History Through Tinted Spectacles (1952)

From the October 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is evident to anyone who is a student of history, however humble, and who is at the same time interested in trends in modem society, that much effort is being expended in bringing the minds of the public to bear on the so-called glories of the Mediaeval Age.

One can think of a number of reasons for this; first, there is the short-term policy—that of “cashing in" in a box-office sense, on the public’s natural curiosity for things of the past, as is evidenced by the spate of so-called “historical’’ films now being shown throughout the country.

The second and more serious reason for this revival in Mediaevalism and obscurantism is to provide an opiate for a society which is beginning to be restive, and in some cases, resistive to the present conditions of graft and gloom that its “leaders” are continually creating for it. These “leaders” are becoming increasingly aware that society is desperately ill and is heading for another major breakdown. Blame is continually laid at the "other fellow’s” door; it is either the poison of Russian "Communism,” which persists in corrupting the Capitalist Democracies or the poison of Capitalist germ bombs which continue to pour down on the heads of "Communist” countries.

The "free world,” i.e., the countries outside Russian Imperialism but subjected to other brands of the same disorder, are on the one hand building up economic barriers to protect themselves from one another (Britain, Australia, U.S.A. are all devoted to the cause of export whilst frowning on imports), while on the other hand they claim they are forced by the threat of Soviet Imperialism to form military alliances for their mutual protection.

It is plain to see that the world is rapidly dividing into two camps, the one representing the well-known company of actors who have for many years treated the general public with drama after drama—usually tragedy from the audience’s point of view—the other a somewhat newer company, branded as upstarts by the more respected company of stock-brokers, bishops and bankers but nevertheless feared for its lustiness and cleverness born of a study of the weaknesses in the make-up of its adversary. No amount of assurances from either side that both companies can continue to do business without coming to blows should convince us when we realise that it is in the nature of both to expand at the other’s expense. In the meantime the audience is being suitably conditioned by both sides whether it be the hypnotic influence of the Russian political ballet or the sanctified self-righteousness of the Western Capitalist knight errants both striving valiantly in the lists at U.N.O.

Which brings us back to Mediaevalism. It is one of the weapons in the armoury of Capitalist, the idea being to feed the workers on past glories in order to forget present-day problems. It is believed by some that a return to Mediaeval faith and philosophy, to the Mediaeval spirit of adventure and chivalry, will give this wobbling society of ours some "spiritual stability” whatever that may mean.

The lusty infant, Soviet Capitalism, utilises history too. It is more than ever tending to portray Russian history as a means of propaganda to its own and other audiences. It has made its peace with the Church on conditions mutually beneficial to Church and State.

In Britain, where an official State religion helps the Capitalist class in its legislation, abetted by numerous other Christian sects, many faithful Protestants banded in the Protestant League are much perturbed at the swing back to Catholicism on the one hand and to the rash of spiritualist churches on the other. While the latter disease is perhaps the misguided groping of befuddled and dispirited workers for a way out of their daily cares, the former appears to be a deliberate plan to bring the minds of people back to the Mediaeval philosophy of poverty.

The attempt to give the bloody wars in Malaya and Korea a semblance of a new kind of “Knight Errantry” is clearly seen from the public utterances of the leaders of Church and State to whom these wars appear as a holy crusade against “Communist” atheism by the one, as an economic necessity by the other, and as salvation to both from the horrors that may come when the exploited classes of all countries break their fetters.

It is when we really study the Mediaeval scene in its true light that we begin to see how utterly funny the present attempts at re-creation are, funny if they were not so terribly serious, if is time that the exploited masses realised the truth about the so-called glories of the Middle Ages; that it was a time of pestilence, famine and rigid class distinction when no man could get outside the pattern of lighters, prayers and peasants with the latter class supporting the whole Feudal structure on its broad back. The prayers and fighters often allied themselves with one another, as for example during the Fourth Crusade in Palestine. Villehardouin, one of six ambassadors to the Doge of Venice, asked for aid in transporting the Crusaders. He tells of an agreement made in March of the year 1201 —“ Sire, we have come to you on behalf of the noble barons of France who have taken the cross.... they pray for you for God's sake .... to furnish them transports and ships of war." The Doge then tells the ambassadors what aid he is prepared to give and continues, “ . . . and we will do more, we will add fifty galleys for the love of God on condition that of every conquest by sea or land, we shall have one half and you the other ....” While therefore the Venetians were willing to help the Crusade along “for the love of God ” they did not let that great love blind them to a fat share in the booty. The Church was of course extremely interested in the Crusade; the “private" of those days, like some of his counterparts to-day, was only interested in his orders and in the belief that dying in the war for Mother Church was a sure passport to heaven.

