Human Nature - How we are adapted for Communism

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.
  
We often fail to realize 10,000 years later just how artificial something like sexism is.  The division of labour that has persisted since the dawn of agriculture has convinced many people that men have always treated women in a subordinate way.  And yet for 90% of human history sexism was essentially unknown: indeed it would have been a death sentence in a pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer society where there was no surplus food production and where everyone had to pull together on a day-to-day basis in order to survive.  In such an environment where serving the common good was a matter of life and death there could be no superiors and inferiors – everyone had a vital role to play, whether it was hunting animals or gathering plants or preparing food.  Sexism, racism, exploitative economics, and war only became possible when people could look beyond day to day survival, when there were fixed resources to fight over such as good agricultural land or pasture land, and when rigid hierarchies began to form – none of which existed in hunter-gatherer societies.
Even today, surviving hunter-gatherer groups have no concept of war, organized religion, rank or private property.  The Hadza of East Africa, probably the closest we will ever come to how our earliest ancestors lived, have no chiefs or any recognizable leadership at all and live in small wandering bands that interact peacefully with each other and have no fixed territory.  Murder is basically unheard of, Hadza who have serious disputes with each other simply part ways and join another band.  The bands are not fixed or rigidly organized along family lines which allows for great diversity as band members come and go.  Band members hunt and work together and all band members share in the food they find or catch, ensuring that no one goes hungry.  In spite of the dangers they face, they are overall happy and relaxed.  After visiting them, Spencer Wells marvelled at how a people without modern medicine, who regularly faced death, could be so free of worry compared with the average resident of a modern, advanced, city like New York or London.  Contrary to the brutish caricatures of “cave men” so familiar to us in the West, these people were at peace and had no real stress or angst.  They had each other, they had nature, and that was really all they needed.  Thus even in the face of the Tanzanian government to “modernize” them, most Hadza have chosen to remain in the bush and continue the old and traditional way of life.  By contrast, those Hadza who have moved to the cities, like displaced indigenous peoples everywhere, have suffered amid violence, drug abuse, discrimination, and suicide – the artificial environment being too much for them to take.

In conclusion we should consider what the hunter-gatherer experience tells us about who we are.  Apparently we are not naturally evil, greedy, selfish, brutal or sadistic.  Just as undisturbed wild chimpanzees live in peaceful, non-hierarchical groups, human beings in their “wild” state can hardly be described as warlike.  Chimpanzees have only be known to kill, rape, and brutalize one another in conditions where their environment has been pressured and manipulated by humans and human beings – as the example of the Hadza who have moved to modern cities shows – are not that much different.  We started waging war after the advent of agriculture to defend the fields we relied upon from intruders, we started waging war to take from others what we could not produce ourselves, to this end we raised hierarchies, kings, rulers, and walled cities and villages.  Our “protectors” exploited us as slaves, serfs, and finally as proletarians.  And so we ended up 10,000 years later in a situation totally unlike the one we were biologically and psychologically evolved for: instead of working together harvesting the bounty of the natural world for collective survival we work individually for someone more powerful than ourselves so he will give us wages that will in turn allow us to buy food to keep us alive.  Instead of living together in tight-knit groups we live apart and often barely see our family, friends and neighbours.  Instead of peaceful co-existence and interaction we are faced with crime, wars, destruction, abuse, and self-hatred.  We now have to worry about market forces, job security, retirement savings, being able to pay for education, securing status, securing promotions, securing a better future for our children, and what the TV and internet tells us is fashionable today.  This is humanity under pressure: so unbelievably sophisticated and ingenious, yet at the same time a shadow of our former selves.  Today’s adult learns pretty early on to keep his or her guard up.  Instead of taking what we need from nature we take everything and pretend it is necessary for “economic growth”, all this while people are still starving amid abundance while the wealthy and privileged live in wasteful luxury.  We are in the process of devastating the same planet that gave birth to us and in spite of all our gizmos, we are far from happy.  Marx identified the misery of the working man as stemming from a lack of control over his own labour and his own life and said that this could only be rectified under communism whereby the primitive virtues of primeval humanity would combine with modern society and technology to produce a radically better future for us all.  The only new thing that Suzuki and other modern scientists are adding is that the failure to achieve this goal may very well mean the end of humanity and the world as we know it.  Inside, deep down, we are all communists and, just as we once did on the African savannah, we must embrace what we are if we want to live.