Free for all? (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony D'Arcy

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.

50 Years Ago: Origin of the idea of justice (1965)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Locke, who, like the philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, used the deductive method employed in geometry, came to think that private property engendered the idea of justice. In his “Human Understanding” he expressly says that “Where there is no property there is no injustice, is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to anything, and the idea to which the name injustice is given being the invasion or violation of that right . . .”

If the idea of Justice, as Locke thought, can only appear after and as a consequence of private property, the idea of theft, or rather the tendency to take unthinkingly what one needs or desires, is on the contrary, well developed, before the institution of private property. The communistic savage and barbarian behave in regard to material goods as our savants and writers do in regard to intellectual goods: whenever they find them they take them, to use Molière’s expression. But this natural custom becomes theft, crime, from the time when common property is replaced by private property.

Into the head and heart of savages and barbarians common property put ideas and sentiments which bourgeois Christians, those sad results of private property, will find very strange.

Heckwelder, a Moravian missionary who in the 18th century lived fifteen years among North American savages, not yet corrupted by Christianity and bourgeois civilisation, said:

“The Indians believe that the Great Spirit created the world and all that it contains for the common good of men; when he stocked the earth and filled the woods with game, it was not for the advantage of some, but of all. Everything is given in common to the children of men. Everything that breathes on the earth, everything that grows in the fields, everything that lives in the rivers and waters, belongs jointly to all, and everyone has a right to his share."

[From a lecture by Paul Lafargue on Idealism and Materialism, Socialist Standard, May 1915.]

Hunting, Gathering and Co-operating (2001)

From the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Bennett

What is this money thing? (2001)

From the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Below is a report of how members of a society which had evolved beyond primitive communism but still retained some of its features and attitudes reacted to their first contact with the money economy.

The Treatment and Customs of the Governor’s House at Botany Bay as told by Tongan Chief Páloo Máta Moinga and his Wife, Fataféhi to Finow King of Tonga and Chief Filimóëátoo. Recorded by William Mariner, Resident of the Islands for 4 years, to John Martin M.D. Author of “The Natives of Tongan Islands”. Published 1818:

“The first thing he and his wife had to do, when they arrived at the Governor’s House, where they went to reside, was to sweep out a large court yard, and clean down a great pair of stairs; in vain they endeavoured to explain, that in their own country they were chiefs, and, being accustomed to be waited on, were quite unused to such employments: their expostulations were taken no notice of, and work they must, at first their life was so uncomfortable, that they wished to die; no one seemed to protect them; all the houses were shut against them; if they saw anybody eating, they were not invited to partake: nothing was to be got without money, of which they could not comprehend the value, nor how this same money was to be obtained in any quantity; if they asked for it nobody would give them any, unless they worked for it, and then it was so small in quantity, that they could not get one-tenth part of what they wanted with it.

One day, whilst sauntering about, the chief fixed his eyes upon the cook’s shop, and, seeing several people enter, and others again, coming out with victuals, he made sure they were sharing out food, according to the old Tongan fashion, and in he went, glad enough of the occasion, expecting to get some pork; after waiting sometime, with anxiety to be helped to his share, the master of the shop asked him what he wanted, and, being answered in an unknown language straightaway kicked him out taking him for a thief, that only wanted an opportunity to steal.

Thus, he said even being a chief did not prevent him being used ill for when he told them he was a chief, they gave him to understand, that money made a man a chief, after a time, however, he acknowledged that he got better used in proportion as he became acquainted with the customs and language, he expressed his astonishment at the perseverance with which white people worked from morning till night, to get money: he could not conceive how they were able to endure so much labour.

After having heard this account, Finow asked several questions regarding the nature of money: what is it made of?—is it like iron? can it be fashioned like iron into various useful instruments? If not why cannot people procure what they want in the way of barter?—but where is money to be got?—if it be made, then every man ought to spend his time in making money; that when he got plenty, he may be able afterwards to obtain whatever else he wants.

In answer to the last observation, Mr Mariner replied that the material of which money was made was very scarce and difficult to be got, and that only chiefs and great men could procure readily a large quantity of it; and this either by being inheritors of plantations or houses, which they allowed others to have, for paying so much tribute in money every year; or by their public services; or by paying small sums of money for things when they were in plenty, and afterwards letting others have them for larger sums, when they were scarce: and as to the lower classes of people they worked hard, and got paid by their employers in small quantities of money, as the reward for their labour: &c. That the King was the only person that was allowed to make (to coin) money, and that he put his mark upon all that he made, that it might known to be true; that no person could readily procure the material of which it was made, without paying money for it; and if contrary to the taboo of the King, he turned this material into money, he would scarcely have made as much as he had given for it.

Mr Mariner was then going on to shew the conveniences of money as a medium of exchange, when Filimóëátoo interrupted him, saying to Finow, I understand how it is:- money is less cumbersome than goods, and it is very convenient for a man to exchange away his goods for money; which, at any other time he can exchange again for the same or other goods that he may want; whereas the goods themselves may perhaps spoil by keeping (particularly if provisions) but the money he supposed would not spoil; and although it was of no true value itself, yet being scarce and difficult to be got without giving something useful and really valuable for it, it was imagined to be of value; and if everybody considered it so, and would readily give their goods for it, he did not see but what it was a sort of real value to all who possessed it, as long as their neighbours chose to take it in the same way. Mr Mariner found he could not give a better explanation, he therefore told Filimóëátoo that his notion of the nature of money was a just one.

After a pause of some length, Finow replied that the explanation did not satisfy him. He still thought it a foolish thing that people should place a value on money, when they either could not or would not apply it to any useful (physical) purpose: if, said he it were made of iron, and could be converted into knives, axes, and chisels, there would be some sense in placing a value on it; but as it is I see none: if man he added, has more yams than he wants, let him exchange some of them away for pork or gnatoo (cloth); certainly money is much handier, and more convenient, but then as it will not spoil by being kept, people will store it up, instead of sharing it out, as a chief ought to do, and thus become selfish; whereas, if provision were the principal property of a man, and it ought to be, as being both the most useful and the most necessary, he could not store it up, for it would spoil, and so he would be obliged to either exchange it away for something else useful, or share it out with his neighbours, and inferior chiefs and dependants for nothing. He concluded by saying ‘I understand now very well what it is that makes the Papalangis (Europeans) so selfish; it is the money!’ When Mr Mariner informed Finow that dollars were money, he was greatly surprised, having always taken them for Páänga (a kind of bear used in one of their games, they supposed dollars to be used among us for a similar purpose), and things of little value; and he was exceedingly sorry he had not secured all the dollars out of the ship Port au Prince before he had ordered her to be burnt: I had always thought said he, that your ship belonged to some poor fellow, perhaps King George’s cook (at these islands a cook is considered one of the lowest of mankind in point of rank); for Captain Cook’s ship which belonged to the King, had plenty of beads, axes, and looking glasses on board, whilst yours had nothing but iron hoops, oil, skins and twelve thousand Páänga as I thought: but if every one of these was money, your ship must have belonged to a very great chief indeed.”

