Human beings – the story goes – are inherently selfish and greedy, and therefore a truly fair
and equitable world is not possible. It’s true that we see greed reflected almost everywhere today – in our high school social studies textbook or in a college economics class, on nightly news reports
about oil prices and home foreclosures, in cartoons like Scrooge McDuck or Richy Rich, in board games like Monopoly, and even in the social commentary
of rap lyrics, like the Wu Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.”:
Cash Rules Everything Around Me
C.R.E.A.M.
Get the money
Dolla’ dolla’ bill, y’all.
Of course the “I got mine” attitude in our society didn’t begin with Saturday morning cartoons, or rap music, etc. Over the course of world history, it grew
out of the social relations inherent in class-divided societies.
But does that mean that greed is here to
stay, or that it prevents us from building a better world? To understand “greed” in our society, we must remember that it is one of the many values that is re-produced by the conflicting relations
of capitalism – a system that rewards exploitation and advantage-taking, while discouraging and punishing cooperation and solidarity. Indeed, in A Contribution to A Critique of Political Economy, Karl
Marx wrote that:
The mode of production of material life
conditions the general process of social,
political and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but their social existence that
determines their consciousness.
This is Marx’s way of saying that the popular culture, ideas, art, music, etc. are largely “products of their time” – or more specifically, they are products of the social relations of their time, of
the reality that has been established by the mode of production (in our case, capitalism). Marx goes on to call the mode of production the “base” of
society, and every layer of our existence that grows on top of the base is what he calls the “superstructure.”
What this means is that the ideas and culture that tend to dominate every era are those that suit its ruling class and that reinforce the existing way that the economy and society are structured – in our case, with an ever-growing wealth and power gap between the rich and poor. From feudal landlords to slaveholders to capitalist owners to today’s private equity banking giants, every ruling class has
established the idea that it is in charge, that’s just how it is, and that there is nothing we can do to change it. So guess who benefits from the idea that humans are too greedy for socialism to work?
Those who benefit from the workings of capitalism, of course.
Caught up in the paper chase, it can be hard for people to imagine another world, let alone the task of constructing it – so the misperception that humans are by nature too greedy for socialism
is understandable. But it is wrong. Other values and ideas can come to the forefront, hand-in-hand with another way of organizing the world.
To Each According to His Greed?
At times of revolutionary change, during which society is being transformed, when conflicts and contradictions are made visible and fought over in the arena of popular struggle, revolutionary ideas
(and art, music, culture, values, etc.) gain more currency and become “pop”. Hence the 1960s saw the rise of folk and rock music with left-leaning and justice-oriented values that accompanied and
helped articulate the aspirations of the civil rights and the anti-war movements. But absent the movements and the more fundamental transformative changes that they sought to bring about, the music, culture, and ideas did not retain a
foothold and began to dissipate.
By the late 1970s, as these movements were on the retreat and “mainstream” life shifted rightward, pop culture took the same path. First it was disco, and then in the 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, came the advent of 80s music and an recklessly aloof and individualistic attitude that “greed is good” – made famous in a speech by
cutthroat CEO Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street:
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed – for lack of a better word – is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed – you mark my words – will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
Gordon Gecko’s logic here is that greed fuels human progress – and that a more just and equitable world is not even desirable, because the persistence of inequality and poverty generates human progress as people duke it out to get
ahead.
This is Social Darwinism – a view that interprets the all of the institutions of human society and behaviors as if they were elements of Darwin’s evolutionary principles of natural selection. According to Social Darwinists – who are usually found on the ultra-right – there should be no financial aid for college, no wage or labor standards, no social security, etc. – the “invisible hand” of the market should just sort it all out. People will compete with one another, only the strong will survive, and society will march forward.
Capitalism With a Heart
A more moderate version of the “people are too greedy for socialism” viewpoint is held by those under the who believe in “compassionate capitalism.” The adherents of this view tend to be liberals who genuinely don’t like injustice, and who do believe in a better world – but they believe it can be achieved by a kinder, gentler capitalism. In this view, there are certain companies that are
“good” (like Ben & Jerry’s, Whole Foods, and Starbucks, for example) because their founders use their profits to promote environmental, animal rights, “fair trade”, anti-poverty, and certain other noble causes. But they don’t dare to ask – or to admit – where these very profits come from: the unpaid labor of the entire working class.
