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

Correspondence: An end to all markets (1962)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

An end to all markets

Thank you for sending me your pamphlet. You say that ‘what is required is not a trust in leaders . . . but an attitude of self reliance and a determination to understand the nature of the problems themselves’.

What is so remarkable is that you yourselves do not appear to understand the nature of the problem. We do not live in a system of society which is capitalist. This may have been true in the middle ages, when the merchant adventurers, who amassed huge fortunes under the trade guild monopolies “invested” i,e, spent their wealth in fitting out fleets to trade with countries abroad. The object of capitalism is to use the means of production profitably.

There is very little indication that a profitable use has been made of capital (the means of production). If in fact its use had resulted in profit, there would have been no debt, but profit, no need for subsidies, but a prosperous industry, no idle resources and no vast quantities of unsold wealth. Lord Glanesk is reported to have said that his firm, in tendering for the construction of a new liner for the Atlantic service, had no hope of earning a profit, but were merely concerned with keeping their men in employment. Mr. Campbell, the largest wheat producer in the U.S. admitted that he had three thousand million dollars worth of unsaleable wheat on his hands. It is obvious that the so-called ‘capitalists’ are only the nominal owners of the land and factories which they are alleged to own, but which in fact are pledged as security for loans, overdrafts and the issue of securities to banks, insurance offices and investment trusts.

You say that the aim of the S.P.G.B. is to replace this system by one in which the ownership would be vested in the community. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could believe that the community could own anything. All that happens is that they are permitted to use the means of production and exchange at the discretion of Government officials who, experience has shown, are more tyrannical, more dilatory and less efficient than anyone else. Of all monopolies, a monopoly vested in the government is more onerous to the community and more difficult to get rid of.

You propose to ‘bring to an end the present competition for markets’. But competition is the only safeguard for the consumer. A market in a commodity is formed by people wanting something and having the money to buy it. If the consumer has no choice, but is forced to have whatever the monopoly produces, the market is restricted: the consumer does not get what he wants, but what he has to put up with.

If under Socialism goods are produced ‘solely for the use of mankind’, how are yon to know what sort of things the public have a use for. You only know what people want after they have bought it. People don’t want what a government official thinks are of use to them, they like many useless things as well as necessities. You say that all persons would have ‘free access’ to the things they needed; but if all that people had to do was to walk into a shop and ask for what they wanted in order to get it, there would soon be long queues outside the shops and nobody in the factories.

Under Socialism, you say, ‘all forms of profit would disappear’.

But it is perfectly legitimate for the worker to profit from his work. The difference between the worker and his employer is that the worker only has to work. The employer has to see that he works (and as nobody likes work, this entails a lot of supervision), secondly he has to provide the means (the plant, machinery and materials) and thirdly to foresee the sort of work people will want done in the future. There is all the difference in the world between profiting from work (industry) which the community wants done (because they pay for it), and profiting from usury by receiving rent and interest for the use of the means of production. Investment to a business means spending money—on wages and salaries—which if spent mean a profit. The wage or salary of the worker is just, as much profit from work, as the profit of the employer is his wage or salary.

Investment to a usurer means lending money. If he saves the money to lend, he robs the workers of an income, because only by spending money can any one earn an income. If he creates the money (as do the banks and insurance offices) he robs the worker of his profit either by inflating the currency, thus raising prices, or by charging interest which is added to the price.

To suggest that man in his present stage of development can be trusted to give of his best, and only take what he needs is totally unrelated to human experience. Man is by nature lazy, selfish, greedy and cruel. In dealing with human nature at its present stage of development it is necessary to insist that men depend for their livelihood on pleasing others. In this way. greed, laziness and selfishness can only be indulged by first gratifying the tastes and needs of others.

Leslie Wilson, 

Wallington, Surrey

Reply

We agree that the object of capitalist production is to use the means of production profitably; but Mr. Wilson does not add that this profit is reserved for the capitalists who own industry and the other means of production and distribution. Some capitalist concerns fail to make a profit, others fall into debt or are propped up by enormous government subsidies. Some, like the, shipyard which tendered for the proposed new Cunarder, may deliberately incur a loss as the cost of staying in production with the hope of making a profit later on. None of this alters the fact that we live in a capitalist society in which the object of production is profit. Some firms, after all, are highly profitable; ICI, for example, made £80 millions during 1960. It is true that no capitalist can be sure that he is always going to make a profit or even remain solvent; that is an aspect of the anarchy of capitalism. It is why some companies make a profit and others make a loss, why some ride high in a boom and others go under in a slump.

