Moral stories (2026)

Book Review from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Moral Ambition. Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. By Rutger Bregman. Bloomsbury. 2025. 283pp.

‘Humans are social creatures through and through’ (Rutger Bregman)

This is the third of Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s books to have garnered attention and praise from a wide range of quarters. His theme is, as before, the need for large-scale social change, and on a planetary scale. Described on the book’s dust cover as ‘the internationally bestselling author’, Bregman proposes morally founded activities that people can become involved in to ‘start making a difference’ and help bring about such change. One of the impressive endorsements by various writers and commentators in the book’s opening pages describes it as ‘packed with powerful insights, inspiring stories, and data to back it up’. Another refers to it as ‘a true bible of realistic idealism’. And it is definitely an invigorating and thought-provoking read.

It focuses in significant part on the work of a number of individuals who, by virtue of their dedication and determination to certain causes, have ‘made a difference’, either historically or more recently, to the lives of large numbers of people. Examples of such individuals, some of them little known, include:

• Thomas Clarkson, who, from the age of 24 in 1785, dedicated his life to campaigning against slavery at a time when, as the author points out, the very notion of abolishing slavery seemed unthinkable;
• Arnold Douwes, the Dutchman, who, in the Second World War and at enormous risk to himself, devoted himself to finding shelter for Jews who otherwise would have been transported to concentration camps;
• Ralph Nader, who over very many years campaigned indefatigably in the US against the advertising and sale of manifestly dangerous products and managed to recruit a whole ‘brigade of Davids’ who ‘combined moral indignation with laborious research’ and eventually become known as ‘Naders Raiders’;
• Rosa Parks, the black woman in Alabama who wouldn’t give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus and lit the spark for the civil rights movement;
• Rob Mather, the British business executive, who, in the early 2000s, inspired voluntary and charitable activity among thousands for the purpose of raising money to combat the world’s single largest killer of children, malaria, and up to the present day is estimated to have saved over 100,000 lives;
• and Joey Savoie, a Canadian would-be psychology student who instead dedicated himself to intensive charitable work and founded a school of ‘Charity Entrepreneurship’ whose graduates then set up projects such as Fortify Health that teaches local millers in India to enrich wheat flower with iron, folic acid and vitamin B2 as a way of reducing iron deficiency anaemia among millions there and protecting against congenital defects like spina bifida.

Bregman also gives space to philanthropists such as Katherine McCormick, whose sponsorship of research into female contraception resulted in the pill and so gave millions of women a new kind of control over their lives, and to campaigning scientists like Joseph Salk and Viktor Zhdanov whose dedication and determination brought crippling and deadly diseases like polio and smallpox under control. And he tells all sorts of other quite fascinating tales of people who have dedicated themselves to ‘making a difference’, some much against the odds of their upbringing, education and the society around them. He frames these with the consideration that ‘a small group of determined individuals can have enormous influence’.

Such stories make this a truly compelling book, as also does its manifest ambition to contribute to improving the lives of humans. So is there anything not to like? In the course of the recent Reith Lectures which its author delivered for the BBC on the subject of ‘moral revolution’, he described himself, on more than one occasion, as ‘an old-fashioned social democrat’. And the trouble is that, just like so many others who call themselves ‘social democrats’, he confines himself to seeking to solve or alleviate the world’s problems within the confines of the existing system, capitalism. His abiding focus is on how to make that system better.

With this book, therefore, he has produced a kind of guide to reformism, novel and very readable, but never seeking to peer outside of the constricting framework of existing society, based as it is on monetary exchange, buying and selling and production for profit. This means that, despite the fact that certain problems may be capable of alleviation or even solution through devoted campaigning or pressure on governments, in the final analysis the anti-human needs of the market and its profit imperative will never allow continuing and widespread scourges such as poverty, insecurity, oppression and unfulfilling work to be consigned to history, and tragedies such as wars and environmental degradation will ever lurk and sometimes pounce. In other words, while admirable in so many ways, this book fails to engage with the real reason that renders necessary all the campaigning and dedication its author records and recommends to others.

That is not to say that the kind of campaigning activity recommended by Bregman – radical, persistent and confident in its ideas – is not necessary. However, it needs to be focused not on ‘morality’ but on challenging the system at source and creating a society capable of offering to everyone a share of the potential wealth and abundance that capitalism – with its interconnected production across the globe, its robots, 3-D printing and digital media – has made possible. Currently all this is being held back by the artificial scarcity and oppression associated with the market, money and production for profit and will only be achievable on the basis of common ownership, the abolition of the market and free access to wealth.

