Violence and war: Are they inevitable? The long view (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

It’s become widely accepted that, for well over 200,000 years, hunter-gatherers, humans like us, lived in egalitarian societies. So why, beginning around 12,000 years ago, did most of them, within a relatively short period of time, give up that lifestyle for settled agriculture and, in so doing, move to a different way of life and new social structures, where a dominance hierarchy of the few began to take over from equality for all, leading to exploitation, slavery, violence and war?

The invention of scarcity

The answer to that is multi-faceted. But, broadly speaking, such a transformation can only have come about as a result of environmental factors pushing people into the imagined greater security that the longer-term and more abundant supplies of food and other materials derived from farming would have been capable of producing. The trouble is that, once that happened, there was no obvious going back, as it brought with it the creation of hierarchies and states and rule by those few who in previous societies would have been considered anti-social for their dominating tendencies. That minority would now have much freer rein for their deviant behaviour, resulting in struggles for power, the development of classes and rulers and ruled, and the emergence of what came to be considered natural orders headed by kings, emperors, pharaohs and high priests, with the majority living at a lower level of subsistence than as hunter-gatherers (‘the invention of scarcity’, it has been called). This in turn gave rise to full-scale predatory social systems (first slavery, then feudalism, and now capitalism) where the majority have been kept in check by tiny, privileged minorities either by the threat of violence from higher authority and/or by ideological constructs or smokescreens such as tribal loyalty or nationalism.

Original sin and the free market

In the lens of recorded history the result of these dominance structures and of the conflicts over wealth and resources that have arisen between the privileged ruling minorities has been (and still is) large-scale violence and continual wars. And over most of this history, the explanation for this found in writings, both secular and religious, has been that conflict between humans is the natural state of things. Christianity, for example, expressed this through the idea of ‘original sin’, while commentators not dependent on religious doctrine tended to come to similar conclusions. For example, the 16th century Italian political writer Machiavelli, in his famous essay The Prince, stated that human beings were ‘ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, hypocritical, cowardly and greedy’ and ‘never do anything good except out of necessity’. Similar views were expressed in the following century by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, which argued that human beings are greedy by nature and that human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’. The following century, the economist Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, also famously insisted that private interest (or ‘self-love’) was ‘natural’ human behaviour, justifying a society based on the ‘free market’, where everyone seeks their own self-advantage regardless of the social and economic inequality that goes with it. Some questioning of these views did begin in the 19th century with the writings of Charles Darwin and early practitioners of the science of anthropology such as Lewis Henry Morgan. But it was only in the 20th century, with the increased flowering of anthropology and the new science of archaeology, that serious doubt was cast on the belief that human beings were deep-down selfish, wicked and aggressive, as new perspectives emerged from growing evidence of how people had lived and interacted in the pre-farming era, the overwhelmingly longest period of human existence on earth.

Not that the traditional ‘fixed human nature’ view simply went away. It continued to be expressed in much popular writing in particular. Examples of this between the 1950s and the 1970s were books like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and imaginative fiction like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (and arguably George Orwell’s Animal Farm too). It also carried on coming from some ‘scientific’ sources, for example Richard Wrangham’s 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence and, most recently, Richard Overy in Why War (2024). Such writers tend to see war as having been constant throughout the whole of human history, suggesting that humans are war prone and have what Overy calls ‘a psychological predisposition for warfare’. And this leads that writer to conclude that ‘if war has a very long human history, it also has a future’.

But, overall, the last 30-40 years have marked a significant shift in perspectives both among social commentators and scientific experts. Among a slew of studies on this and allied topics (some of them reviewed in this journal), titles like Beyond War, The Human Potential for Peace, Team Human, Survival of the Friendliest, and Ultra-Social tell their own tale. The majority of these writings conclude from their authors’ investigations not that human beings are non-violent and non-prone to war per se but rather that violence and fighting are not their most natural inclination, even if they are capable of being driven to it by circumstances. Even the widely read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, though often cited as supporting the idea of innate human selfishness, on close examination does no such thing. In fact it is largely a book about altruism and cooperative behaviour. Even its writer is on record as saying that its title may have been an unfortunate one and that perhaps a different title such as ‘The Immortal Gene’, or even ‘The Altruistic Organism’, might have been more appropriate.