The capitalist often has to pay off overdrafts, loans and so on but this does not affect his situation as an owner of the means of production. He pays off his financial commitments from the profit which comes to him because he owns a factory, a mine or something similar.

Mr. Wilson’s remarks about government officials and state monopolies may or may not be true. Neither of these have anything to do with Socialism, in which the oppressive State organisation will not exist.

Competition may sometimes offer some slight advantages to a consumer. But it can also be wasteful; it is the reason for armies of salesmen chasing each other over the same ground and for a lot more wasted effort. And in the international field competition for markets and the like leads to war. In any case, for the working class the market is always restricted because the limits of their wages mean that they rarely get what they would really like but usually have to put up with what they can afford, be it ever so cheap and nasty.

No government official—or for that matter no market research expert—will decide what wealth will be produced under Socialism. These people are tied to commercial motives and considerations. Set free of such restrictions, society itself will know what it needs and wants and so will decide the matter itself. Queues are the result of shortage, of people being afraid that they will not get something they need and having to wait a long time for it. But Socialism will be a system not only of free access but of plenty, in which there will be no need for the queue or for any of the other symbols of capitalism’s crises of shortage.

The employer does not need to exert himself very much to see that his workers work. Apart from the fact that he employs managers and foremen to see to such things, a worker is forced to get a job because that is his only means of living. He cannot make profit from his wage because it is generally only about sufficient to reproduce him as a worker, which leaves no margin for profit. On the other hand, the employers’ profit conies from the surplus which the worker produces over the value of his wage and the other capital which has been consumed in production. The difference between this profit and the worker’s wage can be seen in the fact that the capitalist does not have to work for his profit. He only needs to have shares in a factory, railway and so on.

Some human behaviour may be as bad as Mr. Wilson thinks. Other human behaviour is heroic, sacrificial and considerate. In fact, it is widely fashioned by the conditions in which men find themselves. Socialism will offer the world peace, plenty and happiness. Men’s behaviour will reflect the fact.

Editorial Committee

Avoiding the elephant (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howard Moss

Old Tales retold (1948)

From the November 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

Propagating Socialism is like spending an afternoon at a fair ground shooting clay pigeons down; you shoot them down, they place them up; you shoot them down again, up they come again. It is the same with arguments against Socialism.

The “you can’t change human nature” argument is an example. Those who put it forward usually know very little about human nature or human history, which is much the same thing. As Marx wrote in the “Poverty of Philosophy” :

“All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.” (Marxist Leninist Library Edition, p. 124.)

The characteristic traits men have expressed in societies based on private property are different from the traits expressed by men in the period termed prehistory. This period, prehistory, has formed by far the greater part of man’s existence on earth. The people who say you can’t change human nature usually give as evidence to support their belief the behaviour of politicians who are all for the working class when standing for election but when in power are different. Whatever we may think of this statement it doesn’t support their contention that human nature doesn’t change, but defeats it, as it implies that people act differently when their circumstances are altered.

Another example is the argument tendered by Mr. Winston Churchill at the Conservative rally in London, quoted in the Observer (13/6/48) : “Socialism is the philosophy of failure and the gospel of envy.”

This argument can’t hold up to a moment’s analysis. Robert Owen, the Utopian, who first coined the term Socialism, was a wealthy textile manufacturer. Frederick Engels, one of the formulators of scientific Socialist theory, was also a successful business man.

The “failure” argument is based on the false assumptions that society is alright and the trouble lies within ourselves.

Those who maintain that the trouble lies within ourselves claim their assertion has a scientific basis in the theories of the psycho-analytical school of psychologists. An essential feature of science is verification by experiment. Otto Fenickel wrote in “The Psychoanalytical Theory of Neurosis,” published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.:

“The application of the general principles of natural science to psychology naturally presupposes the development of new methods of research that are adequate to its subject matter. Attempts to keep the mental realm outside of causal and quantitative thinking . . . thwart real insight as does also a pseudo exactness which believes it necessary to transfer the biological methods of experiment and scientific protocol to a field where these methods are not suitable (astronomy also is unable to resort to experiments and nevertheless is a natural science).” (Page 7.)

