From: mjw+@cs.cmu.edu (Michael Witbrock)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.new-zealand
Subject: Capitalism, violence, socialism, presents, and ethology (was Re: guns etc) (quite long)
Date: 7 Jan 93 09:16:42 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.UfH86Om00hsBJDInZy
	<1993Jan7.152150.13050@waikato.ac.nz>
Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA

Excerpts from netnews.soc.culture.new-zealand: 7-Jan-93 Re: guns etc
jrdodd@waikato.ac.nz (1615)

> > The reason for the violence in our society is the violent nature of 
> > capitalism which is based on competition between individuals at the 
> > expense of other individuals. We are taught that dog-eat-dog is the only 
> way or at least the best way that humans can survive.

While it may be true that unbridled capitalism would be (or is) violent
in nature, it is certainly not  the cause of violence. In fact, it's
probably a result of the same underlying cause, that being the fact that
 human beings evolved, and that, for most of our antecedents, there has
been a strong "fitness" (i.e. number of  one's genes present in the next
generation) advantage to seizing resources from other people. Now,
seizing resources for one's own use, and the use of one's relatives and
descendents, can take the form of violence, or of capitalism, or of
being an apparatchik, and frankly, if it is to happen at all, I'd rather
that it take one of the latter two forms. Whichever form it takes, the
inescapable conclusion is that the desire to seize resources is
endogenous to people, an expression of genes which have been useful (to
themselves, if not the people carrying them) in the past. The
consequences of this path are, inter alia, violence, jealously, and
capitalism.

Now, increasingly in modern societies (and probably to some extent in
all human and hominid societies), it is the case that seizing resources
for oneself does not confer any particular fitness advantage, and that,
to the contrary, sharing resources does, since it enables one to survive
and one's genes to replicate, even in cases where resources directly
available to one are scarce.  In fact, I believe that this second is now
the dominant case - people are more likely to prosper as individuals by
directing their efforts to prospering as a group.  The consequences of
this "group fitness" effect are families, cities, societies, christmas
presents, and socialism (and capitalism too, since it requires
societies). If this is true, then the evolutionary advantages of our
competitive instincts are no more, and we can expect them to wane in
favour of altruism over the next few hundred thousand years.

However, we are not mindless, and, as societies, we have recognised the
advantages of the second type of motivation over the first.
Unfortunately, altruism probably has conferred less fitness advantage,
on the whole, than competition, which may be why we (generally, as
societies, leaving out a particularly evident aberration in `west' in
the 1980s) need to label the latter type of altruistic motivation as
better than the first competetitive one, in order to encourage it. If
the motivations were already set to the right levels, one would not
require encouragement over the other.

What are the conclusions: Well, in the present debate, the most
important may be that, even if it were desireable for human beings to do
so, competitiveness probably can't be done away with entirely, at least
not without subjecting us to controls which most of us would find
unacceptable. In fact, since it is one of the things that motivates
people to produce things like art, technology,  and good food (although
one should not rule out, as those with too high a regard for capitalism
do, the role of altruism in motivating this production), it is entirely
possible that we shouldn't try to suppress it entirely. The best we can
do may be to palliate it's worst consequences :- that means, for
example, giving up on trying to persuade everyone not to  want to be
violent, and instead seeking to minimise the chances that their violent
impulses will do great harm (one way of doing this is to make weapons
hard to get, lowering the average consequence of violence, another is to
lock them up and throw away the key, another is to lock them up for a
long time, another (which I find repugnant) is to kill them), it also
means not banning property, but trying to minimise the degree to which
one person's greed can deprive others of needed resources (by taxes, or
by socialising some resources, or by banning slavery, or by making theft
illegal, or by heavy inheritance taxes, or by forming trade unions, or
by providing a minimum social-welfare set of resources to all).

The second observation to be made is that it is entirely possible that
Alan Gibson is partially correct - that since capitalism and violence
stem from the same motivation, resource acquisition, the degree to which
the former is encouraged in a society may have some effect on the
latter, by legitimising the motivation for it. However, if this effect
is present, its effects are difficult to descern at best (they were a
lot easier to descern when Marx and Engles were alive, but altruism has
made great strides since then, even in "capitalist" societies, an
observation which seems to be lost on most current communists). It is
also possible that the detractors of communism are right in stating that
by basing a society on the motivation of altruism, people come to expect
altruism too much and become unproductive and lazy (leaving aside the
observation that few if any communist societies have appeared to be
altruistic when viewed from outside). If those people are right, it is
difficult to descern in China (although one could argue that, having
decided this year to allow property and speculation, while continuing to
suppress dissent, China has officially changed from Communism to
Fascism). 

The third observation is that the claim that capitalism (and the
motivation of property) is more efficient than socialism (and the
motivation of giving and recieving), or vice versa, is only sensible
(let alone true), if we know the goal with respect to whose satisfaction
efficiency is measured.  In most debates of this kind, it is asserted
that some system (capitalism, socialism, republicanism, monarchy,
theocracy, plutocracy) or another is better in and of itself. This is,
of course, nonsense - even absurd. They are all efficient, and
inefficient, at satisfying various goals, either severally, or in
mixture. It is only when these goals are stated that the discussion has
any hope of resolution. - If the goal is to promote one country over
another (which seems to me to be the most frequent goal people assume
when they discuss economics, and since it is hardly attractive when
stated like that, it is perhaps unremarkable that they choose not to
make it explicit) it is a fair bet that capitalism will be efficient: if
you want to succeed at seizing resources,  trying to do so seems like a
good first step. If you want to succeed at making people less miserable
(if not happy) then socialism (which I'll broadly define to include
insurance, as long as it is fair [even if insurance companies are not
motivated by socialism, their customers (unless coerced) are, whether
they admit it or not]) is the way to go,  since misery is less likely in
those whose basic needs are met.  

The conclusion is that if you want people to be happy, you probably want
some mixture of all systems, since people are happy when their goals are
met, and different people have different goals. And if you don't want
people to be happy, and you don't want their goals to be met, you should
at least be clear about that.

Michael
Newsgroups: soc.culture.new-zealand