Highly flexible or pro-social?

Highly relevant in this connection too is the work of anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, who has spent 50 years researching the origins of war and has been called ‘the greatest living scholar of human warfare’. In an article in Scientific American in 2018, entitled ‘War is not part of human nature’, Ferguson notes that the overwhelming evidence on war, which he defines as armed conflict and killing sanctioned by society and carried out by members of one group against members of another group, suggests that it was not always present among humans. Instead it began as a result of societal changes at varying times in different locations but with its earliest signs appearing around 12,000 years ago – so closely coinciding with humankind’s first experiments with agriculture. In a later article (2023) in the journal Public Anthropologist, he states: ‘Our species is not biologically destined for war. War is not an inescapable part of social existence’; and ‘Obviously, we are capable of war and often choose it. The question is whether evolution tilts us in that direction. I say no.’ His findings, he says, show that: ‘egalitarian mobile hunter foragers generally don’t make war’ and that ‘agriculture and states went along with more war’. His most recent book, Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill? (2023) reiterates this with the conclusion that ‘Men are not born to kill but they can be cultivated to kill’.

This is a perspective also echoed by Yuval Noah Harari in his best-selling book Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (2014). Here Harari makes a clear statement about humans as essentially flexible creatures, insisting that human behaviour is shaped by the society into which we are born and become part of. He goes on to say that, if our social arrangements were determined simply by our biology, then there would never have been the wide gamut of behaviour patterns, relationships and cultures which we know about and which can also be witnessed in what we see around us now.

Some studies go even further than this, seeing humans as naturally ‘pro-social’ beings with cooperation not competition, peacefulness not violence as their intrinsic default. In such studies, qualities such as kindness and empathy are seen as existing ‘naturally’ in the overwhelming majority of humans, as long as overwhelming forces don’t get in the way of it. The historian Tine De Moor, for example, in The Dilemma of the Commoners (2015), claims that ‘history teaches us that man is essentially a cooperative being, a homo cooperans’, that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and that ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’. This kind of outlook is echoed by Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind. A Hopeful History (2021) in which he presents arguments many have found compelling that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal and cooperative and that the outstanding feature of human behaviour is the desire to act together and to display tolerance and mutual support even if circumstances are dire. As part of the evidence for this he points to the plethora of everyday gestures of help, cooperation, solidarity and compassion people in all societies all over the world show to one another on a daily basis without any prospect of gain or reward. John Gowdy’s Ultra Social. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (2021), though in most ways a quite different kind of book from Bregman’s, echoes a similar message with statements like ‘Our current predicaments are not gene-based. They have risen out of the material base of human economies and the associated cultural adaptations and supporting institutions’ and with an insistence that, if we have a ‘nature’, it is a ‘pro-social’ one, a natural inclination, to be empathetic, associative and cooperative.

Such considerations about human behaviour have been accompanied – and often confirmed – by the more detailed and scientific studies of primeval hunter-gatherer societies that modern technological methods have made possible. A recent study, for example, analysing evidence of traumatic injuries in 189 individuals from 25 different sites revealed healed bone treatment, suggesting a story of mutual aid, patience and dedication among those people (Victoria Romano and others, ‘Bone trauma and interpersonal care among Late Holocene hunter-gatherers from Patagonia, Argentina’, International Journal of Paleopathology, December 2025, pp.10-24). It has been estimated that around one in five hunter-gatherers would have been likely to suffer some kind of injury or disability and while most wounds would have been the predictable bruises and fractures of daily life requiring only a short break from everyday activities, others were likely to have been worse, leaving individuals unable to hunt, gather, grind plants, craft tools, etc, for months, or perhaps a lifetime. Here we are presented with evidence that those suffering in this way would have been cared for by the community, even if they were not economically ‘useful’. Such research, therefore, lends weight to the ‘pro-social’ arguments many are making about a fundamentally benign human nature.

