Work: Paid and unpaid (part 2) (2026)

From the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part 1 of this article last month considered how people react to work according to whether it is paid or unpaid and how hierarchised and authoritarian work structures are increasingly affecting their lives. This second part looks at the feasibility of attempts to ‘humanise’ work under the current system of production for profit and points to how such humanisation is only truly feasible in the context of a different social system.

Together with the intensification of the employment process previously discussed, in recent years there has also been considerable discussion about whether there might be more effective and efficient, and at the same time more humane, ways of organising work – even within the existing system of production for profit.

Hierarchy challenged

There are examples of companies instituting freer, less rigid work structures and even more ‘equal’ pay. One of the most striking instances has been the American ‘Valve’ video game company where the owner decided to establish a ‘flat’ non-directive structure based on the conviction that people work better and more efficiently when they’re relaxed and don’t feel they’re being surveilled and constantly judged. Another example is the financial services company Gravity Payments. Here the CEO decided to pay all his staff a minimum wage of $70,000, that being the amount he decided was necessary to live what he called ‘a normal life’. This compared with the previous average salary of $48,000. At the same time, he slashed his own salary of $1.1m to the same $70,000. Then a recent programme in the ‘Analysis’ series on BBC Radio 4 asking the question ‘Does Work Have To Be Miserable?’, included the boss of the Howorth Air Tech company in Salford explaining how he had moved strongly in the direction of putting resources into helping to bring out his employees’ latent talents and not simply regarding them as ‘factors of production’.

Other reactions to hierarchy and authoritarian work practices in capitalism have included a beneath-the-radar move among some workers away from the conventional jobs market – a rejection, partial at least, of the normally life-sapping existence of wage and salary work to lead what has been called ‘a low-desire life without gruelling competition’. Those who choose this path still do of course need to carry out some paid work and to participate in the buying and selling system, but what they are seeking is an existence that offers them more freedom and less stress. This kind of choice was recently highlighted in the BBC radio series ‘The Digital Human’ where the presenter, Aleks Krotosky, talked about how, unexpectedly, in China, a country she referred to as ‘the most competitive society on earth’, a good number of young people were managing to ‘opt out’ from full-time paid work and attempt to lead that ‘low-desire life’.

Reorganising capitalism?

The more radical view, such as espoused by the Socialist Party, that the nature of work can only be fundamentally altered by a new social system, also has advocates in a significant number of quarters. In a ‘Ted Talk’ from the University of Edinburgh given by Jade Saab in 2018 and called ‘A World Without Money’, the speaker includes a section entitled ‘Why and how we work will be different’. On social media too there are groups hosting similar discussions with names that speak for themselves, for example ‘Moneyless Society’, ‘World of Free Access’, and ‘A group around the world where we are all anti-capitalist’. This is matched in book publication by more than just a few writers proposing various different kinds of non-hierarchical work organisation.

Some of these proposals, when closely scrutinised, amount to suggestions for reorganising capitalism, which we would regard as utopian, since it would be impossible in reality for the capitalist system, given its profit-seeking basis, to implement them. We would agree with Anitra Nelson, in her book Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy, that ‘modified forms of money and markets … are bound to fail’ with the vast majority being ‘unable to enjoy the full benefits of their everyday work and have little say in how they live or work’. Her conclusion is that we cannot ‘tweak the system to overcome its weaknesses’.

Such flaws as pointed to by that writer are also to be found in otherwise perceptive books about work such as Daniel Susskind’s A World Without Work. Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond (2020) and Michael D. Yates’s Work, Work, Work. Labour, Alienation and Class Struggle (2022). But even if the conclusions of those writers fall short of advocating a completely different social order or of being convinced that this may be possible in the foreseeable future, they can still have a lot of powerfully relevant things to say about work and its meaning in human society. Susskind, for example, while in the end not venturing beyond the idea of buying and selling, describes work as ‘a source of meaning, purpose and direction in life with community recognition of that work rather than wages fulfilling the human longing for personal fulfilment and social interaction’. Yates, for his part, states: ‘Regarding work (…) we should strive for a society in which this word is no longer used except to describe the past. What we are, as human beings, is a species that can thoughtfully produce what is needed for survival and enjoyment (…) only cooperative and beneficial production, with substantive equality in all aspects of life’.

Work in a non-market society

But others go further in seeing as a practical possibility a society where work in exchange for payment would not need to take place at all – and this within the framework of a completely different social system than the one that dominates the world at present. Recent examples of this outlook are to be found in Matthew Holten’s book, Moneyless Society. The Next Economic Evolution, in Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work, and in Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass. These writers stress the downsides of employment for money with its imposition of a daily stretch of work, lack of variety, hierarchical organisation, and the potential precariousness of keeping your job. And they are generally keen to point to the fact that, in a future post-capitalist, non-market society, non-socially productive activity (e.g armaments, insurance, banking, sales promotion, taxation, legal contracts, etc) will disappear and all the work that takes place will have a useful and necessary function with no stigma attached to any of it.

As to specific details of how work could be organised in a non-monetary society and the nature it would take, it is probably Benanav who puts his finger on it most tellingly. In his final chapter, entitled ‘Necessity and Freedom’, he argues for ‘the abolition of private property and monetary exchange in favor of planned cooperation’, and ‘a world of fully capacitated individuals … in which every single person could look forward to developing their interests and abilities with full social support’ and which will be ‘the first time in their lives that they could enter truly voluntary agreements – without the gun to their heads of a pervasive material insecurity’. He goes on to say that ‘we would divide up responsibilities while taking into account individual aptitudes and proclivities’ with some tasks needing to be performed locally, but many capable of being ‘planned on a regional or global scale, using advanced computer technologies’. And finally: ‘The realm of freedom would be the one giving rise to all manner of dynamism: that is where human beings would invent new tools, instruments, and methods of accounting, as well as new games and gadgets, rapidly reallocating resources over time and space to suit changing human tastes (…). The world would then be composed of overlapping partial plans, with interrelated necessary and free activities, rather than a single central plan’.

Commentators such as these are clearly not talking here about strategies within capitalism for dealing with problems thrown up by that system, for example climate change or environmental degradation. They are not looking for more ‘sustainable’ ways for production, consumption and work to continue much as before, for ‘green deals’ or for ways of finding replacement work for those who lose their jobs through automation. They are talking rather about a society in which people will no longer have to do jobs they do not necessarily like (or may even hate) just for the money but will be able to do work they want to do and ideally enjoy doing. And for any ‘less popular’ jobs, there would be a focus on automation and the use of robotics to give assistance.

Above all one of the first things that will end in the kind of society being envisaged, which we would call socialism, is the link between work and consumption: what people will consume will not depend on the amount of work they do. Above all people will cooperate to do the work that makes society function and they will make decisions democratically – in workplaces, in their local communities, in their regions and, in some overarching cases, no doubt even globally. Above all there will no longer be top-down control by leaders, governments and bosses and no more money controlling people’s lives, wasting so much of our time and energy. There will be no useless toil, only useful work.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

The following books that were mentioned in the article have been previously reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard:

• Mar 2020: A World Without Work. Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind
• Feb 2021: Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav
• Oct 2022: Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson
• Jan 2023: Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holten
• Mar 2023: Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass
• Oct 2023: Work Work Work. Labor, Alienation and Class Struggle. By Michael D. Yates

Work: paid and unpaid – Part 1 (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of my working life was spent teaching in a university. I consider myself to have been reasonably well paid for the work I did. And the superannuation scheme I paid into has yielded a reasonable pension. The same applied to my workplace contemporaries, fellow wage-slaves who started and finished their careers at more or less the same time as me. But, if I look at them, they’ve not all had identical reactions to ending their paid employment.