To call psycho-analysis a science before these new methods of objective verification have been discovered is to beg the question. Verification of astronomical theories is made when an eclipse or the position of some heavenly body is forecast.

What agreement is there between the various schools of psycho-analysis’? With Freud, the determining feature is sexual interests; with Adler lust for power and organ inferiority; with Jung, racial consciousness and the theory of types, extrovert and introvert. All can’t be correct.

The other assumption is that society is alright. In capitalist society there are two classes. The capitalist class who own the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth and the working class who own nothing but their labour power which they must sell in order to live. According to statistics gathered by Sir John Orr, Seebohm Rowntree and others about one-third of the population don’t receive enough to keep themselves in health. It can’t be unemployment that is the cause of their poverty, because in the years before the war about one-fifteenth of the working class were out of work. This doesn’t account for the plight of one-third of the population. Nor is their poverty caused by buying fish suppers and strong drink, as they don’t receive sufficient money it doesn’t matter how they spend it. It doesn’t make any difference which Party of capitalism is in power, whether it is Conservative, Liberal, Labour or a Coalition, the conditions remain the same.

Statistics don’t tell you anything, opponents argue; or statistics can prove anything. Well, they can’t have it both ways. The every-day business of capitalist society is carried on with the use of statistics, for example, how many special trains will be required on Derby day? How many special postmen for the Christmas week? Society is the laboratory where social statisticians verify the accuracy of their methods.

The social investigators mentioned were all staunch defenders of the capitalist order of society.

The Socialist can accept their figures and conclude from them that the poverty of the working class follows from the fact that the working class must sell their labour power to the capitalist class in order to live. Common ownership of the means of living with free access to all is the only solution to the problem.

J. T.

Letter: Human nature (2000)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human nature

Dear Editors,

Capitalism and its unpleasant side-effects rides roughshod over us all (like some giant steamroller crushing and flattening creativity, talent, feelings and our natural inclinations) for example, in so-called “education” which does little more than pour out a certain quota of information and propaganda, necessary to turn out more compliant wage slaves.

We’re constantly encouraged to work against nature, and in turn our own human nature and instincts, in order to get by under this system. When we’re ill we’re encouraged and advised to pump pills and chemicals into our overloaded and abused systems—in order to swell the coffers of the multi-million pharmaceutical firms—when we’d be better off, in most cases, relying on nature and working with it to help our bodes. All the time, it’s moving away from nature.

Manners, politeness and consideration are natural reactions to others and up until recently were taken as such. However it’s no coincidence that they’ve disimproved in the last 20-odd years, exactly since capitalism and greed tightened the screws even more acutely, under the reigns of “leaders” such as Thatcher and Reagan and more recently, Clinton and Blair. It’s a wonder that despite all this, people’s natural consideration for others still surfaces when the chips are down.

I recently got a taste of this, first-hand, after suffering a badly sprained ankle whilst out for a hike. I found myself—luckily in a location I knew well—unable to move by myself on a small beach. Lo and behold people arrived and everyone, without exception, upon learning of my predicament, was helping whatever they could. I was taken by lifeboat ambulance to hospital and all three of their personnel were courteous, helpful and kind, despite, under capitalism, performing a stressful, overworked and thankless job. Despite a system that tries to knock it out of them, every hour of every day, people’s human nature to be social animals and work with each other, still rises to the surface. These people helped me in a situation where I had no choice but to rely on my fellow human beings, and I’m glad to say they all came up trumps.

I’ve had a week to take it easy and plenty of time to mull over things and in reflecting on this topic, it’s overwhelmingly clear, that in our lives greed, selfishness and couldn’t-care-less attitude is merely a result of human conditioning, drummed into us all since the word go (to do better than the next kid in school and get a better job than Johnny next door) but that basic human nature is instinctive, natural and spontaneous. It’s what I witnessed on that beach last week and it’s what we’d all witness, all the time in a proper society. This can only occur when capitalism and its unnatural effects are replaced with a society in which everyone benefits from everyone else’s natural sense of caring and fair play, i.e. Socialism.

