Human nature and greed

Or why Ethan Klein is wrong

In his recent discussion with Hasan about socialism Ethan Klein asked some pretty common questions about socialism and communism’s practical feasibility. These are the kinds of issues that are raised by the average person who has never read any Marx and does not have much knowledge about the theory and practice of the socialist movement, and it is quite understandable why they would raise these questions. To someone born and raised in a capitalist society, human nature appears to be a certain kind of way essentially, and once this essence is fixed, every other objection to socialism and communism flows from it. If human nature is to be greedy, avaricious, purely self-interested, self-calculating, vicious, hateful, violent (because greed begets all these other vices)—then of course you can never have a social and economic system that requires a different kind of human nature, one characterized by virtues such as empathy, solidarity, sacrifice for the greater good, selflessness, the things that provide the foundation for cooperation and harmony in all aspects of social life.

Ethan, like many, believes that human nature is essentially greedy, and hence it is impossible to ever have a functioning socialist and communist society. Liberal and conservative ideology is founded on this very assumption. Human greed and self-interest are rendered as rational in economics and the social sciences more broadly, as expressed in the abstract model of the homo economicus, wherein humans are turned into a rationally self-interested calculation machine. Marx was familiar with this assumption and devoted a considerable part of his theoretical project to dismantling it. There are many arguments he assembles for this task, but I will simply point to the core around which all the others revolve, and which has been expanded by other Marxist thinkers.

There is no such thing as a fixed, unchangeable, universal “human nature”, and there never has been. The homo economicus, the rationally self-interested greedy calculation machine, is a product of the economist’s mind and bears very little relationship to humans as they live in the real world. No, human nature is essentially variable across time and space, meaning that there is no “nature” at all as it implies immutability. Or to put it in terms that Marx himself suggested, it is human nature to make and remake its own nature.

How is this accomplished? Herein lies Marx’s genius, for it was this discovery of his that formed the foundation of a modern materialist conception of history and social life that solved a problem philosophers had been struggling with for centuries. If you want the detailed answer you can read it in Plekhanov’s excellent book on the subject. The problem was as follows: does the constitution and government in a society form human nature—that is, the behavior of humans in said society—or is it rather human nature that forms the constitution and type of government?

Philosophers went back and forth on this. Idealists preferred the latter answer, that there was something in human nature from which a constitution and government took shape. Materialists preferred the former answer, that it was the government and constitution that fundamentally shaped human nature.

But this was a pre-Marxist form of materialism which was unable to provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of historical change. If the government forms human nature, then how do you explain changes in government over time? Why does a republic become a tyranny and a republic again? Why is a monarchy overthrown in a revolution here, but not there? Why are there different forms of governments and constitutions across time and space rather than all of them being of one kind?

The picture, the conceptual framework, is static. There is no movement in it. As later Marxists would say, it was a form of materialism that was not historical in nature.

There was a missing element, a missing category that would make the still photo a moving picture, that would make the machine run properly and explain how change happens and why there is this kind of government there, that government here, and in explaining politics and its movements without having to rely on a static concept of human nature, thereby also explaining the myriad of ways in which human nature has been expressed throughout history.

The missing element was the means of production, or to paraphrase Plekhanov, the artificial limbs of humanity. Humans use tools to change their environment, and in so doing they change their own nature. And as these tools develop and advance, the entire social edifice that was built on top of them also develops and advances and undergoes transformations. Marx: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.”

Further questions remain as to how these artificial limbs, the means of production, develop in each particular historical moment or stage. Marx wrote a book explaining it for its capitalist phase. There are in scholarship several strains of thought on the matter, some that prioritize the role of institutions, others that stress the importance of a ‘scientific culture’, but the general consensus among all of them is that the specific material and social conditions of a particular society are the foundation of every kind of technological development. This is uncontroversial even among non-Marxists. The only difference is that they do not take the next step of seeing how this confirms the broader materialist understanding of human nature as being essentially variable and a product of humans’ own making, and that this has deep implications for our understanding of capitalism, socialism and communism.

Now that all the abstract theoretical stuff is out of the way, we can answer Ethan’s “human nature is to be greedy” objection. No, human nature is not universally, statically greedy or anything else. Yes, there are obviously greedy humans today and there have been throughout history. But there have also been their opposite. In fact, greed and anti-social self-interest have been the aberration, not the norm, including in today’s capitalist society which is systemically set up to cultivate greed. Marx again:

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

I couldn’t resist quoting this at some length as it is beautifully written. For more by Marx on how capitalism has distorted all human relationships see this piece by him.

Despite Marx’s poetic exaggerations, the cash-nexus has not replaced and subsumed the altruistic, cooperative expressions of human nature. Take for example the family. The norm, yes even in our capitalist society, is to suspend the principle of egoistic self-calculation in that domain. Parents do not typically see their children as investments from which they expect a return. They do not count up the amount of money they spend on food and clothes for them and expect them to have it paid back in full as soon as they can find a job. When their child is hurt, their first thought isn’t “is it in my rational economic self-interest to help them?” And this is no small part of social existence to suspend the rules that flow from Ethan’s “human nature is greedy” dictum. Everyone has a family, and we spend a significant part of our times in the family domain.