‘Bored out of my skull’

Some of them have carried on with a particular aspect of the work they did before – their academic research – but independently. And even though they’re no longer paid for it, they seem reasonably content. Others have been less happy. They’ve found themselves at a loose end with no teaching or associated work, and see no point in carrying on with any research given that it’s no longer connected to a day job. They see working in isolated fashion as no longer affording them the recognition and approbation of their colleagues and of their wider academic community. I found an example of this when I ran into a former colleague some time ago, several months after he’d retired in his early 60s. I asked him how things were going. He seemed pretty miserable and replied: ‘I’m bored out of my skull’. He sounded and looked angry and frustrated. I didn’t know what to do other than wish him well.

Volunteering

So these are a couple of the kind of reactions that workers in what was my own line of work may have in response to no longer doing paid work. But there’s also a third category – those who, having finished their paid employment, feel they’ve been set free, and this has made them decide to involve themselves in activities which are usually unpaid and often quite different from the paid work they did. Sometimes it’s a continuation of things they devoted a certain amount of time and energy to in their spare time before, such as looking after family members, for example grandchildren, or involvement in political or social activity such as campaigning or charity work, or participation in a voluntary group of some kind. In my own case, for instance, I agreed to be recruited to a committee of volunteers who run my local Community Centre. Once there, I found that two of my former work colleagues, now retired like me, were also active there and in the community more widely. One of them was heavily involved in helping to organise a local food bank of the kind that has sprung up in increasing numbers in recent times. A common factor in this kind of activity is the obvious personal satisfaction people who engage in it derive from their new unpaid, ‘non-professional’ work. And it is of course a form of work, in that it involves expending mental or physical energy, even if many people wouldn’t necessarily think of it as such, since there’s no suggestion of any financial recompense from it. But, however they regard it, the motivation, rather, is the perception that they’re doing something useful, experiencing a sense of community, and also enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.

As well as this, two other activities have absorbed my own time and energies in a practical and satisfying way since retirement. The first has been increased activity in the trade union that, though retired from work, I’m still a member of. With the forbearance of my former employer, I’m still able to handle personal cases or pension matters for members, as I did when I was employed. And I have more time to do this than those colleagues who also volunteer for union work but still have paid jobs. The second has been playing an increased part in Socialist Party activity – helping to organise my local branch, giving talks, going to events to try and spread the socialist message, writing columns, articles and book reviews for this journal.

Hierarchical work

Some of the reviews have actually been of books on the subject of work in its various different aspects. This seems, in fact, to be an area in which there’s a good deal of interest at present – interest stimulated by the fact that, in recent times, say over the last 30-40 years, the face of employment has changed in a number of noteworthy ways. In particular, it has become increasingly what may be called ‘hierarchised’. The ‘flat structures’ in the workplace that were being talked about and to a certain extent practised in the 1960s and 70s and seen as the way of the future began to fall out of favour and to give way to more rigid, authoritarian line management systems, so that most workers effectively had someone ‘higher up’ breathing down their necks, assessing them, judging their work or productivity – and sometimes intimidating them.

I saw that in my own field of employment, where it was accompanied by the invention of various terms, such as ‘lean production’ or ‘agile working’, to try and give a benign, softening impression to a more rigid form of workplace organisation. Critics of this new form of work discipline gave it other names such as management by stress or managerial feudalism (or even managerial fascism). The way American mathematician and political activist Eric Schechter characterises it in his video ‘Only Revolution Can Save Life on Earth’ is brutally simple: ‘workplaces are dictatorships’. Certainly, in many cases, the process consists of workers’ performance being subjected to close surveillance, with their efficiency or productivity judged on a regular basis via performance targets, sometimes referred to as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). And this with the shadow of a possible ‘capability process’ hanging over them, which can potentially lead to dismissal.

An irony here of course is that the manager conducting the KPI operation is usually her or himself subject to the same process at the hands of the person who is their manager. It’s hard not to be reminded here of Oscar Wilde’s famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, where he writes: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it and degrades those over whom it is exercised’.

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone, authors of the book Wageless Life, are just as uncompromisingly critical. They describe work of whatever kind under capitalism as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’, describing it as ‘a war of profit against life on earth’, in which workers are denied the ability to control how they work and so suffer a disconnection that ‘separates them from the material conditions that allow humans to flourish’. Capitalism, they go on to say, fosters ‘the utter worship of paid work’ and in so doing ‘thrives on producing docile subjects who are alienated from their surroundings’. One of their conclusions is: ‘We live in a world sculpted by money but populated by the moneyless.’ Very much akin to this, if expressed in milder language, is Martin Luther King’s well-known maxim: ‘profit forces people to be more concerned with making a living than making a life.’ A similar more recent characterisation says: ‘the greatest prison has no bars, just a paycheck, a routine and weekends off’.

Not all ‘bullshit jobs’

While we would broadly endorse such an analysis, it is also necessary to point to the fact that not all paid work is equally dispiriting, unsatisfying and alienating. So while it’s surely true, for example, that, if they didn’t need a wage to survive, no man or woman would willingly choose to sit at the entrance to a supermarket all day looking at a screen to check if anyone is stealing or looks as though they might steal, at the same time there’s no doubt that some paid work, even if accompanied by conditions of insecurity or duress, can give significant pleasure or satisfaction to those who carry it out. And while that supermarket guard job is one of the many millions that exist across the planet in the system we live under (so-called ‘bullshit jobs’), constituting a colossal waste of talents, energies and resources, in some cases even the rigid and unforgiving employment practices already mentioned can be offset to an extent by an individual’s passionate interest in the work they are engaged in – maybe for example as a naturalist, a scientist, a computer programmer, or as a gardener or a builder.

It’s only fair to point out too that some challenges have arisen to the hierarchy and intensification of employment practice in recent years, and from some quarters there have also emerged striking (sometimes revolutionary) ideas and recommendations concerning work organisation. These are the areas that Part 2 of this article next month will discuss before going on to look at ways in which work might be organised in the different, non-coercive, moneyless production for need society that socialists campaign to see established.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone's 'Wageless Life. A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism' was reviewed in the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letter: Class and Ideology (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class and Ideology

You accused Harold Walsby of holding that the working class is "mentally inferior”. Challenged to support this you produce statements that the working class does not understand or accept Socialism. But in order to show that Walsby held them to be mentally inferior you have to show him saying or implying that some other group is mentally superior to it. You have failed to support your accusation.

You describe as "absurd” my statement that “in acceptance or rejection of Socialism there is no significant difference between workers and capitalists”. My evidence is that although the majority of capitalists do not accept Socialism, a tiny majority do accept it. Similarly with the workers. Although the overwhelming majority of workers do not accept it, a tiny minority do, and show this by belonging to the SPGB.

