| — |
V.I. Lenin in conversation with Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu in Zurich, circa 1915; recorded in Marcu’s 1927 biography of Lenin (via fuckyeahmarxismleninism) |
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.”
March 14, 1883: Death of Comrade Karl Marx, founder of scientific socialism.
Frederick Engels’ Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx
On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep — but for ever.
An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated — and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially — in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.
Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez.
For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung (1842), the Paris Vorwarts (1844), the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung (1847), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49), the New York Tribune (1852-61), and, in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men’s Association — this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else.
And, consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers — from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America — and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy.
His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.
Highgate Cemetery, London, March 17, 1883
Here’s the New York Times story about this.
A small town in Canada ran an experiment along these lines in the 1970s and reported similar impressive results. Results which were, of course, ignored and the program was shut down instead of expanded because communism.
