Marx on human nature and peoples ideas on peoples greed

I thought I’d blog about human nature and peoples perceived ideas on the matter. I was having a debate with someone on twitter earlier who was so gloomy about the future and what change we can affect. I naturally disagreed as I am new to revolutionary politics learning all the time and very keen and enthusiastic for socialist politics and Marxist ideas to boot.

MANY PEOPLE think socialism is impossible not because the ruling class is too powerful or the world’s resources are too limited, though many people believe this but because “human nature” will not allow it. They think “people are too lazy,” “too passive,” “too greedy,” “too self-absorbed,” “too violent,” “too ambitious.” They think that people are inherently racist, sexist, and homophobic, that they can’t help but hate people from other countries, cultures, and religions. They think that “people like being told what to do” and “people can’t think for themselves” and “people like to boss other people around.” Nevermind that some of these “inherent” traits are contradictory. Together they work to prevent socialism in the minds of many. And, as if all this weren’t enough, human nature is thought to be not only negative, but permanently fixed: “There will always be good people and evil people” and “You can’t change human nature.”
It is no surprise that people often think this way. Marx once said that the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class. The ruling ideas about human nature under capitalism—that it is static, and for the most part awful—greatly benefit the capitalists. On the one hand, they suggest that, because of traits inherent to human beings like greed, ambition, and a tendency towards violence, capitalism—which rewards greed and requires violence—is not only the best and most efficient economic system ever, but also the most natural. On the other hand, such ideas make it possible to blame the enormous inequality and suffering produced by the system on the “natural” defects of certain individuals. If it is natural for some people to claw their way to the top, it is also natural for others to remain stuck in squalor at the bottom.
Socialists argue something quite different. We say that human nature is flexible and multifaceted, and that the behaviors of human beings are shaped by their social circumstances. We are all capable of greed as well as generosity; which one gets expressed has more to do with the values of a society than with the inborn tendencies of the individual. As Karl Marx put it: “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.”1 From a socialist perspective, there is such a thing as human nature, but its most prominent feature is its changeability. What makes us distinctly human is our ability, not only to change as our circumstances change, but to create new and different social relations and then adapt to them. Socialists argue that if humans could create capitalism, humans can create socialism.
There is a lot at stake in this argument. If it is natural for humans to engage in the practices that capitalism supports or requires, then any attempt to change the system is pointless.

Today, when the ruling class controls weapons and oversees business practices that threaten the existence of the planet, promoting a socialist understanding of human nature is not only correct, but urgent.
From the beginning
The tendency to revert to human nature to justify social and economic structures and to explain their failures has been present from the very beginning of United States history. James Madison rationalized the system of checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches that, at the time, distinguished the U.S. form of government, on the basis of a negative view of human nature.

The idea that capitalism’s failures should be blamed on the poor also got an early start. Eager to please their ruling-class benefactors, scientists and scholars have always been willing to develop theories and misinterpret or fabricate experimental results to support this notion. In the nineteenth century, eugenicists and “Teutonists” (think of an upper-crust Aryan Nation) fudged test scores and measured heads to produce what was considered scientific backing for the idea that poverty is the result of inherited weaknesses of character or intellect called “social inadequacy.” The resulting conviction that “poverty begets poverty” led to forced sterilization and enforced illiteracy; if the children of illiterate parents cannot be taught to read, the argument went, why waste money on schools?
This “scientific racism,” which was applied to all members of the lower classes regardless of skin color, existed alongside of and in combination with the racism used to rationalize the enslavement of Blacks and the genocide of Native Americans. An excellent example of the way these ideas came together is a statement by Oxford University Professor Edward Freeman, who toured America in 1881, speaking to university and “learned society” audiences. According to Freeman, and to the delight of his “learned” listeners: “the best remedy for whatever is amiss in America would be if every Irishman should kill a Negro and be hanged for it.”


