Robbo tell us something about your view of human nature. How do you answer the charge that human nature and greed make socialism impossible (devil's advocate)
Well, for starters I suggest you read Marshall Sahlins
Stone Age Economics. the original affluent society Sahlins makes the pertinent point that there are two ways to affluence - producing more and wanting less. Hunter gatherer societies achieved affluence, argues Sahlins, by opting for the latter. All their needs were catered for with a mimnimum amount of labour and much leisure. In fact the accumulation of wealth was looked down upon as positively dysfunctional to a nomadic way of life. By contrast, the industrial prole lives a life of impoverished insecurity which all the anxious pursuit of mod cons and the latest gadgets cannot ever erase. Playing the catch-up game (
keeping up with Jones' ) is futile in a society that not only bases itself upon , but celebrates, material inequality. Its a case of the snake trying to devour its own tail. More wealth does not neceessarily bring more happiness. It is our relationship to it that matters and this stems from our relationship to one another. The kind of society we live in.
Capitalism needs workers to feel incomplete and constantly unsatisfied. It is the whiplash that gets them not only to want to consume more (from which businesses profit) but also (as a consequence of having to pay for that increased consumption), to work harder and to put their noses more firmly to the grind stone to pay off the debt. Its a soulless treadmill weve got ourselves onto. In the early 20th century the US government sponsored large scale propaganda programmes urging people to consume more as a matter of "patriotic duty". The same thing is happening in China today.
Thorstein Veblen in his classic book
The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) argued that in different kinds of societies you have diffierent ways of expressing status. In a hunter gatherer society it was the skill of the hunter or the environmental wisdom of the gatherer that attracted the esteem of others. In industrial capitalism, Veblen argued, it was the conspicuous consumption of wealth that matters and this stemmed from the nature of capitalism itself - its inner dynamic, its restless drive to expand without limit as a consequence of its economic competition. Alexis de Tocqueville made a similar observation in his
Democracy in America talking about the role of money in democratic capitalist societies by comparison with old aristocratic societies of the ancien regime:
Men living in democratic times have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it...When all members of a community are independent of, or indifferent to, each other the co-operation of each of them can be obtained only by paying for it. When the reverence that belonged to what is old has vanished, birth, condition and profession no longer distinguish men or scarcely distinguish them; hardly anything but money remains to create strong marked differences between them and to raise some of them above the common level. The distinction originating in wealth is increased by the disappearance or dimunation of all other distinctions. Among aristocratic nations money reaches only to a few points on the vast circle of man's desires; in democracies it seems to lead to all
So to get to the point of your question I dont think human nature is a barrier to socialism. We havent much changed as a species since the time when we lived in small hunter gatherer groups (the vast bulk of humankind's existence). Our human nature is essentially that of being social animals. What has changed - dramatically - is the kind of society we live in. As Ive tried to demonstrate, different societies have different norms of behaviour, different yardsticks by which they value the individual.
In socialism individuals will have completely free access to the goods and services they need - there wil be no monetary or barter transaction mediating their appropriation of these things - and they will freely and voluntarily cooperate to produce these things. This fundamental change in our basic economic relationships will, I am convinced, totally revolutionsie our whole attitude towards material wealth and make greed pointless and silly (like I said , you dont drink more water than you need from a public tap just because its free and in abundant supply). The need to feel esteeemed and valued is a fundamental human need but in a socialist society when everyone has free access , the link between status and material consumption will be irretrievable severed. It would simply not be possible to claim that you are a better person than someone else on the grounds that you possess a posh car and a fancy house. The only way in which you can attract the esteem of your fellows is through your contribution to society , not what you take out of it.
Grreed is a symptom of scarcity and scarcity is a function not only of demand but also sipply. We can alter our demand for material goods by changing the meaning we attach to them - by no longer seeing them as indicators of social status in the way I suggested above. . But also we can increase the supply of useful material goods by
inter alia eliminating the massive structural wastage of socially useless production that goes on in capitalism. As I said before, the elimination of money and all the kinds of occupations related to money will effectively mean far more resoruces, material and human, will become available for socially useful prodiuction, for directly meeting human needs.
In short , socialism will be an affluent society in the way that capitalism can never be. Capitalism requires us always to feel relatively impoverished. It can never permit us to feel that "enough is enough" since this would radically undermine the whole basis upon which its system of status diffenrentiation is based. Socialism on the other will mean we can comfortably want less as well as enabling us to produce more of the uselful things in life - until an eqilibrium of sorts has been reached.