Gray Matter (2008)

Book Review from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray (Penguin £8.99)

Gray’s main argument is that unrealistic political aims should be abandoned and replaced by goals which are truly achievable. It is probably difficult to disagree with this as a general principle, but of course it all depends on what is regarded as realistic and unrealistic.

Quite a bit of Gray’s discussion is aimed at the impossibility of establishing a Socialist society. While Marx was an unrivalled analyst of capitalism, he says, his view of the future society was impractical. Central planning is bound to fail, since nobody can know enough to plan a modern economy; but this is based on the misconception that there will be an office somewhere that decides how many widgets will be produced and where. Other claims fare no better: it’s just not true that Lenin’s State and Revolution is rooted in Marx’s writings on the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin twisted Marx’s idea of a transitional form of state into a vicious repressive regime that ruled over workers. Gray’s view that Marx and Engels saw terror as part of the revolution is based on remarks made in a talk in 1850, rather than on any of their mature works. In any case, it deals with how workers should act if bourgeois democrats came to power (specifically in Germany) rather than with the aftermath of a Socialist revolution.

Furthermore, Gray claims that no trace has ever been found of ‘primitive communism’ (which is not true either — see the Socialist Standard for December 2006, on life before the Neolithic Revolution). A Socialist society is allegedly impossible because it would pursue harmony and so clash with ‘the diversity of human values’, since apparently a moneyless society would be a vision of hell to some people. To which we can only say that capitalists who yearn for a world where they are billionaires will just have to lump it in Socialism.

And what of the realism that ought to replace all this supposed utopianism? According to Gray, ‘The root of realist thinking is Machiavelli’s insight that governments exist, and must achieve all of their goals in a world of ceaseless conflict that is never far from a state of war’. The heart of realism is ‘its assertion of the innate defects of human beings’. In other words, we should accept capitalism with its violence and poverty, since people are too fierce and unreasonable to live in harmony. But the true realistic approach is to see through the pretensions of capitalism and its supporters and take the view that a society based on cooperation is a practical possibility.

Paul Bennett

Voice From The Back: The cold facts (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cold facts

Britain has seen a sharp increase in poverty, according to a major study that measures how far people on low incomes can afford the basic necessities of life. The report, Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain, has shown that the proportion of households regarded as living in poverty rose from 14 to 24 percent between 1983 and 1999 . . . The research found that about 9.5 million people cannot afford to keep their homes adequately heated, free from damp or in a decent state of decoration. Eight million people cannot afford one or more essential household goods, such as a refrigerator, a telephone or carpets for the living areas in their homes. Times, 11 September.

A corking night out

A worker’s Saturday night out can sometimes turn a bit nasty. You know the sort of thing. Disputes with the waiter about whether you should pay for the extra noodles or boiled rice. But spare a though for the gravity of the situation when one of our masters went for a meal. “The London Restaurateur Gordon Ramsay once had a customer who claimed that a £3,000, 1957 bottle of Petrus was corked. “I don’t mind arguing with people, but if you’ve got a talented sommelier then you know what you’re talking about.” That wine needed to be left open for 45 minutes, but the customer insisted on drinking it immediately. “He was just trying to create a bit of a scene,” says Mr Ramsay. “After half an hour he appreciated the flavours. Had we been weak then, we would have binned a very expensive bottle of wine.” Independent on Sunday, 3 September.

Whose world is it, anyway?

Capitalism is turning the world into a giant dustbin. Oceans are being poisoned, the air is being polluted and, according to a recent report from WWF, the global environment network: if the present rate of global warming continues, almost a third of plant and animal habitat will be destroyed by the end of the century. “Global warming means a horrifying future for nature,” said Ms Jennifer Morgan, the director of WWF’s climate change campaign. “This is a wake-up call to the world’s leaders—if they do not act to stop global warming, wildlife around the globe may suffer the consequences. They must give top priority to reducing levels of carbon pollution to prevent a catastrophe that could change the world as we know it.” Herald, 31 August.

Good news!

In the long dark days of winter there is always some good news. Here are a couple of news items that should lift the gloom a little:

(1) The Labour Party is £2 million in the red and has lost more than 30,000 members . . . However, the Conservative leader, William Hague, is also facing the prospect of embarrassment when the party’s accounts are published: they are expected to show that the Tories managed to raise only £8 million last year, indicating a reluctance by business to make donations. Independent on Sunday, 3 September.

(2) In the past ten years, billed by the churches as a “Decade of Evangelism”, church attendance of all denominations has dropped by 22 percent. Between 1989 and 1999, the Roman Catholic Church lost 490,000 worshippers and the Church of England 290,000. Observer, 3 September.

Without comment

Expect a change in the way business stories are covered on the BBC. The director general, Greg Dyke, says one of the things that irritates him most on the news is seeing a reporter say, “So, it’s good news for the shareholders, even if not for the rest of us.” Dyke wants BBC staff reminded that profit is good for everyone. Independent, 5 September.

Basic instinct

Prehistoric human beings were able to flourish and spread throughout the world because they lived in a state of “primitive communism”, a psychologist has claimed. Professor Andrew Whiten, from St Andrew’s University told a conference at the Royal Society of Edinburgh that our ancestors evolved through a form of co-operation not very different from the ideals of communism. Human beings were able to dominate the world against predators such as big cats and wolves, he said, only by adopting socialist values. All members of the prehistoric tribe were considered equal, he said, and food and clothing was equally shared. Times, 18 August.

Population and Poverty. (1926)

From the April 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

A debate took place recently in South London between an alleged Communist and a champion of the New Generation League on the question, “Is Birth Control Necessary for the Abolition of Poverty?” This is not a report thereof, but an attempt to put before our readers the Socialist view of the question raised.

The speaker in the affirmative was decidedly modest in his claims. He did not assert that Birth Control would abolish poverty, or even ameliorate it, but simply that poverty could not be abolished without it. He advanced, of course, the time-worn dogma that population tends to press upon means of subsistence, no matter what the latter may be, and left his audience to conclude that poverty was a result of this pressure and, therefore, short of artificial control of births, unavoidable. He further attached great importance to the facts that Marx formed his opinions prior to the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” (based upon Malthus) and was, moreover, a townsman ignorant of agriculture and its limited possibilities.