It will be more fruitful to try and get to the root of the difference between Walsby and the SP. It is not the case that the working class accepts Socialism and the capitalist class opposes it. Class position does not correspond with acceptance or rejection of Socialism, and is not coming to do so. What does determine it? The ideology of the person concerned. All of us begin life with the same ideology. Some of us move on to a more sophisticated one, some of those to a more sophisticated one still, and so on. The result is the existence of a number of ideological groups forming, very roughly, a pyramid. The SPGB is the political expression of an ideology very close to the top of the pyramid, an ideology, therefore, with a very small group attached to it.

If a person possessing this ideology hears the Socialist case, he will probably accept it. A person possessing any other ideology will reject the case; it does not "fit” his ideology. This is why, whenever an SP branch is started in a "new” town it usually reaches a size comparable with that of established branches and then stops growing; all the people of the appropriate ideology in that area have been "collected”. Over seventy years the SP has proven that it is impossible to get a majority of Socialists. Walsby’s theory explains why this is, and opens the way, through recognition of the ideological structure of present society, to solution of our main social problems.

Geo. W. Walford

London N1.

Reply:

You acknowledge that Walsby held that the majority of workers would never understand Socialism, but object to our identifying this with the view that they are “mentally inferior”; we must show what other group he compared them with, you say. From Walsby’s writings, let us take the original quotation used in our January article: “an established fact—namely, that the average human intelligence is on the decline”, followed by a sentence accusing the SPGB of vacillating over "whether the workers have or have not the intelligence to establish Socialism”. "Decline” can only mean that the workers at a given time are inferior to a previous generation.

In your own statements, comparisons implying superiority and inferiority are made repeatedly. For example, the “more sophisticated ideology” and the "more sophisticated one still” which "some of us”—but not "the overwhelming majority of workers”—hold. You kindly place the SPGB “close to the top of the pyramid”, with the mass of the workers a long way down below. We do not think you are handicapped by language here: it would be possible to speak of a different ideology and a still more different one, and to use another geometrical shape if that was all you meant.

You misrepresent our answer to you on workers and capitalists. We pointed out (a) that most workers have not heard the Socialist case at all, and (b) that something more than minimal exposure to it is required as grounds for saying they have heard it and reject it. You accept that workers and capitalists are separate classes, but treat it statically; what is not mentioned in any of your three letters, although it was the starting-point of the article you criticized, is the class struggle.

None of us disputes "the existence in society of a number of ideological groups”. Where do they come from? The socialist case is that they arc produced by the class structure of society. A person raised in poverty has different assumptions and attitudes from those of a luxuriously-nurtured person. Of course further experience affects his attitudes; but that also is derived from a class-divided society. A capitalist may, as you suggest, accept Socialism as a system of ideas. That does not make him any less a capitalist, obliged to put his material interests before the “more sophisticated ideology” he may have acquired. (There are exceptional cases.)

The founders of the SPGB knew from earlier experience that the task they undertook was likely to be a slow one; other people, then and since, have understood Socialism but been unwilling to work for it for precisely that reason. Your thesis that a Party branch soaks up "all the people of the appropriate ideology” in its area is quite fantastic. Our branches, whether in suburbs or cities, would be pleased to have a situation in which this was tested—it would mean everyone had heard and considered the SPGB.

The remedy offered by Walsby and his followers for social problems consists of domination over the masses by intellectuals. We give three quotations.

Thus, in basing his ideas of achieving a scientifically controlled society upon an unconsciously motivated assumption—the mass-rationality assumption—the scientific intellectual is wasting much of his political time and energy. It is this assumption (with its associated repressed material) which today largely befogs the minds of those scientists—and others—who are striving for a society in which sub-atomic energy is no longer used for the destruction of man, but for his benefit and well-being.

("Atoms and Ideology” by Harold Walsby, in The New Age of Atomics)

Is the great mass of mankind through its inherent incapacity for scientific thought and understanding, doomed to eternal suffering?. . Concomitant with the rational superiority of these politically more enlightened people goes their inevitable numerical inferiority. Yet, year in and year out, with admirable though blind optimism and appalling ignorance as to the nature and structure of political development, they go on, fighting among themselves and vainly appealing to the masses with the same arguments and upon the same subject-matter which was instrumental in their own 'conversion.

(Understanding the Mass Mind, by Richard Tatham)

No longer are we confined to announcements as to how people ought to think, or as to the attitude they must adopt if civilisation is to be saved . . . not until this relationship between the intellectual and the mass is understood and accepted—and who is to do this if not the intellectuals? — will it become possible to control the development of society.

(The Intellectual and the People)

That takes us back to Plato, and men cast in higher moulds.

Editors.

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.

The Myth of Management (1974)

From the February 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

'We are a happy team here, I treat my workers as human beings and they appreciate that’

Many managers in industry and commerce today, when pushed to explain their rôle, will define management very simply and starkly as: “Getting other people to do what we want them to.” Implicit in this is the idea that most people would not be doing the things managers want them to if they had a free choice. It is not difficult to understand why.

If you have ever had to get up at some unearthly hour of the morning, and journey to work simply to face the prospect of eight hours or more as the victim of an “efficient” system, you will know why. You have little control over what goes on, your time perspective is short, you are a passive instrument of production, you are dependent on those who have authority over you, and so on. Basically you are an adult being forced to behave as a child.

You might think that under these circumstances capitalist bosses and owners would have a difficult time persuading people to work for them, specially as the workers are not producing to fulfil sensible needs but just to supply markets. In one way you would be right; but capitalism has forceful ways of getting people to act against their best interests and produce wealth that will be accumulated to further ensnare workers in wage-slavery. For a start, working people under capitalism need wages to buy the necessities of life. In addition, advertizing implores and persuades everyone to buy more of this and that; with the result that every worker hopes to find a job that pays as much as possible and offers “advancement”, i.'e. the prospect of competing against other workers to somehow get more than they.

Research

Once a worker is engaged, how does capitalism ensure that it gets the maximum possible out of him? This is where management comes in. Capitalism, in order to produce and grow, has no alternative but to devote much attention to management to control workforces and persuade workers to take part in the corporate madness. On the surface it may look as if it has been successful: the majority of workers are persuaded most of the time to behave in a way that is profitable for the enterprise and to accept that managers have “the right” — as trained specialists — to control the machinery and the lives of those who work at it.

In developing the “craft” of management a great amount of effort has been expended, particularly in the universities; today no self-respecting university is without its Management Studies department. Here, students are trained and research is carried out to discover newer and more promising ways to achieve management’s end. It is enlightening to know that the Russians have been among other capitalist countries who have fallen over themselves to gain the latest information on management methods from the gurus at the universities in Britain and America.

Historically, the “Scientific Management” principles of F. W. Taylor in the early 1900s can be seen as among the first efforts by industrial capitalists to control workers otherwise than by force and the fear of dismissal. Essentially, these principles maintained that if firms selected their workers, trained them in the most efficient ways, and appeared to be rewarding them accordingly, the workers would behave in a way that was satisfactory to the management. (The wage-worker’s satisfaction would come from the supposition that he received high earnings.) This view of industrial man has become known as the “Rational-Economic” view and has given rise to work-study, personnel selection and systematic training techniques in industry.

What is a Human Being ?