David Marlborough, 

Dublin

Running Commentary: Human nature (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human nature

We watched them go about their daily affairs as the television narrator quietly described aspects of their way of life. “Here”, we are told, “No man or woman has authority over any other man or woman . . . wealth is shared communally, if one person manages to catch many fish the whole community benefits including those who are not able to work. or who have not worked on that particular day . . . they operate on the basis of 'from each according to his hunting ability, to each according to his hunger' . . . the land, forests and rivers are owned by nobody and no one works for anyone else." Worlds Apart (BBC2 10/9/ 82) was examining the lifestyle of the Panare Indians of Venezuela, with a lot of well presented evidence to repudiate the myth that it is “Human Nature" to be acquisitive, uncooperative and to wish to live in societies with hierarchies of wealth, power and status.

Here were people, physiologically the same as everyone else, who displayed none of the behavioural characteristics which have sometimes been labelled as immutable features of human beings. Through its historical stages, property society has cultivated people to think and behave in selfish and acquisitive ways. Although cooperativeness has always been a striking feature of mankind — as people are social animals and we cannot organise any society without working with each other — in capitalism we have had to cooperate with each other under coercive conditions.

In some parts of modern society with a long history of property, vicious aspects of human behaviour like the barbarism of war are offered as proof of brutal human nature. But war, and people’s behaviour in it, are products of a social environment not a natural propensity to violence. Property society pits people against each other.

An owner can say “This is mine, it is not yours, we have different interests". If the object is a factory the owner can say, “Because this is mine, you will have to spend your life working in it to produce wealth for me, and because the levels of my profits are inversely related, we will be in a constant struggle". The Panare have no notions of property and consequently no notions of competition. They have no competitive sports and those which are played in neighbouring areas, which do put people or beasts against themselves, are looked on as meaningless.

The Panare live in a small tightly-knit community which is a little suspicious of outsiders and does not use much modern medicine or technology. Such communities illustrate the behaviour that homo sapiens are capable of enjoying.

However, civilisation is marching into the forests of Venezuela with its Deeds of Land Ownership in one hand and its police forces and prisons in the other. New roads and a huge bauxite mine will soon disfigure the regions inhabited by the Panare for, as the television narrator observed, “to the investors and entrepreneurs the communities who presently occupy the forests are obstacles to progress". Curiously, in The Investors' Dictionary, the word “progress" is spelt profits.

Parker’s pen

The bookshops will not be troubled by long, disorderly queues of people desperate to buy a copy of Father of the House — the political reminiscences of John Parker, Labour MP for Dagenham. Parker is the longest-sitting Member — he has been in Parliament for 47 years — and that is how he qualifies for this fatuous title. And he has become a strangely tedious man, liable to pass over events of historic importance in some ill-considered laconism.

But it was not always so. Parker was once at the centre of an incident vital enough to reveal the true unsavoury character of the Labour Party. In 1945. Attlee appointed him Under Secretary at the Dominions Office which, as the Secretary of State was in the Lords, put Parker in charge of the affairs in the Commons.

His ministerial career did not last long. Parker refused to intervene over the death sentence passed on a Boer farmer in the (then) South African protectorate of Swaziland who had killed his girl friend. Of course only black people were hanged in South Africa: at that time a white man had not been executed for 15 years. The South African Prime Minister appealed to Attlee to help maintain this racist version of “justice" and the Labour Prime Minister was ready to oblige. Parker was sacked and never offered a job in a Labour government again.

This episode did nothing to reduce Parker’s ardour for the Labour Party. A quirk of his was that he often agreed to take part in public debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain. His defence of the Labour government’s desperate attempts to organise British capitalism was unconvincing but no matter how many times he was floored by the SPGB, Parker persistently got up for more.

In his old age. does he reflect now on these instructive experiences in his political life — on the practical and theoretical destruction of the case for the party to which, through thick and thin, he gave his misguided loyalty?

Jaws

A ten-year-old boy was recently killed by an automatic exit barrier at an underground station in Newcastle on Tyne. It happened very simply and very suddenly. The boy jumped, or tripped, into the barrier, which snapped its jaws about his neck. It took a long time to free him and he was dead by the time they got him to hospital.