So great was the oppression of the serfs by the Chapter of Notre Dame de Paris in the reign of Louis, that Queen Blanche did what many modern philanthropists would do—remonstrated “in all humility" whereto the monks replied that “ they might starve their serfs as they pleased.”

The glorious works of art and architecture, the magnificent cathedrals and palaces, were built not only by the veneration of Christian craftsmen, but out of the sweat of the ignorant and oppressed masses and the blood of the conscript peasant who died fighting holy wars for Christian lords against other Christian lords and even if he did manage to survive the battles alive, lived to supply the wealth with which the members of the late lord's family bribed the Church in order that the period of confinement in purgatory would be lessened.

The progressive thinkers often thought at the peril of their lives if their views were a danger to the existing order. Galileo, who professed the theory of Copernicus that the earth moved round the sun, was forced to recant his scientific belief although earlier, Copernicus had dedicated the same treatise to the Pope. (The Mediaeval Church attracted to herself thinkers and men of learning in order that she might remain the dominating factor, though when she failed at any time she came down with a heavy hand on the blasphemer).

The seamen and explorers of the “Age of Discoveries” were inspired much more by the spur of loot than they were by the spirit of adventure.

It is indeed a fitting comment on the crisis in modern Capitalist society that it must once more revert to a past which it itself burst asunder as being incompatible with the new forms of exploitation and profit-making; that it once again invokes the Medieval spirit on the one hand and piles up super modern weapons on the other.

The writing is on the wall. Capitalism is like the villain in a crime magazine, waiting with bated breath for the stroke of midnight it has nowhere to turn. The world has been grabbed long ago (or almost all of it though various re-distributions go on from time to time, conducted by force or the threat of force as we see in Europe and Asia at the present time). We might remember in this connection the words of Cecil Rhodes, an arch Imperialist to whom the annexation of territories was part of his life blood, “ the world is nearly all parcelled out and what is left of it is bring divided up, conquered and colonised. To think of the stars overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could . . ."

The Christian fighting barons had a faith; the rising Capitalist class had a faith; Cecil Rhodes cleariy had one and we know for a certainty that the Church never lacked a faith. The workers should realise that these faiths, common to them all had to have for practical purposes, a vast army of unthinking automatons to keep them going—first peasants, now wage-workers.

The issue facing the perplexed workers is what to believe in and what to do. They can of course swallow the distortions of the glorious past and live in the Cinema dream world; they can stupify themselves with the various brands of opium turned out by the purveyors of the many religious sects from the State Established to those of humbler but perhaps more exciting causes. They can stop thinking altogether and “concentrate” on placing 14 correct symbols in their proper places on a football coupon, thereby hoping to win a fortune. One thing is plain they cannot go back. They are creatures of the present and must .take the consequences of the present.

Alternatively they can learn to understand Socialism. This will not come as a gift from heaven, neither is it mysteriously inspired nor does it come from “ leaders.” It can only grow from knowledge—a knowledge of the nature of Capitalism and the laws which govern Capitalist society. The only emancipators of the world's toilers will be the toilers themselves. They will then build edifices that will be monuments to those that follow—monuments to men who overcame the last barrier, who understood what freedom meant and having understood, became free.

W.T.B.

Kings & Queens (2025)

Book Review from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens. By David Mitchell, Penguin, 2024

1066 And All That, published in book form in 1930, was a parody on how English history was taught in schools. One of the targets was a history of England as a record of kings and queens, their years of reign and their battles and wars. After the Second World War there was a concerted criticism of this approach from historians — EP Thompson in particular — who argued for a ‘history from below’. One consequence of this criticism was the creation of the GCSE history syllabus in the 1980s. This changed the emphasis from memorising the dates of kings and queens to ‘key skills’ such as empathy. Empathy was an attempt to encourage schoolchildren to imaginatively experience what it was like to live as others lived, such as being a child worker in the cotton factories of mid-nineteenth century Britain. It was controversial, didn’t last long, and the emphasis has shifted back in the other direction.

David Mitchell is a comedian, writer and actor. He has no use for empathy in the study of history. He claims that ‘it’s impossible for a child … to get their head round how different the lives of the people they’re trying to empathise with actually were’. No evidence is offered for ‘impossible’, not even an amusing anecdote of the sort which peppers this book. ‘I’m better with dates, to be honest’, he admits. Mitchell went to a private school, so he might not have done GCSE history. In a book with plenty of autobiographical detail, it’s curious that he doesn’t mention it. So what you do get are a lot of monarchs with a lot of dates and absolutely no history from below. ‘It’s like a soap opera,’ writes Mitchell, ‘It never fucking ends’. He doesn’t refer to Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, but Bennett has a student complaining that history is ‘one fucking thing after another’. This is what can happen when the subject matter lacks context.