What is human nature?
Although the human race has seen enormous and rapid cultural evolution, human beings’ basic physical needs have remained the same for hundreds of thousands of years: we need air, water, food, shelter, or other protection from the elements, sleep, parenting for the young, and sex to propagate the species.18 These general needs are accompanied by a set of specific abilities: because humans have large brains, walk upright, have hands with opposable thumbs, and vocal chords that allow speech, we are able to use our physicality, our bodies and brains and the five senses they afford us, in ways that other creatures can’t. First and foremost, we work in a distinctively human way and, through social labor, we change our environment and the conditions that determine our “nature.”
Friedrich Engels, writing in 1876, placed labor at the very center of human development: “[Labor] is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man himself.”19 Engels goes on to attribute changes in human anatomy to work in general and working with tools in particular, comparing the bone structure of the human hand to that of other primates and noting “the great gulf between the undeveloped hand of even the most man-like apes and the human hand that has been highly perfected by hundreds of thousands of years of labor.”20
In addition to working with tools, humans have always lived and worked in groups: “The development of labor necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual.” From cooperative labor arose the need to speak and the development of language: “In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other. Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed.” The development of complex systems of language allowed for human social consciousness: the transmission of culture and history from generation to generation.
Of course it can be argued that animals also work: they hunt, gather, and in some cases store food; they build nests and dens and tend their young. Some cooperate; some communicate, albeit nonverbally; some even use tools. But the work done by animals is mostly instinctive and unchanging. Otters may use stones to crack open sea urchins but they can’t invent a sea urchin cracker. Beavers take down trees to build their dams but they’ll never use a chain saw. Whales may communicate through songs, but they can’t write lyrics or mass produce CDs. Only humans have the ability to record their history and create art. Only humans can conceive of a project, plan out the various steps to completion, and reflect with satisfaction on a job well done. Only humans can invent and construct complex tools that alter the environment and allow for enormous increases in productivity—tools that enable us to make a lot more stuff with a lot less effort.

By acting on nature to produce their subsistence, human beings change themselves. Laboring socially, humans change the material forms of what Marx called their means of production. These engender new social relations, allowing, in the end, for the distinctive variability of human behavior through history, and from one society to the next.
Marx observed that, under capitalism, human productive capacity increased so much that, for the first time in history, it was possible to have enough of everything for everybody. What’s more, the satisfaction of basic needs and the ways in which they were satisfied led to the development of more complicated needs. Crowded living conditions create a need for systems of sanitation. Complex machinery creates a need for higher education. These complications further the development of human tastes and abilities, and could lead, under conditions of socialized, planned production, to the fullest expression of human nature:
Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under the collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.
But there was (and is) a problem. Capitalists were not (and are not) “rationally regulating their interchange with Nature.” They compete in an irrational and unplanned manner with an eye towards maximizing profit rather than meeting human need. Promoting “conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature” does not concern them either. Instead, their interests lie in getting people to work as hard as possible for as little as possible. And so, despite its potential to do so, capitalism does not allow most of humanity to satisfy its basic needs with “the least expenditure of energy.” Instead, it works some people to the bone while others are thrown out of work. Under capitalism, advances in technology like automation create, not leisure, but unemployment for some and overtime hours of mind-numbing repetitive labor for the rest.
Capitalism created the conditions for the fullest expression of human nature, but simultaneously denied them to the vast majority of humanity by directing all the wealth up to the tiny minority at the top of society. Members of the ruling class collect homes and cars and gadgets, attend first-rate universities, travel the world, eat exquisite food and drink exquisite wine, enjoy operas and the fine arts , and develop whatever talents or abilities they have, and often those they do not. Meanwhile, the majority of the working class struggles from day to day to make ends meet, with a few weeks off per year to develop ourselves in areas other than work—if we’re lucky. Capitalism not only stunts further human development, it is also a stupendous failure when it comes to providing for the basic needs of most people. Every day, all over the world, tens of thousands of people starve or die young of curable diseases.
Far from being naturally adapted to capitalism, most humans are battered or broken by it. If it doesn’t straight out kill them, it stunts their physical and mental development; their intellects are neglected, their artistic talents remain undiscovered or unappreciated, and the distinctively human capacity to engage in creative, socially useful work is reduced to a commodity worth only as much as the capitalist can pay and still turn a profit.
Even those who recognize that capitalism thwarts and distorts human nature—and that we now possess the means to eliminate inequality and want—may still wonder whether humans are capable of the kind of truly egalitarian society that socialists envision. Forced to compete with each other for limited opportunities, compelled to work mindlessly at jobs they don’t like, encouraged to view themselves and those around them as commodities, many people might not seem prepared, at any given moment, to plan and create, “in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms…an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”24 We are swimming (or, more accurately, treading water) in what Marx called “the muck of ages”—racism, sexism, homophobia, competitiveness, conformity, passivity, insecurity—all the ideas capitalists require to divide and enervate the masses and maintain their minority hold on power.
And it is easy to feel, after a few hundred years of capitalism, that things have always been the way they are now and always will be. Luckily for us, this is simply not true. Capitalism is a fairly recent development, and prior to the rise of class society some several thousand years ago, human society was not characterized by classes or inequality or systematic warfare. There are class-free societies on the planet at this very moment, societies that are “egalitarian, cooperative, and on the move.”25 All of the Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) Nharo Basarwa (San or Bushmen) from Ngamiland, Botswana, lived until just recently in societies where egalitarianism—notably along gender lines—was the rule. As some communities shift from nomadism to sedentism, this has started to change—not due to some “resurgence” of human nature, but rather to “the adoption of the economics and attitudes towards gender from non-foraging neighbors [that] facilitates the emergence of gender inequality.… [In addition, some] current development programs designed by Westerners exclude women and contribute to the increase in gender inequality which is emerging in these societies.”