The compassionate capitalists believe that capitalism is the best foundation of our economy, and that applying market principles to philanthropy, charity, and government will help lift certain neighborhoods (or even the entire third world!) out of poverty, cure all famine and disease, give a happier life to the cows, etc. However, they fail to recognize that the exploitation at the core of capitalism and imperialism is what engenders the
very poverty, famine, and disease that their philanthropic and charitable efforts are attempting to relieve. They think that those who are “privileged” to enjoy great wealth should take up the responsibility of sharing a tiny slice of it with poor people – and don’t recognize that the wealth/poverty divide was created by capitalism itself.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels labeled this school of thought as “Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism” and described it this way:
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.
Some compassionate capitalists argue that the government should play a role beyond the basic social support structures – but instead of massive
public works programs, or stronger laws protecting workers’ rights to organize unions, they like to promote “inner-city entrepreneurship” in Harlem or “micro-loans” to women’s sewing co-operatives
in Bangladesh. They do not believe that anything is inherently wrong with capitalism – they just think that a few greedy people abuse it.
So what’s their plan to stop the abuses? If more people would just buy from the good companies, then the world will magically be better as consumers punish bad companies by not shopping
there. (Come to think of it, it’s actually pretty clever marketing strategy!) This view isn’t just held by the owners of these “friendly” companies – many anti-corporate youth who haven’t yet discovered the importance of the working class hold fast to the belief that they can “withdraw” from the ugliest parts of the economy and thus wash their hands of the whole complicated mess. This sort
of “vote-with-your-wallet”, consumer-driven politics falls back on the fantasy that the “invisible hand” of the market is the best strategy to achieving change.
Lastly, the basic belief of these compassionate capitalists – that greed is responsible for all of the excesses and injustices of capitalism, rather than
capitalism in-itself – limits the boundaries of social struggle to a fight for simple reforms. Here are Marx and Engels in the Manifesto:
…The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best… [It requires] in reality that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie…
[This view…] is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class.
In other words, the compassionate capitalists seek to replace the “greedy” CEOs at the top with a group of “less greedy” CEOs – but the workers ought to remain right at the bottom to hold the whole thing up.
Getting Beyond Greed
Of course, it’s not surprising that some would say that capitalism’s excesses are caused by greed. Greed does in fact exist, and it is a motivating factor in human behavior in our society. But to reduce the historically-developed inequalities between rich and poor to a question of mere individual desire is to ignore the facts of how our world has developed: capitalism thrives on exploitation, as lower wages mean higher profits. Capitalism requires a large reserve army of unemployed and unorganized workers in order to keep a downward pressure on wages, and hence an upward-moving profit margin. Under capitalism, workers from around the world (and from opposite sides of the tracks) are pitted against each other
in a race to the bottom. Often despite our best wishes and organizing efforts, we screw each other over – because those are the relations that the capitalist mode of production thrusts us into.
But under a different economic system with different social relations, it is easy to imagine other ideas and values becoming prevalent. Under socialism – an economy organized around meeting the needs of human beings and the planet, an economy that gets rid of (instead of enhancing) class antagonisms, one that builds (again from the Manifesto) “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all” – we could create a different set of human values. This is not to say that human beings will be instantaneously and forever transformed at the dawn of the revolution; rather,
as the economic transformations take place, so too will changes of attitudes, ideas, and behaviors. Greed won’t disappear overnight – but its influence
could be dramatically curbed as we reorganize society and construct a new set of values on top of a new mode of production.
We know this from our experience. Even amidst the ravages of capitalism and imperialism, the values of a new society become visible as people overcome divisions and greed with acts of unity, sacrifice, and solidarity. There are new values present in the many social movements in which we struggle, as people work together to achieve progress: church congregations marching for civil rights, workers uniting together in unions, gays and lesbians demanding equality, youth fighting to end the war in Iraq, and more. Even sports can be a place where the values of cooperation, unity, and teamwork are learned: it is often the teams that play best together as a unit, where a group of players combine their strengths, that end up winning the championship over teams that have a big-name superstar (see 2008 NBA Finals). The point is that there are ways that everyone can learn – through social struggle, through defeats and victories, or even by watching ESPN – that we are not all just on our own as isolated individuals;
that the best chance we have to actually improve our own individual lives is to stick together as a whole.
If we understand the power of the working class, and believe in the creative capacities of our fellow human beings, and if we remember that the dominant values and ideals of each era are determined by the mode of production, then we shouldn’t really be bothered by those who say that humans are to greedy for socialism. We can be confident that our world – the world of capitalism –
where an elite few get to boast that “I got mine” while most people are asking “Who got mine?” can be reshaped by human action into a world where we can all say “We got ours.”
That’s a socialist world, and it’s worth fighting for.
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