But in the end, whether humans are intrinsically ‘pro-social’ or simply highly flexible, the evidence is that, while violence and war are certainly possible forms of human behaviour as both history and the present show, coexistence without violence or war also presents itself as another possible form of human behaviour. This was a reality recognised as far back as 1985 in Unesco’s ‘Seville Statement on Violence’, in the following terms: ‘Biology does not condemn humanity to war … It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature’. And the undeniable fact is that the vast majority of interactions that take place in daily life between human beings are co-operative, peaceful and harmonious, not rude or cruel or anti-social. We do not normally expect to have arguments or experience serious friction with our fellow humans in the course of our daily activities, and most of the time we don’t. And, on the relatively rare occasions when that does happens, it stands out – precisely because it is rare.

Cooperation or competition?

The broader point here is that, while we do not say that the kind of society socialists advocate and regard as eminently possible will be entirely argument or conflict free (no human society could be), we do say that the scope for argument and conflict will be far less than in the competitive, insecure society we live in under capitalism. This society, in both its ethic and its organisation, runs directly contrary to the ‘normal’ human tendency to help and cooperate with others. It drives people to compete with others, to try to get the better of them and even to do them down. It does this by tempting people with the lure of gain or reward, often financial, so pushing them to behave in ways that divide them from their fellow humans and often making the ‘success’ of one into the ‘failure’ of others. Given this reality, what is truly remarkable and significant is that, despite the overwhelmingly powerful pressures capitalism places on people to get the better of others and so not be ‘kind’ to them, in so many of the actions and connections and competitive situations created for us in our daily lives, most of us still manage to be largely kind to others, to cooperate with them and to share. In a new kind of egalitarian society, one of free and equal access, with no buying and selling or wages or salaries, with co-operative endeavour, and with technology and the abundant resources of the planet used to satisfy need and not for profit-making ends, is it far-fetched to believe that such behaviour will come fully into its own?

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Books mentioned in the article that have featured elsewhere in previous Socialist Standards

• Sep 1969: A review of The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris.
• Aug 1993: A review of Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
• Nov 2015: A review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
• May 2021: A review of Humankind. A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
• Sep 2022: A review of Ultrasocial. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future by John Gowdy

50 Years Ago: Rival Paradises (1958)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rival Paradises (From the Socialist Standard, April, 1908), General Booth says: “The Socialists want to make the world a paradise without having a paradise people." Is the General fearful of the competition of a paradise here below with his problematic paradise to come? Or does he expect hell to breed angels?

The Socialist knows that a paradise people could only be born of paradise conditions; but Christians expect figs to grow on thistles.

And does not this reveal a fundamental cleavage between Socialism and Christianity? The Christian looks on man as the creator of his circumstances; the Socialist looks on man as the product without, of course, ignoring the reflex action of past environment through the. individual.

The environment is almost all-powerful, and the secret of the promise of man’s future mastery lies in his growing knowledge of the laws of material development and his consequent greater adaptability to those laws. 

To the Christian, evolution is man-made; to the Socialist, evolution has made man.

Well does the General serve his masters by directing the gaze of the poor from the material conditions to mansions in the sky; but his chief merit must be, in the eyes of the masters, to have organized the greatest "free labour" association in existence.

Rip-Van-Daily Mail Wakes Up (1951)

From the August 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

At last it has happened fellow workers, a great revolutionary discovery has been made, a discovery so outstanding and unique that it requires a large headline in the Scottish Daily Mail (18/6/51). There it is friends, in bold letters, the statement of the century, "Lack of money makes crooks,” and on reading further, we find that this headline alludes to a report by a Stockport, Cheshire, committee set up to examine juvenile delinquency and the increase in petty pilfering in large stores. Now this reason for stealing is really quite new; after all, who would think that a child seeing all sorts of fancy things laid out before him in a shop, would take one, just because his old man hasn't the where-with-all to let him buy them. There must be some other reason surely.

We know of course what the "pulpit parasites” say about theft. As far as they are concerned, it is something that is "born" in the child, and all those children that are good throughout their lives, and don't covet their neighbour's goods, especially if their neighbour (metaphorically speaking, of course), happens to be their boss, will eventually climb the gold stairs and spend the rest of eternity sitting around in a long white nightgown doing an act like Harpo Marx only more solemn like. The  "bad” ones, so we are told, usually end up on a lower stratum, wielding a shovel in an atmosphere that would create a demand for asbestos suits.

