Nature and People are One

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. Human behaviour roots are to be found principally in one's environment and the economic conditions which influences one's physiological make-up. Mankind behaves in the way it does, very largely, although not completely, because of the conditioning he receives , since we are social animals and lives 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. The docility and passivity of the world's population has contributed greatly to keeping intact the increasingly unequal, barbaric and rapacious society that is global capitalism. Because people believe there is no alternative to capitalism, it keeps on existing. Now we are witnessing a change in people's views and there is an increased activism centred around our planet and its eco-systems. The idea of a zero-growth, sustainable society has been put forward by those in the environmentalist movement. Even though the declared aims of the environmentalists appear to be highly desirable the fatal flaw is that they stand for the continuation of the market system. This means the continuation of the capitalist system which is the cause of the problems of pollution in the first place.

Even though the most ardent eco-warrior advocates a society based on cooperation and production-for-use, and where a sustainable production is in harmony with the environment and public affairs are run in a decentralised and democratic manner these ideas are firmly wedded to a form of capitalism, holding a belief that capitalism can be reformed so as to be compatible with achieving an environmentally sustainable society. It is perfectly clear that their sustainable society is not socialism, for the continuance of money and the market is assumed, together with private ownership. The ultimate aim is a participatory economy, based on smaller-scale enterprise, with a greatly-reduced dependence on the world market. What is being proposed is the abolition both of the world market, with the competition for resources and sales it engenders, and of existing centralised states, and their replacement by a worldwide network of smaller human communities providing locally for their own needs. It is setting out to impose on capitalism something that is incompatible with its nature. If the climate crisis is to be solved, this system must go. What is required is political action - political action aimed at replacing this system by a new and different one.

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 which 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. 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.