A common point made: ‘Human nature does not allow for anarchism/communism.’

Short answer: My arse!

Longer answer: People often say that 'we can never have a communal based system because people are greedy and selfish’. Firstly, this is not a fact, it’s an opinion. An opinion heavily influenced by the media and what the dominant want us to think. Of course people can be greedy and nasty and selfish, SOMETIMES. But we can also be kind, nice, polite and considerate too - right? And quite a lot of the time.

We have an IMAGE that people are nasty and violent and will cheat you left right and centre, and a common idea that this is normal in history, that history proves it. But: what history did we learn that proves that? Was that the whole picture? Maybe the history we learned was biased to support some agenda? Anyway, how many of really know history well? Is some half formed idea of history a good basis for making social decisions now? We don’t release some potentially dangerous medicine on the market based on a half baked test done in a scientist’s lunch hour while he was watching The Walking Dead. So, why make equally important decisions about how we are going to run society based on very weak presumptions with precious little evidence?

In my opinion and my experience, despite our common image of how negative humans can be, the cooperative aspect happens - in practice, in reality- considerably more than the nasty aspect. When I go out for a walk, on 95% of days I don’t see people fighting over some computer in every shop, stabbing each other over a packet of frozen peas, stealing old ladies’s purses, cheating their best friends every chance they get,etc. Most of the time I see ordinary, everyday CO-OPERATION: people moving out of each others way, saying sorry if they bump into you, waiting in line patiently at the post office, doing nice things for their mum, holding doors open for old ladies, etc. That appears to be what most of every day life is actually like. And anarchism and communism have that kind of nice cooperative behaviour at their core, that is what they are based on. To summarize it in a bit of a daft way: anarchism and communism are systems whose image of human nature is that most people most of the time will hold open doors for old ladies.

Still, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the selfish aspect is stronger than the co-operative aspect. If so, then the LAST thing we should have is a system in which people are rewarded for being nasty, greedy and selfish! Which is what capitalism is. Would that not just make us even more negative in our behaviour? It does not seem like a good idea to make that side of our behaviour even worse by rewarding it with wealth and power. Which is what capitalism does.

With communism or anarchism, the real ideas (not the bollocks that Stalin and Mao pretended was communism), the system would BALANCE our tendencies to be greedy and selfish with structures and systems and habits that encourage cooperation, fairness and consideration. So, we would end up with a system with LESS negative behaviour. This makes sense to me and does not go against human nature, it takes it into account and weaves it into a larger workable pattern.

Last thing - some people say something like: most folk are ok, but some are ejits that would want to exploit the situation and take power for themselves' Ok, this is a point of concern, yes. But... simply put: there are ways around it, ways to decrease it, and we CAN put those things into operation. For example, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky in our PARECOMIC book went into how we can prevent that kind of 'a minority of arseholes taking over' stuff....It does not mean those plans would definitely work, just that there ARE plans already created to avoid that issue. It's not an inevitable physical law, its not something that has to prevent us from creating a better system.

So, let’s throw this silly myth in the river where it belongs… sorry, I mean bin it in the correct bag and place it out for garbage collection on thursdays, like a good socialist citizen!