Then there are those modern witch doctors, the psychologists. They’ve got their own reason for a child stealing and it is usually something like this. When three weeks old, the child saw its mother hit his father across the skull with a rolling pin. This left a lasting impression on the child’s sub-conscious mind (also on the old man's skull), and Junior has spent the rest of his days taking things, not knowing why, of course, but really because he is looking for a tin helmet to protect his pop from any more rolling pin massage.

Lastly, we come to the S.P.G.B., who have been saying for almost 50 years what the Scottish Daily Mail has just found out, and that is, that material conditions are the determining factor in human behaviour. They go even further than that, and point out that the main cause of the vast majority of problems that face the working class today is poverty, and that the sole cause of this poverty is the fact that the working class only receive back, in money form, a proportion of the value they put into the commodities they produce. But wait a minute, this being true, it must mean then, that the Capitalist, who pockets the difference between what his workers get for their wages, and what he gets for the commodities the workers produce, is really doing a large bit of stealing himself. Tut, tut Somebody had better tell the Scottish Daily Mail quickly so that they can get it into the news, and then perhaps we may see the following headline, "Lord Nockalot steals £10,000 from his employees in previous financial year.” Yes, perhaps.

DIOPTRE

Socialism or Social Catholicism (1959)

Party News from the July 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Debate between SPGB and Roman Catholic Church

It is an extraordinary event for a representative of the Roman Catholic Church to debate in public with a Socialist. On Sunday, 10th May, however, Father Bernard Rickett, headmaster of the West Bridgeford Roman Catholic School, Notts, received the Bishop’s permission to do so. Representing the Catholic attitude he debated the subject, "Socialism or Social Catholicism?” with the Socialist Party’s speaker, R. Coster. The debate was attended by an audience of 78 on a sweltering afternoon at the Co-op. Educational Centre, Nottingham.

R. Coster

Opening the debate for the Socialist Party, R. Coster defined its scope in terms of a Catholic writer’s phrase “ human life and happiness,” and said at once it was impossible to consider the question unless one dealt with the great problems which stood in the way of life and happiness for the great majority of humanity. War and its terrible weapons; insecurity and fear, and the recurrence of economic crises; poverty and its consequences in bad housing, a great deal of disease, crime and unhappiness; the overwhelming lack of satisfaction of people in the present-day world that produced appalling figures for mental and nervous disorders: these were the impediments to human life and happiness, and these were what had to be dealt with.

The Socialist case was that all these problems were consequences of the Capitalist organization of society. Capitalism was founded on the ownership of the means of living by a class; it meant that all productive activity was carried on solely for the motive of sale at a profit, that this commercial motivation dominated all relationships in society. It meant also that the non-owning class, the great majority, must be exploited and always more or less poor; and that the interests of these two classes were therefore irreconcilably opposed.

But Capitalism meant as well the conflicts between rival capitalist groups which led inevitably to war. It meant that from time to time, unpredictably and uncontrollably, there were crises and all the suffering which depressions brought. Parties and governments, and philosophers and religious leaders too, had been powerless to prevent these things because Capitalism’s antagonistic relations arising from division of interests over property caused them. The Socialist case, therefore, was for the abolition of this system. What was wanted was a new basis for society— the ownership by everybody of all the means of living, so that poverty, conflict and all the other barriers to decent life and happiness could no longer exist.

Could Catholicism solve all, or any, of these problems? There was no point of contact between Catholicism and Socialism; the speaker pointed to Catholic reiterations that the two were antagonistic and that private property was a natural right. The Church stood not only for Capitalism, but for a Capitalism so authoritarian that its criticisms of the Russian dictatorship could largely be applied to itself. By its defence of Capitalism, the Church acquiesced in the system which was the source of the problems.

Catholics talked about improving workers’ conditions, but the living standards their Popes advocated were those of “frugal and well-behaved” workers; the rate of emigration from Ireland was no advertisement for Catholic society On the war question, Catholic authorities were as divided and helpless as any Capitalist politicians—some opposed to nuclear weapons, some ready to justify them. The remedies for crises and exploitation advocated were childish: classes could not harmonize even at Popes’ bidding, in a class-divided society, and the proposals to “lift barriers” on trade and production showed incomprehension of how Capitalism worked.