Howard Moss

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We may be much more entertained by charity now. But on account of the Band Aid format, we are now arguably less knowledgeable about why some people suffer terribly around the world – and in no better a position to put an end to it. 

(The Conversation)

Today, political scientists and pollsters use ‘the working class’ to describe members of the work force who do not have a college degree. By that definition, the number of working-class Americans has been declining as the country has grown wealthier and more educated. According to the Census Bureau, nearly 38 percent of Americans had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2022, up from just 17 percent in 1980. There’s a major exception to that common definition, however. Marxist scholars use “working class” quite differently—typically encompassing anyone who depends on wages to survive, regardless of their educational experience. 

(Reason)

In fact, the Democratic Party, the party of the slavocracy, of Jim Crow and of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Vietnam War, has never been a party of the working class. It has, and will always be, a capitalist party. Sanders’ political role…is to use his nominally ‘independent’ designation to provide the Democratic Party with a veneer of credibility in order to contain opposition to the whole capitalist system. 

(WSWS)

What happened during the pandemic especially, was a good tutorial about how to do things. First of all, what pandemic showed us was the Hollywood utopian, you know, imagination of the future of humanity is absolutely bullshit, because when crises happen, people tend to help each other and be in solidarity, and they become even more, even loving, you know, towards each other. So we have to imagine politics as a, you know, natural disaster or like a disaster, like a pandemic, and we have to act like that.

(New Internationalist)

Bregman believes we should be more positive about human potential. ‘We’re at a point in our history where we have such amazing opportunities to make the world a wildly better place’, he says. ‘Our best days are in the future’. 

(Prospect)

A ‘very rare’ 77-year-old slice of the cake served at Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s wedding sold for £2,200 ($2,800) this week, according to auction house Reeman Dansie. The cake, which no longer looks edible, survived for almost eight decades since the wedding day on November 20, 1947.

(CNN)

Yunus’ claims to be overseeing a transition to ‘true democracy’, aimed at realising ‘social justice’ after the increasingly authoritarian rule of Hasina, are belied by the brutal attacks on garment workers

(WSWS)

‘The Turkish police catch 100 to 150 migrants every night. They have no mercy on them. They break their arms and legs. 

(BBC)

I’m all for supporting a new and viable political group but let’s look at what we already have before trying to reinvent the wheel.

(Guardian)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Life and Times: Behind the crime (2023)

The Life and Times column from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

We all make bad decisions. Sometimes the consequences aren’t that bad, but sometimes they are. That may depend on the circumstances at the time, but it may also depend on the long-term build-up to the decision. This came out clearly in a recent BBC radio programme which looked at the life of a woman whose bad decision – in fact whose series of bad decisions – caused her to end up in prison.

Marriage, abuse and incarceration

Sinem was the daughter of a Turkish family who had fled from persecution in their own country to settle and start a new life in the UK. She told us that, as a young girl, she did well at school but found it hard to fit in with others of her age largely due to the strictures of her home background. This sent her somewhat off the rails. As a teenager she was found in bed with the son of another Turkish family and, given the culture, that meant only one thing – marriage. She quickly had children, which, though it somehow made her feel more secure, did not satisfy her and she managed to enrol on a university course and get a degree. But employment was hard to find and she eventually took a job as a prison officer – in a men’s prison.

This is when things really started to go downhill. Her abusive husband was violent to her and she decided she had to leave him. But in doing that she lost the extended family support she had previously had to help look after her children. This meant she had to reduce her hours of work, and this caused her acute financial difficulty. To be able to pay her rent and other expenses she fell into debt. And this triggered another bad decision. She started smuggling drugs into the prison she was working in to raise money. Inevitably perhaps she was found out and arrested.

But it’s what happened then that, as a listener to this programme, I found particularly interesting and noteworthy. When her smuggling activity was discovered, she was not shunned or blamed by her fellow workers in the prison but treated with great understanding and compassion. Though she had, in a sense, betrayed them, during her arrest they carried on supporting her and treating her like the human being fallen on hard times they knew she was. And when she herself was prosecuted and sent to prison, they carried on keeping in touch with her.

