There's a good quote by British philosopher Andrew Collier: "To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough"

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.

It's the human nature of empathy, socialisation and collaboration that allowed us to survive as a species as we know it; including the passing on and development of knowledge and technology within a generation, and from one generation to the next so we don't start from scratch each time. We survived despite our selfishness (as defined limited to the ingratiation of self at the expense of society) not soley because of it.

Capitalism itself tends towards the socialisation of labour, socialism takes it the next step forward and socialises the surplus value.

That's the science of human nature, anthropology and politcal economy in a nutshell. (If you want to go further I would suggest the Dialectical Biologist by Lewis and Lewontin).

Capitalism promotes sociopathy to be the axiom of governance whereas a scientific socialist society harnesses any spectrum of sociopathy towards the overall good of the proleteriat. They can't fathom it in the same way sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, even when you see it before your very eyes (eg there's a litany of youtube videos of liberals glazing China but unable to relay that it is because of marxism-leninism).

So they misconstrue what surivival of fitness is, what evolution is, and draw metaphysical parallels with biological "competition" to their fantasy of a free market and then dare to say you're the unscientific one.

It is human nature to force the fascist to face the wall. It is also human nature for that fascist to exist. We are only demonstrating which nature of human will win in the end.

Dialectical and historical materialism - Stalin https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Dialectical_and_historical_materialism

"Do you steal? Do you knowingly hurt people for personal profit? Why not? isn't that the 'human nature' that capitalism promotes? Greed and self centeredness are not human nature. Human nature is social. Antisocial behavior is not human nature. Greedy sociopaths just keep repeating the lie that everyone is as sick as they are so they can get away with stealing and hurting people."

people are inherently bad...and will always take advatange of others

a good way to answer would be imo: "and because of that we should defend a way of life that promoves taking advantage of others?" or "the voluntary agreement in capitalism between the boss and the employee is a fallacy like the illusion of choice when a mugger gives you to choose between your money or your life"

Selfish behavior is learned behavior. It is learned from the material conditions in which people live. That's why most of the wealthy people behave avariciously. This behavior can also be unlearned. It's basic psychology. You get more of the behavior that is rewarded.

The way people think is shaped by the way people live, and the way we produce and distribute in society is the driving force here. People are only selfish to this degree because capitalism is based on such a process, whereas earlier societies before class struggle were based on mutual cooperation. We can remake ourselves by moving to a classless society.

I think it helps to be able to point at AES (actually existing socialism) states, like China's. Note that China does have police, they do enforce the working class vanguard party being in control, they do punish (sometimes severely) people who abuse positions of power. Communism is not the absence of corrupt behavior and transitioning to communism is a process, not the press of a button.

That said, arguments about inevitability of human nature are usually varying degrees of historically illiterate/misinformed. People have not acted identically in every society and societal structure, neither right now across countries, nor across time.

Dialectical and historical materialism teaches us that people act in relation to the material they are immersed in, not irrespective of it. This is not to say their actions are purely mechanical, with no autonomy (they also have an inner decision-making world, which is both its own set of behaviors and also impacted by the internalizing of the external, from upbringing, culture, etc.). But what it does mean is that, for example, if you lock people in a room and say "You can't eat unless you compete with others in the room for dominance over who gets how much of the limited food and if you try to share evenly, you will lose the food," some people are going to start fighting each other, sooner or later. That's sort of an oversimplified microcosm of what capitalism can be like. People respond most viscerally to what they need and what it takes to get what they need, so when a society is built on perverse incentives and manufactured competition, people are going to be more brutal and individualistic.

As you say, transitioning away from something like this that is embedded can take generations because there is also the belief/culture/norms layer of things that exists prior to a change in society and its incentives. This is key to what marxism-leninism is about. That you can't seize power, press the communism button, and abolish all suffering overnight. So you need a vanguard who can manage the transition, without counterrevolutionary forces reversing your efforts; transitioning both from one material base of society to another and one ideas layer superstructure of society to another. Inner and outer world, to put it one way.

Next time he argues like that, talk about material conditions ask him "If all your needs were met and you could afford the things you want, would you steal?"

You can ask questions about why do "bad" people do "bad" things. For example, why do people steal from stores? Would they steal stuff if they could afford it? Would people take advantage over others if there was a way to take advantage without hurting other people?

Or you can mention some counterexamples, like why don't people steal the free handkerchiefs at tables?

Aside from all the great comments here already, I've also seen it put like this:

Communism is a social-economic-political system designed to put people first and improve everyone's life. This is (after the revolution at least) a systemic and structural thing, not a choice of individuals. You can be awful and selfish, but you'll either be punished for it or it will end up helping society anyway.

By the same logic, someone who genuinely wants working people's lives to improve under capitalism isn't going to get anywhere. The entire system stands against pro-social choices.

Those are the negative feedbacks, the positive ones are that the people who uplift others will themselves be uplifted in a communist society. In capitalist societies those who are the most selfish and sociopathic are successful by the definition of the system and are promoted by it.

We're a social species, as long as we have the means and the ability to recognize the "bad" we can do something about it.

human nature is neither good nor evil. because man at birth is like a blank sheet of paper as taught by john locke and islam.

human become good and evil because:

• the conditions they feel. people who are full will not steal food, people do not dare to steal if the law is enforced.
• people around them. people in love will obey their partner's wishes.
• education.
• their own decisions. some people become evil because of their own desires.

in addition, the purpose of knowing human nature is not to give up but to improve conditions.

This really isn’t about “liberals”, it’s about the individual liberals and their characteristics. For example Black liberals don’t really use the human nature argument because Black people used to be property very recently with the excuse of human nature. You will most likely exclusively argue this with White men who will not listen to you because they will easily denote you to an emotional natural slave or an emotional foid…

If you try to point to examples of high trust societies they will say it’s because those countries lack immigrants/are homogeneous. If you think you caught them by pointing out that the USSR was high trust and so is China, they will tell you that they admire those countries for being racially homogeneous, anti-feminist (Erroneous belief).

I am exhausted just from thinking about this argument but best of luck to you comrade and I hope the comments have some insights

I think you could also talk about how human nature wasn't always there. Like, if you go back in time enough, humans were just fish in the ocean that -- through material conditions -- evolved their current "nature".

So, be a scientist, I guess. Greed is due to the necessity of hoarding scarce resources for later use, violence is a tool for the protection of the self and their group etc.