If you are after the historical facts, there’s nothing here you can’t get from Wikipedia or Google. Apart from the jokes and one-liners such as his summary of Henry VIII — ‘He was a cunt’, there are some interesting factoids. For instance, according to the Domesday Book of 1086, ten percent of the population of England were slaves. By around 1200, after the Norman invasion, there weren’t any.

Lew Higgins

Materialist Conception of History (1979)

From the Fall 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

Down through the ages there have been various interpretations of history. For example, there are the theories which see in history the working out and realization of some sort of divine plan — like Hegel’s philosophy of history, which sees the whole historical development of society as the realization stage by stage of the so-called Absolute Idea. Again, there are the various theories which see history as moving through “cycles,” every civilization passing by some inescapable necessity through the cycle of rise, plentitude of power and decline — as in Spengler’s Decline of the West or Toynbee’s Studies in History. These are idealist theories and socialists are opposed to them. The idealism of such theories lies in the fact that they see the laws of development of society as a “fate” imposed upon society from outside, so that men and women are mere instruments of fate, the tools of external necessity. If such theories are accepted, then we are driven to fatalism. If what takes place is in the hands of God, or is decreed by fate, or follows by some iron necessity — it makes little difference in practice which you say — then it follows there is little we can do to determine our own destinies for ourselves.

Until the advent of Marx the various interpretations of history might be listed under five headings — religious, political, hero, ideas, and war. The elaborations found under these headings make interesting reading but they all contain serious shortcomings. The war or military interpretation of history, for instance, fails to recognize that war, a phenomenon that has been present in all phases of human development, is a result rather than a cause of events. With the coming of Marx and his theory of the materialist conception of history, history took on new meaning — it became rooted in the material conditions of life.

This interpretation of history holds that in any given epoch the economic relations of society, the means whereby men and women provide for their sustenance, produce, exchange, and distribute the things they regard as necessary for the satisfaction of their needs, exert a preponderating influence in shaping the progress of society and in molding political, social, intellectual and ethical relationships. In his Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, Edward Aveling, Marx’s son-in-law defines this theory :

“The materialist conception of history is that the chief, the fundamental factor in the development of any nation or any society, is the economic factor — that is, the way In which the nation, or the society, produces and exchanges its commodities . . .

"Now, whilst it (the economic factor) appears to be the fundamental one, there are others developed from it and reflexes of it, that also play their parts, acting and reacting upon their parent, the economic factor, and one another. The art, the science, the literature, the religion, the legal and juridical formulae of a country, although they all spring directly from the economic conditions of the country, have to be reckoned with.”

The most complete and most significant statement of the main elements of the materialist conception of history are formulated in Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. There one learns that the subject matter of history is man himself, his economic and social conditions and not his ideas. The relations between men’s material conditions of life and their ideas are described in this general fashion by Marx: It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence which determines their consciousness. William Ebenstein in his Today’s Isms illustrates this concept:

“In a nomadic society . . . horses might be considered the principal means of acquiring and accumulating wealth. From Marx’s viewpoint, this foundation of nomadic life is the clue to its superstructure of law, government and dominant ideas. Thus, Marx would say that those who are the owners of the greatest number of horses in such a nomadic society would also be the political chieftains who make and interpret the law; they are also likely to receive the highest response and deference from the tribe’s members who own no horses. In the realm of ideas, the predominant social and cultural concepts would reflect the dominant economic position of the owners and horses. Even in religion the impact would not be missing. God might, for instance, be represented in the image of a swift and powerful rider, and the concept of divine justice and rule would be, in a sense, an extension and magnification of human justice as determined by the horse-owning chiefs.’’

Even as the above horse-owning class determined the political, social, legal, and cultural institutions in its society, so, too, do we find, on looking back, that the landowners in a settled agricultural society set its society’s values. Today in our industrial society the owners of the means of production are in the saddle and have been for the last two hundred years. No matter the formal and legal facades, this owning class, the capitalist class, rules contemporary society. This class conceives that “the ultimate purpose of the law, education, the press, and artistic and literary creation is to maintain an ideology that is imbued with the sanctity and justice of capitalist property ownership.”