Social Catholicism had no case. The only case was for Socialism, which aimed at establishing conditions in which the problems could not arise and human life and happiness could flourish.

Father Rickett

Father Rickett, in his opening speech, said he was not an expert on economic and social matters; he must treat the questions raised as a theologian who had studied history. He expressed appreciation of the Socialist Party as the only organization professing Socialism which was logical in its arguments. The trouble with the Socialist case was that its logic, though impeccable, rested on a false premise. Its view of man's nature was incomplete and therefore incorrect. Man lived in society, but he had been created for a supernatural destiny, and the idea of Socialism was incompatible with this divine nature. Man did not live by bread alone—he had been created not for temporal but for eternal happiness, though that did not mean he had to be miserable in this world.

Man was a selfish brute, imperfect by nature, and no solution could be valid which ignored his original sin.

Catholic sociology started from the need for him to reform his own character, to curb his selfishness and be content with his station in life. Disease, work and suffering were the lot of the human race. Capitalism was largely beyond the control of the Church, which indeed was not concerned with temporal things except insofar as they related to man's salvation.

Nevertheless, Popes had strongly denounced the excesses of Capitalism and laid down for those living in it what were God's will and moral laws. Social living was the will of God. The reverse of the Class-struggle doctrine was true; capital and labour were complementary—each needed the other, and our higher standards of living today were due to large-scale enterprise and the brains and invested capital behind it. It was quite wrong to claim that the product should belong to the labourer. The Church tried to see that there was an equitable share, and laid down rules of justice for employers and employees. The employer had duties to his workmen, and the worker also must recognise moral laws in his behaviour towards the employer.

What must be sought was charity, in its sense of brotherly love and mutual support. The Catholic Church had advocated the formation of Guilds like those which existed in former times, and in these there would be not class conflict but class collaboration. Class hatred, and hatred of any kind, could never produce anything constructive.

R. Coster 

R. Coster, in reply, summarised Father Rickett's argument as that, first, man must consider his life in relation to a life hereafter, and second, that man was innately bad, and that these two conditions put the Socialist case out of court

He submitted that the argument was, in fact, complete irrelevant to the matter under discussion. We were talking about human life and happiness, and it was useless to make the supernatural a basis for argument to people who were not aware of it. The proposal that human society was divinely instituted was superfluous and meaningless; human society was a fact—man organized socially for survival, and had he not done so there would have been no man. '

Were all the things said of man's “brutal, selfish” nature true? Nothing of the kind was known historically of human nature. The only thing known was that human nature continually altered. So did valuations of it: what was brutal and selfish in one age was heroic in another, and the Catholic Church itself had undergone this kind of societal conditioning.

Did the Church want a better world? The speaker read from a Papal Encyclical which said the world could not be better, that claims to the contrary were “lying promises.” But what were the effects of the Church's laying down laws of social justice? One Encyclical had stated the duties of employers towards their employees, and Catholic employers had conspired to prevent their workpeople learning what was said in it. And this in fact underlined what Socialists said—that a class must obey, not its religious ideals, but its interests as a class.

Socialists agreed that men did not live by bread alone. The quality of living was what made happiness. But first, man's material needs must be satisfied. The conditions must be created in which man could know the enjoyment of living; that was the aim of Socialism.

Father Rickett

Father Rickett, replying, spoke of the tyranny which Socialism would impose. It meant that we should lose our freedom. No one could understand human nature unless he contemplated the Crucifixion; it was an aberration of mind to put it aside. Society without God was an unrealizable Utopia. There could be and there was happiness in our world: nothing was more lovely to behold than a little Catholic home with its many children.

It was not mere egalitarian distribution that mattered. The Church wanted to see men make the best of the existing order, and within that order better distribution had been obtained. The Church had encouraged workers to organize in trade unions and stand up to Capital. On the question of the great problems, obviously insecurity and injustice were parts of the natural order. War was hateful and the Church would never support it—but it must be realized that some things were worse than war.

What had been said about Catholic employers was true, but they would suffer in eternity for it; their action was an instance of original sin. The Church's mission was to see that life as it was organized here below was not incompatible with the destiny of man. Nowhere had working people a better friend than the Catholic Church.