SO to conclude human nature is a big beast and something we cant simply target to being the failings of everything we fail to do. Thinking that things will stay the same forever is a very unmarxist way of thinking and fails to take account of history and the class struggles.

There is nothing about human nature that makes socialism impossible, but there is also nothing that makes it inevitable. According to Marx, people make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.28 If we want socialism—and the possibility of developing human nature to the fullest—we will need to organize and fight for it. This may seem like a pipe dream given the low level of class struggle in the Uk . at this time. But a socialist conception of human nature also allows us to understand how groups of people that for a long time appeared to be hardwired for one set of behaviors—like not fighting back—can transform radically and rapidly in response to social changes.



with extracts used to back up my opinions from http://www.isreview.org/issues/47/wdss-humnature.shtml

Is human nature a barrier to socialism ?

This excellent article posted on the Committee for Workers International website this afternoon answers many of the questions i am asked day in day out as a socialist. The idea that socialism can never work as as humans its not in our nature to work and help eachother. This article below from a American comrade looks to answer these points in a brillinatly put way.

Aren’t people motivated by money? Wouldn’t socialism stifle hard work and innovation?

Canyon Lalama, Socialist Alternative (CWI USA)

The world is a mess. War, poverty, and oppression are now part of the daily lives of billions round the globe. Even during the last boom 80% of the world’s population – 5.4 billion people – lived on less than $10 a day. Now that the world is in the midst of this crisis even the head of the World Bank has said it will result in “a human and developmental calamity… the number of chronically hungry people is expected to climb over 1 billion this year”. The wars in the middle east, enviromental destruction and worsening economic turmoil are only the most recent striking examples of the crises facing humanity.

At the root of this suffering is the economic, social, and political system of capitalism. Capitalism has given rise to large multinational corporations that are locked into a system of cut-throat competition, where corporations single-mindedly pursue short-term profits, power, and resources, regardless of the human cost.

Corporations and imperialist countries may have taken over the world, but millions of impoverished, oppressed people from Lebanon to Iraq, Venezuela to Mexico, are fighting back. Since the outbreak of the international economic crisis movements of workers and young people, in the more advanced capitalist countries, fighting against attcks on their living standards have shown the huge anger building up from below.

Many of the people involved in these struggles are searching for an alternative to the misery of capitalism, and many, especially in Latin America, are again beginning to turn towards socialism. However, people often come up against arguments that socialism is unrealistic because it goes against “human nature”. This article attempts to answer some of these questions about socialism.

Aren’t people motivated by money? Wouldn’t socialism stifle hard work and innovation?
In reality, it is capitalism that stifles the motivation and creativity of the majority of the population “the working class”. There is nothing more unmotivating than being forced to do the same repetitive job for 8 or 12 hours per day just to pay your bills.

As the American socialist Eugene Debs put it: “[People] do not shrink from work, but from slavery. The [person] who works primarily for another does so primarily under compulsion, and work so done is the very essence of slavery.”

After 40-plus hours of mind-numbing work and other life pressures, most workers have no time to develop their creative skills and talents. To make matters worse, under capitalism workers have no incentive to develop labor-saving inventions and more efficient methods of work. In a fiercely competitive market economy, greater labor productivity generally leads to layoffs and a more thorough exploitation of the workforce, sending profits up and workers’ living standards down.

But if workers collectively owned and managed their workplaces in a democratic socialist economy rather than taking orders from a boss, workers would be much more motivated. Every new innovation would mean either less working hours or higher living standards.

And if all jobs provided good pay, benefits, and security, people would pursue careers they enjoyed rather than jobs that just provide economic security, which would make people far more productive.

Aren’t people too greedy and selfish for socialism to work?
There is a difference between selfishness and self-interest. There is absolutely no doubt that human beings look out for their self-interests, and the struggle for socialism is completely in line with this tendency. Socialists fight to achieve a living minimum wage for all, for free national healthcare, free public education through college, affordable housing for all, and other programs that would dramatically raise the standard of living for the vast majority.

