A
Contribution To The Debate On ‘Species-Being’
HUMAN
NATURE: A WORK IN PROGRESS
The
starting point:
The starting point of
this debate is the desire to better understand the process of class
consciousness, in order to contribute to it. It serves no purpose to discuss
the role of the revolutionary minority if we can’t imagine this process. The
classic responses of councilism and Leninism are
formulaic: the first swears by the formula: W+C=R (a developed working class
plus economic collapse equals revolution), the second believes (in the best
case) in W+C+P=R (I
guess I don’t have to spell out what the P stands for). Both stand in the
teleological, Hegelian, tradition of Marxism: they see this process as
happening inevitably, history as a program that unfolds as it’s meant to
unfold. In the first, consciousness is entirely passive. The working class
makes its revolution reacting impulsively to events, without knowing the
implications. In the second, the party knows, it embodies class consciousness, its direction makes it possible for the class
to overcome the obstacle of capitalist ideology. Implicitly, both positions
base themselves on a certain view of “species-being,” of human nature. In
each case there is an underlying view as to what human nature is capable and
incapable of in different circumstances. They should make clear why they
believe what they believe, but they never do.
We think that neither
party nor crisis make the working class revolutionary. Does that mean that we
don’t have to consider human nature? Or is the opposite true? If the working
class doesn’t automatically make its revolution because its income and social
security are collapsing and the party shows them the way, what does give it the
will, the motivation, the insight, to do it? Don’t we have to look beyond the
economic grievances of the working class to find the answer to that question?
And does that not lead us to consider other core aspects of human nature in the
working class that are oppressed by capital and that create the desire to break
that oppression?
Another argument to
investigate this further: the more capitalism’s real domination is developed,
or in other words, the more it is based on automated mass-production, the
smaller the part that attacks on wages, direct pauperization, represents in the
totality of ways in which the capitalist crisis affects the working class. The
reason is that the more productivity grows, the more the relative cost of wages
declines. Today, capitalism’s crisis affects the working class in many ways not
as workers specifically but as human beings: Wars, the destruction of the
environment, the destruction of social services, the destruction of community,
the growth of insecurity and anxiety…Is it not necessary that the working
class, in its struggle, develops an understanding of
how all these aspects are linked with its fights for wages, employment and
other workplace-related issues, in order to grasp the scope of its undertaking?
Is it not the case that the revolution is possible because the working class
embodies a human nature that is threatened by capitalism, and only it is in a
position to defend it?
The
biological base: a mixed bag
Does a species being, a human nature across social classes exist? Like all other
species, we have a common genetic make-up. But we are a special animal, the one
that changes the world, through its consciousness. Since consciousness is what
makes us different, it has to define our species being. Is it also in our
genes, an evolutionary outcome created through natural selection? Some think
that consciousness is indeed entirely genetically programmed; that all our
individual as well as group traits have been selected by evolution. Take sexual
jealousy, a trait that is common across cultures and ages. It can be assumed to
be genetically universally successful in the long run, since jealous people
will prevent their partners from having sex with others, while spreading their
genes through sex with non-jealously inclined people, so that over thousands of
generations, only the genes of the jealous will survive.
In this way, one can
assume that there are many other traits in humans that have either died out or
have become universal, depending on their genetic success, just as in other
species. Most of that selection process took place when humans still lived in a
form of society we call “primitive communism”. Since the time that people
painted those wonderful images in the caves of Lascaux,
mankind has presumably undergone very little change in its genetic make-up.
Genetic evolution is favored by living in small groups, in which new,
successful traits can generalize relatively quickly, with limited outside
intermingling but with a universal incest-taboo to curtail negative variations.
The larger the intermingling, the more mutations cancel each other out.
The implications of the
assumption that our species being is created essentially in this way, are deterministic. We can have illusions about deciding
our own fate, but in reality we only do what our genes tell us to do. We’re
programmed. We can think what we want about war but mankind is doomed to wage
it again and again, because evolution has favored the selection of aggressive
genes in our struggle for survival.
But even if we accept
for a moment that all our characteristics are genetically determined, the
implications are not as simple as that. Evolution has promoted contradictory
characteristics: it rewards cowardice and courage, aggression and meekness,
conformity and creativity, altruism and egoism, tenderness and brutality,
solidarity and competitiveness. These are all genetically successful traits, in
groups as well as individuals. The biological base of our species being is a
mixed bag, a complex vat of raw material.
The limitation of
genetic evolution to explain consciousness and therefore species being becomes
clear when you look at something like suicide. With the above theory, you can
“prove” that suicide does not exist. Humans who are genetically inclined to
suicide have less time to transmit their genes so that, over enough
generations, the suicide-gene is weeded out. Why then is it a growing
phenomenon?
Looking
again at jealousy: the assumption was that, if at some point in time some
people were jealous and others were not, they were genetically different. But that is just a
guess, something that can neither be proved nor disproved (for now). Let’s say
that the guess is right, that in that mixed bag of evolution, there is now a
universal jealousy-gene (or combination of genes). Does that mean that I have
no choice but to act jealously? My point here is not to debate which choice is
the right one, but to affirm that there is a choice, both because of my complex
and contradictory nature and because I am a thinking being, a product of a
collective process of consciousness that shapes how I look at the world, at my
choices and actions. I think that the same is true in a collective sphere, for
groups, for classes and for mankind in general now. In both cases, for the
individual and the collective, the choices are obviously shaped by outside
conditions: I may not be jealous now if I don’t see the situation as
threatening, but I may become so when that changes; in the same way the working
class reacts differently when it sees the capitalist crisis as a threat to
itself. But while the changes in the context inform the choice differently, it
remains a choice, based on an active (and thus not pre-ordained) understanding
by mankind, and the working class in particular, of its situation.