The misrepresentations and distortions of Marx’s writings are legion. They perhaps are paralleled only by the slanders and vilifications on Marx’s person. For instance, critics love to reproach Marx that the materialist conception of history disregards the influence of non-economic factors. This is not so. There is nothing in Marx’s theory to indicate such an assertion, though it is true that he failed sufficiently to safeguard himself against this charge. Engels repeatedly acknowledged that many interacting forces give rise to an historic event. Again, some critics would have one believe that Marx’s “materialism” is but a depiction of man’s wish for monetary gain and comfort, of his desire for material goods, and this charge is sometimes coupled with the distortion that Marx was an advocate of the barracks, that is, the giving up of one’s individuality and entrusting oneself to an all-powerful state bureaucracy. Again not so. Relative to this Erich Fromm writes in Marx’s Concept of Man:

This “description . . . fits almost exactly the reality of present-day Western capitalist society. The majority of people are motivated by a wish for greater material gain, for comfort and gadgets, and this wish is restricted only by the desire for security and the avoidance of risks. They are increasingly satisfied with a life regulated and manipulated, both in the sphere of production and of consumption, by the state and the big corporations and their respective bureaucracies; they have reached a degree of conformity which has wiped out individuality to a remarkable extent They are, to use Marx’s term, impotent ‘commodity men’ serving virile machines. The very picture of mid-twentieth century capitalism is hardly distinguishable from the caricature of Marxist socialism as drawn by its opponents.”

The materialist conception of history is not only a theory about how to interpret history, but also a theory about how to make history. This theory was arrived at by Marx by applying the materialist world outlook to the solution of social problems. And in making this application materialism was no longer just a theory aimed at interpreting the world, of building a society free of the expoitation of man by man.

REN.

History writing (2008)

E. P. Thompson

Pamphlet Review from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal. Edited by Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, 2007. 

 

The clumsy title comes from E. P. Thompson’s phrase to describe the difficulty of writing “history from below.” After the Second World War, a group of Communist Party historians including Thompson, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton set out to bring the experiences of the working class to the fore in the study of history. This was to some extent a reaction to structuralist and functionalist interpretations in which workers’ experiences and abilities to effect social change were down-played or ignored. The most famous example of “history from below” is EP Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class, first published in 1963 and still worth reading. But Thompson’s concept of class is controversial in some quarters:

“If we stop history at any given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and in the end, this is its only definition.”

Some have seen this definition of class as being subjective, but Thompson must be right in saying that class is not simply an economic category but also an historical concept. The working class was not just the product of capitalist social relations or the industrial revolution: “The working class made itself as much as it was made,” wrote Thompson. Writing history from below means not invoking “iron laws” and ignoring the abilities of the working class to effect social change on the one hand, or getting lost in the detail and denying the importance of class on the other hand. This short pamphlet discusses these and other problems in writing history.

Lew Higgins

Marxist Historians (only) (2022)

Book Review from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British Marxist Historians. By Harvey J. Kaye, Zed Books, 2022

This is an update to a book first published in 1984. It’s a study of an influential group of academic historians, but there are wider lessons to be learned. They were mainly active in the second half of the twentieth century. Kaye’s survey is mainly confined to the following writers and books.

Maurice Dobb in Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) wrote on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. For Dobb the ‘bourgeois revolution’ of the seventeenth century provided the necessary foundation for the later Industrial Revolution. Dobb emphasised the role of class struggle in this process.

Rodney Hilton focussed on feudalism and the English peasantry. For instance, in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 there emerged a ‘positive class consciousness’ which ‘was initiated from within peasant society.’ Hilton argued that ‘one of the most important if intangible legacies of mediaeval peasants to the modern world is the concept of a freeman, owing no obligation, not even deference, to an overlord’ (Bond Men Made Free, 1973).

Christopher Hill wrote extensively on the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, though probably his best work is Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530-1780, (1969). The English Revolution was ‘the world turned upside down’. In Hill’s account: ‘Levellers called for political democracy, Diggers for communism, Ranters for free love. Others called in question the common law, the Bible, the existence of heaven and hell, God and the devil’ (John Bunyan and the English Revolution, 1979).

Eric Hobsbawm wrote on workers, peasants and world history. Industry and Empire (1969) is a commercially successful social and economic history of Britain from 1750 to the 1960s. His examination of the development of the modern world, what he called ‘the long nineteenth century’, is divided into three phases: The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, (1975), and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987). These books probably made Hobsbawm Britain’s most famous ‘Marxist’ and historian.

E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is one of the biggest selling non-fiction books in Britain. It is still widely used as a school and university textbook. His statement on the role of the historian was Thompson’s contribution to an understanding of class:

‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan . . . from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.’

In William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) Thompson defended what he called ‘Morrisian-Marxism’. According to Kaye, this is ‘a Marxism transformed by the concerns and values represented in the work of William Morris’. The Poverty of Theory (1978) is Thompson’s attack on the then growing popularity of interpreting Marxism as a form of structuralism.

