-human primates (chimps and gorillas) do have dominance hierarchies, so the human capacity for egalitarianism is an evolutionary innovation. According to Whiten possibly people who put time and effort into trying to dominate others found they had less time to devote to foraging and enjoyable leisure pursuits, so the would-be leaders discovered that they were living less well than their more co-operative colleagues. This last part is speculative, but it does help to emphasise the point that humans are different from our closest non-human relatives, so that it is quite invalid to argue that whatever holds for chimps must be valid for people too.

So what does Whiten’s work have to say about the prospects for socialism? The answer is: not necessarily very much. It would be nice if we could conclude that human characteristics, as they have evolved over the millennia, have made us “naturally” egalitarian and co-operative. But what matters is not whether people are naturally like this or not. More important is whether our behaviour, influenced as it is not just by our evolutionary heritage but also by the social conditions we live in and our cultural response to these conditions, can fit in with the idea of a co-operative and egalitarian socialist society. Even under capitalism people often share and work together. Hunter-gatherer societies also show that people can live in a co-operative way, without bosses or governments. It might be nice to bolster this by claiming that humans’ long egalitarian heritage means that we are better adapted to sharing than to competing, but this extra, and more speculative, argument is not really essential.

We may conclude that humans are not condemned to be endlessly competitive or selfish, and that socialism is not contrary to human nature.

Paul Bennett