(Photo by Harlan Harris.)
Eric Michael Johnson wrote the following article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine.
Eric is a doctoral student in the history of science at the University
of British Columbia. His research examines the interplay between
evolutionary biology and politics.
A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that
Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and
inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the
corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few,
produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s
ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man argued that the human species
had succeeded because of traits like sharing and compassion. “Those
communities,” he wrote, “which included the greatest number of the most
sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of
offspring.” Darwin was no economist, but wealth-sharing and cooperation
have always looked more consistent with his observations about human
survival than the elitism and hierarchy that dominates contemporary
corporate life.
Corporate culture imposes uniformity,
mandated from the top down, throughout the organization. But the
cooperative—the financial model in which a group of members owns a
business and makes the rules about how to run it—is a modern institution
that has much in common with the collective tribal heritage of our
species.
Nearly 150 years later, modern science has verified Darwin’s early
insights with direct implications for how we do business in our society.
New peer-reviewed research by Michael Tomasello, an American
psychologist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has synthesized three
decades of research to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory of
human cooperation. What can we learn about sharing as a result?
Tomasello holds that there were two key steps that led to humans’
unique form of interdependence. The first was all about who was coming
to dinner.
Approximately two million years ago, a fledgling species
known as
Homo habilis emerged on the great plains of Africa. At
the same time that these four-foot-tall, bipedal apes appeared, a period
of global cooling produced vast, open environments. This climate change
event ultimately forced our hominid ancestors to adapt to a new way of
life or perish entirely. Since they lacked the ability to take down
large game, like the ferocious carnivores of the early Pleistocene, the
solution they hit upon was scavenging the carcasses of recently killed
large mammals. The analysis of fossil bones from this period has
revealed evidence of stone-tool cut marks overlaid on top of carnivore
teeth marks. The precursors of modern humans had a habit of arriving
late to the feast.
However, this survival strategy brought an entirely new set of
challenges:
Individuals now had to coordinate their behaviors, work
together, and learn how to share. For apes living in the dense
rainforest, the search for ripe fruit and nuts was largely an individual
activity. But on the plains, our ancestors needed to travel in groups
to survive, and the act of scavenging from a single animal carcass
forced proto-humans to learn to tolerate each other and allow each other
a fair share. This resulted in a form of social selection that favored
cooperation: “Individuals who attempted to hog all of the food at a
scavenged carcass would be actively repelled by others,” writes
Tomasello, “and perhaps shunned in other ways as well."
This evolutionary legacy can be seen in our behavior today,
particularly among children who are too young to have been taught such
notions of fairness. For example, in a 2011 study published in the
journal Nature, anthropologist Katharina Hamann and her colleagues found
that 3-year-old children share food more equitably if they gain it
through cooperative effort rather than via individual labor or no work
at all. In contrast, chimpanzees showed no difference in how they shared
food under these different scenarios; they wouldn’t necessarily hoard
the food individually, but they placed no value on cooperative efforts
either. The implication, according to Tomasello, is that human evolution
has predisposed us to work collaboratively and given us an intuitive
sense that cooperation deserves equal rewards.
The second step in Tomasello’s theory leads directly into what kinds
of businesses and economies are more in line with human evolution.
Humans have, of course, uniquely large population sizes—much larger than
those of other primates. It was the human penchant for cooperation that
allowed groups to grow in number and eventually become tribal
societies.
Humans, more than any other primate, developed psychological
adaptations that allowed them to quickly recognize members of their own
group (through unique behaviors, traditions, or forms of language) and
develop a shared cultural identity in the pursuit of a common goal.
"The result,” says Tomasello, “was a new kind of interdependence and
group-mindedness that went well beyond the joint intentionality of
small-scale cooperation to a kind of collective intentionality at the
level of the entire society.”
What does this mean for the different forms of business today?
Corporate workplaces probably aren’t in sync with our evolutionary roots
and may not be good for our long-term success as humans. Corporate
culture imposes uniformity, mandated from the top down, throughout the
organization. But the cooperative—the financial model in which a group
of members owns a business and makes the rules about how to run it—is a
modern institution that has much in common with the collective tribal
heritage of our species. Worker-owned cooperatives are regionally
distinct and organized around their constituent members. As a result,
worker co-ops develop unique cultures that, following Tomasello’s
theory, would be expected to better promote a shared identity among all
members of the group. This shared identity would give rise to greater
trust and collaboration without the need for centralized control.
Moreover, the structure of corporations is a recipe for worker
alienation and dissatisfaction. Humans have evolved the ability to
quickly form collective intentionality that motivates group members to
pursue a shared goal. “Once they have formed a joint goal,” Tomasello
says, “humans are committed to it.”
Corporations, by law, are required
to maximize profits for their investors. The shared goal among corporate
employees is not to benefit their own community but rather a distant
population of financiers who have no personal connection to their lives
or labor.
However, because worker-owned cooperatives focus on maximizing value
for their members, the cooperative is operated by and for the local
community—a goal much more consistent with our evolutionary heritage. As
Darwin concluded in The Descent of Man, “The more enduring social
instincts conquer the less persistent instincts.” As worker-owned
cooperatives continue to gain prominence around the world, we may
ultimately witness the downfall of Carnegie’s “law of competition” and a
return to the collaborative environments that the human species has
long called home.
BEST COMMENT (community rating)
The basis of this research is
entirely consistent with Marx's historical materialist methodology. In
order to make history, humans must first live. In order to live they
must labor. Human labor must continually alter nature's materials into
forms suitable for satisfying needs and wants. It's nearly impossible
that an individual can produce all of the use values necessary for
his/her survival.
Therefore, there must be cooperation in production
and a mutual transfer of the resulting use values. That is, the
material production and reproduction of a society requires that there
must be a social division of labor, i.e., society's total labor is
allocated to qualitatively different productive activities in specific
quantities and proportions. Society's material production and
reproduction of life requires that humans cooperate with each other and
mutually transfer the results of their productive activities.
Marx from the Introduction to "A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy," "The further back we trace the course of history,
the more does the individual, and accordingly also the producing
individual, appear to be dependent and to belong to a larger whole. At
first, the individual in a still quite natural manner is part of the
family and of the tribe which evolves from the family; later he is part
of a community, of one of the different forms of the community which
arise from the conflict and the merging of tribes...Production by a
solitary individual outside society – a rare event, which might occur
when a civilised person who has already absorbed the dynamic social
forces is accidentally cast into the wilderness – is just as
preposterous as the development of speech without individuals who live
together and talk to one another. It is unnecessary to dwell upon this
point further."
And we all should know that Marx projected the future of humans as
one of cooperation and not competition intrinsic to capitalism's bellum
omnium contra omnes.
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