Understanding and compassion

This behaviour by her co-workers seems to accord well with the view now widely expressed by writers and commentators that the age-old idea of an inevitably ‘nasty’ human nature is no more than a myth and that, given half the chance, human beings will be kind to, cooperative with, and supportive of one another – including, and perhaps especially, when someone is ‘in trouble’. Rutger Bregman’s recent massively influential work, Human Kind, for example, argues that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal, kind-hearted and cooperative, something that seems to be confirmed by what happened in Sinem’s case. And Sinem’s incarceration also then turned out positive for her. In the open prison she was sent to, again she found enormous support, especially from the ‘mentor’ assigned to her. This helped her to recover from being the ‘broken person’ she said she was and to be then granted a day release arrangement to begin studying for a further degree and afterwards, when released completely, to end up as a university lecturer in criminology.

So a sort of happy ending. But a lucky one too, since, as the programme pointed out, we are all profoundly marked by the string of experiences that constitute our life. And of course in many cases this does not have a happy ending. In Sinem’s case the earlier experience of a repressive culture, an oppressive partner, and then the pressure of poverty led to an act which could have seen her life spiral entirely out of control. The fact that it didn’t was, to a large extent, due to the kindness of others. This made her realise that, regardless of the ‘crime’ she’d committed, some people were on her side. And this made it possible for her to gain sufficient strength to make a relatively stable life for herself and her children, and also to help educate others.

Autonomy and cooperation

If we look more widely, how many times, in the society we live in – a society that is so advanced in technology and productive capacity but oh so backward in the way it makes use of these things – does lack of money and/or lack of the power and autonomy over their own lives (the two ‘lacks’ often going together) limit or remove an individual’s control over their own life, their freedom of choice, their ability to interact cooperatively and, above all, to make the ‘right’ decision? And how much more likely is it that, in the society organised on the basis of ‘from each according to ability to each according to need’ that socialists argue for, the cooperative ‘nature’ of humans will prevail. And how true too is the writer Tine De Moor’s statement that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’.

Howard Moss

Friends for Life (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity. By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Oneworld £10.99.

The title is a reference to the ‘survival of the fittest’, Charles Darwin’s alternative formulation of the idea of natural selection. This raises the issue of how fitness is measured: it is sometimes seen as a matter of physical strength, intelligence and power, and some racists even regard it as a justification for white supremacy. Here, however, Hare and Woods argue that it is friendliness and co-operation that have led to humans’ evolutionary fitness. The argument is in some ways similar to that of Rutger Bregman in Humankind (discussed in the May 2021 Socialist Standard), though the evidence here is more based on human (pre)history and psychological experiments, rather than discussion of human behaviour in the real world.

The essential concept here is that of self-domestication: ‘natural selection acted on our species in favour of friendlier behavior that enhanced our ability to flexibly cooperate and communicate … we thrived not because we got smarter, but because we got friendlier.’ Female preference for male friendliness is claimed to have caused a friendlier society to evolve. Other human species besides sapiens went extinct since they could not co-operate and communicate in the same way. Friendliness resulted in larger social networks and hence better technology, which meant bigger groups and even better technology, in a positive feedback loop. Human self-domestication happened before eighty thousand years ago. Dogs and bonobos are also ‘built for cooperative communication’, but chimps are not.

However, there is a negative side to the formation of larger groups of people: outsiders can be treated with fear and even aggression. They may even be dehumanised, considered less than fully human, and simianised (looked on as similar to apes). This occurred as part of the justification for the slave trade, and one recent study of Americans found that Muslims were regarded as only 90 percent fully human by the group tested. Dehumanisation seems to be central to explaining why some people do terrible things, along with obedience to authority and a desire to conform (note that all this is in the context of a society that sets people against each other). But contact with other groups reduces conflict, by removing the sense of threat and increasing empathy.

Unfortunately among this presentation is a truly bizarre claim that ‘communists’ (who support ‘extreme forms of egalitarianism’) and anarchists are dehumanisers. Naturally no explanation or justification is offered for this.

On the whole, though, this is a worthwhile account of aspects of human evolution, where co-operation and friendliness have played a crucial role in making modern-day humans such an intelligent and technologically-advanced species, with the potential to live in a world of equality where all needs are met.

Paul Bennett

Human Nature: What Is It? (2021)

Book Review from the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In any conversation about a different kind of society organised on principles of cooperation rather than competition, of common rather than private ownership of the means of living, the subject of human nature inevitably arises. To those who support a society of from each according to ability to each according to need, the answer is often given that it could not work, since human beings are by nature selfish, possessive, competitive and always wanting more. It’s not an easy argument to combat, as all around us, in present society, we see examples of this kind of behaviour both on a personal and a collective level.