Let us examine these claims. In the first place poverty is not merely a relative term, it is a description of the condition of a particular class in society, namely, the working class, i.e., the class which produces the antithesis of poverty, which is wealth. This wealth is enjoyed by a comparatively small section of the community, namely, the capitalist, or master, class, who own the material means by which the workers produce it. In this ownership is to be found the cause of their social position and not in the size of their families. Broadly speaking, it is true that the workers have more numerous progeny than their masters, but it is equally true that no amount of abstinence from the function of procreation will make a man a millionaire. Something more is necessary, i.e., the exploitation of social labour.

This fact is ignored by the Malthusian. He talks imposingly about “the struggle for existence” (a term which he never accurately defines), but omits to mention that before the struggle for wealth can commence, it has to be produced by some measure of co-operation. Every historical form of society has involved the co-operative efforts of the labourers as an element in its economic basis. The ancient empires, founded on chattel-slavery, the feudal kingdoms of the middle ages resting on serfdom, as well as the capitalist régime of to-day based upon wage-labour, could not conceivably have existed if the productivity of the workers’ labour had not exceeded their necessary consumption.

The pressure of the workers upon their means of subsistence is thus the product not of “nature” but of society under certain conditions in the course of its development. In other words, the contrast between wealth and poverty is of historical origin and came into existence only when, by dint of labour, mankind had acquired a degree of control over nature’s supply of the means of subsistence sufficient to permit of the existence of an idle class.

Under pre-historical conditions, a primitive form of Communism existed. The small, narrow social groups of those days knew no class distinctions. If nature was niggardly, all suffered ; if generous all benefited. Property rights as understood to-day did not exist. Mankind exploited nature as their state of development permitted, with none but the savage beasts to say them nay. The basis of the group was kinship, i.e., descent from a common ancestor. Under Communism men advanced from the lowest depths of savagery to the threshold of civilisation. They discovered fire, invented the bow and arrow, and the arts of smelting and pottery-making, domesticated animals and initiated horticulture. They laid, in fact, the ground-work for all subsequent progress.

Tribal communism, however, broke up with the advance of chattel-slavery, an institution, the origin of which affords an interesting refutation of Malthusianism. In extremely primitive times, groups engaged in warfare among other objects for women to add to the numbers of their tribe ; the men they slew. With the increase of the fruits of labour, however, a use was discovered for the male captives of war as well. They became slaves of their conquerors, and the wealth of a Roman patrician was in proportion, not to the smallness of his household, indeed, but, on the contrary, to the numbers of these slaves who constituted its most important element. For their maintenance he was responsible just as the farmer is responsible for his cattle ; but the surplus-product of their labour was the source of his wealth, and the same principle has applied under various forms to this day. The wealth of the feudal lord was in proportion to the number of his tenants, while the modern financial magnate controls huge industrial armies.

On the other hand the avowed birth-controlling peasants of France “enjoy a standard of life lower than that of the wage-slaves of Britain and America; a fact which is due, not to any niggardliness of nature in France, but to the antiquated methods of exploitation upon which its rulers depend.

The Malthusian claims that this is due to the absence of coal in France. He forgets that if this is true then the presence of coal would have led to similar results as in England, i.e., a higher degree of exploitation and unemployment !

It is clear in any case that the progress of industry and, consequently, in the long run the progress of society, depends upon the further development of social labour. The restriction of population can at best play but a negative part in this progress, while, pushed to extremes, it can only produce stagnation. Modern industrial development necessitates the existing population with its massing of the workers in highly organised productive centres. As a remedy for poverty, therefore, birth control is a policy of reaction and despair, whatever its value may be from a hygienic point of view.

To recapitulate, present poverty is due to capitalism, i.e., to the monopoly by a diminishing class of the fruits of social effort. It can be abolished so soon as the class which suffers from it realises the cause of it and removes that cause. When the workers organise as a class, seize political power, and convert the means of living into the common property of all, then and then only will class distinctions and their social and economic accompaniments disappear.

The struggle between the capitalists over the surplus wealth wrung from their slaves on the one hand and the struggle between the slaves for jobs on the other are the fruits of immature development. They will vanish when in the struggle between these two classes as a whole, the workers, are victorious. Production will then be carried on in conscious co-operation in order to secure the fullest possible development for every individual.

The limits of productive possibility no one can foresee, and it behoves the workers in their own interests to study existing conditions for the solution of existing problems. Mathematical calculations with regard to the number of elephants per square yard likely to result from unchecked multiplication may be ingenious and even exciting to an overheated imagination, but they have no bearing upon the problem of poverty. As for Marx, whatever his views on Darwin may have been, he was able to expose Malthus for the plagiarist he was (see footnote 1 to page 345, “Capital,” Sonnenschein edition).

Eric Boden

Society without exchange (1987)

From the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may be hard to imagine a society totally without exchange, but nevertheless for the vast majority of human history, around 15.000 years, this was exactly the way things were organised in a stage of human history called primitive communism.

At this time humanity lived a tribal existence with each member of the tribe as important as another: the men as hunters, the women as gatherers of fruit and roots. The young, as the future of the tribe, the old as the wisdom of the tribe, who knew the migratory patterns of animals, where the best roots could be found and much more besides. When the men and women returned with food it was not (as portrayed in some of the more pathetic films such as One Million Years BC) a mad rush for food and the strongest getting the most but a fair and equitable share-out, as the tribe realised the importance of each member of their society.

Examples can still be found today of such tribal societies: the Kalahari Bushmen and Pinaro Indians to name but two who, when first confronted by colonialists and asked about greed and property and who owned what, could not even find words in their language for such concepts and would end up laughing and looking bemused.

Socialist society

The Socialist Party however is not advocating a return to primitive communism. Far from it. but we can learn from history. Socialism must be on a world-wide scale, to replace worldwide capitalism — no individual countries, just one world. Also, it can only be established when the majority understand and want it. There will be no leaders and it can only be brought about democratically, by the ballot box, through conscious political action.

Socialism is only viable when the means of producing and distributing wealth are sufficient to provide for everyone's needs. Even the most conservative estimates of food production conclude that with farming methods now available we could feed six times the present population of the world — a total of five billion people.

Money is only necessary today because, living in capitalism, the means of producing and distributing wealth are in the hands of a tiny minority of the population. A person's position in society is determined by their relationship to these means of production. If someone is lucky enough to be one of the owning minority then they are members of a capitalist class whose ownership of the means of producing wealth means that they do not have to work but are able to live off rent, interest and profit. If however you are one of the vast majority of people who do not own factories, banks, shipping lines or whatever, then you are a member of the working class. You must make a living by selling the only thing of any value you own; this is your labour power — your ability to work — for which you receive a wage or salary.

