"Human Nature" Don't Mean Crap

In one of our first articles, we debunked the idea that communism does not work. One part of the common claim says that communism "requires perfection" that cannot be achieved because "human nature" is always greedy and prone to selfishness or even inclined to capitalism. However, neither part is true. Human nature is not necessarily selfish, prone to exploitation, or in support of capitalism; even if it was so selfish, that would not mean communism cannot work.

Before we go into that, we'll define capitalism, socialism, and communism briefly because most people that use these terms simply do not know what they mean thanks to our garbage capitalist education system. Capitalism is a mode of production in which capitalists own the means of production; capitalists make money by buying workers' labor-power and expending it to produce surplus-value, which is where their profit comes from. There is a conflict of interest between the working class and capitalist class. Read this for a more-detailed explanation of capitalism. Communism is a mode of production in which there is no class, state, or commodity exchange. The transition between capitalism and communism is socialism, which we detailed here. Neither socialism nor communism need absolute equality, so to say that they can't work because "human nature is against absolute equality" is wrong.

Now we will go into how "human nature" cannot possibly be inherently inclined to commodity production, class society, or capitalism.

If human nature was inherently prone to developing capitalism, then humans would not have lived for thousands of years in primitive communal society. Before the development of agriculture (which led to surplus production, which allowed the commodification of goods), people lived in communities in which everyone contributed labor as they could and took as they needed. Obviously, we Marxists do not support going back to that society because of the low development of productive forces in it, but it shows how "human nature" is not inherently "selfish" enough to make communism impossible.

Production relations are determined by the character and condition of the productive forces. In primitive communal society the basis of production relations is communal property in the means of production. Communal property corresponds to the character of the productive forces in this period. The implements of labour in primitive society were so crude that they prevented primitive man from struggling with the forces of nature and wild animals singlehanded. "This primitive type collective or co-operative production", Marx wrote, "was, of course, the result of the weakness of the individual and not of the socialisation of the means of production." ("Rough drafts of Marx's Letter to Vera Zasulich", Marx and Engels, Works, Russian edition, vol. XXVII, p. 681.) Hence came the necessity for collective labour, for common property in land and other means of production as well as in the products of labour. Primitive men had no conception of private ownership of the means of production. Only certain implements of production, those which were also implements of defence against wild animals, were their private property, used by separate members of the commune.

Primitive man's labour created no overplus beyond what was essential for life, that is no surplus product. In such conditions there could be no classes or exploitation of man by man in primitive society. Social property extended only to small communities which were more or less isolated from one another. As Lenin put it, the social character of production here embraced only the members of one community.

The labour activity of men in primitive society was based on simple cooperation. Simple co-operation is the simultaneous application of more or less considerable labour force to perform work of the same kind. Even simple cooperation gave primitive men the possibility of performing tasks which would have been unthinkable for a single man (for example, in hunting large animals). [Source]

Human nature is not static, but it is very much dynamic. It changes with a society's superstructure, which changes with its economic base (its mode of production). Marx said succinctly in his "Theses on Feuerbach": "... [T]he human essence... is the ensemble of the social relations" [Source]. Engels also understood that private property and exploitation were products of changing material conditions in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State; in Chapter IV, he stated (our emphasis):

Only one thing was wanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquired riches of individuals against the communistic traditions of the gentile order, which not only sanctified the private property formerly so little valued, and declared this sanctification to be the highest purpose of all human society; but an institution which set the seal of general social recognition on each new method of acquiring property and thus amassing wealth at continually increasing speed; an institution which perpetuated, not only this growing cleavage of society into classes, but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing, and the rule of the former over the latter. [Source]

"Human nature" is also not uniform among all people; people are affected differently by their material conditions. People are generally not inclined to exploitation because of their natural senses of ethics and morality, though our capitalist superstructure forces people to get out of those desires and makes them accept and even support exploitation if they want to "get ahead", out of the working class and into the capitalist one. Scott Harrison talked about this in an exchange of letters with his friends (his italics):

Communism (as opposed to socialism) requires many people to be willing to ―work for “nothing” (i.e., for the good of society; or simply because they enjoy the work they are doing; or because they find their work personally fulfilling; or because this leads to appreciation and commendation by others; or for various other non-pecuniary reasons).

The fact is that there are some people, even under the present capitalist system, who already work more for reasons of personal fulfillment than they do for money. There are even many people who donate their time and services to a myriad of worthwhile causes. Sue, for example, does volunteer work for the Cystic Fibrosis campaign. My wife and I have done a lot of volunteer work for anti-war efforts and other political causes. (In fact I spend most of my time doing stuff like this.) I have a friend who is very active in voluntary environmental work, another who volunteers at a branch of the public library, and so forth. Plus, of course, there are many medical doctors who donate lots of hours of their time and effort to free clinics, and even travel overseas (such as to Haiti) to do so. nd beneficial-to-others sorts of behaviors are present to a major degree in only a minority of people at present does prove that communism cannot possibly be implemented immediately. There does need to be a transition period (socialism) wherein people are primarily rewarded on the basis of the work they perform (wages for the hours of useful work done). During that transition period several things have to occur, and one of them is the raising of a new generation of more socially concerned people. [Source]

"Human nature" as it truly exists still allows for a communist mode of production to develop.

People say that humans are driven to work for themselves, and that is pretty much true (as it has been since primitive society). That only makes communism all the more compatible with "human nature", and it really should make capitalism less compatible since that system appropriates the products of workers' labor; Marx explained this in Chapter Two of the Communist Manifesto (our emphasis):

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class [middle in that time; after capitalist revolutions, they became the ruling class] owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital. [Source]

Communism liberates people and allows them to produce use-values for themselves and each other freely—without the constraints of commodification, class, society, etc. This liberation does not make people lazy, but it causes them to want to work for themselves and for each other. Humans are social beings, after all; just as primitive people in their tribes cared for each other for the sake of survival, people in a future communist society would likely care about others' well-being. At the very least, social pressures would make them feel required to work as they can, and they would still want to work for themselves to improve themselves. The abolition of the social division of labor will help with that; we can see that in Engels's "Principles of Communism":

The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other.

A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear. The management of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classes of people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association. The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrial population into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both agriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development.

The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country – these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property. [Source]

With all these in mind, we recognize that so long as the proletariat suppresses the bourgeoisie, transforms its superstructure, and creates the correct material conditions, full communism is possible, and it is possible with human nature. We are not Utopians; we are dialectical and historical materialists. While full communism cannot be implemented yet, and it is technically incompatible with our existing societal superstructure, socialist transition with cultural revolutions will make it very much possible. It is necessary, too, if we do not want climate change or nuclear war to destroy human society as we know it!