Kaye pulls together a useful survey of some key Marxist historians and how they grappled with Marxism and history. The trouble was, and remains, their politics. Their collective contribution as historians has been called ‘history from the bottom up’, but their politics can be termed ‘politics from the top down’, and it calls into question their understanding of Marxism. All the above historians were at one time members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

After the suppression of the uprising in Hungary by the Russian military in 1956 all the above resigned from the CPGB – except Hobsbawm and Dobb. Hobsbawm remained in the CPGB until its break-up in 1991. As a cheerleader for the CPGB and the Russian empire, Hobsbawm defended the leading role of the party advocated by Lenin, and dismissed the view that the emancipation of the working class had to be the work of the working class itself – the cornerstone of any Marxian politics. Thompson later tried to justify his CPGB membership by claiming it was part of a ‘Popular Front’ against fascism. But he did not appreciate that his CPGB membership would lend legitimacy to Stalin’s reign of terror. His concern for the lives of ordinary workers did not extend to the working class in Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Later in life, after Thompson had joined the Labour Party, he rebuffed an approach by the Socialist Party to discuss ‘Morrisian-Marxism’.

Lew Higgins

The Critics Criticised – Professor Popper Looks at History pt.3 (1956)

Book Review from the August 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from the July Issue)

Mr. Popper’s own remedy is that men must change their hearts. He takes little note of the fact that hearts themselves are environmental products. Or to put it another way the beliefs, ideals, theories, for which we seek to gain acceptance are themselves products of social development, i.e. they have a growth and history. Indeed it is only by seeing them as patterns of response in an historical process that they become intelligible. Nor are these responses merely subjective as Mr. Popper seems to think but are brought forth by the needs of men and these needs are part of an objective class conditioned situation.

Ideas, theories, doctrines, are always related to the needs of men in some way or other. Social aims and purposes are for that reason never mere abstractions. Never attempts to realise eternal truth but projections of group needs. That is why the demands for justice, equality, progress, have at bottom been the demands of social groups. It is for that reason “the what is” has ever in practise been directly related to “the what ought to be.” The function of “the what ought to be,” has been to mask the “this worldliness” of social ends, as an aspect of “the other worldliness.”

From this it follows that a ruling social section will always define the good in relation to its own needs. But because we live in a changing world the character and content of its needs undergo historical modification. Sometimes a ruling social group will demand more freedom, more equality. At other times they will proclaim against what they term excesses carried out in the name of these. Sometimes they have called for democracy and toleration, at other times for less democracy and less tolerance. In a world in which they are in social control hut cannot control there can be no eternal truths, no fixed values to serve as precepts for final social judgments.

Again it is not true to say that because we cannot know all the ideas which have ever passed through the heads of men or their emotional experiences we cannot know history in any valid or concrete sense. To say that because we do not know everything on a subject we cannot know anything worthwhile, has no more validity in history than any other subject. The ideas Marxism seeks to investigate are the ideas which have brought about significant changes in the social pattern. Not all ideas do this. The various ideas men form in the world in which they live have a greatly varying weight and importance. Many have a purely personal aspect. Some are the outcome of prejudice and attachment. Other ideas are merely cranky. There are ideas which are held one day and discarded the next. And even if we could trace these ideas down to their finest nuances we should find them irrelevant for purposes of historical investigation, for they do not reflect those social forces which are necessary for any major social change.

The point Marxists are interested in, is what gives momentum and power to those ideas which are crucial for social development. The answer is that it is those ideas which are expressions of group interests which are historically effective, for it is these ideas which have been most instrumental in bringing about social change.

Marxism does not, however, view ideas as powers in themselves, capable of conjuring things into existence by pure mental activity. Men can only think within a socially organised continuum. That is why their theories, aims and ends, are moulded by the particular configuration of the society in which they live. It is then a particular historic phase which sets the questions to which men must find the answers. It is because men enter into certain determinate relations with each other that sets the stamp on their interests and activities, and provides the conditions which make their thinking effective.

Mr. Popper, and he is one of legions, accuses Marxism of social determinism. If Marxism insists that a knowledge of the social forces and those impersonal elements which form part of the social structure of society are essential for forming valid judgments, then we plead guilty. Not to know the relevant facts of a situation is not to know effectively and when there is no effective knowledge, there can be no effective action. Where little or nothing can be proved, everything can be believed. That is why any competent diagnosis, whether it concern our social ills or bodily ills, must be brought under the control of the objective data at our disposal. To recognise that there are determinate limits to a situation is to come to grips with that situation. To chose the alternative, necessary, for the best solution of the problems set, is the first step to freedom. Mr. Popper’s contention that Marxism seeks to nullify political action and makes everything dependent on something called inner reality, is non sense.

Yet (on p. 268) he says that we want to know how our troubles are related to the past, in order to progress towards the solution of what we feel and chose to be our main tasks. Thus it seems that vide Mr. Popper “the what is,” definitely links up with “the what was.” This would suggest that even Mr. Popper believes that the connection between the past and present is influenced by causal factors; that there has been development and continuity in human affairs. In that case our interpretation of this development process must be guided by an objective assessment of the available material and not by a subjective judgment based on our particular feelings and thinking. It is the latter which Mr. Popper generally adopts as his criterion for judging history.