It is backed up furthermore by much written ‘authority’. As early as the 16th century the Italian political writer Machiavelli, in his famous essay The Prince, stated that human beings are ‘ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, hypocritical, cowardly and greedy’ and ‘never do anything good except out of necessity’. This view of humans has often been quoted since, as has the similar idea expressed in the following century by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan that human beings are greedy by nature and human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’. For Adam Smith too in his late 18th century Wealth of Nations, private interest (or ‘self-love’, as he also put it) was the basis for his argument for the free market. Though, in the two centuries that followed, the rise of views contesting the inevitability of the market and the social and economic inequality that went with it saw some questioning of the fixed human nature theory, it is only in very recent times that such questioning has come to the fore and now seriously contends with the ‘original sin’ idea, whether religious or secular, of human beings as deep-down selfish, wicked and aggressive.

This change in perception (though not yet a sea change) has come about partly through the arguments put forward by organisations such as the Socialist Party arguing for a cooperative society of common ownership, but more widely through a slew of publications, especially over the last few decades, by thinkers and writers from a variety of fields. The latest of these is a remarkable book entitled Humankind. A Hopeful History (Bloomsbury, 2020) by the Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman. This work has already received praise from many quarters and it isn’t difficult to see why. It comes at ‘human nature’ with in-depth scholarly research from a whole variety of areas (an ‘immense sweep’, as one reviewer put it) and is unfailingly informative, instructive and thought-provoking. At the same time, for the informal ‘in your face way’ in which it’s written, it manages to be highly and consistently entertaining, a page turner in fact. So a real ‘good read’ for absolutely anyone.

Bregman’s main line of approach is to examine the evidence presented for what he refers to as the ‘veneer theory’ of human nature and to show it as severely flawed. By veneer theory he means the widespread idea that the civilised, communal behaviour which characterises many of the normal day-to-day interactions of human beings only take place because of the pressure social and political authority puts upon us to behave in a civilised way and not tear one another to pieces. But, the theory goes on to say, the pressure that this authority creates is only a thin layer (a veneer) and as soon as it is relaxed or things go wrong, our true savage individualistic nature manifests itself and we are revealed for what we are – self-centred, individualistic and even savage. So, according to this notion (referred to by the writer as ‘the zombie that keeps coming back’), evil simmers just beneath the surface in us all. He looks at the various writings and life events that are used to support this theory – e.g: the immensely successful novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding about children stranded on an island turning savage; the story of the supposed cannibal inhabitants of Easter Island; the famous ‘shock machine’ experiment by Stanley Milgram, anthropological works by ‘big name’ writers such as Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari – and proceeds to drill down into the reality of these and show us new perspectives.

So, for example, the only real-life instance known of children being lost on a tiny island (which he calls ‘the real Lord of the Flies’) shows those children to have set up a friendly cooperative way of living before being rescued rather than establishing some kind of cruel hierarchy as depicted in the novel. In the same way Milgram’s experiment, which purportedly showed volunteers willingly administering increasingly powerful electric shocks to people in obedience to an authority commanding them to do so, is shown, when examined closely, to have encountered significant resistance from those taking part and the outcome to have been reported in an unbalanced, one-sided way. Again, amidst the carnage of the First World War, Bregman provides evidence that very few soldiers in the trenches actually fired their weapons at members of the enemy they could see and many deliberately fired into the air. Likewise, during the Second World War he quotes research showing that only a very small percentage of soldiers actually managed to fire their guns when they came into direct contact with the enemy despite being under orders to do so. Other real-life extreme situations such as the impact of aerial bombing on populations are also seen in a light rarely considered. For example, one of the expectations of aerial bombing by both sides in the Second World War was that it would cause social chaos with people turning on one another. But, in fact, just the opposite happened. Despite the extreme circumstances and the casualties, there was no breakdown of morale. The communal spirit was actually greater than before. In Britain there was the ‘blitz spirit’ and in Germany the mass bombing of civilians towards the end of the war resulted in people working harder than ever and actually increasing production of food and other necessities as well as war equipment. The numerous examples he cites of this kind of thing allow him to state that ‘catastrophes bring out the best in people’ and to regard the ‘bad’ behaviour frequently seen in human beings and their societies as aberrant. He dates it back to the invention 10,000 years ago of settled agriculture, seeing it as a ‘mismatch’ that did not fit the human psyche. Yet it became a game-changer in destabilising and stratifying populations that had previously lived in relative harmony and equality and had not been plagued by the idea of scarcity or the constant desire for more which agriculture introduced.