Anyone who has had a thoughtlessly trailing piece of luggage bitten by these barriers knows how aggressive they are, with that malevolently watchful eye to trip them into action. The barriers are installed, in places like Newcastle and London, to stop people travelling without paying a fare — to stop them using the railways as a means of travel instead of as a means of yielding a profit to the owners. They are not designed to distinguish between those who are evading paying a fare and those who are just not totally alert to the instantaneous demands of electronic ticket checks.

The cause of profit making is greater than all others, in the morality of private property society. Truly, it is greater than any human being, or of any collection of them. In this cause it is permissible to herd long suffering workers, probably trying to get to and from the places where they are to undergo the indignities of being exploited by their masters, into canyons of electronically controlled discipline. To stray deliberately from the canyon could mean that they are punished — fined, imprisoned — and if they do this by accident they may even be killed.

In many ways — some trivial, some substantial — capitalism informs the working class that they are socially inferior, exploited, degraded. This information is sometimes emphasised in episodes of bitter tragedy, which would not have happened but for the class divide of capitalism, or for the production of wealth as commodities, or for the poverty of the majority of people, or for some other essential feature of capitalist society.

Such an incident was the death of the boy in Newcastle. There will be an inquest, which may decide that it was an accidental death. A better verdict — simpler, straighter, more accurate — would be that Capitalism Kills.

Blogger's Note:

"A quirk of his was that he often agreed to take part in public debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain." 

According to the SPGB debates wiki page, Parker only debated the SPGB once, in June 1948 at Fulham Town Hall. (The SPGB speaker was Clifford Groves.) My guess is that the wiki page is incomplete, and that Parker did debate with the SPGB on more than one occasion. He was a Fabian intellectual in his early political career, and such types had a tendency to debate again and again with the SPGB.

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

From the August 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from the previous issue.

4—Capitalist Patterns of Behaviour

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

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

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

False Separation

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

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

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

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

Impersonality and Excessive Specialisation

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

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

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

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

Symptoms of Maladjustment

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

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

“They are systematically related to the culture.” 

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

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

“ The result is mass frustration and despair.”

#    #    #    #

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

Stan Parker

(Next Article: We Learn From Social Scientists.)

Human Nature and Socialism: The Role of the Socialist (1953)

From the July 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from the previous issue.

3—The Role of the Socialist

Let us try to see how socialists can use their knowledge of man in society to achieve social change. We must first discuss human nature a little further from a theoretical standpoint, in order to relate it to other socialist theories, and in particular to historical materialism.

There are two main points about human nature that are implicit in Marxist theory (though Marx and Engels avoided the term “nature” in connection with “human” because of its idealist associations). One is that it is essentially subject to change, and the other is that it is entirely made up of the behaviour and powers of individuals or groups within their environments.

Human nature is to be understood neither idealistically nor mechanically, but dialectically. It is no single universal form or essence which individual human beings share; nor is it the mere sum total of those individuals. It is the sum total of the needs, desires and activities of human beings in society. In other words, man can be no more than what men actually do in their historical and social environments. Thus human nature is essentially the history of humanity, and has nothing to do with any idealistic concept of some changeless entity called man.

Man has evolved as a species slowly and continuously through all the various phases of human society, from tree-climbing anthropoid to his present status. This evolution has been social, cultural, psychological— but hardly at all biological. It is therefore in a dual sense—biologically and socially—that human nature is to be understood; and this is why it has been truly said that human nature changes in some of its respects because it remains the same in others.

Production and Change

Of all the factors determining historical development the decisive element is the production and reproduction of life and its material requirements. Men must be in a position to live in order to be able to make history. The production of the immediate material means of subsistence, and the consequent degree of economic development form the basis upon which all other institutions, concepts and ideas have been evolved. All these things must be explained in the light of the material basis of life, and not vice versa.

Against this, the idealists portray history as though it were dancing to the tune of men’s ideas, or, more precisely, the ideas of a few “great men.” So determined were Marx and Engels to combat this line of thought that they ran the risk of being accused of saying that the production of the means of life is the only factor causing change. But, as Engels points out,

"Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else has a passive effect There is, rather, interaction on the basis of the economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself." — ("Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence," p. 517.)

At each stage of history there is a sum of productive forces and relations of individuals to things and to one another—all handed down to each generation from its predecessor. While these forces and relations are modified by the new generation, they also prescribe the conditions of life of that generation. In short, circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.