When Mr. Popper says we cannot know the past that is true in the sense that the past as the past is physically dead. Yet it is also true that in another sense the past lives on, in so far that elements of the past are always incorporated in some way into the present and just as aspects of the past exist in a reconstituted form in the present, so features of the present will be reconstituted into the fabric of the future. It is because that which has been most significant in the past is linked with the present in a continuous chain of historic events that the structural evolution of human society becomes possible,. To seek to reconstruct this evolution into an intelligible pattern is| the task of historical investigation. In this way it serves as a present guide to our actions. To suggest that Marxism seeks to make men into marionettes moved by a mysterious force called history is merely a pleasantry of Mr. Popper.

Ted Wilmott

(To be continued)

Steven Pinker, the modern Pangloss (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like a fearful angel, you don’t need to tread far into the recent works of Steven Pinker, particularly The Better Angels of our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018), to get the gist of his popular thesis that today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better still, so long as states maintain control and reason triumphs over savage instinct. Better Angels is Bill Gates’s favourite book, and it’s not hard to see why.

The appeal is in the sensationally anti-intuitive optimism and the simplicity of the argument. A clear line is drawn from barbaric prehistory through the murderous Middle Ages all the way to the relatively placid present, in a bid to demonstrate the ‘civilising process’ embodied by states, which has led to universally declining levels of violence. Pinker doesn’t claim it’s a new idea, and indeed bases much of his argument on Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, published in Germany in 1939 (a not-insignificant date, as we shall see).

It’s also an idea with some good prima facie evidence supporting it, at least for Western Europe during the last few centuries, at least for average civilian homicide rates. Few historians would argue that murder rates in this part of the world have not declined substantially over that period.

But zoom out, and the price of this simple linear argument seems to be that all other lines and details have been overlooked, rather like a large-scale geographical map from which all roads and features have been erased, apart from the one single highway that Pinker wants you to follow.

Predictably, this has enraged academic historians, who liken Pinker to a visitor who enters your house in muddy boots and then sticks his feet up on your living room table. Now, frustrated by the fact that ‘Pinker’s message is reaching the masses, and ours is not’, many of these historians, some of them from Pinker’s own Harvard University, have joined forces to deliver a devastating counter-blow (The Darker Angels of our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence, edited by Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale, Bloomsbury, 2022). There are 18 chapters written by experts in pre- and medieval history, early modern Russia and Japan, the Enlightenment, the British Empire, and histories of the environment, sexual violence, race, and the myth of a universal human nature. Some contributors offer a cool and detached evaluation of Pinker’s methodology, while others write with barely concealed rage at his blithe effrontery and cavalier lack of scholarship.

Pinker’s approach to evidence is variously described as shoddy, egregious and cherry-picking. He quotes sources that suit his argument, even if they’re only coffee-table books (like The Great Big Book of Horrible Things), and ignores vast swathes of respectable research that don’t. For instance, the medievalist Sara Butler writes: ‘Pinker has never seen a medieval court record, nor does he understand how the law worked in the Middle Ages… When he measures medieval against modern statistics, he has no idea that they are measuring very different things… without valid statistics, Pinker’s entire argument falls apart’ (p136).

If you ever wondered how Pinker could possibly know the murder rates in medieval times, with its patchy records, or in prehistory, with almost no records, you’ll find academic historians asking exactly the same question. Pinker doesn’t know, he’s guessing, and relying on estimates which are themselves sometimes wildly inflated and ideologically suspect, like those of Catholic missionaries estimating the supposed violence of heathen Native Americans. If you as an archaeologist dug up two Iron Age skeletons, and one had had its head bashed in, you wouldn’t automatically conclude that the murder rate must have been 50 percent. Archaeologist Linda Fibiger certainly wouldn’t. She studied 1,000 human remains from 150 sites spanning 3,000 years and made tentative conclusions on interpersonal violence only for that period and only within that geographical range. Pinker makes continent-wide conclusions based on 21 individuals from one Jutland cemetery (p.115).

What we discover, in chapter after chapter, is that Pinker is massaging the evidence, upwards in the case of the past, to make violence and ‘savagery’ look much worse than it really was, and downwards in the present, to make the world seem more peaceful than it really is. To take one example, he cites one claim that the Spanish Inquisition executed 350,000 Jews in 350 years, which was nearly twice the total population of Jews in Spain during that period (p.128). He also name-checks an eminent researcher but without mentioning the researcher’s own estimate of executions for the same period at around 810, a figure widely considered more reliable. This figure generates its own irony, as it would mean that Pinker’s own ‘civilised’ USA, with 1,526 executions between 1973 and today (p.270), has executed almost twice as many people as the Spanish Inquisition, and in a fifth of the time.