Though other writers too have presented arguments for seeing ‘human nature’ in a positive light (a recent example is Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff), Bregman goes further than these in a particularly striking way. Like him, most of them reject the notion of an innately self-serving, potentially evil human species, explaining anti-social behaviour as the reaction of hugely adaptable and flexible beings to conditioning and circumstance. Bad circumstances can make us bad people. But Bregman goes a step further. He looks beyond that idea to claim that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal, kind-hearted and cooperative, to the extent that he attaches to humans the label Homo puppy. This may seem sweeping or extreme and perhaps the jury is still out, but his arguments are certainly compelling. He sees as the main driver of human behaviour the desire to act together even in the most dire circumstances, leading to tolerance and mutual support even when things seem to be falling apart. Apart from the ‘blitz spirit’ in Britain in the Second World War, he also gives the surprising example of the apparently inexplicable dogged resistance shown by the vastly outnumbered and outgunned German forces as the Nazi regime was falling apart towards the end of the war. They found it impossible not to continue cooperating with one another. More generally, the author points to the plethora of everyday gestures of help, cooperation, solidarity and compassion people in all societies all over the world show to one another on a daily basis and quotes approvingly the statement by historian Tine De Moor that ‘History teaches us that man is essentially a cooperative being, a homo cooperans’. Another way he puts it is that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’.

On violence too, after presenting the evidence put forward by war historian Samuel Marshall in his book Men Against Fire that ‘the average and normally healthy individual (…) has such an inner usually unrealised resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life’, the author expresses agreement with sociologist Randall Collins that ‘Humans are hardwired for (…) solidarity (…); and this is what makes violence so difficult’. In view of all this, it is perhaps unsurprising that one reviewer has seen Bregman’s analysis as leading to ‘a new understanding of human nature’ and lighting ‘the path to a brighter future’ and another as ‘a devastating demolition of the misanthrope’s mantra’.

This is truly myth-busting stuff and all good news for socialists who have always argued that there is no ‘human nature’ obstacle to a society of common ownership and democratic organisation based on from each according to ability to each according to need. But what about any political conclusions or prescriptions by the author from the wealth of evidence he presents? Well, he expresses strong support for ‘participatory democracy’, even if with no clear explanations of its content, and recommends people associating with one another as closely and directly as possible as ‘the best remedy for hate, injustice and prejudice’, since, once they come into close contact, their Homo puppy nature, their innate friendliness, will dissipate any hostility, prejudice or lack of empathy. He doesn’t go much further than this, and he had already done that in a previous book, his best-selling Utopia for Realists (reviewed in the August 2017 Socialist Standard). In political terms that book roundly criticises the market system for its ‘bullshit’ jobs and the waste of skills and energies it engenders and sees a remedy for this in various reforms such as a shorter working week, a basic income scheme (here now renamed ‘a citizen’s dividend’), increased taxes on wealth, and open borders. From the socialist point of view, though Humankind is an impressive and important book, it’s a pity he didn’t go any further, since the changes he recommends, apart from being unlikely to happen given the nature of capitalism, would clearly not, even if enacted, get to the root of the problems caused by the money and profit system with its imperative to produce come what may for profit rather than for need.

There is, however, one point in Humankind in which the author does seem to make an argument against the money system by pointing out that in capitalist society, even of the Western democratic kind, ‘the threat of violence is still very much present, and it’s pervasive. It’s the reason families with children can be kicked out of their homes for defaulting on mortgage payments. It’s the reason why immigrants can’t simply stroll across the border in the fictions we call ‘Europe’ and ‘the United States’. And it’s also the reason we continue to believe in money (…) Money may be a fiction, but it’s enforced by the threat of very real violence’. Yet in the end, disappointingly, money and the violence behind it are not something he seems to want to look outside of. As in his previous work, he fails to go beyond recommending anything beyond what would in practice be relatively minor reforms to capitalism, easily withdrawn if the going got tough for profit making. Indeed, he’s on recent record as saying that ‘sometimes markets work best, sometimes the state has the best solution’. This is a pity, given that he expresses an unequivocal liking for the kind of non-hierarchical social arrangements which characterised the pre-agricultural past of our ancestors, people who were ‘allergic to inequality’ and ‘universally – and all but obsessively – concerned with being free from the authority of others’. What is the objection, therefore, to such arrangements – without the market and without the state and at a secure level of technology – for our own future now?

Howard Moss

After shipwreck (2020)

From the WSPUS website

Socialism will never work. It goes against human nature. 

So we are often told.

But where do we get our ideas of human nature? Partly by observing ourselves and those around us. Partly also from the books we read and the films and TV programs we watch.

