Please let me know if this community is not the best place for this post.
When I was a teenager, and even in my twenties, I used to be quite idealistic, naive, and somewhat radical, believing that all humans have the capacity to be good, and that the only thing preventing utopia where all live in abundance were the historical shackles of national/cultural/religious identities. As in, humans would for sure all get along, if only there were no major reasons for any “us vs them” type thinking.
But the older I get, the more my thoughts on the topic have shifted. My idealism has constantly been worn down by finding out about more and more people who would be happy to fuck over every single other person on this planet if it meant they could get a bit further “ahead” than everybody else. But even on a much smaller scale, after establishing my own family and building my home, at some point I realised that I would personally also be willing to go to extreme lengths if necessary to protect the way of life of my loved ones, including picking up a gun if our neighbouring country decides we should no longer have our freedom - this is something I would have considered “idiotic patriotism” when I was younger. Basically, this means I would also be willing to fuck up the lives of others in order to improve the lives of my family, and I think the same is true for most people.
What I’m getting at is that I think there are lots of reasons that people can have to hurt other humans, ranging from psychotic greed to a strong commitment to close ones. I think this is just human nature. I’m using the word “hurt” here in a very broad sense, including taking advantage of somebody, etc.
If indeed this is human nature, and humans are willing to exploit others to try and improve the situation for themselves and their loved ones, how can communism work? Would we not need to “evolve” to a new stage of humanity first, where people are capable of putting the needs of society above their own desires?
I apologise if this is a dumb question with some obvious answer, I admit I have not read any books on communism and am probably missing some key points.
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“Human nature” is a fake concept, especially one that is considered “essential” and eternal of humans. If human nature is anything, then over our 100K year history as anatomical humans it’s our nature to live in communitarian tribes with no personal property.
Human behavior and incentives emerge from the economic base - NOT IN AN OVERDETERMINED MANNER, meaning it’s not inevitable that all who live under capitalist wage relationships seek to become exploiters and greedy. But what is incentives and rewarded is greedy, shitty, alienating behavior in the absence of true and proper solidarity. When people act the way you suggest they’re doing so rationally, now it’s true that they would more to gain if they take the proverbial leap of faith and taking part in a socialist revolution but that prospect is scary because it implies a potential loss without gain and things aren’t bad enough for enough people for them to feel the risk is worth the reward yet.
In my day to day encounters with people, I’m reminded of the enduring power of love and small acts of kindness and solidarity that power our daily lives even in this hellworld.
But what is incentives and rewarded is greedy, shitty, alienating behavior in the absence of true and proper solidarity.
Can you elaborate a bit more what you mean by this? Is the lack of this solidarity really caused by how our economy works? For me, it seems more intuitive that the lack of such solidarity is in general caused by a lack of interpersonal relationships and links between the vast majority of humanity. As you said:
In my day to day encounters with people, I’m reminded of the enduring power of love and small acts of kindness and solidarity that power our daily lives even in this hellworld.
I totally agree with this. Even the most hateful people have shown that they can change their views about groups they hate if they just spend some time together. But how can such solidarity be built between complete strangers who will never meet each other? Can changing the economic system really be enough for this?
Can you elaborate a bit more what you mean by this?
I’m not who you’re replying to, but maybe I can take a stab at answering your question.
The way I see it, under capitalism, people are encouraged to see each other as competitors - business owners are placed in competition with each other for market share, and workers are forced into competition with one another for work. Under capitalism, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. This sort of relationship is far from natural, and often brings out the worst in people.
On the other hand, the collective nature of work that has developed along with capitalism (for example, a whole bunch of people working together in a factory, on a construction site, or in an office, towards the production of a product or service) can - and does - exert an opposing influence in favour of working class solidarity as well.
Hope this helps, at least a bit!
For future reference, this is more of a post for /c/[email protected], but I’ll go ahead and leave it up. :)
Thanks, noted
Even if you accept that human nature means people want to exploit each other (which is contentious), the point of communism isn’t to change that. It’s to structure society so that those who would be exploited and are exploited have the power. If the people who want to exploit others don’t have armies or wealth or positions of power, then they can’t do much. Communism tackles this by placing those who are exploited for their labor in power. Because labor is how society exists. It’s how the buildings get made, it’s how the heat stays on, it’s how we get food and water and antibiotics. This grounds the idea of exploitation in a material relationship with the mode of production. It avoids the moralism of seeing exploitation as some inherit demonic influence on mankind. People exploit people because it betters their own lifestyle and because society is structured to allow those people power.
Think of Marx and other revolutionary science the same way you would think about physics or other science. In the late 1800s science began formalizing and moving away from the Enlightenment philosophies. Also at this time the industrial revolution had taken hold and was creating a new abstraction for feudal exploitation. So just like how the modern physicists began to move past Newtonian physics, social scientists began moving past the old ideas about human nature and society. This means dispelling a lot of old superstitions about people’s places in society.