In reality, much of the historical evidence suggests the opposite of what Pinker claims. The Middle Ages was not addicted to cruel executions, which were in fact rare, and most punishments were in the form of fines. Early modern Russia, considered ‘uncouth’ by Western standards, executed far fewer people than its neighbouring European countries, and with less Grand Guignol cruelty. The Enlightenment, rather than civilising society, served to justify unparalleled colonial and racist violence, while excluding whole categories including women from supposedly universal notions of human rights. There’s a pattern to all this, and you can easily find other examples yourself. For instance, the ‘Wild West’ was arguably less violent than the modern USA and had more robust gun laws (bit.ly/3wYwj7S).

Pinker is unashamedly a neo-Hobbesean, arguing that in ‘non-state societies’ we humans are ruled by our inner demons – predation, dominance, revenge, sadism and ideology (‘ideology’ here meaning fascism, Marxism etc, but not his own perspective, which doesn’t count), whereas the benevolence of disinterested elites (like himself) and the ‘gentle commerce’ of capitalism have ‘gifted’ us modern civil liberties and allowed the predominance of our ‘better angels’ including empathy, self-control, a moral sense and reason. At no point does he consider that these modern freedoms had to be fought bitterly for, and in fact sees any social dissent or struggle as counter-productive and ‘de-civilising’.

And here is where Elias, a German Jew writing in 1939, becomes relevant again. His theory of states as a civilising influence presupposed that the state itself was benevolent. Elias ended up doubting his own assumption (p.101) precisely because of what subsequently happened in Europe. Yet Pinker skates over all this, dismissing the Holocaust as a statistical outlier that doesn’t affect his main argument. Awkward details don’t trouble him, as he ‘only travels on the sunny side of the street’ (p.66), trading in ‘comfort history’ and ‘Pinkering’ the evidence (p.305). Though Better Angels, at 800 pages, seems to follow the principle that ‘if you say it enough, it becomes true’ (p.176), Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil – Sparta to Darfur (2007) concludes, in 700 pages, that genocidal violence is as bad today as it’s ever been (p.332). With Pinker, one is irresistibly reminded of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, for whom everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Finally, modern historians are suspicious of linear historical narratives, because linearity always involves leaving stuff out. Nowadays they prefer more ‘webby’ approaches which reflect the diverse and often contradictory nature of the evidence. Marx the dialectician would have approved of this approach, so it’s a shame that one or two contributors in this book see him as part of the problem, a linear teleological thinker plotting a deterministic path to the future. This is to take the same one-sided view of Marx that Pinker takes of history. In all probability, judging from the withering scorn that Marx levelled at the half-baked and self-serving bourgeois thinkers of his own day, he would have given Pinker a roasting that even the sharpest condemnations in this collection would struggle to match.

Paddy Shannon

The Critics Criticised – Professor Popper Looks at History pt.2 (1956)

Book Review from the July 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from the June Issue)

Mr. Popper’s own evaluation of history can hardly claim any scientific pretentions. In the main he largely garbles the anti-Christian Nietzsche’s “power drive theory of history.” With Mr. Popper this power drive reveals itself in the history of political power which, he says, “has been elevated into world history.” This political power drive theory is explained by Mr. Popper as the impulse to worship or be worshipped. He repeats Schopenhauer that man’s besetting sin is making power synonymous with success. This worship of power it seems is due to fear (p. 272) although (same page) he appears to have changed his mind and made the power drive one of instinct which in that case makes him a Bertrand Russell adherent. This, then, is Mr. Popper’s theoretical contribution to the understanding of our times. One might add in passing that to grasp the significance of political power or any aspect of social power lies not in assumptions about some neurotic impulse or instinct but in an analysis of the historical conditions and social formations which explain not only the nature of political power but why different societies have thrown up different forms of political organisations. When this is done the power drive theory of history becomes supernumerary.

Mr. Popper has quite mistaken notions as to what constitutes history. For him, technocracy, political power, historical records, etc., are history. In fact they are not history, but the outcome of history. History itself is the story of man—not this man or that man but socially organised man in pursuit of his ends under given and determinate conditions. Since the passing of primitive society the pursuit of these ends has taken place via the agency of social groups whose aims and interests have been conflicting ones. It is by an examination of these social productive relations—the economic factor—that we reveal the rise and fall of institutions, traditions, politics, ideologies and other cultural phenomena and thus allow a theory of historical causation to become possible.

Marxism is an attempt then to show the prime causal factors in the evolution of human society. In spite of Mr Popper’s efforts to show that Marxism believes there are mysterious impersonal forces in history which shape man’s destiny, it is no more mysterious than other evolutionary concepts which seek to account for development in other fields.

