Keita's useful article was, in turn, a response to Zhang Boshu's earlier (1987) "Marxism and Human Sociobiology" A Comparative Study from the Perspective of Modem Socialist Economic Reforms", also in this journal. Boshu had originally raised the question of whether sociobiology and Marxism could be combined to generate a new theory of human social behavior that would be both able to explain why other communist experiments, such as those in the USSR, eastern Europe, and China seem to have failed. Boshu's argument suggests that sociobiological theory, with its emphasis on selfishness as an innate (biologically based) component of human "nature", explains these failures: oldstyle Marxists had an unrealistic (non-biological) view of how selfless, or altruistic, human beings could be. Presumably, an understanding of sociobiology can correct this defect by showing how the selfish side of our nature must be accepted. Such acceptance can pave the way for a more realistic kind of communism. Keita's critique of Boshu's reinterpreted Marxism is right on the mark, but leaves untouched one of the problems encountered in all discussions of "human nature": the meanings of terms such as "altruism" (or "selflessness") and "selfishness."
The basic problem as I see it is that the terms "altruism" and "selfishness" have acquired their meanings in the highly competitive culture of western capitalism, and hence have come to refer to two quite distinct, and opposite, human behaviors. "Selfish" means seeking one's own advantage ahead of others, while "altruism" means putting the advantages of others ahead of one's self. Furthermore, long before modem sociobiology came on the scene, it was the received wisdom of capitalism (with some heavy input from Christianity) that the "selfish" side of human nature was "natural," innate, or basic, while more civilized behavior such as "altruism" had to be learned or grafted onto it. Sociobiology became merely the casting of these concepts in the genetic and evolutionary language of post-synthesis Darwinism.
Marx and Engels, however, rejected such simplistic notions of "human nature," believing it was not a fixed entity but malleable and capable of an evolution (social, not biological) of its own. The problem with Boshu's attempt