Men are products of certain conditions, and therefore changed men are products of other conditions. But it must never be forgotten that conditions are changed precisely by men. Man changes history, and is thereby himself changed and, in this sense, “all history is but a record of the continuous transformation of human nature ” (Marx).

When production was primitive, man’s simple biological needs determined his activities—but as production developed his needs developed also. In the process of production man is driven to a fuller comprehension of the world in which he lives. By acting on the external world and changing it, man changes his own nature.

History-making Animal

The basic difference between man and other animals—the change-over, as it were, from non-human to human—is when he begins to produce his own means of subsistence. This is not to say that animals don’t produce. The difference is that human production is premeditated, planned action, directed towards definite ends. Again, this doesn’t mean that no animal acts according to a plan. But, with man, consciousness takes the place of instinct, or, to put it another way, his“ instinct” is a conscious one.

“What distinguishes the most incompetent architect from the best of bees is that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he constructs it in reality,” wrote Marx. The labour process ends in the creation of something which, when the process began, already existed in the worker’s imagination in an ideal form. We may say that what ultimately distinguishes men from other animals is consciousness of method in production. The animal merely uses external nature, and brings about changes in it by his presence. Man, by his changes, makes nature serve his ends.

Yet man is not only a nature-controlling animal. He is also a history-making one. He is the sole animal who has worked his way out of the merely animal state —his normal state is one of consciousness, one to be created by himself. Man’s mastery over nature, of which he is a part, consists in the fact that he is able to know and correctly apply its laws.

Man has achieved a considerable measure of success as a nature-controlling animal, but when it comes to history-making there is much less cause for satisfaction. Broadly speaking, human action has achieved its desired end only in exceptional cases, and much more often it has achieved the exact opposite. Unforeseen effects have predominated, and uncontrolled forces have been far more powerful than those set in motion according to a plan.

These and other considerations lead socialists to believe that man has not yet made truly human history. “Only conscious organisation of social production,” says Engels, "can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species.”

Understanding and Co-operating

The question may be asked: why has man, who has been so successful in developing his powers of production, made such a failure of history? The answer is that men have made bad history because they have been unable to prevent the means of production from conflicting with the relations of production. They have been so preoccupied with having to “make a living” in competition with others that they have had no control over the long-term consequences of their actions. The history and human nature that have resulted have thus been unplanned and mostly unintended.

In the process of controlling nature man has been scientific, in the widest sense. But in the process of making history he has not. Man makes a machine by manipulating suitable materials in a certain way according to a planned purpose. On the other hand, he makes history as an indirect result, almost a byproduct, of quite another activity—that of competing with his fellow-man to “earn a living.”

The conditions of property society have never been, and can never be, such as to allow men to solve their problems with a collective will or according to a collective plan. The dominating motive being individual self-interest, their efforts clash, what each individual seeks is obstructed by others, and what emerges is something that no one sought.

Man has had greater success in his efforts to master the forces of nature than those of society, which dominate him as a power independent of himself. Slave to classes and to the conditions of class society, man (whether as owner of property or non-owner) has been merely a class animal. He has not yet become truly human, in the sense that he has been passive instead of active in the historical process that makes human nature.

The case for Socialism amounts to saying that history, like the control of nature, ought to be planned and consciously organised. It ought to be produced, like any other product, for a purpose, and this purpose ought to be broadly human, not narrowly individual. It should aim at the transformation of human nature to make man integrated, complete, and balanced through the free use of his creative energies.

The role of the socialist consists in his capacity for understanding the world, for understanding its natural and historical movement, and for co-operating consciously with all the factors that are working towards classless society. We are able to speak of Socialism as a potentiality because it already exists in the minds of men in an ideal form, just as the house exists in the architect’s imagination even before the blueprint stage.

Without classes, human nature can at last become the product of human science rather than the by-product of class struggle. With the abolition of class control of economic forces, when the whole of society has gained mastery of the conditions of social life, man will be able to exercise real control over his own nature. With the release of his human powers from capitalist servitude, he will be able to shape his environment so that it promotes the fullest possible development of all his faculties.

Stan Parker

(Next Article: Capitalist Patterns of Behaviour.)

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.)

