By Andy Fenwick, Worcester South Labour member
On the doorstep socialists are asked to explain what socialism is. We can talk about a planned economy, controlling the means of production for the betterment of all. But the trouble with this answer it is that it sometimes sounds hypothetical and allows workers to trot out capitalist media-spin about human nature being ‘greedy’ and ‘selfish’.
So how can we answer this myth? Well, let’s look at this in more detail. Human nature is more considerate than the media would us believe. When there are natural disasters, like earthquakes, we see people on TV digging in the rubble for survivors, and there are no distinctions of colour, race, religion or age or gender – everyone just mucks in.
When the 2004 tsunami devastated and impoverished communities living around the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean, an appeal was met by a generous donations to the Disasters Emergency Committee; £392m was raised from the British people. My experience of this appeal was that the money was raised despite the actions of the bosses, who would use their own workforce’s generosity for cheap public relations and to avoid tax and NI payments.
Aberfan disaster in 1966
It is also the case that where possible workers will always go that extra mile to help their follow human beings. That was the case at the Aberfan Disaster in October 1966, when it was not the National Coal Board or the mine management, but local miners, who got to the school twenty minutes after a slag heap poured onto the classrooms from the top of the valley. They struggled to rescue twenty-two children, even knowing that the coal tip above them was still unstable and that more could come down on them any minute. To add further misery, the residents of Aberfan had a long fight with the Coal Board to get the rest of the spoil heap removed. Eventually the NCB relented, but only after being embarrassed into a £150,000 contribution to the Aberfan Disaster Memorial Fund.
Today we can see people giving their all without reward, like the crews of lifeboat stations dotted around the coast, who will drop everything when their pager goes off. I have some family history related to this; an ancestor of mine, William Guy, was washed overboard from the Redcar Lifeboat “Zetland” on Christmas Day 1836, during a vain attempt to save the crew of the Danish brig “Caroline”. He left a family behind.
Six hundred lifeboat crew lost
It is not only the crews who make sacrifices; on the morning of the 19th January 1881, a ship was running aground at Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire and the Whitby lifeboat could not be launched because of gale-force winds So began an epic eight-mile journey through treacherous snowdrifts, over the Yorkshire moors to Robin Hood’s Bay. In the end, over two hundred men and women hauled the heavy lifeboat in, just three hours.
These stories are not just history. Right up to modern times, over six hundred crew members have lost their lives, most recently with eight lives lost from the Penlee lifeboat in 1981.
RNLI founded on local fishermen
The RNLI institute was founded on local fisherman coming to the aide of fellow seaman and sailors in distress. It is ironic that today ordinary workers risk all to save the lives of well-off yacht owners in their floating ‘gin palaces’. Boats and premises are needed for these volunteers, and usually only the cox is a paid employee.
The RNLI has an income of £191m, all from charitable donations, and with no government funding. It is multi-national, with 238 lifeboat stations in Britain and Ireland covered by the costs and it sets aside two per cent of all income for international work. This fund covered swimming lessons for Bangladeshi children, something recently attacked by the rabidly-Tory Daily Mail.
What drives over five and a half thousand crew members to drop everything to go out in stormy conditions and putting their lives at risk? It is the same mentally that rests in all of us to put need ahead of greed. It is the best of humanity and it is at the same time the most natural thing in the world. Humans are naturally social and cooperative beings; it is those who are the greediest, most selfish and most ambition who are the ‘unnatural’ aberrations!
Natural spirit of cooperation
We can even see this natural spirit of cooperative behaviour in things like the BBC program DIY SOS, Big Build where, apart from the fulltime presenters, hundreds of local tradespeople will come to aid of a family who find themselves in dire circumstances to build a solution to the family’s problems in nine days, and without pay.
Talking to lifeboat crews and the tradespeople, they all offer a similar response as to why they do what they do. First, is the need to help others, but the second is that a feeling of mental wellbeing you get from helping others without reward, something that we could say is the cornerstone of a socialist society.
Here, some critics and armchair philosophers might say that such ‘altruistic’ actions are for personal betterment. What is called psychological egoism is that view that humans are always motivated by self-interest and selfishness, even with what seem to be acts of altruism. It claims that, when people choose to help others, they do so ultimately because of the personal benefits that they themselves expect to obtain, directly or indirectly, from so doing. It is suggested that an individual may receive an intrinsic reward in the form of personal gratification for their actions. This is a strange way to explain the sacrifice of, say a soldier who throws himself onto a grenade to save his comrades.
No expectation of reward
The ideology of the ruling class cannot rise above the idea that human interactions only happen in return for reciprocal reward. But in the example I’ve focused on here – that of lifeboat crews – there is no expectation of reciprocal reward or help.
When the philosophy of the capitalist media focuses on people’s natural ‘greed’, it is only an attempt to justify their own exploitive system. Even the word ‘aspiration’ can be misused, as if it meant the self-interest of a few individuals, rather than the hopes and needs of the working class as a whole. But, as the evidence shows over and over again, under the right circumstances, it is clear that greed and selfishness are far from being the the natural instinct of most people.
A socialist society already exists in embryo, even in a capitalist society, in the form of the natural interactions and mutual support that people exhibit. Humanity is naturally social and cooperative and on the basis of a different society, where provision can be made for all the basic necessities of life – something that is easily within the ability of modern, technology – that beautiful human nature can develop to its full potential.
November 12, 2020
