redtea

You’re very welcome, and I’m glad you’ve taken my comments in the spirit in which I wrote them. I wasn’t trying to be awkward and you are making some good points. I’m happy to keep talking if want to discuss the sources I suggested.

You might also really enjoy David Harvey’s Rebel Cities. He’s a geographer, so he engages with some of your ideas directly. He’s not arguing about human nature, but he takes this notion of profit and commodities and runs with it to see how it shapes cities and how cities shape capitalism.

The book introduces many concepts of historical materialism. It’s dialectical, but Harvey does not use much jargon. Okay, he uses some jargon, but he is good at explaining his terms and using examples. You can see this in the example quote below (at the end of this comment).

One aspect of the book you might like is his criticism of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation. Harvey argues that a better term is ‘appropriation by dispossession’, which is an ongoing process. This has implications for how we understand modern capitalism, its origins, and its effects on human behaviour.

I read Harvey before any of the other texts cited in my previous comment, and although those other texts are complex, they were easier to read because I could fit the new ideas into the imagery that Harvey provides (he’s good at painting the picture). I also watched the first few videos in his lecture series on Capital, vol I before reading the text myself. These are on YouTube and were very helpful for me.

A quote that may pique your interest, from Harvey, Rebel Cities, p.5:

From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon of some sort, since sur­pluses have been extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while control over the use of the surplus typically lies in the hands of a few (such as a religious oligarchy, or a warrior poet with imperial ambi­tions). This general situation persists under capitalism, of course, but in this case there is a rather different dynamic at work. Capitalism rests, as Marx tells us, upon the perpetual search for surplus value (profit). But to produce surplus value capitalists have to produce a surplus product. This means that capitalism is perpetually producing the surplus product that urbanization requires. The reverse relation also holds. Capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it perpetually produces. In this way an inner connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. …

Let us look more closely at what capitalists do. They begin the day with a certain amount of money and end the day with more of it (as profit). The next day they have to decide what to do with the surplus money they gained the day before. They face a Faustian dilemma: reinvest to get even more money or consume their surplus away in pleasures. The coer­cive laws of competition force them to reinvest, because if one does not reinvest then another surely will. For a capitalist to remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to make even more surplus. Successful capitalists usually make more than enough both to reinvest in expansion and satisfy their lust for pleasure. But the result of perpetual reinvest­ment is the expansion of surplus production. Even more important, it entails expansion at a compound rate—hence all the logistical growth curves (money, capital, output, and population) that attach to the history of capital accumulation.

The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption. …

Not just anyone. Only capitalists. Or, rather, only those who own the means of production within a commodity producing society. In capitalism, those owners are organised as a class. The profit motive is what drives that class, not humans in general.

I must reiterate that we're talking at cross purposes. I'm saying that profit only exists where there is commodity production. If we cannot agree on that, we won't agree about much else. Before commodity production, there was no concept of profit, and there could be no concept of a profit motive, hence humans could not be motivated by profit before they began to produce commodities.

As for your questions relating to the 'first' capitalist, you may want to read:

• Marx, Capital, vol I, Part 8 'So-Called Primitive Accumulation';
• Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View;
• Cedric J Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism; and
• Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism.

You will find some support for some of the ideas that you're talking about in these works, relating to the difficulty of pointing to a precise date at which humans began to be motivated by profit (which is impossible to pinpoint). You will also find a rejection of the argument that the profit motive is part of human nature and why. Mainly, this rejection lies in the claim that everything is historically contingent—which follows logically from an historical materialist world outlook. That will support some of your ideas but it will also challenge your main argument about what human nature is and about how we know what we know about capitalism.

For analyses on why and how profit is related to commodity production, try:

• Marx, 'Wages, Price and Profit' (short and sweet); and
• Capital, vol I, chapters 1–3 (comprising 'Part One: Commodities and Money'—well-known as the driest part of Capital but it's perhaps the most crucial part, too).

I'm not making any moral claims nor claiming that any trait is positive or negative. I am not proposing that there is an essence of human nature.

I'm saying that the profit motive is unique to commodity production. If there is no commodity production, there is no profit motive. I am also claiming that within a system of commodity production, only a small fraction of the people within that system seek profit. And in a system of commodity production, it is only the owners of the means of production who seek profit.

I am then claiming, which to me seems to follow logically, that if very few humans throughout history have sought profit, then seeking profit cannot be part of human nature.

Then we are talking at cross purposes.

I'm not sure what fascism, geography, the environment, or sociology have to do with it.