Mutual aid in adversity (1953)

From the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is frequently argued that, notwithstanding the validity of the Socialist case against Capitalism, Socialism is foredoomed to failure because of "human nature.” This last-ditch argument of capitalist apologists is based on the assumption that human nature is fundamentally anti-social and self-destructive. The absurdity of this notion is easily demonstrated, if only by observing that, were this true, the human species would have destroyed itself in the first generation.

The idea that it is only by the good offices of our “natural” leaders in maintaining a vast integrated structure of legal, police and military organisation that we are restrained from wholesale robbing, raping and murdering of our neighbours is one actively encouraged by the propaganda agencies of Capitalism. The Press, the cinema, radio and religions are all concerned in representing the coercive machinery of Capitalism as a set of benevolent institutions, exercising a firm but impartial discipline in the interest of society at large.

The Socialist argues that it is human nature to desire co-operation and social intercourse. It is the influence of and the reaction to the economic environment, based on oppression, insecurity and ruthless competition that forces men to behave in an apparently un-co-operative and anti-social manner—a manner entirely opposed to the fundamental promptings of human nature.

Occasionally, particularly at times of singular stress, when fellow creatures are subjected to exceptional privations and sufferings, human nature breaks through the brittle veneer of civilised behaviour and all thoughts of personal gain and advantage are submerged in a vast social effort to aid those in distress. The Capitalist spokesmen note these manifestations with considerable interest but are apparently, unable to interpret them in terms of their popular “human nature” theory. The Editor of the “Observer” (5.4.53) asks

“Why should it take an emergency to bring out the best in people? This was often asked during air raids in the war, and again at the time of the recent East Coast floods. The spontaneous response to the floods was felt to be remarkably different from the grumbling inertia often detected in post-war Britain, especially in the industrial field.”

It is evident that the Editor is disturbed at the apparent inconsistency of a people who will give of their best to help their fellows in an emergency, but who cannot be persuaded to show the same spirit in applying themselves to the relief of the emergency which threatens industrial profits. He continues

“When the floods broke, people showed exactly the virtues and the spirit needed in a modern industrial society. Machines and material had to be moved quickly to the coast, and so had a labour force of many thousands. There had to be a service of engineers and technicians, and a system of administrative control . .. the total organisation worked well, mainly because so many people worked willingly and in relative harmony.” 

Now, why should this be so? Why, for instance, should a gang of men work “with fortitude and persistence, under conditions of unrelieved hardship” near a spot where a short time ago "thousands of men struck work partly because they had been denied a tea-break”? The Editor supplies his own answers :— 

"The motive force was enthusiasm, sweeping away the inhibitions and protective restrictions which persist in many of our industries.”

“Nobody on the East Coast was afraid of working too hard or of working himself out of a job . . . nobody was worried by the thought that he was working to make profits for someone else”

“Part of the answer, perhaps, was given ... by a man working strenuously on the defences of Canvey Island—' I know that this job is. worth while '. " 

The Editor of the “Observer” is, of course, concerned with the problem of harnessing this enthusiasm and feeling of “worth-whileness” to the needs of industry, and he sees the answer in terms of industrial relations. With that problem we are not concerned, but what is of interest to us is the evidence of the fact, clearly given in this article, that when events temporarily push the daily struggle into the background, human nature compels men and women, in spite of a life-time under the “blow-you-Jack” rules of Capitalism, to co-operate and to enjoy co-operating for their mutual well-being.

". . .  once the tragic side of the disaster had receded, people scarcely bothered to disguise the fact that they were enjoying themselves. They seemed to welcome the chance to work without sparing themselves, in co-operation with others, and for the good of an obviously stricken community.”

And when Capitalism, with its tragic toll of war and poverty-stricken victims and its legacy of insecurity and misery has finally receded, people will still welcome the chance to work without sparing themselves, in cooperation with others, for the good of the Socialist community.

H.J.G.

Blogger's Note:

See this blogger's note from a previous post for background on why I think 'H.J.G.' was Howard Grew of Birmingham Branch.

Human nature (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—From a leaflet.

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

From the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

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

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

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

What about the free rider?

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

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

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

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

Capitalism: work as sacrifice

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

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

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

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

Everybody entitled to a share

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

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

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

Next month

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

Hud.