Some people say that even workers do not have to work. They could live on social security, but anyone who has tried to manage on this pittance realises how hollow this argument is and that, if a worker is able to get a "decent" wage, he or she is forced by necessity to take it.

Workers, even though they and their class produce everything in society and run it from top to bottom, are only able to gain access to the fruits of their labour through money. A worker who helps to produce, for example, £50.000 worth of cars a week will only receive a small fraction of this in wages; the rest is the surplus value (unpaid labour) extracted from all workers, which yields the rent, interest and profit from which capitalists derive their wealth.

In socialism however things will be very different. Once a majority of people want and understand socialism and how to get it, then they will take control of the various state machines and implement it. When socialism is established the land, factories, transport — all the things we need to live — will be taken into common ownership and democratic control. No one will own anything (apart, of course, from personal items). This is not to be confused with nationalisation, which is merely state controlled capitalism as exists in countries such as Russia. China and Cuba.

Production for Use

How will things be produced? Who will produce them? They will be produced as they are now. by the people who produce them now. The important difference will be that instead of the rationing of a wage or salary, there will be free access to all wealth for everyone. Everything produced will go into a common store from which everyone will take what they need. Everyone will have free access to the common store because you cannot buy what already belongs to you and everyone else. People will not be left out because they are too old, young or sick to contribute to production as happens now. These people will be looked after to the best of society's ability. Things will be produced directly for human use, not for sale with a view to profit as now. when, if there is no profit there is no production and if you are unable to pay then you are not able to consume.

Human Nature

One of the arguments socialists often encounter is that all the greedy and selfish people will take more than they need. How correct is this argument?

First of all, in a socialist society people would have to be very greedy and foolish to consume so much as to cause any kind of problem. However, apart from that the notion of greedy people is quite wrong.

"Human nature" does not exist. Human behaviour, which is its proper title, is not fixed but is the result of the society people are conditioned to live in. At present we all live in a "dog eat dog" society of competition; a vicious society where the weak are fair game. Yet even now anyone can point to examples where people forget about the greedy nature of this society to help others. They co-operate even though there is no economic reward; think of voluntary workers, or blood donors for example. There is no reason why our rational desire for comfort and human welfare should not allow us to co-operate even further in a sane society based on cooperation.

So-called human nature is no barrier to a concept of “from each according to ability, to each according to need". Human beings are not naturally greedy, selfish, aggressive, or naturally anything else; human behaviour is determined by the kind of society people are conditioned to live in. There is only one barrier to socialism: a lack of understanding by people and therefore a lack of desire for it — in other words, a lack of socialists.

The Socialist Party does not have or need leaders; the party is only used by politically conscious socialists as a vehicle to get socialism; when socialism is established the need for the Socialist Party will disappear. Its job done, it will go out of existence.

Steve Colborn

Where Private Property Does Not Reign. (1922)

From the March 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism stands for a society of equals in which the distinctions between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, no longer exist. Opponents of this revolutionary conception assure us frequently that no such form of society has ever existed, or ever will ; that there always have been rich and poor, and always will be, and so on. The following is an attempt to show this statement to be false by depicting the social conditions obtaining amongst the native races of the interior of Africa prior to the European invasion. This invasion having taken place (so far as the countries known as Kenya and Uganda are concerned) during the past generation only, living evidence of previous conditions still exists. It takes the form of customs not yet entirely abandoned, of institutions not yet completely destroyed, and, above all, of the wonderful memories of the old men of the tribes, memories which, of necessity, are enhanced and sharpened by the absence of any literature of native origin.

The evidence above described has been the subject of much investigation on the part of Government officials, missionaries, and travellers in the course of their occupations, some of which has found expression in book form. To this the present writer is much indebted ; but the key to the understanding of native life was supplied to him by one (Lewis H. Morgan) who actually had very little knowledge of Africa; for the obvious reason that it had hardly been opened up at the time he wrote his master-work, "Ancient Society." This speaks volumes for the thoroughness with which Morgan dug to the foundations of barbaric society.

He discovered that among the American Indians the clan (or gens) was the central institution of society, the pivot on which turned the customs and beliefs of the people. He further showed that the same condition had obtained in ancient Greece and Rome before the development of political society, that is, society founded on economic classes ; and also among the barbaric races of Northern Europe and Western Asia who subsequently came under the sway of the above Empires. The case is the same in Africa!

The essential feature of the clan is kinship, i.e., its members are supposed to be descended from a common ancestor more or less remote. Being of the same blood, they may not intermarry. Each member of the clan must find his or her mate among the members of the other clans, the children ultimately becoming members of their fathers' clan. This occurs at the age of puberty, when the rite of circumcision is practised amid great ceremonial and rejoicing. Henceforth they are regarded as adults eligible for marriage. The young men at this age are trained as warriors. Their function is to protect the flocks and herds (which constitute the tangible wealth of the clans), and occasionally, when considered necessary, to undertake raiding expeditions on hostile tribes to augment this wealth.

At this age the young men and women enjoy a considerable amount of sexual freedom, which, as might be expected, gives bourgeois, who are establishing themselves there, a horrible shock and provides them with ample material for the propaganda of measures, such as forced labour, etc., which convert the men into wages-slaves and the women into whores. Infanticide appears to be practised before marriage, but this latter state is seldom long delayed, whereupon children become an important object in life. In fact, barbaric sentiment with regard to the younger generation, only equalled by its respect for the old, surpasses anything the present writer has seen expressed among the civilised races.

The first-born child marks yet another change in the status of its father, who thereupon commences to take an active part in the administration of tribal affairs. He serves at this stage an apprenticeship, as it were, in the art of judging cases such as are brought from time to time before the council of elders, the supreme judicial authority of the tribe. A man becomes an elder upon the circumcision of the firstborn. He thus enters upon the final stage of his career. Those dying before reaching this stage are exposed for the wild beasts to devour ; the elders, however, are accorded burial and their spirits become the guardians of the tribe. This brings us to another aspect of native life, i.e., its religious aspect. It is difficult, however, to say just where this aspect begins and ends. Unlike the abstract religions that have succeeded it, ancestor worship is an everyday religion. From birth to death the life of the individual is hedged around with superstitious observances to secure the favour of the guardian angels and, through them, of nature, the supreme element in a social order based upon primitive modes of living. As a result there exists a hierarchy of so-called medicine-men, elders who are supposed to have special intimacy with the spiritual forces surrounding the tribe and are expected to exercise their influence for its benefit.