Few books can have had as big an impact on people’s ideas of human nature as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. First published in 1954, this novel has been bought by tens of millions of people, translated into over 30 languages, turned into two films (1963 and 1990), and adapted for radio and the stage. As the many study guides devoted to it show, it has been a set book for innumerable students of English literature. And it was the inspiration for Reality Television!

The story line is simple enough. A group of schoolboys are marooned on a desert island. They soon start fighting. Out of their fears and the power lust of a dominant boy they create an idolatrous cult with chants, rituals, and painted faces. The message is painfully clear: the veneer of ‘civilization’ is skin-deep and once the constraint of authority is removed our inner savage quickly emerges.  

But this is fiction – a lesson taught by a misanthropic schoolmaster prone to alcoholism and depression. Now Dutch historian Rutger Bregman has uncovered a true story of how a bunch of real schoolboys behaved in the same situation – a ‘real Lord of the Flies’ that conveys a very different idea of ‘human nature’.

In 1965 six boys, aged 13–16, got bored with their life at a Catholic boarding school in the Polynesian island kingdom of Tonga, so they ‘borrowed’ a fishing boat and set sail. They were shipwrecked in a storm, drifted at sea for eight days, and were washed up on a deserted Pacific island where they lived for 15 months before being rescued by Australian adventurer Peter Warner. By that time they had been given up for dead and their funerals had been held. 

Even while adrift at sea, these boys cooperated and treated one another as equals:

They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.

On the island

  the boys set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire… [They] agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty… Their days began and ended with song and prayer. 

The boys survived at first on fish, coconuts, tame birds, and seabird eggs. Later they found wild taro, bananas and chickens in an ancient volcanic crater where people had lived a century before. 

When one boy slipped and broke a leg, the others set it using sticks and leaves and looked after him until it healed. Occasional quarrels were resolved by imposing a time-out. 

In short, they demonstrated – on a very small scale, to be sure – that socialism is not against human nature and that it can work. 

Unfortunately, the owner of the fishing boat did not fully appreciate the boys’ achievement. He  pressed charges against them and had them imprisoned for theft. It is understandable that he should have been annoyed at the boys, but a more constructive reaction would surely have been to get them to build him a new boat.

A study of post-shipwreck societies

The original version of this article ended here, but after uploading it I discovered an author who has made a comparative study of post-shipwreck societies — Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2019). 

Christakis examined numerous historical accounts of shipwrecks and their aftermath, but focused on 20 cases between 1500 and 1900 in which a group of at least 19 initial survivors set up camp on an uninhabited island for 2 months or longer. What factors were most important in determining which of these groups succeeded in ensuring the continued survival and eventual rescue of their members?

Available resources mattered a great deal, of course – both resources found on the island, especially food and fresh water, and things salvaged from the wreck. Another factor that mattered was terrain. For example, the survivors of one shipwreck were handicapped by finding themselves at the bottom of steep cliffs that they had to climb. And it helped if members of a group had a variety of usable skills. 

However, the relationships that developed within a group of survivors also made a big difference. The mini-societies that fared best were those based on cooperation, equity, and altruism. Their members worked together on agreed tasks, shared food fairly, and did not separate into subgroups based on military rank or social status. 

One group in this category consisted of survivors from the Julia Ann, wrecked in 1855 in Pacific reefs known as the Isles of Scilly. This was an unusually large group of 51 people, all of whom were rescued after 2 months. The ship captain set an example of unselfish behavior right at the start, when he saw the second mate about to remove from the wreck a bag containing $8,000 belonging to the captain. He told the man to abandon the money and carry a child ashore instead. 

In 1864 two ships were wrecked on opposite sides of Auckland Island, south of New Zealand. The two groups of survivors, though on the island at the same time, were unaware of one another. Of the 19 who came ashore from the Invercauld, only 3 were still alive when rescue came a year later. They had behaved in accordance with the motto: every man for himself. By contrast, all 5 initial survivors from the Grafton worked closely together and were rescued after almost two years. 

One striking difference between the two kinds of group concerned how the sick and injured were treated. You might think that by looking after ’useless mouths’ a group would lessen its chances of survival. There would be less time to gather food and the food would have to be shared among a larger number of people. Abandoning the sick and injured would seem to be more sensible. Eating them would seem to be even more sensible (cannibalism was actually a rare occurrence). In reality, this sort of crude arithmetic was outweighed by the fact that taking care of the sick and injured helped a group build mutual trust and solidarity. It was on balance an activity that increased chances of survival. 

