It is time that we faced reality and understand what is at the root of the psychological and spiritual alienation we face amid the fast-paced and ruthlessly competitive environment of the modern capitalist society. In the 1960s, the scientist Desmond Morris described how the “human animal” built for life as a hunter-gatherer, has imprisoned himself in the gilded cage of the modern city where intimacy is fleeting and where no one knows his name. Recently the famed geneticist Spencer Wells described how much more “natural” it felt living amongst the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania compared with the “crazy” life he was used to back in urban America. David Suzuki has described how, in the face of impending catastrophes like global warming, humanity’s only salvation would be to re-capture our ancestors’ ability to live in harmony with nature in sustainable communities. Many other scientists have said similar things but have failed to draw the obvious conclusions: the fact that for more than 90% of humanity’s 150,000 year history, human beings effectively lived in self-sustaining nomadic and semi-nomadic groups according to communism’s founding principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Suzuki and other scientists are implicitly arguing the same thing Marx did: that our only hope for a better future lies in bringing the virtues of our distant past into the modern age.