It rapidly became apparent that this view was inadequate, and soon another factor in the industrial situation was named by researchers in the United States of America. It was discovered from the deservedly famous Hawthorne researches of Elton Mayo and others that there was a social factor to take into account in the workplace. Workers left to congregate did so in what were termed “informal groups”; in these they operated norms of behaviour and restricted production — not always in the best interests of the management and owners but in their own interests as workers. The management teaching which emanated from these researches became known as the “Human Relations” school, and was concerned to show that leadership at work was very important in order to get workers’ behaviour to coincide with the wishes of management.

This doctrine was very acceptable to capitalists, not only because of its timely appearance but because it seemed to fit in with Christian ethics and thereby reinforced management’s responsibility to control the enterprise. It has given rise to innumerable supervisory management courses, and the theatricals of treating workers as “real people” to give them motivation to produce for the benefit of the owners. In the immortal words of an unnamed industrial supervisor: “We are a happy team here, I treat my workers as human beings and they appreciate that.”

After the Second World War, in the developed capitalist countries there was a tremendous upsurge of study in the “social sciences” of psychology, sociology, social anthropology, political science, etc. To gain money for research in the USA, researchers removed the tainted word “social” and substituted “behavioral”. This name-change had the tempting implication of learning how to predict, control and manipulate the behaviour of human beings. Needless to say, plenty of money was then forthcoming to pursue these “sciences” and to feed resulting information to management so that it would be utilized to increase industrial stability and efficiency.

Inventing a Meaning

Management studies “discovered” what Marx had known long before: that man looked for meaning in his work, and the chance to develop and mature. Bureaucracies and other traditional forms of organization took away the likelihood of finding meaning except in the top echelons of the hierarchy. It was said also that bureaucracies produced immature behaviour and conflict among themselves because of the workings of internal politics and career structure. Therefore people were looking for their satisfaction outside the workplace and becoming apathetic and non-involved towards work. Management badly needed an ideology to cope with these problems. Lo and behold, it was produced in the guise of “Organization Development”.

“Organization Development” is the requirement for a firm to keep pace with technical and social changes inside and outside itself. It makes use of such trendy techniques as “participative management”, “job enrichment”, etc. What it means for management is seeking the commitment of the work-force by devising and designing jobs which offer people a challenge, and offer the worker more positive opportunities to “fulfil himself as an individual” at work. The supporting logic is that given these opportunities the individual will gain more satisfaction at work; his defences, brought into action to combat the immature manner in which he had to behave at work formerly, would be eroded — and consequently organizational effectiveness would be increased.

It is precisely this logic and ideology that is behind the much-publicized reorganization of production at Volvo in Sweden into teams of workers producing whole cars themselves, not on assembly lines but in what are termed “villages”. Volvo’s boss has been quoted as saying that if the experiment fails and output falls, the whole system can soon be re-transformed to the assembly line. So much for concern with “human satisfaction” !

Scientific Management was rape but Organization Development, with its techniques of “participation” and “enrichment”, is seduction. The end result is the same, a violated human being and society.

Why it will not Work

The Behavioural Science techniques have been and are being used by management to meet the continual difficulty of getting people to accept wage-slavery. It is the latest fad in a long line of panaceas for the problems of the capitalist system. We may take for granted that it will be as unsuccessful as all the other rearguard actions of capitalism and will not for long dupe workers into believing it is in their interests to acquiesce. The dilemma for management is that responsibility given to a person or group means a loss of managerial control. Therefore, management could not go far in creating true enrichment and participation without undermining its own control of the means of production. They will not do that.

All these attempts then have failed and will fail to deliver the goods. From the capitalists’ point of view, people remain “unmanageable” — but the capitalist class must go on seeking ways to manage, training people for leadership (and presumably followership).

It may appear that managers themselves have a vested interest in the continuance of capitalism because it gives apparent power and status. It should be remembered that they too are workers, anxious to be hired and liable to be fired. While perhaps lording-it over their “workforces”, they are themselves just as much aware of their own insecurity: they share the same problems. From that point of view the so-called leader is likely to be conscious that leadership is a myth.

Socialists do everything possible to destroy that myth and the necessity for people to be “managed”. The idea of management and leadership is an industrial as well as a political fallacy. In a Socialist society people will be able to decide democratically how labour is to be applied for the common good. The need for management is obsolete in such a society. No wages or status, but democratic decision-making and free access to goods and services. Who needs managers ?

D. G. Bishop

The trouble with gods (2008)

From the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those fortunate enough to live in relatively secularized societies should not underestimate global power of religion.

Gods do exist, in a certain sense (I use the word “gods” as a gender-neutral term that includes goddesses). Humans create them in their own image, though without being aware of doing so. The fact that gods are male or female in itself strongly suggests that they are creatures of the human imagination. But they infest the mind as powerful, capricious and mysterious beings who demand endless worship and praise, reverence and obedience, devotion and propitiatory sacrifice. The gods in the head of the believer thwart the development of confidence, self-respect, rational enquiry and independent judgment.

In this way the idea of domination and submission is imprinted in the psyche as a model for relationships between beings. That model is then readily applied to social relationships – to the relationship between man and woman, master and slave, and so on. The Moroccan scholar Fatna A. Sabbah has shown how this works in the case of Islam in her brilliant (pseudonymous) study Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (Pergamon Press, 1984), but her analysis applies equally well to the psychology of “God-fearing” Jews and Christians.

The imaginary world of the divine, in turn, draws its inspiration from the real world of human power structures. God is “king of the universe”, the archangels and angels are his ministers and officials, and the devil has the job of running the Gulag.  

My argument is that it is above all these psychological effects, and not specific religious dogmas and practices, which make god worship a bulwark of class society. That, surely, from the socialist point of view is the main trouble with gods.

Objections

It may be objected that some religious beliefs do not seem compatible with the division of society into classes. An obvious example is the idea that “we are all equal in the eyes of God.” Beliefs of this kind have, indeed, inspired peasant uprisings. “When Adam dwelled and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” asked John Ball in the 14th century.

This objection is not completely groundless. Submission to gods does not always and automatically translate into submission to human masters. But surveying the broad sweep of history, I still think that accepting divine authority tends to predispose people to accept human authority as well.  

Another possible objection is that belief in gods predates class society. Primitive people already feared gods who embodied the uncontrollable forces of nature. People were in thrall to gods before they were in thrall to other people. And yet this made them especially vulnerable to oppression and exploitation when other conditions were in place for the transition from primitive communism to class society.

God-kings and priestly castes

Many of the earliest rulers made the most direct use of their subjects’ belief in gods by demanding that they themselves be worshipped as gods (the Roman emperors, for instance) or – more often – as descendants or earthly manifestations of gods. Egyptian pharaohs claimed descent from the creator sun-god Atum or Re. The Inca was descended from the sun god Inti, while the Aztec king represented the fire god Xiuhtecuhtli (Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations). The Shinto belief that the Japanese emperor was descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu held sway right up to 1946, when Hirohito renounced divine status.

Some religions directly support the class structure by sanctifying the entire ruling class. The best-known case is the sanctification of the priestly Brahmin caste in Hinduism, although the Indian caste system no longer corresponds precisely to the class structure. Judaism also has its “pure” priestly caste – the cohanim, who trace descent from Moses’ brother Aaron.