I agree that humans produce society. But if humans have produced societies that do not involve commodity production, then they have lived without profit and without a profit motive. This was the case for the majority of human existence, perhaps some 300,000 years.

If human societies have lived without a profit motive, then the profit motive cannot be part of human nature—it arises only when humans produce commodities (i.e. rather than because humans are involved).

To accept that the profit motive is part of human nature, one must also accept that it existed in all human societies. It did not. Something (e.g. the profit motive) cannot be part of human nature if it has only been an organising force in human society for 200–500 years.

I'm not sure. Possibly. But you also seem to be disagreeing with me, which suggests not.

I'm not starting an analysis of capitalism with human nature. Capitalism is the name of a particular political economy / mode of production that is based on producing commodities.

If capitalism has unique implications, which by definition only arise in capitalism, it stands to reason that those implications (being unique) do not arise in all human societies. If something only arises in specific era, and not in all human societies, it is specific to that era, and not part of human nature.

Edit: To add for clarity: within capitalism, seeking profit is a political economic necessity for capitalists. I'm not making any moral, psychological, or philosophical claims here.

Do you agree that if something is part of human nature, then it will be present in some form in all human societies?

Then I'm afraid we're talking at cross purposes. I was talking about profit as a political economic category. I wasn't making and moral claims when I said that the profit (and so the profit motive) only exists where commodities are produced.

I thought the OP was also asking about profit as a political economic category, because this is the sense in which the word would be used when asking, to paraphrase, 'why do capitalists seek profit if the profit motive is not part of human nature?'

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. But profit is a result of producing commodities. No commodities, no profit. No profit, no profit motive.

To my knowledge, profit only exists in systems that produce commodities to be sold in markets. While markets predate capitalism, they were largely optional. In capitalism, there is no choice but to participate in markets and commodity production.

If a society does not produce commodities, there is no profit. If there is no profit, there can be no profit motive. The profit motive cannot be a part of human nature because it was absent from almost every human society that ever existed.

The profit motive may not be a part of human society once it develops beyond capitalism, either. Even in the transitional Soviet Union and China, which had/has a form of state capitalism (depending on who you ask and how they define it), their planned economies undermine commodity production and made/make inroads into profit. In these two examples, the profit motive did/does not drive the state.

Even in capitalism proper, it is only the capitalists who seek profit. By definition, profit is what remains after paying wages and overheads. Some workers benefit from profit. These are labour aristocrats and petit bourgeois. But on the whole, workers are not motivated by profit.

There is no way that the profit motive is part of human nature if: most human societies were not driven by profit; the vast majority of workers living within a system driven by profit do not seek profit; and states that move away from commodity production in a world governed by profit try to live according to other motivations.

If you were asking about why capitalists, specifically, are profit seekers, I'm happy to go into that.

Before I type out a reply: can you see this comment?

Interesting stuff.

I have two thoughts / questions.

1. This seems rather different to Kautsky's suggestion of breaking up monopolies and forcefully returning to smaller producers. Lenin ridiculed that, arguing that the small producers would simply band together and create new monopolies to stay competitive. Coops could overcome that because, I assume, they work on a different logic, even if there are elements of the commodity form within coops. Is there a danger that a coop will grow so large that it will be able to challenge the current state, creating a struggle between two conceptions of a dictatorship of the proletariat?

2. China has erected defences against corruption and US meddling. It seems to have been rather successful. By shifting to smaller coops in Vietnam, does Vietnam risk fragmenting its state power, making it easier for outsiders (mainly western actors) to infiltrate and sabotage?

I agree with part of what you said but not all of it. I wonder if some Socratic questions would reveal how much we agree and perhaps make you change your mind.

Do you mean that after a revolution a socialist state would still have to deal with gender, sexuality, racial, etc, issues? (I think this is what you meant,v as you give the example of China, and I agree.)

If so, does it matter that a socialist state will still have to deal with class as well? China still had a bourgeoisie, for example, and has to reign it in now and again.

To ask the question in a different way: can class and other 'identity' issues be separated just because those 'identity' issues will remain after a revolution, if class will also remain a problem after the revolution?

During a dictatorship of the proletariat, there will still be a bourgeoisie, and the related problems of having a bourgeois class, even if it's power is diminished. It would not be till much later, when bourgeois social relations have withered away, that class is abolished and 'full' communism reached.

Would you expect those identity issues to have been dealt with by the time that full communism is reached?

If so, is that not the exact time that class contradictions will be finally resolved?

And to get back to where we started, does this indicate that 'identity' and class are interwoven after all and cannot be treated as separate issues?