Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

HIRED GOODS INSTEAD OF PROPERTY 373
questionable. For it would above all be a society which would produce a
considerable resentment among its members with every new generation.
Enough tensions are generated already, as psychoanalysis has shown,
when society exerts control only over the primary sexual drives during
childhood and adolescence, the time of socialization and the development
of identity. But if the urge for property also represents a natural,
primary and universal desire in man, then a form of society that
equipped the superego with commandments prohibiting private property
would be extremely distasteful to the individual.
Significantly, in his behavioural studies based on depth psychology on
the personality of native members of the kibbutz, Spiro found numerous
signs of ambivalent feelings towards the collective, of resentment and of
bitterness. 16 It is certainly no coincidence that in many kibbutzim today,
people confess to a desire for private property and privacy which would
have been regarded by the founders as rank heresy. In addition, there is
the fact that the kibbutz movement, which must be seen as the only
large-scale 'utopian' experiment ever genuinely to have sought to abolish
private property, has obviously begun to stagnate and, if only from the
viewpoint of population, can hardly now be considered as the nucleus of,
or model for, a new epoch.
Hired goods instead o!property
In 1959, when the Soviet Union had already set its course unequivocally
in the direction of private property and a consumer society, one of the
younger officials, a protege of Khrushchev's power machine, Komsomol
leader Semichastny, was to declare at the 21 st Party Congress that
'manifestations of egoism and individualism, as well as other remnants
of the psychology and morality of private property owners, must be
eradicated in the Soviet Union.' Semichastny's proposed method was as
follows:
From his earliest days we say to the child: That's your toy, that's your
book, that's your bicycle. When he grows up he says: That's my car, that's
my country house, that's my motor-bike. We ought increasingly to introduce
16 M. Spiro, op. cit., pp. 367 f.