By: Will Miller*
When radical
social change is mentioned, apologists for present practice take a
philosophical turn. In nearly every discussion of social alternatives to market
capitalism, defenders of the marketplace appeal to their own conception of
human nature as the final explanation of the predatory competitiveness of our
age of waste and greed. We are quickly assured that the ever more unsatisfying
and dangerous exploitation of our natural and social environment is an
inevitable consequence of our human nature.
According to
the market view of human nature, we are—and have always been—greedy, grasping
creatures, entirely absorbed in ourselves, manipulating others as means to our
own private ends. All human ties of love, affection and social unity are really
manipulative appearances that conceal the sheer private opportunism that
actually motivates us. We are all bottomless pits of insatiable desires, so no
amount of consuming, owning or controlling is ever enough. These traits of
individualism are cast as universal human nature, making market capitalism
inevitable and radical social change impossible. Occasionally, defenders of market
capitalism seem slightly saddened by their own view of human nature. But more
often they cannot disguise their pleasure at the dismay they provoke in gentler
folk.
It is not
without reason that economics has come to be known as the dismal science. Mainstream
economists since Adam Smith have assumed that all human relations are
ultimately those of the marketplace, of buying and selling, of control and
exploitation of the suffering, vulnerability and desperation of others. The
current dominance of private property relations—where land, resources and tools
are exclusively controlled by a small minority of individuals for their private
perpetual reward—is projected backward over the whole span of human history.
However useful this projection may be for justifying existing market society,
it is strikingly poor anthropology, dubious history, and third-rate psychology.
But it seems
actual human history has had a much different bent. For our first few hundred
thousand years on this planet—according to current evidence—humans lived in
small groups organized around mutually beneficial social relations, with
resources held in common as social property. Social equality and voluntary
divisions of labor endured for millennia as the basis for human communal life.
With essentially social incentives, everyone who could contributed to the
commonwealth for the use of all. In the long sweep of this history the
emergence of dominant classes—chiefs, kings, aristocracies of birth and
wealth—is a very recent event, perhaps no more than 10,000 years ago, or less,
depending on which culture is considered. From time to time, small human
communities organized in such communal ways continue to be ‘discovered,’
communities that have been spared being “civilized” by conquest at the hands of
more “advanced” class societies.
A common
pattern for the development of class societies, where a dominant class holds
the power to exploit the labor and lives of subordinate class members, begins
with the emergence of wealth as social, and communally produced surplus beyond
subsistence. Often the first storable surpluses came with settlement
agriculture and the emergence of production organizers, who coordinated the
complexities of agriculture as a new means of production. Seizure of this
social surplus provided the means for the emergence of a dominant class. The
surplus provides the material means for creating a “palace guard” to enforce
the relations of domination, on behalf of those who seek to institutionalize
their private ownership of that stolen social surplus.
This is the
pattern of the earliest coup d’ etat, out of which the state and class society
is institutionalized. Accompanied as it often was by male-supremacist divisions
of labor, the social opportunities for free and cooperative association were
shattered by a succession of forms of domination from slavery and serfdom to
“free” wage labor. The most recent installment in this historical process,
market capitalism, is only 500 years old in Europe and much newer elsewhere.
Capitalism in Europe succeeded in wresting control from the patchwork of feudal
estates and their lords. The modern capitalist nation-state was the outcome of
this struggle to lay the foundations for market relations of buying, selling
and owning to become the primary determinants of human life. The new system’s
need for primitive capital accumulation led to the conquest and colonization of
most of the rest of the world over the last five centuries.
Less than 200
years ago, 80-90 percent of the U. S. labor force was self-employed. Today only
about 10 percent of us can avoid going to someone else for a job, for access to
the means to work. This monopoly control of the means to work, by some 2
percent of us, came about not by democratic consensus, but by the formally
totalitarian structures of corporate capitalism. These structures
systematically exclude the overwhelming majority of us from any significant
role in economic decision-making. In the first decades of our nation, gender,
race and property requirements for voting and holding office meant that only
wealthy white males could vote, and then only for even wealthier white male
candidates. Political parties were in competition to see who would win the
right to represent the wealthy in office. The long struggle to gain the vote
for all adult citizens is unfinished—migrant workers are often still
disenfranchised by residency requirements. But the present political monopoly
exercised by two parties equally committed to transnational corporate
capitalism provides no real choice at the polling booth. Given this history, it
is plausible to claim that if voting could change the system it would be
illegal.
Under the
not-so-tender mercies of industrial capitalist development, we were forcibly
relocated by a succession of economic crises—twenty-seven depressions since the
Civil War—to the growing urban centers, where more than 70 percent of us now
live on 1 percent of the land in the United States. Stable human communities
were shattered by this forced urbanization. Rural self-sufficiency of families
and communities was replaced by the forced dependency of urban life and the
social isolation of the anonymous city. Most people now depend entirely on
systems of energy, food, clothing and shelter that are centralized under
corporate control. As “free wage labor” the vast majority of people are “freed”
of the material resources—land, tools and skills—to employ themselves. Such
free people are forced to compete with one another for chances to sell their
ability to work. With the increasing movement of U.S. transnational
corporations to the third world’s cheap labor markets, this competition between
people who must work in order to live has become global, forcing them to sell
their labor ever more cheaply.