Father Rickett 

After a short period in which questions were asked and contributions to discussion made by members of the audience. Father Rickett made his summing-up speech. He said that the Catholic Church was much misunderstood by people; one either loved it or hated it. The idea of the classless society was unreal. It had never been depicted, and could only be achieved if we were all angels. Marx's arguments left much unexplained : heaven help us, the speaker said, if the right of property were not safeguarded. This right was precious to all of us in our daily lives, in our homes and in preserving our possessions. It protected the small man trying to advance his business or his career. Capitalism would pass away and some other social order replace it, but the Church would remain.

R. Coster 

R. Coster, concluding for the Socialist Party, said that Father Rickett had completely evaded the issue of the debate.

The questions put had not been answered. It was claimed that the Catholic Church stood aside from politics; in fact, the Church’s record showed a great deal of political activity not advantageous to working people. To say that Socialism would take away freedom was untrue and, for the Church, unfortunate; the Concordat between Spain and the Church, for example, had stripped the Spanish worker of every kind of freedom. As for happiness, the “lovely” Catholic home was frequently a squalid, overcrowded place. As for war being hateful, in this century Catholic authorities had repeatedly advocated the suppression of heresies by violence.

The whole conception of property as a right was mistaken. The capitalist class had known no right but might: by force and every other means they had secured their ownership, and established the legal and moral titles—the “ right ”—to it afterwards. At no point had Father Rickett shown why Socialism was “unrealizable.” All that was needed for its realization was understanding, and this was the enemy of Catholicism. Cardinal Manning had once said: “ I do not have to think for myself. The Pope does my thinking for me." But Socialism had everything to offer of human life and happiness, and to think for oneself was to hold the key to it.

Freddie James

Blogger's Note:

As mentioned previously on the blog, 'R. Coster' was the pen-name/party-name of Robert Barltrop during his first period of membership of the SPGB. When Barltrop rejoined the SPGB in the 1970s, he opted to use his own name when writing and speaking for the Party.

Barltrop, in fact, briefly mentions this debate in The Monument — his unofficial history of the SPGB — when he states that Father Bernard Rickett was ". . .  the best of all the speakers I met in debate . . ."

Born with a silver spoon in your mouth or born in Sin? (2011)

The Halo Halo! column from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers of the ‘Standard’ are probably not too bothered about the notion of being ‘born in sin’. To others though this can be a problem. Not least, you might suppose, because even those who warn us about the dangers of it – the various priests, parsons, rabbis and mullahs etc, have never been able to reach an agreement about the precise nature of sin. The various Gods, apparently, are offended by anything from people eating the wrong food or dressing in the wrong way to facing the wrong compass point when saying their prayers. Fortunately Iain Duncan Smith has now been able to step in to clarify matters and explain to us what sin is.

Duncan Smith is not only the Work and Pensions Secretary, he is also a practicing Roman Catholic and has previously informed us that “religion is integral to everything I do”. He also holds the view that many of the problems of poverty have a “spiritual base”. Now either this man is just talking out of his ‘spiritual base’, or he knows something the rest of us don’t.

During a BBC radio Today programme in November, commenting on Tory plans to take away benefits to the unemployed who fail to accept a job offer, he explained the problem of people refusing to take unsuitable, or poorly paid work. “Surely,” he said, “that’s a sin.”

If he’s right that’s good news. Well um, sort of. It depends on whether you hold the same religious beliefs as Iain Duncan Smith. Look at it this way. The penalty for failing to accept a job offer will be the loss of the £64 a week Jobseeker’s Allowance for three months. If you do it again you will lose it for six months. And for a third offence you lose it for three years.

Now if you compare that with what Christianity previously told us was the penalty for sin you can see how beneficial and merciful the Tory plans will be. According to the Pope, the Born Again mob and numerous other fundamentalists, the penalty for sin is to spend eternity in Hell, screaming in agony and being prodded back into the brimstone by the Devil.

Be honest now, Three years starvation for you and your family in this life, or eternity in hell in the next. Which would you prefer?