Mr. A. C. Hollis, in his work, "The Nandi," gives a curious instance of a chief medicine-man who was put to death by his tribesmen for being the assumed cause of a serious military disaster. Misfortune, however, of various kinds continued to dog the path of the tribes, who then, with characteristic lack of consequence, attributed this to the murder of the medicine-man!

The medicine-men share with the people at large the selection of the chiefs from among the warriors to direct military affairs, and their advice also guides the people in the choice of times and seasons for stock movements in the case of pastoral tribes, and planting, etc., for those depending on horticulture. Thus the religious and conservative element dominates and holds together the destinies of the people, as is but natural in a State where economic conditions hardly vary from generation to-generation.

Between the different leagues of tribes, or peoples, the mode of life naturally varies. Thus, in the mountain fastnesses, clad in dense forest, dwell the Wandorobo, hunters of the big game (elephant, buffalo, and the like), whose bows and poison-tipped arrows are practically their sole means of production. Out on the open plains the Masai herd their cattle, wandering from place to place according to the rainfall and the growth of grass. Among the lower hills and the valleys formed by the streams, live people like the Kikuyu, cultivating with primitive knives and hoes small patches of ground for grains, legumes, tuberous roots, plantains, etc. But although normally hostile to one another, each people recognises amongst itself the principle of common access to the means of life, i.e., the land. With the hunters and the pastoral nomads this is obvious ; but even in the case of the horticultural tribes the same principle applies. The family (normally polygamous) holds from the clan sufficient land for its needs. It is entitled to that, and no more, and if by chance it dies out the land reverts to the clan.

Private property is confined to tools and domestic utensils, weapons and ornaments. These are all in such an immature state of development that it is impossible for them to form means for exploitation through monopoly. Agriculture strictly so-called (i.e., the cultivation of fields by drawn ploughs) not having arisen, the productivity of the individual is too small to make slavery a source of wealth. The slaves would produce little more than they would consume. Hence only the female sex are taken captive in battle, and they are adopted into the captor's family either as daughters or wives. Cattle occupy a peculiar importance in native economy. Their slaughter for food is practically confined to festivals and sacrifices. Their milk, of course, is used, but their principal function seems to be to serve as equivalents to human beings. Thus, when, by marriage, a man takes a woman from another clan, he has to compensate that clan, through the father, for the loss, with so many head of cattle. When, again, a man kills another, of a different clan, similar compensation must be made.

To kill a member of the same clan as himself is apparently a hopeless crime, for which no compensation can avail. The murderer becomes an outcast for the rest of his life.

After a raid the relatives of any warriors who have been slain receive, again, this same compensation. The herds are so numerous in excess of economic requirements and are distributed so liberally among the families from the heads of the clan downwards, and are, withal, regarded with such an intense sentiment, bordering on (if not actually amounting to) superstition, that they appear as a part of the tribe rather than a form of property.

Thus European civilisation has discovered in Africa a form of society somewhat similar to that examined by Morgan in America, a system in which economic classes do not exist, in which each individual becomes in turn warrior, worker, and counsellor, thus combining in his own person the social functions, the division of which, later in history, formed the basis for the origin of classes.

Some bourgeois critics, impatient for an end to this primitive form of communism, do not hesitate to describe it as the enslavement of the people by the chiefs.

Their assertions, however, are based on a very scanty acquaintance with the facts, and are effectively refuted by the painstaking literary efforts of prominent officials such as Sir Alfred Sharpe and Sir Harry Johnston, men whose life-work is the overthrow of this same communism in favour of British capitalist Imperialism, and consequently they are not prejudiced on its side.

The chiefs and elders express the unity of the clan. They have no power apart from it. They are its agents in dealing with other clans and with its individual members. Any privileges which may be incidental to their office are in the nature of special rewards for special services. They depend upon the voluntary tribute of the people and not upon any political or economic means of extortion. (Such means are a later innovation of the British Government, anxious to undermine native solidarity.) The chiefs are the creatures of the customs which they enforce ; any antagonism between them is fatal for the chief. As for the so-called subjection of the female sex, this is readily seen to be a form of division of labour dictated by the conditions of social existence. The women till the gardens, look after their houses, prepare the food, and nurse the young; but the bourgeois critic conveniently forgets that the tribes would soon expire if the male sex did not clear and break up the ground, fell the trees and build the houses, and devise and construct the tools and weapons (of iron) with which the ground is tilled and the herds protected from the wild beasts.

Still the defender of capitalism remains unsatisfied. "Even so," he will say, "admitting that society existed without economic classes for hundreds of thousands of years from the days of the ape-man to the dawn of history, granting that in that time it developed speech, discovered the art of making fire, domesticating animals, the use of grains and vegetables, and evolved from promiscuous herds to organised groups, even so, it did not produce the comfort and leisure without which art and science, in a word, civilisation, would not have come into being ! To do this the subordination of the ignorant many to the intelligent few was necessary."

This admits that civilisation is based on the servitude of the people; for it is not they who enjoy comfort and leisure, art and science, although they produce these desirable conditions by their labour. They do not even obtain the same security of life as the clansman ! But the same onward march of the productive forces which burst asunder the narrow communism of the past is preparing the economic basis of the world-communism of the future, i.e., enough wealth, comfort, leisure, art and science for all !

Eric Boden

As it was not in the beginning, it will not always be. (1921)

From the November 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

In human history, just as in all other directions, the principle of change operates. Social systems arise, grow, and decay, just as animals and plants do, the new system being a growth out of the older system.

A glance along the path the human race has traversed in its development brings to light the fact that there have arisen at different times certain fundamentally different social systems, and in each epoch the people of the period have had their own particular outlook on life; as the epochs have been fundamentally different, so have the ideas of the times.

Until the latter half of the last century the early history of mankind was, comparatively speaking, something of a mystery. There was no guide or key to assist investigators ; no scientific theory to bring order out of the apparent chaos and render fruitful and intelligible in this field the work of ethnologists and archaeologists ; all was shrouded in darkness.

To the late Lewis Henry Morgan, the American ethnologist, we are indebted for the clearing away of the clouds that obscured man's early social history. His laborious, careful, and lengthy investigations have not only provided us with a wealth of material, but have also given us the key to the progressive movement of man from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilisation. Morgan analysed and explained the development of the Gens (the blood relationships and all that this signified) and the part it played in primitive society.

Since Morgan published the results of his investigations, other workers in the same field have followed the paths he pointed out, so that we now have ample material to enable us to understand primitive society.

