fullpraxisnow:

Proclamations about the “truth” of “human nature” as evidence that communism cannot work are the most boring and intellectually lazy arguments a person can make. They are expedient though – and almost intuitive – given the constant bombardment of capitalist propaganda. But consider, when you place a caring and cooperative individual in a cage with people who have been conditioned to survive through competition, it is exceedingly difficult for the individual to elicit from their fellow imprisoned the cooperative momentum necessary to achieve freedom. From the outside looking in, it appears to the bystander that indeed, human nature must be beastly. Such a view is inherently skewed though, because it erases that cooperation never stood a chance in an environment specifically bred to crush it.

In short, if this were an actual experiment it would have been rigged from the start because both individual and group potentialities cannot exist independent of their environments. In some ways the Stanford study, a study conducted by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo on the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard, proved this. Wikipedia notes that by day four of what would be a six day experiment, “Zimbardo argued that the prisoners had internalized their roles, since some had stated they would accept “parole” even if it would mean forfeiting their pay, despite the fact that quitting would have achieved the same result without the delay involved in waiting for their parole requests to be granted or denied. Zimbardo argued they had no reason for continued participation in the experiment after having lost all monetary compensation, yet they did, because they had internalized the prisoner identity.“ The same could be concluded for the cruelty of the guards too.

The results of the experiment favored situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution (a result caused by internal characteristics). In other words, it seemed that the environment, rather than their individual personalities, or any particular predisposed nature, caused the participants’ behavior. We would have a disturbingly flawed understanding of humanity to export from that study the notion that humans are innately one way or another. The Stanford study further proved that when we fail to contextual human behavior within its environment we create sinister deceptions about the idea of our nature, if it exists at all.

As another example, let us revisit how our society has structured its inquiry of drug addiction. Johann Hari, in “Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?”, writes:

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction.

Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction… Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.

[…] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.”

Just as important as environment was for contextualizing and understanding the prisoners’, guards’, and rats’ behaviors to their respective circumstances, so is it important for us to understand our environment under capitalism, to contextualize why so many people believe communism is impossible. Capitalism’s culture of competition conditions us to think of working with each other outside a profit motive or government mandate as an impossibility. In turn, our inability to imagine it crushes it. Such a cycle is purposefully enforced to maintain the status quo, but we need only revisit our evolutionary history to see the fundamentals of communism at work.

As Darwin pointed out in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears where cooperation becomes a necessity for survival. Indeed, it is an evolutionary fact that without cooperation, the most fundamental tenant of communism, our species would have succumbed to its inferior physicality among other predators long ago. Stated differently, the substitution of competition with cooperation resulted in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secured to our species thousands of years of civilization.

I will end this post with this quote by Jason Godesky and the final thought that yes, communism is possible, if we can first remember where we come from and be willing to imagine where we want to go:

“Our culture denigrates sharing. The recent innovations in “intellectual property” especially have tried to make sharing illegal, and induce in us all a feeling of shame when we share with others. Yet we still believe sharing to be a virtue. In our evolution as band-animals, sharing was not simply nice, it was the cornerstone of survival. The Ju/’Hoansi have no word for “thank you”; to thank someone suggests that their actions were out of the ordinary. Caring for others in band-level society was the expected norm; it was the most selfish act one could come up with. The most effective way to serve oneself was to serve others. Bands very effectively defeated violence, cheating, and other “immorality” not nearly so much by condemning it, as by removing the incentive.

Compare this to our own, hierarchical “Cheating Culture.” Our survival does not depend on sharing with our small, close-knit community. Not only do the people around us no longer register as “people,” beyond our 150-person neurological capacity, neither does their survival affect us in any way. In short, there is great incentive to steal, cheat, lie or commit any of the other “immoral” acts which small, egalitarian groups need not concern themselves with. As a result, we must impose laws, to create artificial disincentives against what is otherwise a very clear endorsement of “immorality.” Yet this is an artificial disincentive – laws can be gotten around, police eluded, and so forth. There is no disincentive in the act itself; only in being caught.

Most of our problems today can easily be traced to some manner in which we remain maladapted to our present life – to the struggle of a Pleistocene animal, to adapt to the bizarre, Holocene nightmare we have created. Our social structure is one such example. We evolved as band-animals. Our egalitarianism defines us; it is probably the single most defining trait in humanity. We evolved as egalitarian band-animals in the Pleistocene. Egalitarianism is our natural state, and our birthright. It is what we expect, down to our very bones. Yet today, it has become so rare that many humans doubt its very possibility. We have accepted the evils of hierarchy — the trauma of an animal maladapted to its current environment — as inevitable.

Humans are best adapted to small, egalitarian bands, in the same way that wolves are adapted to packs or bees to hives. Humans flourish in such a social structure, providing us not only with our material needs, but also our universal psychological needs of belonging to such a group, of personal freedom, and of acceptance for ourselves as individuals. Hierarchical society is a social structure we left behind when we became human. It may provide for our material needs, but it fails utterly to provide for any of our psychological needs. So, we invent small, band-like societies — social circles, clubs and the like — to compensate for all the failings of hierarchy. In short, egalitarianism is an essential requirement for healthy human life; hierarchy is an utter rejection of everything that makes us human.”