The lazy fallacy that the alternative (i.e. life organised on conscious production for need) to societies based on exploitation and the profit motive is incompatible with human nature represents the clearest sign yet of humanity strolling downhill with the inscription written in bold on its back: “The hour of rigour’s flight”.The strength of this fallacy lies in it drawing inspiration from the unity of the theory and practice of capitalism, in other words, it is based on the ‘common sense’ notion that society as we know it today is a result of the inherent impulse of human beings to exclusively own things privately.
This notion is clearly supra historical. We will shortly explain why we say it is an above-history view of both human nature and forms of economic organisation. First, we must explain why this common sense view of human nature and economic organisation is able to appear so ‘natural’. This is important, for it is here that the lack of intellectual rigour on the matter is plainly laid bare.
When human beings look at how the world functions, ‘common sense’ make phenomena seem part of the natural order of things. Because we ‘find’ these phenomena already existing around us, we are apt to function as though our ideas about them are an expression of an innate compulsion and not as a direct result of these phenomena exerting their impression upon our lives. Our investigation of the material world and the very many forms of social, political and economic organisations start from things that we find ready-made; the process through which these manifestations are brought to existence is veiled. This is how our views about things around us are divorced from the historical processes that gave rise to them, and appear innate, as eternal manifestations of human nature. Our first task, therefore, is to dispel this unscientific approach by showing how human nature is a manifestation of specific historical processes.
We shall bore no-one with a lengthy history of the development of capitalism from feudalism. We must insist, though, that the form the so-called ‘free market’ took is embedded in how best to ensure the extraction of profit under new conditions. Feudalism rested on a combination of laws of the state, brute compulsion of the feudal lord and moral sanction of the church as supreme land owner. Still, the worker was tied to the land and the fruit of his/her labour. In our society, these political measures are removed and the extraction of profit happens entirely through pressure of survival on necessities. [An aside: The notion often peddled that ‘workers are free to work or not’ is simply another manifestation of the erroneous belief about freedom under capitalism. There are too many determinants and these so-called freedoms are fictitious given the harsh realities of a system pitting poor people against one another and atomising their social power. But we must agree here: workers are free, but they are free from feudalism and the means to produce — all they have is their ability to work]. Clearly, this transformation is not a result of inherent human nature. It is deeply part of historical processes under direction of new forms of social and economic organisations based on the market. If it was human nature, why did it not happen earlier or later in the lives of human beings? No, human nature itself is a product of these selfsame forces.
Human beings amassing property on an exclusive basis, children unwilling to share their play things and sometimes even taking the toys of their play mates are all examples people give to illustrate that the drive for individual appropriation is naturally part of human beings and tempering with any sort of large scale societal planning violates the very ‘nature’ of human existence. That’s not true. This behaviour to accumulate and refusal to see something as belonging to one without that thing being owned by one arise under specific economic and social organisational forms. The fact that children exhibit the same behaviour does not contradict the point, it proves the success with which the system determines behaviour at such an early stage of human development; it underscores the depth to which the profit motive is able to warp life at its tender age. Not to see this is pure laziness of mind.
Under conditions where production is organised on the basis of need, a different type of economic organisation will take place and with it, the basis laid for the emergence of a new impulse in human nature. This is already visible in some places where children are taught an ethos of ‘shared’ joys — sharing of toys, cooperation instead of competition, etc [Oh yes, this is another favourite hobby horse of freemarket apologists: if you remove competition, you remove the impulse of success. Rubbish! Competition is purposed to push the back of competitors against the wall, force abdication and take over the space left by the forced exit; its logical result is monopolisation and ruthless price control, an economic war against the majority of society’s people…].
The human nature arguments are all shades of the same thing: reflections of the bourgeois intellect in dire lack of rigour. Pure laziness in its attempts to prop up a historically obstructive system. Production for need is a historical necessity and a condition for humanity’s advance to greater heights.
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