In view of the attempt on the part of Capitalist professors to spread the false idea that Capitalism, in one form or another, has always existed, the work of Morgan is especially valuable to the Socialist movement. He has provided us with indisputable proof of the existence in the past of communities practising communal ownership; and he has shown that the introduction of private property broke up the old societies founded upon kinship and started society off on a new career founded upon private property—the territorial tie. The re-introduction of communism—the aim of the Socialist—will write finis to the social systems based upon property, and bring society to a new communism—but communism upon a vastly higher scale; communism with the advantages that will accrue from all the discoveries and accumulated means of wealth-production obtained by the human race at such a cost of blood and tears and misery to the wealth producers since society passed out of primitive communism into early civilisation.

If a broad glance be taken at history, it will be found that four distinct forms of society have existed at successive periods in social development, i.e., the Primitive, the Antique, the Feudal, and the Capitalistic. In each of these social systems the method of obtaining the means to satisfy social needs, or, to put the matter more simply, the way in which wealth was produced, differed. In the Primitive commune all the able-bodied members took their allotted part in obtaining what was required to satisfy the needs of the commune, and as all shared the work, so they also shared the fruit of their, work. In the Antique system, which flourished during the palmy days of Greece and Rome, the wealth of society was obtained by means of the work of chattel slaves, and the wealth produced flowed into the hands of Greek and Roman proprietors. Under Feudalism the bond slave was the beast of burden, and the feudal proprietor the appropriator of the wealth obtained. In our day, the day of fully-fledged Capitalism, the wage-slave does the toiling and moiling in the obtaining of the means of social existence, whilst all the wealth produced is owned by the Capitalist proprietor.

So far, then, each social system had a different economic foundation—its own peculiar method of satisfying its needs. But each system has not been what we may call "self-developed" ; that is to say, they have not grown from separate isolated seeds. Each has grown out of the preceding system. The question that immediately confronts us, then, is : What has been the dynamic factor of the matter? What has caused one to be transformed into the other? How, for example, came society to forsake its communistic basis for a private property basis?

In the first place, Karl Marx subjected this point to a thorough analysis and elucidated the cause of social change. But, independently of Marx, Morgan also solved the problem, and his investigations shed light on the matter.

Morgan divided early social development into two main periods—Savagery and Barbarism ; and these periods he split up into six sub-periods—lower, middle, and upper stages of Savagery, and lower, middle, and upper stages of Barbarism. The transition from one sub-period to another is marked by the discovery of a new means to obtain from nature a better subsistence. For example, the transition from the earliest form of social existence to the middle stage of Savagery was marked by the discovery of fire; the transition to the upper stage of Savagery was accomplished by the invention of bows and arrows; the discovery of pottery introduced the lower stage of Barbarism ; the cultivation of food plants and the domestication of animals introduced the middle stage of Barbarism; the melting of iron ore the upper stage of Barbarism; and the invention of letter script and its utilisation for writing records brought mankind to the threshold of Civilisation.

Each of the different discoveries mentioned brought mankind into better harmony with natural forces; enabled him to take greater advantage of the latter to the end that he obtained a better subsistence. But the increase in the means of production, the obtaining of a better and easier subsistence, led to the production of a surplus over and above what the community immediately required, and this in turn led to a struggle for the ownership of the surplus. Here we have the embryonic class struggle, the germ of future class struggles and social systems. Society had developed to the point where all need not be workers, owing to the fruitfulness of the wealth-producing appliances; hence the struggle as to who should own and who should work these appliances; the establishment of a class of owners (the introduction of private property); and the struggle between the owning and producing classes, which, as fresh method of obtaining wealth were discovered, gave birth to new social systems with new social classes.

The following quotations from Morgan's chief work, "Ancient Society," on the introduction of private property, are an example of his insight and grasp of the matter :

  ''When field agriculture had demonstrated that the whole surface of the earth could be made the subject of property owned by individuals in severally, and it was found that the head of the family became the natural centre of accumulation, the new property career of mankind was inaugurated. It was fully done before the later period of barbarism. A little reflection must convince anyone of the powerful influence property would now begin to exercise upon the human mind, and of the great awakening of new elements of character it was calculated to produce. Evidence appears, from many sources, that the feeble impulse aroused in the savage mind had now become a tremendous passion in the splendid barbarian of the heroic age. Neither archaic nor later usages could maintain themselves in such an advanced condition. The time had now arrived when monogamy, having assured the paternity of children, would assert and maintain their exclusive right to inherit the property of their deceased father."—pp. 553-554.
  "During the Later Period of Barbarism a new element, that of aristocracy, had a marked development. The individuality of persons, and the increase of wealth now possessed by individuals in masses, were laying the foundation of personal influence. Slavery, also, by permanently degrading a portion of the people, tended to establish contrasts of condition unknown in the previous ethnical periods. This, with property and official position, gradually developed the sentiment of aristocracy, which has so deeply penetrated modern  society, and antagonised the democratical principles created and fostered by the gentes. It soon disturbed the balance of society by introducing unequal privileges, and degrees of respect for individuals among people of the same nationality, and these became the source of discord and strife." —Page 560.
  "Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding, and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence, and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim ; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes."— pp. 561-562.

The above quotations are an indication of the remarkable insight and thorough grasp of his material Morgan had. Perhaps it will be an incentive to the reader to get a closer acquaintance with Morgan's writings. In particular, a study of "Ancient Society" would reward well the effort expended.

From the foregoing it can be seen that each social system has had at the back of it an older one, right away back to the time when our ancestors forsook their arborial abodes for the solid ground. Just as each social system has given birth to or foreshadowed a later system, so Capitalism at the high tide of its development foreshadows another system in which the evils that flow from the economic foundations of Capitalism will cease to exist; economic insecurity will be as remote as the marvellous development of science can make it; no longer will those toiling myriads be bowed down with the weight of economic troubles, and the miseries we know to-day will disappear as snow before the sun.

Gilmac.

Born Lazy (1961)

From the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

"What will you do with the lazy (or greedy, or selfish) people, who will want to take everything and give nothing?”

We often hear this objection to Socialism, from opponents who think that a social system in which wealth would be freely available to everybody must collapse, because it is somehow contrary to “human nature”. To these objectors, we are all, because of “human nature”, basically lazy (or greedy, or selfish).

In fact, the term “human nature”—the need for food, air, water and so on, and some biological peculiarities—can only apply to those characteristics which are unalterably human. Laziness, greediness and the like are only aspects of human behaviour. These are not unalterable—they are often fostered in us by the acquisitive and competitive nature of property society: some of them, indeed, are taught to us from our earliest days. There is a lot of evidence to show that, when the conditions are right, human beings do not behave in an anti-social manner.