Whether Iain Duncan Smith has done his theological homework on this though is perhaps questionable. A quick check of catholic theology on Google throws up a few more sins that are so serious that they “cry to heaven for vengeance”. They include the oppression of the poor (Exodus 2:23) and defrauding workers of their wages (James 5:4). Are the Tories moving in mysterious ways here?

NW

The Human Nature Myth (1969)

From the February 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It won’t work. You can’t change human nature”. How often has the Socialist heard this objection! It is easy enough to answer because it is a catchphrase whose meaning is unclear and whose implications the objector won’t have thought through.

What, first, might “human nature” be? The usual answer is that human beings are greedy and lazy and are out to get as much as they can with the least possible effort. But this should more accurately be called “human behaviour” and few will say that human behaviour doesn’t change. It is easy to show that throughout history and pre-history human behaviour has varied from society to society. It is easy to show too that people don’t in fact act from such simple motives. The whole objection thus falls. If the objector is particularly persistent or particularly foolish, he will try to argue that greed and laziness are built-in human characteristics, that they are part of what is more properly called “human nature”, that is, the biological nature of homo sapiens that distinguishes it from other animal species. But here biological science is insistent: such patterns of behaviour as greed and laziness are not and could not be inherited. Besides, a little thought will show that the idea of greed or laziness has no meaning except in society. A man can have black or white skin independently of society; but he cannot be greedy or lazy except in a social context.

Social science tells us that human behaviour changes. Biology tells us that traits like greed are not built-in and are not transmitted by heredity. So the human nature objection hasn't a scientific leg to stand on. It's a myth. But why does it persist?

There are at least three reasons.

The argument “you can’t change human nature” was developed as an answer to those who wanted social change in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The real purpose was to argue not so much that you can't change human nature as that you shouldn’t try to. Too loose use of the phrase “human nature" to cover human behaviour and psychology dates from this period. Which is not surprising since neither sociology nor biology nor psychology were far developed at that time. Previously thinkers in England and France had worked out a materialist theory of knowledge which saw man as the product of his environment. Change the environment, they said, and you will change human behaviour. Human nature could be improved! This was the message of English and French materialism and was taken up by social reformers everywhere. The reactionary supporters of the old order could only come up with the human nature objection.

Most of these reactionary thinkers were religious and, in the Christian dogma of original sin, they had a ready-made argument. Many of the reformers rejected this dogma; some even were atheists. But religion in preaching that man is born “evil”, "depraved”, "corrupt”, “wicked”, "sinful" and the like is clearly a powerful source of the view that man’s nature would be a bar to Socialism.

The rising middle class in England in the 17th century developed its own ideology (which was transmitted to their colleagues in America by the Pilgrim Fathers). This was part Puritanism and part what has been called "the theory of possessive individualism”. The originator of this theory, in a coherent form, was Thomas Hobbes in his book called Leviathan. Politically, Hobbes was a supporter of the King (Charles II) and an opponent of the middle class. All the same his theory well suited capitalist society. He held that in nature there was a war of all against each and that this was only ended by a contract to set up a government which would restrain everybody, save for the governor or governing class. Abolish the oppression of government, said Hobbes, and all Hell would break loose.

The human nature myth, like the religious dogma of so-called original sin, has long been used as an argument against social reforms, let alone social revolution. Now integrated into the theory of possessive individualism they are part of the ideology by which capitalist society seeks to justify itself.

Human beings are quite capable of co-operating as free and equal men and women, to produce this wealth they need and to run a social system in which the satisfaction of these needs will be the guiding principle. Men are not naturally lazy. Quite the contrary. Working (which after all is only the expenditure of energy) is a biological as well as a social must. Socialists assert that men and women can so organise the conditions of work that they can get pleasure from working and making useful things. Nor are men naturally greedy. Grabbing and hoarding are signs of scarcity and insecurity. These are certainly features of capitalism, but they won’t be of Socialism —the society of abundance. Where men and women have free access to what they need to live and enjoy life, there will be no reason to take more than you need. To do so would only clutter up the place where you live. You might as well leave what you don’t want immediately in the local store, sure in the knowledge that you can always get them whenever you want. And of course human wants are not really insatiable.

Socialism is a practical possibility. Human beings are capable of better things than the priests would have us believe.

Adam Buick