Socialism and human nature

Here's a thing. 'We'd all like Communism...' said a friend from the coast. You could hear the 'but' in the air. But - every effort to apply it has failed hasn't it? (Unless you agree to conditions and regimes that most people in the West would not choose.) Communism doesn't deal with real human nature. There are good and bad in all of us - mostly bad when it comes to power and politics. (Those were additions from my friend.) We (human beings) have always been like that. (Another addition.)

Before getting to 'human nature' and communism, we need to grapple with the West's particular version of its own type of socialism, (not communism) which has had its tussles, via 'peaceful', socialist reform, and which promotes the 'reform of the capitalist system'. It has now become pretty obvious that this kind of western socialism, social democracy, has closed down in the last four decades. Social democracy had always been helpless outside the West. And now, in the West, despite the use of traditional but hollow names, social democracy has virtually disappeared in the shape of major political parties. 

Suddenly, this trend appeared to turn over. Contrary to the decline of European social democracy as a whole, on the wave of a new, youth radicalism, the genuinely social democrat - Labour leader Corbyn (loathed by most Labour MPs) got close to recharging real social democracy in 2018. The split of the British working class over Brexit was enough to show what a ruling class can do with an up-to-date, modern, social democracy these days. Britain's rulers' determined the creation of a temporary fusion from all its corners, despite the divisions over the EU (the EU was deeply desired by the UK's big capital) rather than allowing a genuine social democratic government. They created the organised destruction of Corbyn and forced, wherever they could, the removal of Corbyn from mainstream politics. All sorts of lessons apply. Corbyn's destroyed effort is just one of them. It shows what happens in today's capitalism regarding any serious social democratic project.

Social democracy in general has been kicked, or been swallowed, to death across its whole, previously more fertile, western history. Our 21st century rulers, even in the West, perhaps particularly in the West, don't and won't make social democratic reforms and concessions anymore. This will be the norm, whether or not the decaying and increasingly baseless 'Labour Party' in Britain is allowed to take its turn for government. So social democracy as well as communism appears to have failed.

Back now to 'human nature'. Good old Marx can help. He might have avoided speculations of a communist nirvana and neither did he try to study individual minds. What he did do, among the many glorious understandings that he opened up, was to insist that it is existence that proceeds to consciousness. This is a basic and fundamental concept. Of course people of all sorts, from epic philosophers to murderers, might think that they (and we) act otherwise, from the spark of our own brain. And it could be argued, correctly, that consciousness, having proceeded from existence, could itself help create a change in existence, as it evolves through peoples' specific thoughts and actions. A thought can also become the reason for an action, and if an understanding of a thought is shared, then most will comply with that thought. Isn't that human nature? Sorry no. That would be the organisation of humans in the consequence of their conditions. And that opens the real problem of 'human nature'. 

Humans, to exist, need to organise with other humans, from childhood to the grave. That's a truism. But the type of organisation that collective humans live in, in their histories so far, have yet to be considered and then decided on by humans themselves. Small numbers of privileged humans have ended up arranging whole societies over the millennia, often without knowing it themselves. (They simply demanded their own dominance via their gods or by using brute strength or both.) More recently, ruling classes do become more self-conscious. They prepare accordingly their places (as rulers) in society. That's the experience of our history as a species up to now. What utterly bursts the continued fallacy that 'human nature' is fixed is the simple observation that human kind, even without control of its history, has, nevertheless, changed constantly. 'Human nature' shifts and turns in the effort by most non-rulers to find what they see is the best possible available existence for themselves, their families, their friends, alliances and most of all, from their work, throughout the different systems of society that they do not control. Most humans have never been allowed to decide what sort of civilisation that they live in. 

Therefore 'human nature' constantly changes as our societies change, as it flows through the changing contexts that place us in our society. History unfolds unevenly. In the last 100 years for example many (but not yet most) human beings face the expansion of technology and the use of literacy. But these developments are still the same, that is to say they still depend on a social society; one that also forces exploitation, drudgery, violence, incapability and horror. These negative features of society cause humans to try to build their defences. But the world, which has always up to now been run by a small elite, turns its society on its head. For those that defend themselves against the difficulties created by society are presented as the reason for the negative effects of society and are blamed for the problems they face. So called 'human nature' is turned into the opposite of the reality of life and living. Each person is different from everybody else who has ever existed. Theoretically everybody has their own nature. OK. But consciousness does not proceed to existence. Although humans are different they are made in the very earliest aspects of their shared lives in common, by a society. Human natures are responses to society and not a person's original choices, uniquely created, which decide our society. It is the other way round.    

Collective experiences of societies come and go. People become more and more curious, angry, bereft about specific items of their society - including other people; and then they become conscious to a degree, when daily-life forces the decisions of human interventions. This finally has led, in the last hundred and fifty years, to the wavering understanding in very large large numbers of the world's population for the need for a society that meets all human's basic needs. Of course individual humans will continue to be savage, to paint great art and love their neighbours. They are still, albeit odd, responding to society. But a human social society, one which is organised consciously by most people, would inevitably tend toward collective support and shared purposes. Life will still require analysis, singers, law, labour and education. But the overwhelming majority would not, if they really got to choose their own society, want or accept what is happening in their lives and the lives of others like themselves, in the frankly unacceptable here and now. 

Take an example. The pandemic, in the current UK society, has just been served with its cost. In the UK the Tory Chancellor has told the British people that the price is £400 Billion this year. He wants to cut public worker wages (already cut for ten years.) And this is nothing compared with what is to come. Meanwhile, the UK newspaper, the Observer, ran an article that pointed out the Swiss Bank UBS calculated that the world's billionaires have surged to a record $10 Trillion by the end of last July. Talking again about Britain, even the International Monetary Fund (a capitalist thinktank) argues that it is 'absolutely crucial to mobilise revenues in an equitable way.' But our Chancellor is married to a millionaire. His government is run by the most personal political corruption since the 18th Century. And we live as the majority in our (capitalist) society, run by a couple of thousand people, which will now fire a giant blow against the welfare, education and their work (or lack of it) of the big majority of the UK population. 

This is the workings of the new type of modern capitalist society. As western capitalism declines (a key reason why we face the end of Europe's social democracy) so the pressure on the big majority is reflected in the political and economic choices that are emerging from capitalist societies. The manipulation of human nature into its opposite is at at the highest degree, at least in the West. Why? Because the old 'truths' are shaking, and manipulation and corruption are essential to make the regimes work.