“The basic law of capitalism is you or I, not you and I.” Karl Liebknecht, German socialist
It is human nature to eat when you are hungry, to drink when you are thirsty, and to sleep when you are tired. Nothing can alter this least of all socialists. However, what is meant by human nature as an objection to socialism, is not human nature at all, but human behaviour. The roots of human behaviour are to be found principally in one’s environment and the economic conditions which influence one’s physiological make-up. Mankind behaves in the way it does, very largely, although not completely, because of the conditioning we receive from our environment since mankind is a social animal and live in a community. How we behave is not “innate” or governed by our “instincts” or our genes, but can and does vary depending on the sort of society we were brought up in and live in.
We are born human and therefore possess the unique capacity to adapt culturally in accordance with the environmental conditions which surround us. The brain is not just a passive receptor of sense-impressions (experience) but plays an active role in organising these impressions so as to make sense of them (understand them). This capacity to organise sense impressions is part of human biological nature. Before humans could develop culture – accumulated wisdom such as ways of tool making, hunting and gathering method, which is learned and passed on by non-biological means – they had to have brains capable of learning and of using language and of thinking abstractly. These brains had to have evolved and are just as much a part of “human nature” as walking upright and stereoscopic colour vision. So, there’s no denial of human nature. The view that the mind is a blank sheet on which the environment can imprint anything is wrong because the brain plays a much more active role in the learning process. Nor are we born with pre-programmed patterns of behaviour.
We learn how to behave after we are born (this even starts while we are still in the womb) and in so doing “programme” our brains. We are animals that are capable of adopting a great variety of behaviour patterns. The nature of our brain allows us, as participants in a particular system of society, to “programme” ourselves, in ways that neuroscience is beginning to understand in more detail, for living in that society. Human behaviour is not biologically determined and the main characteristic of us humans that distinguishes us from other animals is the capacity, as a species, to engage in a great variety of behaviours. This versatility and flexibility when it comes to behaviour have a biological basis, of course.
There is scarcely a single socialist who has not heard repeatedly the statement that human nature is against socialism. This objection needs to be met. When an opponent of socialism says “What about human nature?”, “you can’t change human nature!” Needless to say that when they talk of human nature they mean human behaviour. So when a supporter of capitalism says “you can’t change human nature”, the reply should be: “who wants to? Human nature is alright as it is”. Human nature as it is makes it possible to exist in all kinds of manifestations, not just support for capitalism but also the potentiality of the change from the behaviour of capitalism to that of socialism. The combination of our genetic and cultural characteristics makes humanity a superbly adaptable being, well-equipped to deal with problems.
For socialists, human nature is viewed as the “normal” mode of behaviour and mental outlook in any given society at any given period and, being determined by external material circumstances (physical but above all social), varied over the type of society, time and place. Human nature is not fixed, but variable. It is what we would now call rather “human behaviour”.
Once a distinction is made between human nature (biological, and which can hardly have changed since homo sapiens evolved) and socially and culturally determined human behaviour (which has changed throughout pre-history and history), then the issue becomes clearer. It can be seen, not to be about whether or not there is such a thing as biological nature which is inherited and determined by genes (so there’s “no denial of human nature” as we have stated), but about the extent of this and in particular whether or not it includes specific ideas or behaviour patterns. It is not our consciousness that determines our social existence but our social existence which determines our consciousness. Nobody, for example, is born a racist or a patriot or a bigot – this has to be learned.
Socialism does not require us all to become altruists, putting the interests of others above our own. In fact, socialism doesn’t require people to be any more altruistic than they are today. We will still be concerned primarily with ourselves, with satisfying our needs, our need to be well considered by others as well as our material and sexual needs. No doubt too, we will want to “possess” personal belongings such as our clothes and other things of personal use and to feel secure in our physical occupation of the house or flat we live in, but this will be just that – our home and not a financial asset. Such “selfish” behaviour will still exist in socialism but the acquisitiveness encouraged by capitalism will no longer exist. The coming of socialism will not require great changes in the way we behave, essentially only the accentuation of some of the behaviours which people exhibit today (friendliness, helpfulness, co-operation) at the expense of others that capitalism encourages.
Socialism is a society where would all be considered of equal worth and be able to have an equal say in the way things are run and in which we recognise ourselves as members of an interdependent community where different people perform different functions and where everybody, irrespective of their function, has access to what they need to live and enjoy life just because they are members of the human race. And this doesn’t require us to be any less selfish or more altruistic than we are today – it’s not about changing human nature but about changing the basis of society. We don’t need to change human nature; it is only human behaviour that needs to change. Humans’ behaviour has been determined by the sort of society they live in and has varied with this while their biological make-up has remained unchanged. While our genes can’t be ignored, they only intervene in our behaviours in an indirect way, by programming the development of our brains. Therefore, to understand the complexities of our behaviour, it is to our brains, not directly to our genes, that we have to look. When we do this we find that our brains allow us, as a species, to adopt – and, as prehistory and history bear out, we have in fact adopted – a great variety of different behaviours depending on the natural, economic and social environments we have found ourselves in. So, “human nature” is not a barrier to socialism. On the contrary, our biologically evolved and inherited human capacity will allow us to live in a socialist society.