These rules of greed are also suspended in the sphere of friendship. When a friend is in need, we do not activate some mythical rational calculation machine to do a cost-benefit analysis of helping them, and then decide to not do so when it costs more than it benefits us. At least, only sociopaths do that, and despite their promotion in the social hierarchy under capitalism exactly because they do not suspend these rules in any sphere of life, this is not characteristic of the vast majority of humanity.

In fact, this cooperative, altruistic impulse is so widespread and common that it is also socially enforced, with anyone breaking these norms being frowned upon and it being considered a taboo.

The Marxian economists and behavioral scientists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have done extensive research on these areas of social life which demonstrate cooperation, altruism and reciprocity, thereby revealing the hollowness of the capitalist conception of human nature as greedy. The title of their main book containing a lot of this research shows the alternative conception: A Cooperative Species (link to a PDF of the book here, and I also highly recommend listening to some of Bowles’ talks). Here’s Bowles summarizing their work, taken from this interview:

As Bowles and Gintis point out in their work, and as is confirmed by extensive research in sociology, psychology and anthropology, not only is there no such thing as a singular, fixed, universal “human nature”, but also its particular expressions, as greed or altruism, are fundamentally affected by the material and social contexts, or conditions, in which the individual finds themselves in. Everyone knows about the Stanford prison experiment and the malleability of human behavior through their presence in particular kinds of contexts has been replicated countless types. There’s a famous study where people are asked to estimate the length of something, and when they hear others give a longer or shorter estimation they go along with whatever the prevailing answer it, skewing their own answer in this or that direction. When you’re waiting to cross a street and you see someone else crossing it, you have the impulse to follow along, as this gets stronger the more people there are.

We are fundamentally shaped by our environments, and Marx’s genius lay in pointing out that the nature of our environments are in turn fundamentally material in kind, which relies on economics and a particular configuration of it that shapes it, and that this is ultimately of our own making. Again, we make our own natures, hence why it is so variable and multifaceted and we can go from acting close to the model of the calculation machine when we’re at a market and trying to buy something, as we’re forced to by the implicit and explicit rules of that domain, but we move to its diametrically opposite when we’re around friends and family and co-workers and fellow students.

The aim of the socialist and communist is to further expand this cooperative, altruistic, solidaristic aspect of our natures, such that we not only see our close friends and family in this light and treat them accordingly, but also those who are further removed from us, beyond our neighborhood, workplace, city, nation. This requires reshaping our material environments in such a way that this aspect of our human nature is further cultivated rather than stifled and distorted at every step by the cash-nexus, by the money-relation that forces us to feel ill at ease, alienated if you will.

Scarcity is the fundamental problem here, argued Sartre, and Marx would agree:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

The more scarcity and the division between mental and physical labour is overcome through the latter’s replacement by machines, the more we depart from the realm of necessity and get closer to the true realm of freedom:

In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations 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. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

Pay careful attention to the final sentence about the shortening of the working-day being a step toward this realm of freedom. As I noted in my piece on socialism, the Marxist project has never been the absurd caricature of a utopian fantasy to be imposed immediately, as Ethan suggested. The same materialist analysis that leads us to recognize that human nature is variable also leads us to a pragmatic understanding of the particular viable steps that can be taken toward freedom in each circumstance. If Ethan disagrees with the end-point but sees value in some of these steps as he said he does, like for example increasing the minimum wage and other elements of what he sees as a social democrat program, there is a basis for cooperative work, and perhaps through that he can change his mind and come to see the limitations of a politics that believes a minimalistic socialism can thrive in capitalist system rather than always and inevitably being drowned by it as has happened to the welfare states since the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s after owing their rise to the October Revolution.

A final point on the fundamental incoherence of the fixed conception of human nature.

When Hasan asked Ethan about why social democracies were prone to failure, he responded with the same flawed conception of human nature being greedy. This is a non-response, and can be used to explain away anything. When welfare states are formed and maintained over several decades, suddenly human nature’s intrinsic greed ebbs, but then it comes back and flows before it ebbs again. Moreover, any regulations of the market still in place are elements of human nature not being greedy co-existing with human nature being greedy.

But you have then admitted that there is no single fixed universal human nature. The entire position is undermined, but not in favor of a coherent framework of analysis that has explanatory power, like the Marxist materialist one, but for some arbitrary model of “when I like it, human nature is being good, when I don’t like it’s human nature being bad.”

The explanation of the dismantling of welfare states from the Marxist materialist perspective is a thorough, detailed, systematic one. There is a whole branch of scholarship devoted to the rise of neoliberalism in its various forms. See for example the works of sociologist Loïc Wacquant who focuses on the establishment of the neoliberal carceral state, and the work of Mirowski and Slobodian on how the neoliberal “thought collective” was formed and advanced its policies. And there are detailed analyses for how this operated on a national, even regional basis. This is how do you serious analysis of events in the real world. You don’t just wave things away by referencing some abstract conception of human nature which the moment it hits reality blows apart into a million pieces.