Human
nature is not innate
Since the specificity of
humankind is its consciousness and consciousness develops itself, species being
is necessarily a product of history, a work in progress. I think it’s valid to
speak of “species being” because there is a collective
consciousness of the species that is not unique to a class or a culture. That
is why you can take a peasant from the Andes or a remote Chinese village and
put him in New York: it won’t take him long to fit in. A bourgeois can become a
proletarian and a proletarian bourgeois without changing their human nature,
not because their genes stay the same but because both, despite their
conflicting class interests, are the product of the same collective
consciousness.
A human does not acquire
species being by being born. There is the Tarzan-myth, a man raised by apes yet
being wholly human, a model-human to boot, a splendid specimen proving the
superiority of the white race. In reality, the rare cases of humans raised
outside human society show that Tarzan would not have become human but at best
a weird hybrid. As a human, he is frozen in a very early developmental stage,
even after integration in human society. Human nature is not innate,
you acquire it by living in society. It therefore changes together with society
itself.
Although by definition it is not class
determined, different classes live it differently -- stimulate and develop
certain aspects of it, suppress and develop alienation from others. So they
change it too. Individualization has been a long-term trend in the development of
our species being. For hundreds of thousands of years, the border between men
and their natural environment, and between “I” and “we” subjectively hardly
existed. Humans lived in unity with nature and each other, not in the romantic
sense in which such phrases are used today, but because their consciousness did
not make distinctions which for us are self-evident. Yet you could say that,
because of this magical unity with the world around them and the submergence of
the ‘I’ in the “we”, they were subjectively immortal. They didn’t bury their
dead because they were too much “we” to care about the loss of a particular
member of the group. The first ritual burials, about 80, 000 years ago, showed
a new consciousness of humans as individuals, presumably as a result of more
complicated interaction and division of labor and thus a sharper sense of loss
when a member of the group died. Individualization developed together with
specialization. So it was really under capitalism that it most drastically
altered our species being. In his article on the same subject in this issue,
Mac Intosh makes a good point about the need for
capitalism under real domination to stimulate individual freedom and autonomy
(the qualification “relative” needs to be added) despite the fact that this
undermines its control over society. Real domination developed specialization
to the hilt but it’s really a feature of capitalism as a system, not just of
its latest phase (ascendant capitalism brought on the age of enlightenment, the
age of reason, against the magical group thinking of feudalism). Capitalism
changed our species being, not through ideological influence but by creating
new social practices, which create a new understanding by men of the world. So
species being today is very different from what it was under “primitive
communism” yet it is still the same, in the same way as a man is different from
the child he was, yet still the same person.
We all know that the
first years of a person’s life have a tremendous formative influence. The same
might be true for our species being. The way we experienced
life under primitive communism, which constituted about 98 % of humankind’s
history, cannot but have left deep imprints on our collective consciousness.
It must have left a very deep longing for community that stands in conflict to
the reality of capitalism, despite the fact that capitalism alienates us from
it. An urge for a “paradise regained” which feeds into the working class
struggle. Yet when we look at this, we also have to look at other childhood
legacies in our species being: the tendency to magical thinking, to turn to
self-deception when facing apparently insurmountable obstacles. When we really
think that the concept of species being is useful to understand how humankind
can accomplish a communist revolution, we must also look at it to understand
why men have made such horrible, self-destructive, choices in the course of
their history, and not just blame the productive forces.
The reasons why we pin
our hopes on the working class include the worsening of its specific conditions
and its position of potential power over these conditions: the working class
already operates the productive forces and is thus in a unique position to gain
control over them and to choose to overthrow capitalism. But there is another
reason that is to be found in the way species being is lived by the working
class. Only the working class under capitalism lives in conditions that favor
the cooperation and natural solidarity on which a post-capitalist society must
be based. Resistance to conditions that threaten its basic needs naturally lead
to collective action, to self-organization and living solidarity. It’s not just
a matter of efficiency, of having no other means to fight, but also that
through this collective action, it reconnects with our deep-seated need for an
empowered communal existence.
The
anti-climax
Primitive communism and
class societies have all formed the species being that exists today.
Inevitably, our species being is not harmonious and stable but contradictory
and evolving.
It seems useful to try
to understand it better and relate it to the subjective conditions for
revolution. But (and that’s disappointing and exciting at the same time) it
will not make us able to predict if and how a revolution may occur. We can’t
know. We’ll have to find out. We can predict some things that will happen, but
we can’t predict how the working class will choose to react. It stands on the
historical scene, loaded with the luggage of millennia, with its baked-in core
of social being, its baked-in gift of creativity, its baked-in capacity to
think and imagine, its baked-in tendency to self-deception, and so on. Its
choices are not pre-determined and that also means that we can participate in
the choosing, if we see ourselves as part of it and not standing outside of it;
neither as leaders nor as spectators. If we find a candle, we should light it,
if we have a match, we should strike it.
Sander