Why is it that capitalism has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty and starvation? What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and indignity for the many? Why does wealth seem to go hand in hand with squalor? Is there is something in the nature of capitalism that generates deprivation and inequality?
Capitalism has developed human powers and capacities beyond all previous measures. Yet it had not used those capacities to set men and women free of fruitless toil. On the contrary, it had forced them to labour harder than ever. We sweat every bit as hard as our ancestors. It is because of the peculiarly contradictory way in which the capitalist system generates its fabulous wealth. Equality for some means inequality for others, and freedom for some brings oppression and unhappiness for many. The system’s voracious pursuit of power and profit had turned foreign nations into subjugated colonies, and human beings into the play-things of economic forces beyond their control. Capitalism has blighted the planet with pollution, inflicted mass hunger, and scarred it with atrocious wars. Yet we understand that there are more than enough resources on the planet to solve most of our material problems. Socialism does not depend on some miraculous change in human nature.
The way we go about our business, the way we are organised in our daily life is reflected in the way we think about things and the sort of world we created. The institutions we build, the philosophies we adhere to, the prevailing ideas of the time, the culture of society, are all determined to some extent or another by the economic structure of society. This did not mean that they were totally determined but were quite clearly a spin-off from the economic base of society. The political system, the legal system, the family, the press, the education system were all rooted, in the final analysis, in the class nature of society, which in turn was a reflection of the economic base. Marxists maintain that the economic base or infrastructure generated or had built upon it a superstructure that kept it functioning. The education system, as part of the superstructure, therefore, is a reflection of the economic base and served to reproduce it. This did not mean that education and teaching is a sinister plot by the ruling class to ensure that it kept its privileges and its domination over the rest of the population. There are no conspirators hatching devious schemes. It simply means that the institutions of society, like education, are reflections of the world created by human activity and that ideas arise from and reflect the material conditions and circumstances in which they are generated. Some of those who defended feudalism against capitalist values in the late Middle Ages preached that capitalism would never work because it was contrary to human nature. Some capitalists now say the same about socialism.
Concepts such as freedom, democracy, liberty and phrases such as “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” are bandied around by opinion makers as if they were not contentious. They are, in Marxist terms, ideological constructs, in so far as they are ideas serving as weapons for social interests. They are put forward for people to accept in order to prop up the system. Ideas are not neutral. They are determined by the existing relations of production, by the economic structure of society. Ideas change according to the interests of the dominant class in society. Gramsci coined the phrase “ideological hegemony” to describe the influence the ruling class has over what counts as knowledge. For Marxists, this hegemony is exercised through institutions such as education, or the media. Again the important thing to note about this is that it is not to be regarded as part of a conspiracy by the ruling class. It is a natural effect of the way in which what we count as knowledge is socially constructed. The ideology of democracy and liberty, beliefs about freedom of the individual and competition are generated historically by the mode of production through the agency of the dominant class. They are not neutral ideas serving the common good but ruling class ideas accepted by everyone as if they were for the common good.
The members of the World Socialist Movement are against people setting themselves up as superior to ‘ordinary’ workers as if they and only they had the ability, foresight and knowledge to discern what socialist society would be like. This elitism had no place in the World Socialist Movement. It emphasises the creativity and spontaneity of the drive towards socialism, and charts and assess the practical experiments of workers in this endeavour. The tragedy is that we labour to create a vast, global social structure powered by capital (which depends upon us for its existence) that oppresses us, and limits and constrains human and social possibilities. We toil to build our own cages. The struggle for socialism is both the struggle against the constraints and limitations of capitalist social life and for a new form of human society. Alienation, boredom, the length of the working day, and so on can be key issues. Explaining the mode of exploitation in the capitalist labour process would be essential – how it is that value and surplus-value are produced. The exploration of the perverted form of human life in a capitalist society, and the ways that human life is being capitalised (the human as a form of capital – human capital). Any ‘anti-capitalist’ revolution worthy of the name must break with the all-consuming ‘logic’ of capital from day one of any revolutionary transformation. The ‘education of the future’ is part of the struggle for a new society
Socialists believe in the uniqueness of the individual. The idea permeates our writings from end to end. We hold a passion for the sensual and our so-called materialism is at root about the human body. Again and again, we speak of the just society as one in which men and women will be able to achieve their distinctive powers and capacities in their own distinctive ways. Our goal is pleasurable self-fulfilment. To achieve true self-fulfilment, human beings must find it in and through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others. That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one’s own self-realisation, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one’s own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism, a set of institutions which will allow this reciprocity to happen to the greatest possible extent, a socialist commonwealth, in which each person’s participation in the project augments the welfare of all the others and vice versa. This is not a question of some saintly self-sacrifice. The process is built into the structure of the institutions.