For example, there has recently been published the translation of Jens Bjerre’s most interesting account of the latest Danish Kalahari Expedition, when he spent several months living with the Kung Bushmen at Samangeigei. This is what Mr. Bjerre says about the Bushmen's way of life:

   “During the time we lived with the Bushmen, we never once witnessed a quarrel among them, which is surprising considering how close they live to each other and that they have to share everything together. The very fact that they live so intimately appears to give them a feeling of mutual dependence and confidence. . . . This natural feeling of solidarity within the clan begins in their childhood. Children are a kind of common possession. Even though mothers for preference look after their own children, they are just as often to be seen looking after other children—even suckling them if the child is hungry and its own mother is not on the spot. The older children eat sometimes with one, sometimes with another family—according to where they happen to be when they are hungry and when food is ready. The whole settlement is their home. The children help to collect firewood and food for the older people who cannot travel far, and sometimes they even sleep alongside them to keep them warm at night.
   From the example of their elders they learn the code of behaviour which is the foundation of the clan's unity; to share food and to assist each other in every way.”

Mr. Bjerre concludes this paragraph by saying:

  “We white people, surely, have now reached the stage—with our hydrogen bombs and rockets—when we also must choose between living at peace with each other or obliterating ourselyes."

These Bushmen are primitive people —they are, in fact, probably the oldest surviving human race. But they know that, were they to adopt the very forms of behaviour which so many in our “civilised” society call unchangeable “ human nature ”, they would destroy themselves. Humanity, also, will not willingly commit social suicide. The people of the world will establish Socialism because they want to live cooperatively, in a free and abundant society. They will, in fact, practice the “virtues” which the Kung Bushmen have kept up for so long.

Eric Coffey

The Outline of History by H. G. Wells. A Criticism. (1920)

Book Review from the December 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

This, the Magnum Opus of Mr. Wells, is a very remarkable book. It will be a useful addition to the "library" of the worker-student as undoubtedly it already is in many thousands of cases, and the work will probably have a widespread influence. Whilst woefully deficient in many respects, it is certainly the best one-man attempt at a fairly detailed "Universal History" which has come under the notice of the present writer. A "perfect" work of this kind will never be written this side of the Revolution.

The prime value of the book is as a great accumulation of historical data, orderly arranged and compressed within comparatively small compass. As a narrative it is for the most part intensely interesting. The descriptive powers, not to speak of imagination, of the writer of "The Time Machine" are, in places, exercised to the full, and the grip of the story at times approaches fascination.

The evolution of the Solar System, the earth and life, the races of men and their languages, and the evolution of writing and of primitive ideas, are all clearly and concisely dealt with according to the most recent and authoritative findings of Science. Mr. Wells is particularly good when describing the growth of inventions, discoveries, and knowledge in general.

A good sense of proportion is, in the main, shown throughout the book. The civilisation of China in particular, receives the prominence to which, by its "peculiar" character, age and expansion, it is entitled in any general account of the work of Man. Moreover Mr. Wells is continually reviewing well known facts from quite unusual points of view. He shows, for the most part, at least, a healthy disregard for conventional opinions, and especially for those which, embellish the sacred personalities of "great men." Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and Gladstone receive some rough handling which has shocked some of the more orthodox reviewers of the book. Mr. Wells has done some useful work in pulling down some of the "tin gods" of the multitude of hero-worshippers. He has his own "heroes," nevertheless.

A very valuable and organic part of the work are the maps. They form quite an historical atlas in themselves. The same artist, Mr. Horrabin, has produced the "time charts" which are a novel and helpful inclusion, whilst his numerous line illustrations are not only really illustrative and seemingly very accurate but they are good examples of a rather severe, but eminently suitable technique in that difficult art—pen drawing.

In reviewing such a large work the line must be drawn somewhere. Therefore the following comments and criticisms are chiefly confined to some of Mr. Wells' generalisations about history and views regarding social evolution. Owing to the different paging of the several editions, all citations are to the chapters and their subsections.

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Despite his sub title: "A Plain History of Life and Mankind," Mr. Wells has not made the mere telling of his story his sole, or even his primary, aim. He has a theory to expound and to prove—a theory which issues finally as a lesson and a warning to his readers.

Briefly, Mr. Wells' "theory of history" is that the evolution of the human race consists of the gradual "rise" of bestial, cruel, selfish, ignorant animals — primaeval men—living in small, independent, isolated and antagonistic family groups, to a cultured refinement, wisdom and altruism—fit citizens of one world-wide brotherhood-community. We have not yet arrived at this latter stage of perfection, but Mr. Wells says we have made enormous strides in that direction and this achievement is the next great step in human progress.

It is important to note that this evolution is the result mainly, in Mr. Wells's opinion, of the influence of Religion and Education upon the minds of men, and it is to these factors he looks for future progress.

Of course our author strains the evidence to fit his theory. Practically all historians have done the same. It is so easy; it is all but unavoidable. Many of the "facts" upon which histories are based are so uncertain in themselves, are almost always open to a variety of legitimate interpretations and still more illegitimate ones. Moreover, their immense number makes inevitable a certain selection and suppression of facts in accord with the writer's views as to their relative order of importance, which again depends upon his theoretical opinion or practical aims. In the book before us the "straining" is very obvious in parts, but on the whole is not so much in evidence as one would expect, for the author is by no means either thorough or consistent in the application of his theories.

Mr. Wells assumes that altruism and social solidarity was lacking in the earliest men. Even apart from other considerations this is rendered very improbable by the fact that recent savages possess these qualities to a marked degree. The extinct Tasmanians certainly did, and, as Mr. Wells points out, they were still in the early Paleolithic stage at the time they were discovered. The Bushmen and Australians, only a little further advanced, also contradict his view. Savages are almost invariably kind, affectionate, and loyal to their own people, but hostile to strangers and cruel to their enemies. Any survey of the races of men, such as Keane's or Hutchinson's, will prove this.

A serious and significant omission occurs when Mr. Wells fails to make any mention of the existence of the communal marriage system among primitive peoples. The discovery of this institution was one of the most revolutionary in the whole range of anthropology.

The reason for this omission is that our historian believes that the earliest and original form of human society was the single "self-centred" family group, ruled despotically by the oldest male, usually the father, until he died or one of his sons managed to kill him and rule in his stead. This is merely an extension to primitive conditions of the old "patriarchal theory." He quotes from Worthington Smith's excellent description of life in the early Stone Age, but, as this writer holds the contrary view of primitive society, Mr. Wells adds a highly hypothetical account of the supposed paleolithic family group and the conduct of its ruler, the "Old Man," borrowed from the "Primal Law" by J. J. Atkinson, who, with Andrew Lang, is the only authority mentioned who supports his view. (See Chap. IX. 2.)