In that we consider the situation you describe. You’re a peaceful and successful socialist/communist country but your neighbor decides to invade just because they don’t like you. Well, people don’t act for no reason. In history a country invades another for resources or to defend its own political position of power. They may say they fight for honor or freedom or God, but those are just flimsy justifications that obscure the material reasons for conflict. So your communist nation would have to be smart enough to understand that and work to decipher what’s really going on so you can solve the problem.
Under communism you use an inductive system that moves between practice and theory to solve problems. So you come up with a reason why you think your neighboring country might invade, and then you test it by diplomacy or war. You see what doesn’t work and you go back and adjust the theory. Then you test it again. It’s literally a scientific method of social organization.
One of the reasons why capitalism is so precarious is that it contains what are called contradictions. Contradictions are not logical contradictions. They are two things that oppose each other but also can’t exist without the other. The buyer and the seller for example. The buyer wants the cheapest price and the seller wants the highest price. If there are no buyers there are no sellers. These contradictions exist all over capitalism and go unaddressed because the wealthy refuse to recognize them. They don’t have a scientific view of society. They use mystical explanations for these contradictions and the crisis to which they lead.
Under communism there will also be contradictions. They will be different from those of capitalism but they will exist nonetheless. It’s up to a communist society to recognize their own contradictions and resolve them before they cause crisis. Communism doesn’t aim to be perfect or eternal, it just aims to do better for everyone.
Thank you for the detailed answer, but it created a lot of new questions for me. I think the most important one is the question of how communist society can react to conflict and “evil” without a state.
I get the impression from your answer that in communism, having a military is possible:
So you come up with a reason why you think your neighboring country might invade, and then you test it by diplomacy or war.
Also, from these statements, I gather that it’s possible under communism to actually limit somebody trying to seize power or just effectively start doing “organised crime”:
If the people who want to exploit others don’t have armies or wealth or positions of power, then they can’t do much.
It’s up to a communist society to recognize their own contradictions and resolve them before they cause crisis.
But how is it possible to have a military or to limit unjust behavior within society if there is no state?
I don’t think you can do it without a state. That’s where I differ from my anarchist comrades. In the beginning and for some time you will need a state. But the state doesn’t have to be organized as it is today.
Back to communism and revolution being a social science – you have to be careful with speculation. We can try to sit here and figure out what that society would look like down to the fine details but we won’t actually know until it’s accomplished. It’s a bit like people trying to predict iphones when computers were the size of rooms. You can kinda see what might happen and what might be possible but the exact outcome is unknown. There could be a stateless solution that I can’t imagine because I spent my whole life and my whole historical understanding includes various state entities. Or, as I suspect, there must be a state for some time before something stateless comes along. Regardless, it’s important to remember that these organizations of society are always changing and will always change. A communist state will not be eternal and a stateless society will also not be eternal. They will each contain contradictions and must be addressed when they actually exist. Contradictions lead to instability.
To re-frame the problem, history is a struggle between classes. If you want to look at it like a struggle between those who exploit and those who are exploited, you can. So even in a communist state or a stateless society, those who exploit will still exist. Right now it seems the only solution to stopping those people is a military or police force of some kind. I don’t know the exact shape of that. I just know that the American version of policing and military is not the default option and it’s not the only viable option. It’s hard for people who live under capitalism and who look at capitalist history to see alternatives. It’s purposefully presented as if the current organization of society was inevitable and the most efficient/stable outcome. But it’s not.
This goes into the popular conceptualization of human nature. If you’re a scientist, you try to be objective. When you study something you compare it to something else, some kind of neutral control. But capitalist sociologist, psychologists, and economists focus solely on society under capitalism. Then they draw conclusions about all of human nature from that. Capitalism is just one outcome just as feudalism was one and slavery before that. It’s not even the only form of organization in history let alone the world and all of humanity. So how can we talk about human nature when we don’t study all of human nature? And this is a common thing you’ll see in academic studies under capitalism. When they do study other forms of society, they’ll use the underpinnings of their field, which is founded on studying capitalist society, as the assumptions from which to draw conclusions. So they end up being biased.
We also can look at the history of science in the West to gain an understanding. Under late feudal and monarchist states, they began trying to use data to govern. They would collect data about the far-off places of their empire and use that information to make decisions. Then you get into the industrial revolution. People are forced from self-driven artisan labor into factory work. The factory work is miserable and bad for their health. People begin to refuse to work. They become vagrants. The capitalist states notice this through their data collection. In order to account for why so many people are miserable and/or not working they come up with medical reasons. They open asylums and sanitariums. They diagnose people as mentally unwell and force them into padded rooms. This separates them from the rest of society. They make laws against vagrancy and jail them too. Then they force them to work at gunpoint.
So the early history of sociology and psychology in the West is one of capitalism trying to hand-wave away its faults. It’s a mystification of the problems of the society rather than address them. Because addressing them means not having factories and that means capitalists lose money and status. It’s not that there aren’t truly mentally ill people or criminals, it’s that the basic malaise created by the mode of production is pathologized and criminalized.