In terms of political structure, non-cooperative groups might be either anarchic or harshly authoritarian. Cooperative groups were more democratic, but this did not exclude an element of leadership. Thus the 5 men from the Grafton elected one of their number to act ‘not as a master or superior but as a head of family.’ It was his assigned duty to ‘maintain order and harmony with gentleness but also firmness.’ It was agreed that this person could be replaced on a future vote if necessary.     

Christakis acknowledges that cooperative groups were relatively few. This should not be too much of a surprise, considering that many shipwreck survivors were traumatized and all had come from competitive and highly status-conscious societies. What is remarkable is that cooperative post-shipwreck societies did exist, demonstrating that even under unfavorable circumstances human beings have the capacity to act together as equals. 

Stefan

Blogger's Note:

See also, 'But Flies Are Not Human' (August 1993)

Demanding the Impossible (2017)

Book Review from the August 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Utopia for Realists'. By Rutger Bregman. (Bloomsbury, 2017. £16.99)

Bregman is a Dutch philosopher and he has produced a book that many are claiming is up there with Piketty in terms of recent works that have achieved real kudos and wide resonance among critics of the market economy.

In fairness, it is well-written and thought-provoking—definitely a cut above the many philosophical pot-boilers that wordily say little and invite being left on the ‘New Titles’ shelves at Waterstones. Bregman is good at sensing where the problems in modern day society are and how they have morphed over recent decades—the proliferation of ‘bullshit jobs’ from PR to the law, from public sector pen-pushers to private sector money-shufflers; the disconnection between the property-owning ideals of the free market nirvana, and the inability of people to secure their place within it; the massive rise in automation which counter-intuitively has led to people working longer and harder, and often with less purpose.

Where Bregman is less convincing is his prospectus for change. Most of the ideas he advances here are familiar ones—a basic income scheme, a move towards a 15 hour work week, open borders, increased taxes on wealth . . . in other words, a reversal of the dominant trends within capitalism over the last three or four decades that were promoted by Friedman, Hayek and their latter-day neo-liberal evangelists.

Bregman sees these as being radical and seemingly utopian demands that are capable of realisation in the way that other supposedly outlandish reforms were previously (he cites votes for women and same-sex marriage among others). But many—in fact, almost all—of the examples he gives of this nature were cultural changes that occurred within the market economy as it swept away the last vestiges of the attitudes that went alongside the feudal master/servant relationship. In other words, they were entirely compatible with the development of capitalism itself. Capitalism’s economic laws are rather different and do not bend so easily to the political will of those who would seek to curb their seeming excesses—the tendency towards an increasing work week in recent decades being a case in point.

That’s why Bregman’s book title is misplaced—his prospectus for change isn’t really Utopia for Realists but Utopia for Utopians. This is because the reason capitalism hasn’t delivered what many radicals have expected over the years is that in many ways it can’t. For instance, a basic income scheme is capable of realisation within capitalism only within certain parameters but these are circumscribed by the profit system and the need for the driving force of capitalism to operate —businesses competing to accumulate capital without the state interfering to prevent this. At a higher level of technological advancement this applies to basic income schemes today just as it did the original Speenhamland system and the Poor Law in nineteenth century Britain. Within the market economy, these schemes are unable to abolish poverty—in capitalism, the rich are rich because the poor are poor, and wealth accumulates to those that have it and only expands on this basis. In anything other than the very short-term, capitalism is incapable of behaving any other way.

The fact that until comparatively recent times the working class of wage and salary earners were often able to increase their absolute levels of income (and sometimes their relative share of income for a time) was the product of organised trade union action, but there were always limits to this. That the average skilled US worker hasn’t seen an increase in their real wages for around 30 years and that most workers in the UK and many other European countries have had real pays cuts for over a decade now illustrates this point well enough.

Capitalism has economic laws that are not easily transcended within the system (as has been illustrated by reformist governments of the Labour variety and also by more radical interventions such as the creation of centralised state-run capitalism in Russia and its satellites in the twentieth century). So what is needed is the sort of movement that Bregman identifies—radical, democratic, confident in its ideas—but one genuinely focused on challenging capitalism at source and creating a society capable of realising the potential that the market economy has unleashed. As Bregman himself rightly says:

‘A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering the walls cave in’(p.240).