As the history of the trade union movement has shown, working people have the most power to improve our lives when we work collectively instead of desperately trying to succeed as individuals in a system rigged against us.

Ironically, it is the same pro-capitalist ideologues who preach that people are too “greedy” for socialism who then turn around to demand workers “tighten their belts for the common good” whenever they want to lower our wages, lay us off, or cut our social programs.

But self-interest is not the only thing that guides us. Take a look at the amount of people doing volunteer work. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 65 million Americans volunteered in some way in 2005.

After Hurricane Katrina, individuals around the country donated $4.25 billion to help the victims, whereas corporations donated a pitiful $400 million (Charity Navigator, 8/8/06). These figures show the enormous sacrifice and solidarity working people are capable of.

Won’t socialism result in a dictatorship like in Russia?
The monstrous bureaucratic dictatorships in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere were a complete negation of genuine democratic socialism. At the same time, it is crucial for socialists today to study the experience of the Russian revolution in order to explain the reasons behind its bureaucratic degeneration, which lay in specific historical conditions, not human nature.

The Russian revolution of 1917 was the first time the working class overthrew capitalism and started building a new socialist society. The early Soviet Union was the most democratic government the world has ever seen: ordinary workers and peasants ran society democratically through workers’ councils (called soviets). It was one of the very first countries in the world to give women full legal rights, including the right to vote and have abortions, and to legalize homosexuality.

The Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, always explained it was impossible to build socialism in one country by itself, especially in the undeveloped and semi-feudal conditions of Russia. They argued the Russian revolution would only survive if it spread to the powerful capitalist countries of Western Europe.

The major imperialist powers themselves recognized that the Russian revolution was not a purely local affair, but threatened capitalism internationally. They therefore moved, along with the Russian capitalists and landlords, to instigate a bloody civil war to overthrow the new Soviet government. 21 countries, including the U.S., France, and Britain, invaded Russia to help the counter-revolution.

Decisive in the Bolshevik victory in the civil war was the wave of revolutions throughout Europe and the world, sparked by the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ call for workers to rise up against World War One. The revolutionary uprisings in Germany and across Europe brought the war to a decisive end, and compelled the ruling class internationally to withdraw their troops from Russia in order to avoid further upheavals at home.

Unfortunately, these revolutions did not succeed in overthrowing capitalism. This was because unlike in Russia there was no mass revolutionary party that was willing to lead the revolutions through to completion. Instead, the mass working-class parties in Europe were dominated by reformist leaders who played a decisive role in saving capitalism.

So, while the Soviet Union defeated the attempt at counter-revolution, it remained isolated. The bloody civil war left the country in shambles with the masses exhausted, unemployed, and hungry. This laid the basis for the rise of a conservative, bureaucratic caste. The bureaucracy, centered around Stalin, consolidated power in its hands in the 1920s and 1930s and demolished the democratic rights the Russian working class had won.

The many revolutions in the neocolonial world and Europe that subsequently took place unfortunately looked to Russia as an example to follow, and the Soviet government was able to export their Stalinist model to China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Is capitalism part of human nature?
The ruling class would have us believe that capitalism or class society is the inevitable result of human nature. While biology determines certain aspects of our behavior, human nature is not a permanent, unchanging thing that magically fell from the sky. How we act, and how we relate to the world and each other, develops in response to the changing material conditions of society and our relationship to the natural world.

For millions of years, people lived in egalitarian, nomadic hunter-and-gatherer societies. Food, shelter, and the necessities of survival were equally shared throughout society. Only after the agricultural revolution, when nomadic tribes settled down to cultivate crops, did a surplus of wealth develop that allowed a ruling class to arise for the first time in history.

Various ruling classes since then have claimed that it was “human nature” for one person to own another as a slave, or for there to be a divine king appointed by God to rule over everyone else. Today people would rightly dismiss this as utter nonsense!

By harnessing modern technology to provide for everyone, socialism would create the material basis for human culture to change in the most fundamental way. Instead of a society that rewards the most vicious and greedy, a socialist society would develop a new culture based on equality and justice.

Decisions would be made democratically, not by electing one capitalist party or the other every five years but by regular working people making decisions themselves through mass meetings and direct elections. People in power, such as managers and public representatives, would be elected, subject to instant recall, and paid only the average wage of the people they represent.

Shortening the workweek, sharing out the work with the unemployed, and providing for people’s basic needs would liberate women and men to finally take control over their lives and pursue all forms of creative and intellectual endeavors, unleashing humanity’s vast creative potential.