The Collectivists were right: we're not as selfish as we think

Stories of greed and ego bombard us. But a new study shows that humans are inherently good.

A study by the Common Cause Foundation, due to be published next month, reveals two transformative findings. The first is that a large majority of the 1,000 people they surveyed – 74% – identifies more strongly with unselfish values than with selfish values. This means that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty, forgiveness and justice than in money, fame, status and power. The second is that a similar majority – 78% – believes others to be more selfish than they really are. In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about other people’s minds.

The religion of capitalism

From Work: Capitalism. Economics. Resistance

Having become merchandise themselves, workers consume merchandise to exert power the only way they can. Once there is nothing to compare it against, purchasing ceases to be a necessary evil and becomes a sacred act; in the religion of capitalism, in which financial power is equated with social value and spending is thus proof of worth, it is a form of communion. The store is the temple in which the act of buying affirms the consumer's place in society. Much of our leisure time is made up of rituals in which spending money itself is the point: it is what qualifies an activity as having a good time or going on a date.

What is dialectical materialism?

A simple explanation of Marx's dialectical materialism:

A dialectic is a conflict or a contradiction.

Hegel's philosophy is applied to history. He thought that history was the process and formation of what he called a 'spirit' which is like the sum of knowledge, truth , reason. We could say 'zeitgeist' which is the spirit of the age. Hegel asserted that the spirit of one age (thesis) eventually comes against or creates its opposite (antithesis) and the clash of the two creates a new age (synthesis). And the conflict between these forms the new thesis which meets its antithesis forms a synthesis and so on until humanity reaches the pinnacle of absolute truth.

This idea is a lot like religions or other philosophies like stoicism as it makes it easier to deal with evil and horrible events because you can view it as progress towards a greater future. Marx was a Hegelian which means he followed this line of thinking about the dialectic. But instead of applying it to an abstract concept of history, he applied it to matter (stuff that exists). He was a materialist. Strictly, he placed more emphasis on the influence of material things - like the distribution of goods, resources and money. Marx saw a disparity in ownership and control of these goods. On one side he saw the upper classes, the 'Bourgeoisie', who were the owners of most of the resources (factories during industrialization) and on the other side he saw the lower classes who had fewer goods and powers (the 'proletariat').

Using Hegel's method, Marx interpreted this material relationship in terms of the dialectic (conflict or contradiction). With Hegel, the spirit of the age would go in conflict with another new spirit of the age until a new spirit of the age emerges better informed to tackle new conflicts and so on. With Marx, the 'spirit of the age' is seen as systems defining our material relationship with one another (how we transfer goods between ourselves). For Marx, the first spirit of the age would have been Feudalism which was a system of monarchs and peasants. The opposite of that would be capitalism which is a system of owners of goods (principally the 'means of production') and the people who worked for them. Theoretically, out of this conflict of thesis and antithesis would emerge as the synthesis which Marx called Communism. Communism is a system in which everyone owns the goods and everyone contributes according to their ability and takes according to their needs.

So in sum, Hegel's idea was highly abstract. It laid out that ideas go from being thesis (in itself) to antithesis (out of itself) to synthesis (in and for itself).

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