Capitalism, with its interconnected production across the globe, its robots, 3-D printing and digital media, has brought about a real potential abundance of wealth that is now held back by the artificial scarcity associated with the market, money and production for profit. A genuine society of abundance will have no time for basic income schemes and attempts to institute part-time wage-slavery, and will instead mean a conscious move towards full unemployment and zero money income instead—only achievable on the basis of common ownership, the abolition of the market and free access to wealth.

Dave Perrin

An unrealistic utopia (2017)

Book Review originally published on the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There. By Rutger Bregman. Bloomsbury. 2017. £16.99.

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch advocate (the book is translated from Dutch) of a universal, unconditional basic income as a payment from the state to all citizens as of right and of an amount at least equal to the poverty line. A large part of the book, however, is devoted to advocating an unconditional basic income for the poor only, i.e. not a universal one (and not entirely an unconditional one since you have to be poor to get it). In other words, a proposal to merely reform the so-called Welfare State.

At present, the state already gives the poor 'free money' but conditional, besides means -testing, on being sufficiently unfit for work or seemingly actively seeking work, as the case may be. Bregman’s case against this is that it would be cheaper to make such payments unconditional as this would avoid the administrative work involved in checking entitlement and organising bogus courses for the unemployed; that 'free is cheaper' if you like. A number of pilot schemes are being carried out, as in Finland and Canada, to see if this is true. Bregman lists some previous ones which he says have shown that it is.

What he really wants, though, is an unconditional, non-means-tested, payment to everyone. His case for this has certain similarities with the case for socialism: that we are living in an age of potential abundance (he writes of a 'Land of Plenty') but that this abundance is not used to directly improve people’s life but is wasted on such non-wealth-producing activities as investment banking, advertising and legal services (since he doesn’t envisage the disappearance of money his list is shorter than ours). The resources exist, he points out, to eliminate poverty, improve education and health care, and provide a comfortable retirement for all. For him, it’s the introduction of a universal unconditional basic income that will enable this.

Some of the objections to this are the same as those raised against socialism – that if people were given free money (or had free access) the incentive to work would be undermined. Bregman counters: 'There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the vast majority of people actually want to work, whether they need to or not' and 'Stable and meaningful work plays a crucial part in every life well lived.'

In any event, he does want people to work less as he also advocates a 15-hour week. This, he says, should be enough to provide an adequate plenty for all. The resources for this would come from increased automation, the end of the consumerist mentality, and from what is currently wasted in wealth-shifting rather than wealth-creating activities.

Bregman includes the word 'utopia' in the title but is it a realistic one? Since he doesn’t object to the market mechanism or even to profit-making his scheme is to be introduced within capitalism. This is not realistic. One of the objections to such schemes, and which socialists share, is summed up in one word: Speenhamland.

In 1795 the magistrates in the Berkshire village of that name decided to make up the wages of poor farm labourers up to a minimum level with payments from the Poor Law rates. This was a subsidy to their employers who were thereby enabled to continue paying below subsistence, or starvation, wages. Marx pointed this out in Volume I of Capital :

'At the end of the eighteenth and during the first years of the nineteenth century, the English farmers and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wages by paying the agricultural labourers less than the minimum in the actual form of wages, and the remainder in the form of parochial relief.' (Chapter 24, section 4)

That a universal UBI would be a subsidy to employers is in fact a major socialist objection to it which Bregman is unable to counter. Indeed, in the Swiss referendum on the matter in June last year, the advocates of a UBI openly stated that everybody’s wages would and should be reduced by the amount of 'free money' from the state.

The other socialist objection is that ignores the economic imperative of capitalism, enforced through competition, to accumulate more and more capital out of profits, and so profits must come first before meeting the consumption needs of the population. Catering for these is kept to the minimum to maintain productive efficiency or, in the case of 'free money' payments to the poor, to the minimum needed to avoid bread riots. Bregman shares the illusion common to many would-be reformers of capitalism that production under capitalism can be made to give priority to people’s consumption instead of to profits. It can’t, as the failure of numerous reformist government that have set out to do this is testimony.

This said, Bregman’s book is very readable and he lands some effective punches on the status quo. He also has a pertinent criticism of those he dubs 'underdog socialists', Old Leftists nostalgic for what capitalism used to be like until the mid-70s:

“Reining in and restraining the opposition, that’s the sole remaining mission of the underdog socialist. Anti-privatisation, anti-establishment, anti-austerity. Given everything they’re against, one is left to wonder, what are underdog socialists actually for.”

And he does get Marx right when he writes that, for Marx, ‘releasing the proletariat from the shackles of poverty required a revolution, not a basic income.’

Adam Buick