Sailors are some hard working people. It doesn't matter what their rate is: you could be a cook or an Information Technician. Every sailor is first a sailor, and their specialty second. Many of the jobs and qualifications are universal for all sailors, and these things give sailors common experiences that bond them together.

Sailors must work together.  Living on a ship requires living in tight spaces with lots of other people. So many aspects of ship life are, by necessity, communal. Ship life influences the way sailors think about life, both philosophically and politically.

Sailors aboard aircraft carriers Midway, Coral Sea, Constellation, Forrestal and Kitty Hawk, among others, organized mass rebellions against racism and the Vietnam War

I had a conversation with my friend Greg on deployment about the current state of capitalism and possibilities of replacing it with another system. Greg told me there couldn't be societies better than our capitalist one. But instead of justifying why capitalism is the best system (and trying to explain away all its problems), he wanted to shoot holes through the idea of a system that could replace capitalism.

Want to live alone and away from everything?

Greg mentioned that communism focuses too much on community and doesn't accommodate those who wish to live on land alone and away from everything. We talked about how a person recognizes herself as an individual through her community, and more generally through her society, in which she lives and learns. 

Her individuality, and even her values that praise individuality, are largely a product of her culture. And culture stems from how society produces for itself. It's not a coincidence, for instance, that culture in slave society held beliefs that some people were inherently inferior to others.

Why do challenging work if no money's involved?

Greg's next issue was that a communal society lacks incentives for people to pursue the extensive training needed for complicated skills, like medicine and engineering. Greg started with a philosophical claim about human nature. He claimed that an essential feature of our nature is to be greedy. Justifying arguments with human nature claims, however, is a shady business, since they're notoriously inconclusive.

One person may propose that humans are naturally greedy and then cites examples from her experience; another person claims we are naturally altruistic and also cites examples from her experience. We could also propose, instead of assuming a static human nature, that our nature largely corresponds to the society and historical time period in question.

But more often than not, claiming that a characteristic is inherently natural, as in saying "she has god-given talent" or "she is greedy by nature," serves more to discourage discussion and investigation than it does to help us understand our latent capabilities.

If we consider Native Americans living in North America during the 1600s, for example, their communal society and its corresponding ideas conflict with the claim that humans are naturally greedy. But if we consider businessmen, like Donald Trump, who understand people as either wealthy or lazy, then it's no surprise they see humans as inherently greedy.

When we suggest that greed is part of human nature, we have to ask ourselves how much of that claim stems from ideas we absorb from capitalism. Ideas like these strengthen the status quo and make progress more difficult.

Maintaining the status quo of capitalism makes sense to the few people who benefit from the system. Of course, the rest of us make up the working class, and we would all benefit from a communist society that places our interests first.