Still mighty foes

By and large, however, the mechanisms through which religion supports class society (capitalism) are nowadays indirect. It is still risky to challenge the powers that be, but — except in a few countries like Iran — it no longer counts as sacrilege. The image of God has even started to mutate from that of the irate patriarch to that of the “sympathetic” social worker.   

And yet in large parts of the world religion still occupies a very important place in people’s hearts and minds. Those fortunate enough to live in relatively secularized societies should not underestimate its global power. The gods remain mighty foes of their deluded human creators.

Stefan.

Leadership (2001)

Book Review from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leadership and Social Movements. Edited by Colin Barker, Alan Johnson and Michael Lavalette. (Manchester University Press, 2001.)

Socialists are interested in leadership from a number of different perspectives. Capitalism as a class society engenders owners of the means of wealth production, the privileged, the leaders; and non-owners, the unprivileged, the followers. Most of the followers don’t oppose the system, which is why it persists. They elect leaders to get the best deal they can from the system. Socialism as a classless society based on social and political equality (though not on the absence of difference) is inconsistent with leadership. However, socialism is not inconsistent with some functions associated with leadership such as organisation, co-ordination – and even inspiration.

Then there is the perceived necessity and inevitability of leadership as an objection to socialism – “There will always be leaders and followers and you can’t change human nature.” This objection needs to be met.

Leadership and Social Movements touches on some of these issues but doesn’t really deal with them. As an edited book with 14 authors (mostly sociologists, social psychologists and related academics) it lacks the coherence of a single-authored work. The editors are frank about this: they invite readers to find “that it is worth poking about further in the black box of leadership”.

After an introduction, there are chapters on Robert Michels and the “cruel game” (of the alleged inevitability of leadership), Leninism, the French anti-racist movement, the women’s liberation movement, Martin Luther King, the Sefton Two, Brazilian youth leaders, a radical environment group, crowd leadership, suffragette movements, and the Soviet Revolution of 1905. The chapter on Michels has most of the book’s few references to the word socialism – “socialism from above” (the Labour Party’s Clause 4) and socialism as “the enhancement of state power via the nationalisation of property and state planning”. Not socialism at all, in other words, but state capitalism.

Readers interested in how leadership relates to the socialist movement would do better to read the three relevant pages (195-7) in David Perrin’s book The Socialist Party of Great Britain than the 215 pages of this rambling collection.

Stan Parker

Pathfinders: Ancient wisdom (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

After last month’s shit-show by the UK Tory leadership, you have to ask yourself why people believe in following leaders at all, when the consequences of doing so can be disappointing at best, at worst spectacularly awful.

Many scientists think we’re programmed to. Leaders perch at the top of hierarchies, and if you look the word up you’ll find the common claim that hierarchies are built into us, and not just us but all animals. ‘Social groups across species rapidly self-organize into hierarchies, where members vary in their level of power, influence, skill, or dominance… A wealth of evidence indicates social hierarchies are endemic, innate, and most likely, evolved to support survival within a group-living context’ (bit.ly/3yOkGCa).

If this is so, how can we advocate a classless and egalitarian social system? Doesn’t hierarchy scupper socialism?

If by hierarchy we are talking about royal rulers and the oppressive machinery of class societies, palaces, slaves, and all the rest of it, then it is obvious that these are not built into humans, because good evidence for this highly stratified behaviour is only seen within the last 10,000 years, a mere thirtieth of the 300,000 years that anatomically modern humans have existed.

Prior to this, human activity mainly consisted in immediate-return hunting and gathering (HG), an uncomplicated and egalitarian lifestyle sometimes called ‘primitive communism’ and based on sharing resources. HG bands were typically small and mobile, though they may have been part of regional and even continental communities, and any property that did exist was little more than tools and trinkets. Interestingly, studies of modern HG groups show that they often find domineering behaviour insufferable, and actively combat it using tactics like ‘reverse dominance’. Anthropologist Richard Lee quotes one HG member: ‘When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way, we cool his heart and make him gentle’ (bit.ly/3yNeWJ9). What this suggests is that an innate tendency to hierarchy might exist but that, other things being equal, human groups have no problem keeping it in check and under control.

What happened to humans 10,000 years ago to disrupt aeons of peaceful coexistence? This period saw the shift from hunting and gathering to settled farming, a radical change in the mode of production. With farming, you have to stay in one place and work it, and investing labour in a plot of land creates a ‘value’, both in terms of sunk cost and of productive potential. This value might only be notional in a situation of abundance, but it becomes worth preserving and defending where scarcity enters the equation, which may happen with rising populations. At first the ‘property’ might be shared, but a ruthless warrior elite will have the incentive to monopolise it and then use artificial scarcity as a power base. At this point, whatever social customs exist to keep latent hierarchical tendencies under control are overwhelmed. One way or another, farming historically ushered in all the oppressive apparatus of property ownership including ruling elites, religion, civil administration, money forms, social stratification, massive inequality, slavery and organised warfare.

Today, defenders of capitalist privilege are happy to justify all this, in a kind of broken-eggs-and-omelettes way, by pointing to the modern benefits of civilisation, and by ignoring the role that artificial scarcity continues to make in shoring up these hierarchies. They also may hay with the word primitive in the term primitive communism, arguing that HG groups were only egalitarian because they were incapable of anything more complex, and that any non-hierarchical alternative to capitalist inequality must necessarily be a retrograde step that would undo civilisation and take us back to living in huts.

In the first place, we have seen that egalitarianism is not some passive factory default but an active process of collective social management. HGs like it that way, and work to keep it that way.

Secondly, archaeology has some bearing on this. If HG groups were primitive and incapable of complex culture and social organisation, then large-scale projects such as monument building were clearly out of the question. But excavations at the 12,000-year-old site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey are overturning this assumption. Not only does it appear that HGs were indeed able to build monuments, but also that large-scale organisation and interaction were possible before the mechanisms of settled farming, property and social stratification existed. Bottom line: you don’t need hierarchies to do fancy stuff.

If a ‘dominance drive’ is universal and innate among animal species, it seems to be more like a dial than an on/off switch. In some animals, like elephants, manatees, bonobos, bats, the dial is set low. In others, the dial is turned right up to despotic. Some interplay of genetic and environmental factors is clearly at work. Humans don’t have just one behaviour, we’re very adaptable, and as a highly social animal, good at cooperating. But hierarchies don’t help, if anything they get in the way. A study cited in Nature suggests that hierarchies actually hinder the process of cooperation: ‘Compared to a condition lacking hierarchy, cooperation declined in the presence of a hierarchy due to a decrease in investment by lower ranked individuals.’ And it doesn’t matter whether the hierarchy is deemed justifiable or not: ‘hierarchy was detrimental to cooperation regardless of whether it was earned or arbitrary’.

And this is to say nothing of the strong case, eg, Michael Marmot’s 2004 Status Syndrome, that hierarchies cause massive stress, ill health, low fertility and high mortality. Rather than being a rocket booster to civilisation, hierarchies hobble us, make us ill and piss us off. Hunter gatherers weren’t daft. They always knew hierarchies caused trouble, and were best avoided. Socialism would simply apply the same ancient wisdom.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: Socialism and “supermen”, (1927)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A Criticism and our reply. 

The Editor of the Socialist Standard.

