As I've explained at tedious length on this list and elsewhere (I have a draft paper that I will send to anyone who wants to see it) that is not an immutable whatsit that is rigidly manifested in the same way in all circumstances. It is (in part) "the sum total of human relations" (Theses on Feuerbach) as refracted through our biology.
Our biology gives us certain dispositions that can be manifested in different ways in different circumstances. We can be competitive under capitalism, deferential under feudalism, maybe cooperative under communism.
Talk of human nature, which Marx indulged in too, is not therefore an ideological justification for existing injustices and inequalities, projecting the present forward and backward with the suggestion that change is impossible.
True, some people use the term like that, but that is incorrect. The nature of nothing else is like that. Neither is ours. It's getting really boring to have to explain this every time someone says "human nature" and we get the :kneejerk reaction,"ideology!" Apologist!" "No such thing!" There is no such thing as human nature the way the ideologists understand it, but there is a human nature as scientists understand it.
Now, as to the "unpleasant facts," also human nature is mutable to some degree, it's not like a light switch. That's why the Israelites had to wander 40 years in the desert, till those whose human nature was formed under slavery were dead. That's Marx's point about how the new society is stamped with the birthmarks of the old.
We may get people to be perfectly altruistic and unquestioningly cooperative after centuries of socialism (though I doubt it, if I weren't busy and didn't find this boring right now I'd explain, and it doesn't have to to with an immutable human nature rigidly manifested the same way no matter what the circumstances, biological determinism, the selfish gene, etc.), but we surely cannot expect instantaneous transformation in the first few generations.
Now that I have annoyed everyone, satisfied no one, and wasted 15 minutes I need to work, I depart.
--- On Wed, 4/23/08, John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> From: John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] To each according to work
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 7:20 AM
> Charles Brown wrote:
> > John Thornton
> >
> > My reply was to both you and Charles. Charles did make
> a claim
> > concerning human nature. I though that was clear but
> apparently not.
> >
> > ^^^^^
> > Charles: I didn't say, nor do I think ,anything
> said below about human
> > nature.
>
> You wrote this:
>
> This claim embodies some unpleasant but true assumptions
> about human
> nature than we may transcend someday, but we deal with the
> new society
> as it emerges from the womb of the old,
>
> That was what I was responding to. Not the section you
> snipped.
>
> John Thornton
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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