This article is a part of Fightback’s ‘What is Capitalism’ series, to be collected together in our next magazine issue. To subscribe to our e-publication ($20 annually) or physical magazine ($60 annually) through PayPal or credit card click here.

A common criticism of socialist politics holds that greed, or even capitalism, is necessary to human nature. However, most of human history was not capitalist. This social system has existed for approximately 300 years out of 200,000 years of human existence: in other words, capitalism makes up 0.15% of our time on earth. More complicated is the claim that greed, clearly older than capitalism, is fundamental to our nature.

The claim that ‘greed is human nature’ has a kernel of truth. Humans, like any creature, are naturally attracted to activities that are rewarded. If humans are rewarded for their greed, most will act accordingly. We can’t all be Jesus. However, greed is far from the only human compulsion. Cooperation and care are also necessary to ‘human nature.’

Cooperation and care are even necessary to capitalism. A private corporation requires huge amounts of cooperation: between workers in different departments, customers and workers, bosses and workers. If everyone acted on their own individual impulses, companies would likely not function. Capitalism is a cooperative social system. Although the profits are privatised, the labour process is socialised. Without this cooperative labour, the luxuries enjoyed by the rich would be impossible.

Care is also necessary for human existence, and for capitalism. As Terry Eagleton highlights in Why Marx Was Right:

For a long time after birth [human beings] are unable to fend for themselves, and are thus in need of a prolonged period of nurturing… Even if the care they receive is appalling, infants very quickly imbibe some notion of what caring for others means. This is one reason why, later on, they may be able to identify a whole way of life as callously indifferent to human needs. In this sense, we can move from being prematurely born to politics.

Care must be built into any society. In this sense capitalism undermines human existence – unemployed single mothers are punished, rather than helped, despite doing necessary work. Although capitalism does not always reward care work, care work remains necessary for capitalism, as it would for any society. People perform care without reward, showing that ‘human nature’ involves compulsions other than greed.

Greed is not outside the range of human nature – anything humans do is, by definition, a capacity of ‘human nature’ – but it is currently so central because it drives and is driven by capitalism. By contrast, a socialist society could reward collective behaviour. Returning to Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right:

Take, for example, the idea of a self-governing cooperative, which Marx seems to have regarded as the key productive unit of the socialist future. One person’s contribution to such an outfit allows for some kind of self-realisation; but it also contributes to the wellbeing of the others, and this simply by virtue of the way the place is set up. I do not have to have tender thoughts about my fellow workers, or whip myself into an altruistic frenzy every two hours. My own self-realisation helps to enhance theirs simply because of the cooperative, profit-sharing, egalitarian, commonly governed nature of the unit. It is a structural affair, not a question of personal virtue.

Put simply, different societies reward different kinds of behaviour. A society that rewarded egalitarian cooperation would make avarice less attractive.

This would not be totally unprecedented. Anthropologists have highlighted ‘gift economies’, based on giving rather than financial exchange. In the lands that would later be named New Zealand and Australia, where indigenous societies lived off the land collectively, capitalism had to be imposed through colonisation (see ‘How was capitalism established in Aotearoa and Australia?’ in this issue). If capitalism is a part of human nature, why did so many people engage in bloody wars to defend their way of life?

Unless you’re reading this as a historical text in a post-capitalist society (inshallah), all of us were raised under capitalism. We internalise its compulsions. When we wake up in the morning, we see Capitalism in the mirror, and blame the figure that stares back:

“where the whole world is against us, we begin to take its part against ourselves, to avoid the withering sensation of being alone on our side.”¹

The notion of ‘human nature’ itself is debatable, hence the quotation marks. Humans are very adaptable. There are compulsions we all experience, like the need for food – but this does not mean human behaviour is permanently fixed in one form.

Now, with the complex cooperation that has overcome the scarcity of earlier societies, we could achieve an egalitarian society with greater comfort than ever before. Likely people would still harbour the occasional negative thought, but the point is to liberate ourselves, not to redeem all our sins. The primary barrier is not human nature, but that minority which benefits most from colonial capitalism, and resists any attempt at redistribution.

In short: yes.

However, some claim that the regulating role of the state means that this system is not ‘true capitalism.’

Capitalism can be defined quite straightforwardly, if tautologically: an economic system based on the private ownership of capital. This is a descriptive definition rather than an ideal one: capital can be defined as financial and productive wealth (shares, land, factories etc). This definition is not distinctly socialist: The Oxford Dictionary defines capital as “wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available for a purpose such as starting a company or investing.” (Later we will break this concept down further, but Oxford’s definition will suffice for now).

In other words, capital is private property used to generate profits. This is distinct from previous social systems, such as indigenous societies, where land was collectively rather than privately owned. Under capitalism, an investor may own and profit from miles of irrigated land he will never visit, an inconceivable concept in most indigenous societies.

Although many libertarians define capitalism as a free market without state involvement, we again define capitalism straightforwardly: a system based on the accumulation and circulation of capital. The relationship between property owners and the state varies, but the property relations are the common feature.

The involvement of the state does not in itself negate capitalism. In fact, the state often serves capital. This is most obvious in the case of massive subsidies and tax breaks given to corporations. There are also more extreme cases: in Chile 1973, a democratically elected socialist government was overthrown by a military regime that implemented pro-market reforms, the first of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ policy regimes that would soon sweep the world. By contrast, in countries such as Aotearoa and Australia, a relatively representative democracy operates alongside undemocratic private property relations. Democracy can be tolerated by the powerful, up to a point.

Even state regulations that help workers also stabilise capitalism as a whole. For example, clashes between labour and capital over the work-day were resolved in the interests of labour, with a state-imposed 8-hour work day, but this also prevented that bloody conflict from destabilising capitalism itself (it’s also a reform that has largely slipped from our grasp again). Similarly, minimum wage laws guarantee a certain amount of social stability, as well as ensuring that workers have the money to buy commodities, thereby lubricating the profit system. Individual capitalists, by acting in their own interests – increasing the work day, cutting wages – destabilise capitalism as a social system. Through regulation, the state saves capitalism from itself.

The state also develops infrastructure necessary to capitalism. Roading, railways, and other national infrastructure are too expensive for any given capitalist to produce, so the state uses its accumulated resources to invest in this infrastructure (often giving individual capitalists lucrative contracts in the process). Taxes, seen by some right-wingers as an attack on capital, enable this investment that ensures a stable basis for capitalism.

The capitalist state also provides police, and the military, to protect and enforce the capitalist system. The police first developed in 19^th century Britain and the USA, not in response to any increase in crime, but in response to angry working-class mobs: riots, strikes and slave insurrections.¹

Even some nominal socialists claim that the state is inherently socialist, just as right-wing libertarians do. Bernie Sanders claimed that the military and police are socialist, because they are provided by the state. However, Irish socialist James Connolly explains the problem with this in his work State Monopoly versus Socialism:

Socialism properly implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production… state ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism – if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Gaolers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, all would all be Socialist functionaries, as they are State officials… To the cry of the middle class reformers, “make this or that the property of the government,” we reply, “yes, in proportion as the workers are ready to make the government their property.”

For revolutionary socialists, the question is not state or capital: state ownership can exist in a capitalist system. The question is private exploitation, or collective liberation. We may use the levers of the state at times, but only where they benefit liberation struggles, not because the state is automatically socialist. Capitalist states continue to predominate in the world today, and in Australasia specifically.

This article is a part of Fightback’s ‘What is Capitalism’ series, to be collected together in our next magazine issue. To subscribe to our e-publication ($20 annually) or physical magazine ($60 annually) through PayPal or credit card click here.