Sir,

When reading socialist literature I do not disagree with its claims that capitalism is based upon exploitation. But surely this does not constitute an exception ? It seems to me that all life is one immensity of desire to exploit and attain power and supremacy. Even in the obedience of the slave there is the ceaseless desire to take advantage of any weakness in the master. There is no equality or desire for equality to be found in alert and healthy organisms. But there is youth and decay, triumph and death. And it is when failing powers, frustration and consequently misery are paramount that the sentient creature begins to doubt the wisdom of the warlike nature of existence. It is in this condition that we get the following conceptions : (1) That robbery and exploitation are abominable ; (2) that equality is desirable ; (3) that one should sacrifice for one’s neighbour ; (4) that the base have been chosen to bring to naught the things that are; (5) that in the order of social evolution the emancipation of the slaves will involve the emancipation of all mankind; (6) that all souls are equal before God. Some of these are to be found in Christianity, others in Socialism. It appears to me that there is not a great deal of difference between either, allowing for phraseology and the periods when written. I contend that they are both emanations arising from revolting and submerged peoples or classes who have found means to present their case as if their conceptions and values of existence were worthy objects for all. Thus the vanquished can teach that the highest goodness is to sacrifice for one’s neighbour. This, if successful, would act powerfully in their favour. Or they could teach that democracy and equality are involved in the order of social evolution, and interpret history to that end. Both are ruses of the vanquished designed to turn the tide in their behalf. And both have met with partial success.

For instance there is that phenomena the Christian capitalist, who is a monster of contradiction and falsehood, whose very existence depends upon a mode of conduct that is anti-Christian as well as anti-Socialist. But he is yet Christian enough to will vast sums to succour the miserable and unfortunate of life, he has a conscience that way ; and English philanthropy is perhaps one of the most amazing spectacles in existence. Further, he is democratic enough to enfranchise vast numbers of slaves, etc. That which separates me from Christian, Socialist and modern ideas is that they are wholly or in part attempts to exercise a paralysing effect upon enterprising and thoughtful men under cover of the lie of equality, and they hold up the ideas emanating from decline, envy, resentment and decay as the goal of human well-being and goodness.

The object of the Socialist Party is in opposition to the natural desires of extraordinary men, for they wish to further their ideas regardless of the indifferent and conforming multitude. But Socialism would have it that they must, before embarking on new ideas and therefore on new actions, consult by democratic means the opinion of the majority who are inhospitable to ideas, suspicious of anyone who is different, and who cling tenaciously to a few simple superstitions, hates, aversions and longings—most of them idiotic, and all of them coarse, blunt, cowish and stupid.

I am convinced that new civilisations proceed from the higher levels of the race. They are the work of men of exceptional energy, powers of thought and audacity. Both Socialism and Christianity are attempts to paralyse the free play of these men by means of the belief that the low, the ordinary and wretched have something sacred or worthy in them. At their best they are useful, and cannot be more than that. Socialism is the unification of the belief in the greatest good of the greatest number, government of the people by the people for the people, and similar products “in the interest of the whole community” emanating from mob and slave ideas. I claim that these ideas are opposed to the development of higher men, and therefore of a higher race, which can only proceed from its exceptional individuals who should be above responsibility to the general mass of ordinary men. And if among Socialists there happen to be working men of profound intellectual perceptions, they are surely jumping out of the frying pan into the fire in elevating the common man by means of revolt from below and equal rights for all.—I am, Yours, etc.,

Robert Hart.

Reply to Mr. Hart.

Mr. Hart’s letter consists almost entirely of baseless assumptions for whch he does not attempt to give the slightest evidence.

For instance, he uses the term “equality” on several occasions without defining it, and then tries to fix his term on us. In view of our published attitude in our pamphlet, “Socialism and Religion,” Mr. Hart’s claim that we differ little with the statement that “all souls are equal before God,” is not merely absurd, it is a direct misrepresentation.. Moreover, we do not say that “the emancipation of the slave will involve the emancipation of all mankind,” but that the emancipation of the working class will involve this. The modern working class is a slave class, but it is only one in an historical series. What distinguishes it from previous slave classes in this connection is the fact that it is the last class in the series and there is no class below it. Hence its emancipation must mean the emancipation of humanity as a whole.

Neither does the Socialist talk about or advocate “sacrifice for one’s neighbour.” On the contrary, we distinctly point out that it is to the interest of each member of the working class to do his or her share in bringing about Socialism.

Mr. Hart’s ignorance of even elementary history is shown in his statement that “English philanthropy is perhaps one of the most amazing spectacles in existence.” At base English philanthrophy is no different from any other philanthropy, ancient or modern. The sort of philanthropy Mr. Hart mentions has its roots either in a fear of a hereafter, the belief in a heaven or a hell, or else in a desire to achieve notoriety or fame. There is nothing “amazing” about this.

When Mr. Hart says the object of the Socialist Party is in opposition to the natural ( !) desires of extraordinary men, he merely shows his ignorance of Socialism. Unless the men desire to be “extraordinary” thieves and murderers, there is nothing in Socialism to prevent them furthering their ideas unless this furtherance is to the injury of the community. To-day, so beloved by Mr. Hart, these people can only “further their ideas” if such ideas suit the ruling class. If they do not suit this class, the ideas are crushed at birth.

Mr. Hart summarises his views in the last paragraph of his letter when he says “new civilisations proceed from the higher levels of the race.”What are the “higher levels”? He does not say. Further on we are told that higher development “can only proceed from exceptional individuals who should be above responsibility to the general mass of ordinary men.” How charming! But are these “exceptional individuals” also going to “be above” using the services and abilities of this mass? If not—if, as happens to be the fact, they are utterly dependent upon these abilities of the “general mass,” even for their existence, then on what ground does Mr. Hart claim that the “exceptional individuals” should be above responsibility to those on whom they depend?

Apparently Mr. Hart has been reading some defender of Capitalist robbery, like Mr. Mallock, who argued that the Capitalist was entitled to the wealth he stole from the workers, because of his (the Capitalst’s) “exceptional abilities.” If—and when—Mr. Hart cares to give a little time to the study of historical development, he will find that “new civilisations” proceed from the changes in the material conditions of existence. That this development is due, not to the “higher levels of the race,” but to growth and changes in the instruments of production and distribution. When these 
changes reach a stage where they become fettered and hampered by the then system of Society, a struggle ensues between the class interested in the new forms of production, and the class wishing to retain the old system of Society. From the point of view of social status, the class interested in the
new forms is always a “lower” class, but from the wider point of view of social evolution, it is a “higher” class because it is endeavouring to establish a more developed, and therefore a “higher” system of Society. But these terms “higher” and “lower” are the cant and humbug of a ruling class and its dupes, who use them to try and hide the truth from their victims. Socialism is the next stage in the order of social evoluton, and when the growing knowledge of the working class in the truth of our case is extended over a majority of that class, they will take the necessary steps to establish that system despite all the squeals of the “exceptional individual ” who may try to sweep back the ocean with a broom.

Editorial Committee.

Blogger's Note:

Mr. Hart further replied in the February 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard. 

David Graeber’s False Dawn (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Graeber and Wengrow’s new book, The Dawn of Everything, is making waves. Its cover may not be sitting, face out, on the shelves of all the high street bookshops, but it is gathering a lot of positive reviews in both the left- and right-wing press. For a book written by a prominent anarchist, getting any reviews at all in the conventional media is quite a feat in itself. So, what is going on? Well, for one thing, The Dawn of Everything sets out to challenge the conventional narrative of human origins – or claims that it does. And since the conventional narrative in anthropology is one which, since the 1960s has tended to favour left-wing interpretations of ‘human nature’, it is no surprise the right has welcomed it.