As you can probably tell by now there are a couple of things you can do to better understand communism. One is to study history, the real history, of the world. There is the mystical version of history where the context of production is ignored and many things are hand-waved away in favor of a nice story. Another is to read the experiences and thoughts of revolutionaries. They were the ones carrying out the experimentation of the social science. They were the ones putting theory to the test. Communist revolutionaries also tend to be big writers so they have journals, essays, and entire books on what they were doing and why. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc all have writings. You can also read the theory too, so Marx, Engels, etc.
Of course the big names aren’t the only ones. There is a long and rich history of people trying to solve these questions you ask.
Here’s a link to the text for those that prefer to read:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-are-we-good-enough
Appreciate the link, I will listen to it later today
Someone will have a more thought-out answer than me, as I am not a communist (I have not decided what I am anyway other than generally left… I have a rather distaste for labels anyway.). But, I do recognise your human nature argument, which is a common one, but inherently flawed. So much so, that it is even in this FAQ. See: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#what-about-human-nature
Basically, a tl;dr version is that humans will act in accordance within the systems they set themselves in. They can be greedy, generous, violent, kind, or anywhere on a grand spectrum of the tapestry of options. If you set up the system to encourage greed, such as we have now, you reap what you sow. It is important to remember that we have not always lived in this way and have the option to change things for better or worse. How we do so is another matter and is one of the reasons why the left is always infighting.
For an example of how these systems work in practice, when done correctly, check out: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/capitalism_doesnt_work.html (read the full thing to see why it is relevant)
There are some arguments, I’ve come across, that suggested that the US might have needed the USSR so that they had a competition to keep standards for their citizens up (to keep them loyal, etc.), however, that is debatable but a fun thought experiment.
PS, if you want a great read on this theme, well, sort-of-kind-of, check out: https://archive.org/details/graeber-wengrow-dawn/David Graeber%2C David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything_ A New History of Humanity-Farrar%2C Straus and Giroux (2021)/ As with anything, having a simple source to blame such as “human nature” never really tells the full story.
Edits: Many and lots, flowing with my thoughts. Deal with it.
Thanks for answer and references, I will go through and read everything you linked
Another penny for your thoughts: https://lionelpage.substack.com/p/the-game-theoretical-foundations
https://linktr.ee/comradestarter
Something else to peruse when you have time.
original sin is a lie. I can understand the cynicism, but capitalism inherently indoctrinates us into this line of thinking, because as you rightly note, it is the only way to get ahead.
But it doesn’t have to be. We get to choose our own affiliations, our own way forward, and I genuinely believe we’d be better off with a communalistic approach to society.
It takes a village to raise a child, atomic family and patrilineal baggage be damneddeleted by creator
I don’t think there’s an existential problem with communism, just practical problems because of our historical reality. In that it’s hard to establish when there’s enough wealth and momentum in the entities which brought about the current order, such that they can interfere in revolutions successfully.
If those practical challenges would be overcome though, I don’t think you’d see enough people able to get together to collude to overthrow it from within. The facts of sustainability and equity should be able to be understood well enough by enough people such that attempts to destroy it would be snuffed out before they attained enough support to change things.
I think I’m not so much worried about overthrowing, as I am about corruption, organised crime, etc.
I am trying to imagine a society where people are living in a well functioning global society, where the planet’s resources are shared between all in a sustainable way. Are there any mechanisms in communism to prevent “egoists” in such a society from taking more than they need, either overtly, or covertly through corruption, lying, etc?
The Confucian philosopher Xunzi argued that humans are inherently bad, but it’s precisely the inherent badness of humans that we should put immense thought and care into our ethical and social systems so that the few good parts of humans are cultivated and humans become good. This is what’s fundamentally missing in your analysis. Whether humans are inherently good or not is a different question from how humans can become good and what responsibilities humans have with each other and with the rest of the world. Nothing is static, and as conscious actors, we have the power to shape our environment, including ourselves.
No human should die from malnutrition and starvation. This is a goal humanity ought to achieve. Human nature only factors in to predict how easy it is to accomplish the goal. If humans are inherently good, feeding every single human is largely an agricultural and logistical problem with an agricultural and logistical solution. If humans are inherently bad, then feeding every single human becomes a long and arduous struggle to root out callous apathy and malevolent actors. But the war against hunger still has to be waged, even if the fight is too hard to be won.
I noticed you said idealism was a major part of what inspired you to think a better world is possible when you were younger, but that your opinion changed as your idealism faded; you will likely be interested to know that Marxism firmly rejects idealism, so much so that a large body of Marx and Engels’ work is dedicated to BTFOing earlier idealist conceptions of socialism.
The first part of Marx’s A Critique of the German Ideology is a good piece of theory on how society comes to be a certain way and evolves into other forms. Here’s an excerpt that captures the point pretty well (emphasis mine):
Feuerbach’s conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says “Man” instead of “real historical man.” “Man” is really “the German.” In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lights on things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous world and especially of man and nature. To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which only perceives the “flatly obvious” and a higher, philosophical, one which perceives the “true essence” of things. He does not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach.
