We all know the argument that profit motive is part of human nature is false. Yet I’m still not sure why capital owners pursue profits. Is it the difference of self-interest vs collective interest? If so then wouldn’t that enforce the argument on human nature? Or am I missing a crucial aspect of the Capitalist system? I’m genuinely wondering.

Edit: Sorry for not being able to answer all of the comments, the blocklist of my instance sadly won’t let me see all of the comments.

  •  altair222   ( @altair222@beehaw.org ) 
    2•1 year ago

    To that i want to express that the “few” people that we are talking about that pursue profit could literally be any of us, for any number of variables affecting us. These arent some different subspecies of humans we are talking about, theyre just humans whose will was to seek profit, a desire that could have been inspired for any number of reasons.

    The same reasons that could have inspired it in you or me, In any socialist, anarchist or a communist if we were born in a certain environment. The said environment doesnt need to be capitalistic in its existence for it to inspire profit motive. One has to ask, what inspired the first capitalist to seek profit. A lot of questions arise from this very question: what is a capitalist, is there a “first” capitalist? does capitalistic endeavour exist in a spectrum?.

    This is pan-determinism im referring to. And if a human like you and me can be put in an environment with variables that may inspire capitalistic pursuit in us (even if that environment’s economy doesnt rely on capitalism), albeit to a much lower degree (which may or may not escalate with time), how can we not call this pursuit as a part, or for a better word: an element, of human nature.

    •  redtea   ( @redtea@lemmygrad.ml ) 
      3•1 year ago

      Not just anyone. Only capitalists. Or, rather, only those who own the means of production within a commodity producing society. In capitalism, those owners are organised as a class. The profit motive is what drives that class, not humans in general.

      I must reiterate that we’re talking at cross purposes. I’m saying that profit only exists where there is commodity production. If we cannot agree on that, we won’t agree about much else. Before commodity production, there was no concept of profit, and there could be no concept of a profit motive, hence humans could not be motivated by profit before they began to produce commodities.

      As for your questions relating to the ‘first’ capitalist, you may want to read:

      • Marx, Capital, vol I, Part 8 ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation’;
      • Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View;
      • Cedric J Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism; and
      • Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism.

      You will find some support for some of the ideas that you’re talking about in these works, relating to the difficulty of pointing to a precise date at which humans began to be motivated by profit (which is impossible to pinpoint). You will also find a rejection of the argument that the profit motive is part of human nature and why. Mainly, this rejection lies in the claim that everything is historically contingent—which follows logically from an historical materialist world outlook. That will support some of your ideas but it will also challenge your main argument about what human nature is and about how we know what we know about capitalism.

      For analyses on why and how profit is related to commodity production, try:

      • Marx, ‘Wages, Price and Profit’ (short and sweet); and
      • Capital, vol I, chapters 1–3 (comprising ‘Part One: Commodities and Money’—well-known as the driest part of Capital but it’s perhaps the most crucial part, too).
        •  redtea   ( @redtea@lemmygrad.ml ) 
          2•1 year ago

          You’re very welcome, and I’m glad you’ve taken my comments in the spirit in which I wrote them. I wasn’t trying to be awkward and you are making some good points. I’m happy to keep talking if want to discuss the sources I suggested.

          You might also really enjoy David Harvey’s Rebel Cities. He’s a geographer, so he engages with some of your ideas directly. He’s not arguing about human nature, but he takes this notion of profit and commodities and runs with it to see how it shapes cities and how cities shape capitalism.

          The book introduces many concepts of historical materialism. It’s dialectical, but Harvey does not use much jargon. Okay, he uses some jargon, but he is good at explaining his terms and using examples. You can see this in the example quote below (at the end of this comment).

          One aspect of the book you might like is his criticism of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation. Harvey argues that a better term is ‘appropriation by dispossession’, which is an ongoing process. This has implications for how we understand modern capitalism, its origins, and its effects on human behaviour.

          I read Harvey before any of the other texts cited in my previous comment, and although those other texts are complex, they were easier to read because I could fit the new ideas into the imagery that Harvey provides (he’s good at painting the picture). I also watched the first few videos in his lecture series on Capital, vol I before reading the text myself. These are on YouTube and were very helpful for me.

          A quote that may pique your interest, from Harvey, Rebel Cities, p.5:

          From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon of some sort, since sur­pluses have been extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while control over the use of the surplus typically lies in the hands of a few (such as a religious oligarchy, or a warrior poet with imperial ambi­tions). This general situation persists under capitalism, of course, but in this case there is a rather different dynamic at work. Capitalism rests, as Marx tells us, upon the perpetual search for surplus value (profit). But to produce surplus value capitalists have to produce a surplus product. This means that capitalism is perpetually producing the surplus product that urbanization requires. The reverse relation also holds. Capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it perpetually produces. In this way an inner connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. …

          Let us look more closely at what capitalists do. They begin the day with a certain amount of money and end the day with more of it (as profit). The next day they have to decide what to do with the surplus money they gained the day before. They face a Faustian dilemma: reinvest to get even more money or consume their surplus away in pleasures. The coer­cive laws of competition force them to reinvest, because if one does not reinvest then another surely will. For a capitalist to remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to make even more surplus. Successful capitalists usually make more than enough both to reinvest in expansion and satisfy their lust for pleasure. But the result of perpetual reinvest­ment is the expansion of surplus production. Even more important, it entails expansion at a compound rate—hence all the logistical growth curves (money, capital, output, and population) that attach to the history of capital accumulation.

          The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption. …