The Dawn of Everything is a big, fat book, some 500-plus pages in length. It is teeming with fascinating accounts of recent archaeological findings. And it is worth reading for this alone. Anthropologists are not great popularisers of their work, and much of the information contained here is normally only available on the shelves and stacks of university libraries. As the subtitle of their book tells us, however, Graeber and Wengrow (G&W) are not merely interested in informing the public of these new findings, they are attempting nothing less than A New History of Humanity.

Their book opens with a historical survey of the way in which the debate about human origins has been framed in Europe. In essence, it’s an argument between those who, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, view ‘human nature’ as essentially co-operative, and our early human relations as egalitarian, and those who, like Thomas Hobbes, regard us as competitive creatures, and conceive of our early existence as a ‘war of all against all.’ These claims, of course, have distinct political alignments. For left-wing Rousseauists, humanity is best suited to living in an egalitarian society, while for right-wing Hobbesians, no degree of human flourishing is possible without a restraining dominance hierarchy. Numerous variations on these two opposing myths have emerged over the centuries, but they have continued broadly to shape the debate.

Egalitarian hunter-gatherers

In 1966, however, a milestone was passed when the first ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium of hunter-gatherer specialists was held in Chicago (the name of the symposium reflected the patriarchal assumptions still prevalent in the anthropology of that time). As researcher after researcher took to the podium, a radical picture of hunter-gatherers began to emerge. Above all, the evidence showed that hunter-gatherer peoples had notably egalitarian features, and there was a subset among them that was hyper-egalitarian in virtually all aspects of their social lives, including relations between men and women. This suggested that humanity itself had egalitarian origins. Within the academic discipline of anthropology, at least, the Hobbesian view of humanity’s hierarchical nature and beginnings had been blown clear out of the water.

Around the turn of the millennium, this view of hunter-gatherers was given new theoretical depth by Christopher Boehm in his 1999 book, Hierarchy in the Forest. Boehm pointed out that the Rousseauist and Hobbesian narratives both contain elements of truth. Human beings are undoubtedly capable of seeking to dominate others, but they are also innately predisposed to resist being dominated, and wherever possible will band together to repulse those who would subordinate them. In Boehm’s view, whether a society became egalitarian or hierarchical depended on whether the material conditions within that society advantaged those with a will to dominate or those who resisted being dominated. Our early societies were egalitarian, he argued, because the conditions they lived under favoured coalitions which could resist domination. One example of such a condition was the invention of projectile weapons which could be used by everyone, large or small, male or female, to undercut the physical strength possessed by alpha males. This resulted in a state of reverse dominance, or counterdominance as it is now more commonly called.

Evolved cooperators

Boehm’s argument set the scene for a revolution in anthropology. The next step was taken by Sarah Hrdy, in her ground-breaking 2009 book, Mothers and Others. Although Boehm had argued for egalitarianism among males in early human societies, he had made the assumption, common at the time, that in early societies males had dominated females. Hrdy pointed out that there were biological grounds for not taking this assumption for granted. Humans differ from their great ape cousins in one very noticeable respect: they give birth to big-brained babies. Human brains including the brains of infants gobble up calories at a furious rate, and human children mature slowly, remaining dependent on their caregivers for many years. In the Machiavellian world of our close cousins, chimpanzees, with its alpha males and hostile, shifting alliances, no mother could or would trust her infants to another female and certainly not to a male. In the human world by contrast, mothers could not cope with feeding and bringing up their children alone. If humans were to survive, they would have to develop co-operative childcare arrangements, something we invariably see among egalitarian hunter-gatherer peoples. Among great apes, males are the leisure sex. The only contribution they make to the next generation is a dollop of sperm. In human societies, that was no longer feasible. Mothers needed help from their own mothers and from the rest of society, males and females alike. Humans, Hrdy argued, are evolved co-operators. We co-operate on a grand scale, and this requires the development of a great deal of trust. Numerous evidences that we are biologically wired to coordinate our activities exist. We see signs of it marked on our bodies, in our ‘co-operative eyes’, for instance. Whereas the eyes of our great ape cousins are round, and the sclera which surrounds their irises is dark, our eyes are almond shaped and our sclera are white. We can see immediately where some other person is looking and therefore what they might be thinking. It is hard for a chimpanzee to read much from the eyes of a rival. Humans on the contrary are extremely good at interpreting other people’s thoughts and reactions from their eye movements, a process known as intersubjectivity. Research has demonstrated that humans are capable of working out how someone is reacting to the way we are reacting to their reaction.

Strange synthesis

In The Dawn of Everything G&W set out to challenge this orthodoxy. Like Boehm, they propose a kind of synthesis between the Rousseauist and Hobbesian myths, but a synthesis of a rather strange kind. They argue that in fact there is no particular way in which our original societies organised themselves, that humans have always adopted a range of different social forms, sometimes egalitarian, sometimes hierarchical, and that we have done so purely out of choice. Graeber, in particular, had long been of the view that conditions of individual freedom can arise at any time irrespective of the economic context. Similarly he has denied that there exists any such real thing as culture, that there are merely individuals who are free to create their own identities. This suggests that Graeber believed that there was no value in attempting to overturn capitalism, since no society will ever be governed by a single principle. At best we should seek out liberated zones where community can assert itself.

For G&W, however, the ability to choose our own social structures is part of what makes us human. In support of this claim, they make several arguments in the course of their book. They point to a number of groups such as the Inuit that are known to vary their social structures seasonally. During one part of the year, they form hierarchical relationships in which, for instance, women are subordinated to men, and egalitarian ones during another. These relationships, according to G&W are chosen in a playful, carnivalesque spirit.

As an approach to understanding social organisation, this idea has multiple problems. Societies are rarely, if ever, the result of unified or even collective decision making. It seems hardly credible, for instance, that women would have playfully chosen to occupy a role subservient to men, or that one section of society should have placed itself freely and experimentally under the oppressive rule of another. To say that ‘society chooses’, means, at most, that some section of society with some material advantage over the rest has exercised a prominent influence over social relations. Class societies are cockpits of competing interests with built-in fault lines, and even classless, egalitarian societies are full of members whose desires and wishes come into conflict with one another.

A second line of argument that G&W advance in The Dawn of Everything is that in the last few decades, evidence has been accumulating which challenges the ‘standard’ view that we had egalitarian origins, or that hierarchical (class) societies emerged only with the onset of agriculture. In particular they turn to archaeological evidence from the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe (approximately 40,000 – 15,000 years ago). This evidence includes, for example, the discovery of large-scale ‘ceremonial’ buildings and a number of ‘princely’ burials that contain artefacts which would have taken a great many hours of collective labour to produce.

