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Aren’t communism and the revolution pipe dreams because of human nature?

This argument is probably the favourite among opponents of communism: it is short and effective. And while it is supposed to settle the matter of communist theory and practice, it is also a justification for the system of exploitation in which we live. But how valid is it?

To begin, it’s fair to say that if human nature was actually an obstacle to social change, we would still live in a society based on outright chattel slavery. At best, society would have stopped its development in the Middle Ages. If this were the case, we certainly would not be debating this issue! We would be exhausted by a life of misery and slavery, subjected to constant physical violence (torture, rape) and forced labor, with the only hope to hold onto being death like that of a machine: worn by constant use. At best we would be peasants chained to the land of a lord, starving and crushed under taxes, with the landlords and the clergy living in extravagant excess while the surpluses we produce go rotten in their barns.

To imply that there never has been and will never be any significant social change or revolution is simply dishonest. And that’s without mentioning the significant progress that the bourgeois democratic revolution allowed, whether formal equality for women and African Americans, the criminalization of child labor, access to education, etc.

If we follow the argument of our detractors, it seems that the closest expression of the “cruel, selfish and individualistic human nature” seems not to be bourgeois democracy, but slavery. This demonstrates the failure of that argument. Capitalism has not always existed and it won’t last forever. The social and economic relationships change; society as a whole is constantly moving, and history shows that it is the contradiction between the dispossessed and those who own everything that propels it.

In fact, individualism and selfishness come more from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology (accumulation of wealth, personal success) than from human nature itself. A person’s thinking has more to do with the material conditions in which they and the social class to which they belongs. Those who profit from exploitation will always argue that it is part of human nature... To argue that individualism and selfishness derive from human nature denies all evidence of altruism which we can see daily —whether the parents who sacrifice for their children, partners who put the welfare of each other before their own. History is full of examples of people struggling and sacrificing themselves in the hope of a better life for theirs: Second World War resisters who fought against the Nazi occupation, French, Russian, Chinese, Indian or Nepalese revolutionaries who fought to the death, facing hunger, torture and disease to give birth to a better world.

That being said, human nature, in any manner whatsoever, never determined the economic system: it is the human needs (food, clothing, housing, etc.) that propel society forward. Satisfaction of the basic needs of the greatest number of people is at the base of any social change. This is neither a matter of altruism or selfishness, but a matter of survival.

Socialism, which will lead to a communist society is not based on altruism; it won’t be a kind of heaven on earth where there will be universal “love and sharing;” it is basically an economic system based on collective ownership and central planning, which tries to satisfy as many human needs. There is nothing impossible about it, just as there was nothing impossible about abolishing slavery or feudalism.