Uprooting
people from a direct relationship to the land, from the intimacy of extended
networks of kin and community, only to thrust them by the millions into the
social anonymity of contemporary urban and suburban life, has raised the level
of social alienation to new heights. Our social needs, as a social species, are
thwarted by conditions of life imposed on us by a tiny unrepresentative
minority for the sake of their endless accumulation of wealth, along with the
power to secure it.
It is when
people begin to resist the dehumanizing and exploitative conditions of
contemporary life that we are more often reminded of the limitations of human
nature. The function of this pathological view of human nature is to discourage
us from attempting to change the conditions of our lives by cooperative struggle.
“After all, you can’t change human nature,” is a mythic claim calculated to
drown in despair aspirations for significant social change.
But human
nature is not the problem. Given social opportunities and the institutional
structures to meet their needs by means that hurt no one else, historically,
most people have chosen non-selfish alternatives. We are a social species, and
social species survive by cooperation—evolutionary ‘mutual aid’ in Peter
Kropotkin’s sense. Our current problems are rooted in the forced competition
required by the structure of market society, with its carefully crafted
artificial scarcities of opportunity for cooperative and mutually satisfying
activity. This forced competition for scarce educational, work, housing and
other opportunities is the basis for dividing the majority of people against
one another by sex, race, age and ability. A ruling minority depends on a
divided majority for its security and continued privilege.
At the same
time, it is a system that both produces and selects the most socially stunted
among us—least able to trust and cooperate with others—and places them in
positions of power and privilege. In an Adlerian sense the desire for coercive
power over others is often part of a desperate strategy for enhancing one’s
self-esteem. Acts of domination over others require numbing oneself to the
needs of others and the repercussions of one’s own acts on others. People
become mere objects, in a field of objects, to be manipulated for private
advantage. For those whose self-esteem is low enough, having coercive power
over others is compensatory—even exhilarating. In Henry Kissinger’s own words,
“power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
It is not the
pathology of all human beings but the pathology of some humans that lies at the
root of our current social and ecological crises. Predatory personalities among
us are often in positions of control, where their pathologies are nurtured by
the very structure of advanced industrial capitalist institutions. A socially
concerned corporate manager who puts human interests ahead of profit
maximization joins the ranks of the unemployed. It may not be strictly
necessary to be a sociopath in order to be in a position of power in our
society, but the rules of the game require doing a good imitation of one.
Yet other,
less socially harmful strategies for self-enhancement can be found for
constructively meeting the needs of those consumed with the desire for power
over others. Being denied opportunities to dominate, in an otherwise supportive
social environment, may allow them to come to feel better about themselves by
strategies that do not require victimizing others. In any case, we need to
remove them from the control over all our lives by whatever means are
available. This is primarily an institutional issue. How are we to democratize
the structures of decision-making in our political, social and economic
institutions, so that everyone affected by a decision has a significant role in
making it? How do we empower ourselves as a self-consciously organized
majority, so we can create liberatory social relations in which the free and
full development of every person depends on, and is made possible by, the free
and full development of all of us?
Structurally,
we have to take democratic control of what was—and is—social property, the
means of production and reproduction of ourselves as a human community. The
existing system of private, income-producing property embodies an
institutionalized extortion, where those who control the means to work demand an
unearned reward (profits, interest and rent) for granting permission to use
what we as a society have already labored to create. The imperatives of
capitalist development have shaped technologies for the domination of nature
and of peoples, in the interest of securing and enhancing capital accumulation
for the few. Conquest, colonialism and imperialism are the products of these
imperatives. Technologies in the service of such institutions have had
devastating consequences, far beyond those of all pre-capitalist social
formations combined. No other society has had such ecocidal relations with its
environment or deployed such destructive technologies around the world.
By taking
democratic control of the means of production, we can redesign the character
and uses of technologies to harmonize with the human needs of those who are
affected by them. The nature of work can be recreated in more satisfying
contexts of producing to meet human needs. It will no longer be necessary to
spend more than 50 percent of every tax dollar on military spending to prop up
the profit margins of major arms manufacturers. With social ownership and
worker control, we can turn our surplus productive capabilities to
environmental reclamation on a global scale, to restore much of what has been
damaged already. By learning how to live in gentle and ecologically enduring
ways in our world, we can reach toward the biospherical egalitarianism and
social justice that holds the most promise for our survival as a species.{Ђ}
*Will
Miller has been assistant professor of philosophy at the
University of Vermont for thirty years. He is an activist and organizer on the
campus and in the community, where he serves on the board of the Green Mountain
Fund for Popular Struggle.
Republished by permission of
the author.
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