Multiple problems

These arguments should be treated with care. G&W, for instance, have limited their examination of the evidence to only one small part of the globe, to Europe, which is conveniently the only area in which clear evidence for hierarchical society definitely exists during this period. They have also limited their view to the last 40,000 years, a relatively short, and relatively recent, period of time. If we go back beyond this period, evidence that could indicate the existence of hierarchical societies becomes vanishingly rare (which led one critic, Chris Knight, to point out that the book should have been titled The Tea Time of Everything). The authors attempt to justify their limited time frame by arguing that evidence before 40,000 years ago is scant and we cannot reliably know what was going on in this period. It is true that archaeologists have less evidence than they would like from before the Upper Palaeolithic, but is not negligible as G&W suggest, and with modern methods of analysis, a lot of information can be gleaned from it. Moreover G&W’s argument cuts both ways. If we take the view that the evidence we do have is unreliable, then we certainly can’t conclude, as G&W do in one of their most bizarre arguments, that because the physical appearance of individuals varied widely in earlier periods (several human species still existed side by side), we can simply assume that their forms of social organisation were also various and not necessarily egalitarian.

When setting out this evidence for hierarchical societies in the Upper Palaeolithic, the authors are careful not to tell their readers how extensive it is or how it compares with evidence for other forms of social organisation. As their review of it takes up a significant amount of space it is easy to get the impression that it is rather extensive, when in reality this is not the case. Covering a period of 35,000 years, for example, archaeologists have found no more than six ‘princely’ burials. More-over, as G&W admit (when they are not directly advancing their claims for hierarchy) the individuals found in these burials show evidence of some sort of physical deformity making them difficult to interpret. It is not possible to conclude with certainty, therefore, that they indicate the existence of hierarchical or class societies at all. The meaning of big ceremonial buildings is also ambiguous as similar constructions have also been discovered in societies that are at least partially egalitarian.

There is a lot about G&W’s arguments throughout The Dawn of Everything that doesn’t add up. And their book presents other concerns as well. They tend, for instance, to suggest that anthropologists habitually ignore the evidence now available for hierarchical societies in Upper Palaeolithic Europe and cling to older egalitarian narratives. In reality, most anthropologists are very aware of this new evidence and in the last two decades have modified their views to take note of it. They have pointed out, however, that the balance of evidence is still in favour of predominantly egalitarian early societies. Instead of addressing the evidence for this claim, G&W go noticeably silent, preferring instead to poison the well by tossing aside such views as ‘Utopian’ or as ‘Garden of Eden’ narratives. Their treatment of Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest, is an example of their general attitude to the subject. Having presented a positive assessment of his theory of reverse dominance, they feign surprise and confusion at why he, like the majority of anthropologists, should commit to belief in human egalitarian origins. The answer is not hard to find by anyone who wants to find it. In his book, Boehm sets out explicitly the grounds on which he takes this view. As for the extensive work of Hrdy and others on co-operative childcare, G&W hand-wave this away in a single sentence. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the authors are trying hard to present themselves as pioneers, as edgy and iconoclastic rebels against the academic status quo.

Graeber’s dismissal of the idea of early egalitarianism is one that has a long history in his writing. Anyone who reads through the bibliographies of his earlier works, for instance, is unlikely to find reference to authors who have pursued this research. He has consistently refused to address it, and is notorious for accusing colleagues who have published reports of their fieldwork on egalitarian hunter-gatherers as having made it all up. At first sight, this seems a curious attitude. Knight has argued that it can be traced back to Graeber’s early experience of fieldwork in Madagascar where for specific historical reasons the state had dwindled in significance and self-organising communities had arisen in the interstices. However, a simpler explanation might be that to accept the idea of hunter-gatherer egalitarian origins runs counter to his deeper political instincts as an anarchist. If egalitarianism is only to be found among immediate return hunter-gatherer peoples, then that might suggest (as many right-wing critics argue) that it is only possible for it to exist in societies organised into small bands and with little property. That in turn implies that it would be impossible to reproduce in more populous societies with large-scale social production. There is no evidence for this claim, but neither is it the real issue. The undeniable fact that egalitarian and hyper-egalitarian hunter-gatherers do and have existed has never been proof positive that a future society of free association and free access is possible. Our knowledge of egalitarian hunter-gatherers has a different value. It reveals to us the material circumstances under which an egalitarian society can function, and this is not an insight to be tossed aside in favour of a rather weak and unproductive theory.

Material circumstances

What egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies show us is that in order for a dominance hierarchy to arise two conditions must be met. The first is that one section of a population must gain a material advantage of some kind over the rest. This could be something as simple as having access to weapons or other means of coercion. The second is that alternative means of satisfying needs must be unavailable. The disadvantaged population then has no choice but to accept the domination of others. Together, these two conditions allow a dominant group or class to stand between the rest of the population and the satisfaction of their needs.

This situation was neatly illustrated in the 1820s by the fate of the unfortunate Thomas Peel, a cousin of the soon-to-be Prime Minister, Robert Peel. As leader of a syndicate of financiers, Thomas proposed to develop a colony at Swan River in western Australia (now the city of Perth). Setting out in 1829 from England he took with him provisions, seeds, implements and other means of production to the tune of £50,000, a huge sum at that time. He also took with him 300 men women and children whom he intended to employ in the 250,000 acre colony. Once he arrived in Australia, however, Peel discovered that with land and opportunities available, employment seemed less than desirable to his 300 workers and they rapidly decamped to pursue independent lives elsewhere in the colony. As a proponent of colonisation dourly observed, ‘Mr Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’

As Thomas Peel’s workers demonstrated, we will often resist the domination of capitalist employment if an escape route is available to us. Hunter-gatherers tend to fiercely resist employment when colonial or post-colonial governments try to impose it on them. Workers too in early capitalist societies demonstrated the same reluctance to accept wage relations. Thanks to a flourishing working-class press in the eastern states of America during the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism, we know how strongly workers resisted capitalist employment and how humiliated and defeated they felt when it was eventually forced upon them.

Capitalism is a clear example of a dominance hierarchy. Ownership and control of the means of production by the capitalist class is backed up by the coercive force of the state. Historically the elimination of forms of subsistence other than employment was achieved by the enclosure of common lands, thus turning peasants into landless labourers. Material conditions thus gave the capitalist class the ability to stand between the working class and the satisfaction of its needs. With no escape routes available, workers today have no alternative but to accept the domination of capitalist relations. For the majority, employment is the only option. A smaller number become self-employed and escape the domination of a human boss, but are still at the mercy of the capitalist market. Fewer still attempt to go down the risky and insecure road of starting a business. A few will succeed and end up dominating others, but most will fail, often with dire financial consequences to themselves and their families. For the vast majority of us as workers within the capitalist system there can be no escape from a life of domination and exploitation through capitalist employment. We do, however, have a means of escape from the domination of capitalism itself. And that is not because it is in our human nature to be able freely to choose any social system we like, as G&W would have it, but because material conditions at this time allow us a real and sustainable alternative. As members of the working class, we have the option to act consciously and collectively, to challenge the system, to eliminate class society and put an end to the patterns of domination it inevitably entails. A society of free association and free access is within our grasp – if we choose to reach for it.

Hud.

Watch:

• A lecture given by Camilla Power providing an evolutionary perspective on the origins of egalitarianism (bit.ly/3rqCMGX).
• The first of a series of videos critiquing The Dawn of Everything in great detail (bit.ly/3jKKzv2).
• A lecture given by Jerome Lewis on a group of contemporary egalitarian hunter-gatherers in Africa (bit.ly/3rv0z8D).