Now Mr. Wells does not tell his readers that a very large number—probably the great majority—of ethnologists and sociologists, hold a totally different view of social origins. Prof. Edward Jenks, a very able thinker, says in his "History of Politics" (p. 18) "by the discoveries concerning the nature of savage society . . it has been proved, that the earliest social group, so far from being a small household of a single man and his wives, is a large and loosely connected group or 'pack' ... it could easily be shown that the origin of society in 'single families' is inherently impossible," and he refers to the view supported by Mr. Wells as "the old theory, now definitely exploded."

It is difficult to see how man could have acquired language, tools, or a developed intelligence without a considerable degree of sociability. The conclusions of modern Psychology as to the deep-rooted power of the herd-instinct and the pronounced suggestibility of the human mind also point indisputably to the gregarious nature of man.

The "Handbook to the Ethnographical Collection" of the British Museum (a cheap, well illustrated and useful book to students) states the general opinion amongst ethnologists as follows :

  "In a primitive community the individual has little importance as such. He may almost be said to belong to it body and soul, and apart from it he has neither rights nor responsibilities. Such a system is unfavourable to the development of enterprise or private initiative, but at the same time it entourages the habits of obedience, discipline and common action, upon which further social progress depends. The absorbing claims of the community are well illustrated by the primitive laws of property, according to which everything of the greatest value belongs to the clan in common." (P. 25.)

Now the above paragraph flatly contradicts Mr. Wells's assertion that "No more nonsensical expression is conceivable in sociology than the term 'primitive communism.'" (Chap. XXXVII. 13.) By the use of such totally irrelevant analogies as the "dog and his bone, the tigress and her lair," he tries to prove that primitive man was an intensely individualistic property-holder.

Many readers of his work will be unaware that in taking up this position Mr. Walls is contemptuously disregarding for the benefit of his thesis the accumulated evidence of a host of competent observers in all parts of the world, and also, for the later stages of primitive communism, a considerable mass of documentary evidence. We cannot state or discuss this evidence here. The works on the subject are numerous ; those by Morgan, Tylor, Lubbock and Maine will be profitable reading to the student. A good summary from a sound viewpoint is Lafargue's "Evolution of Property," and a great mass of evidence from all peoples and periods is contained in Prof. Letourneau's "Property, its Origin and Development."

These omissions and errors, unfortunately, give a distorting perspective to what would otherwise be an uncommonly vivid picture of primaeval humanity. So conspicuous and important are they that their occurrence is only to be explained as a result of the preconceived theoretical notions of the author.

Mr. Wells classifies more advanced human societies into two primary types: "Communities of Will" and "Communities of Faith and Obedience." The former are societies of "free" individuals, jointly and freely determining the activities of the communities to which they belong. His stock examples are the tribes of nomadic, warlike herdsmen of the great plains. Illustrations of the second type of community are the ancient States, such as those of Egypt and Babylonia, in which a monarchic and priestly government controlled the lives and commanded the allegiance and obedience of its subjects who regarded it with fearful and religious reverence.

Now, to the Marxist this classification must appear unsatisfactory, being based on nothing fundamental. It lays no stress upon the supremely important factor of interest. It should be obvious that you will find no community of will where there is no community of interest. The two conditions are interdependent. One in the absence of the other is almost inconceivable.

The tribesmen of a nomadic people could determine the activity of the community in defence, offence, or migration because their individual needs both immediate and ultimate were identical. This was easily seen and fully understood. The division of social labour had not yet reached the point at which it produces classes of oppressors and oppressed. All had inalienable "rights" in the community, membership of which was based upon actual blood-kinship. Every incentive existed to loyal action in support of the tribe.

Moreover, the fact that in a pastoral community public affairs are decided by the Council of Chiefs or assembly of tribesmen in no way alters the fact that "faith and obedience" exert a great influence on its members. The people of the tribe owe rigid obedience to the tribal custom law, and the sacred bonds of "ancestor worship" are an additional cement to that produced by unity of interest.

Now, exactly the reverse state of affairs obtained in the great communities of Egypt and Babylonia. Here diversity of occupation social function and interest brought about by progress in agriculture, handicraft, and commerce, was the cardinal feature. There were peasants, artisans, merchants, soldiers, officials, nobles, and priests, with sub-divisions of each. (Chattel slaves, very numerous, especially in Babylonia, are expressly omitted, as they are not members of the community in Mr. Wells's sense.) The bulk of the "free" town workers had their narrow but well recognised craft interests, but those in different trades even in the same locality would have little in common. There were few amongst them who were completely propertyless, and thus no proletariat existed.

In districts where a large slave population existed—especially of gang-slaves—fear of their revolt would act as a sedative to discontent amongst the "free" workers.

These great States covered an extensive territory, and their population was large. Means of communication between distant cities and districts did not exist for the common people. There was thus little possibility of widespread revolt on the part of any exploited class. Local revolts though were not unknown—there was a "strike" of labourers at Thebes in the reign of Rameses III.—and as they were bound to conflict with the politico-religious authority they show that the common people were not so servile as Mr. Wells would have us believe.

Division of interests among the masses made possible the despotic rule of the politically intelligent minority, and the common need for protection against the inroads of barbarian invaders justified it. This minority, the "ruling class," were originally successful conquerors, clan or tribal chiefs and "medicine men." They had at their back a disciplined army largely of foreign troops from conquered provinces. Tradition and superstition were contributory factors, but of secondary importance.

Turning to another aspect of this interesting question, as Mr. Wells says (Chap. XX. 2): "On the whole the common men were probably well content to live under lord or king or god and obey their bidding. It was safer. It was easier." Accustomed to his lot and aspiring to nothing higher than the standard of comfort it traditionally afforded, the average Egyptian peasant or labourer would submit in "faith and obedience" to what must often have seemed intolerable extortion and irksome obligations, rather than engage in any serious revolt against what must have seemed to him the mightiest, most impregnable power in the world. Such an act would do too much violence to his settled habits of work and thought, and all to no good purpose. Here also, then, interest, bodily and mental, is the deciding impulse.

It must not be thought that Mr. Wells entirely fails to recognise these effects of the hierarchy of classes; he does show that they are a contributory factor, but seems to think that it was the influence of priests and of the "god-king" idea which primarily caused men to surrender their "wills" in social affairs. The "god-king" certainly was a useful, indeed a necessary institution to primitive civilisation. Superstition, religious or secular, is always useful to class divided societies. It gives the ruling classes a supernatural or a moral sanction otherwise absent and thus oils the wheels of exploitation.

Mr. Wells devotes a whole chapter to the rise of classes in Egypt, Babylonia, India and China and his treatment in the main is very satisfactory. Here and there throughout the book he shows very clearly the effect of class grouping and interest as a determinant in social change.

R. W. Housley

To be continued.