It seems that most of the time, my discussions with people about socialism and communism end up on the topic of "but people are inherently bad, or at least a few people are, and will always take advatange of others. Even during natural disorders, some go steal everything in the stores while other help strangers"

I always have a hard time arguing that human nature depend on the environment, that it takes a few generations, and that there is probably always going to be violence but it's marginal and can be taken care of.

What main ideas am I missing? And how to argue about this and respond to this central idea that refrain a lot of liberals?

Thank you!

If you have any theory that you want to point at, that would also be great

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[–] 19 points 2 weeks ago

You don't argue against it. You argue it away.

Human nature doesn't matter, it's irrelevant to the question of communism.

Look, let's just look at history. Capitalism started in the 1600s. If capitalism was human nature, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years to show up?

I can agree that the nature of humans includes all of their behaviors. How could it not? It's not like I believe the behaviors of humans come from aliens or something. Of course everything any human has ever done is inherently a potential within the natural human animal. That's true.

But every single system of society has always had to deal with that. Do you imagine communism is just a couple of naive bullet points? Is that what you think communism is? That's not real. You don't have a half-dozen successful communist revolutions, pull almost a billion people out of poverty, set the world record for industrialization speed running industrialization twice, and defeat the Nazis on a paper thin wish list form of government. Communism would never have left the page and no one would know Marx's name if communism didn't account for human nature. Even Marx himself said that there's no way to run a society that relies entirely on everyone's good will and voluntary cooperation out of altruism. He knew that the only way for people to cooperate is if it served their needs more than competing did and he showed mathematicallly how that was true.

So yeah, fine, human nature, whatever. It's irrelevant to the specific system we use. All systems everywhere will always account for human nature because creating systems of government is literally in our nature and whenever a system goes against our nature long enough we will destroy it.

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