Men make history Marxists contend and what some men have made, other men can understand. In this way history becomes an intelligible process and the past capable of being reconstructed by the same pattern of enquiry which marks other fields of scientific investigation. In the light of this, Mr. Popper’s remarks that men have only faked history seems more than a little foolish.

Mr. Popper is unoriginal enough to seek to be original and daring and too often succeeds in being merely dull and pretentious. He plays to the gallery by announcing that all the history which exists, i.e., our history of the great and powerful, is a shallow comedy. He brings in the usual gods whose function it is apparently to mock at human affairs and they indulge in the conventional guffaws at our expense. At other times he converts the comedy into crude melodrama by assuring us that the history which is advertised as the history of mankind is but the history of international crime and mass murder (p. 270).

Mr. Popper’s views on history seem to waver between a cloak and dagger conspiracy and another version of the fall of man. Neither of them can validly explain the actual evolution of human society: Why it has pointed in a determinate direction, viz., primitive society, slavery, feudalism, capitalism. And why in that order.

In spite of the nonsense talked about by Mr. Popper, Isaiah Berlin and others, that “historic inevitability” is another name for an automatic impersonal force which supposedly operates in history, Marx’s views on history were sharp and clear. Human effort and struggle he held were the means which brought about the historically determined. He never sought to make history a mystery. Indeed he claimed that history had no greater reality than that which could be discovered by the analysis of actual historical events. While unlike Hegel he never believed that history was the outcome of logic and reason, he nevertheless believed that it could be rationally explained.

Marx had then a view point on history. He did not believe it could be explained by abstractions like power drives or impulses. Nor it might be added by spirit, nature or some economic first cause. For Marx history had no purpose which was not the purpose of man. No goals which are not human goals. It is men who will to do things. But what men will is always contramenious with elements in the social situation which are unwilled. Because society is a continuous process, men always find themselves in a set of conditions which is given. It is these conditions which give the scope and set the stamp on particular social aims and goals. When and whether they will be effectively realised will depend upon the objective possibilities within the social situation. It is true for instance that Socialism must be willed by men but it is not until a particular set of social relations namely capitalism, appear, can there arise the objective means for Socialism to be realised. Marx’s theory of historic causation explains then why men in different historic phases seek to achieve certain ends and what have been the nature of the circumstances which have allowed them to succeed —or fail. Critics of Marx have seized upon the term “objective” conditions, isolated it from its context and then accused Marx of propounding a prime mover on economic first cause which propel men along some predetermined path. Mr. Popper is an incorrigible exponent of this type of distortion.

It has already been noted that Mr. Popper’s conception of history, i.e., the story of power politics, technocracy, historical records, etc., is not history, even though each of them has a history, and even when he presents them as history he converts them into a masquerade of power drives and neurotic impulses. Because Mr. Popper denies there is any valid continuity, any causal connection in social development, he asserts it is only we who live in the present, who can change things not something called history. Almost a century before Marx had said: “Things cannot remain that way, they must become different and we human beings must make them different.” Indeed the whole purpose of Marx’s teaching was that only by understanding capitalism and acting upon that understanding would we be effective in changing it to something better.

Mr. Popper wants something better. He refers vaguely to the need of justice, democracy, equality, without any real reference to the social context. His own assertion that something called historicism alias Marxism sees men as pawns in some inevitable cosmic evolution which ignores their personal aims and attitudes, renders politics null and void, and allows “the social scientists to say what shall or shall not be done,” is a sheer invention on his part. He refers innocuously to the brotherhood of man but he has no serious quarrel with the present set up. He fails to recognise that the removal of class privilege based on productive ownership must be the indispensable and elementary step for achieving that “brotherhood.”

Ted Wilmott

(To be continued)

Bourgeois revolutionaries (1998)

Book Review from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The French Revolution. Edited by Gary Kates. Routledge, 1998

“Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society.” (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).

On the night of 4 August 1789 the newly triumphant French National Assembly issued a decree formally abolishing feudalism. The process of building a bourgeois (capitalist) society in France has been documented by the influential French academic historians Albert Mathiez (1874-1932), George Lefebvre (1874-1959) and Albert Soboul (1914-1982). They were also very public members of the French Communist Party, and in due course this provoked a “revisionist” challenge from liberal and conservative ideologists. This collection of essays provides further proof, if it were needed, that the study of history is not just about interpreting the past but part of a struggle for the sort of future people want.

For liberals, Alfred Cobban (1901-1968) argued that the revolution had an early constructive phase, but efforts to create a liberal capitalist constitution were overcome by violence. The conservative François Furet (1927-1997) emphasised the role of political ideas, especially those of Rousseau, upsetting the natural order of things. A central concern of these “revisionist” challenges has been what they saw as the dominance of Marxism in interpreting the French revolution and its relevance for the modern world. Marx drew attention (see quote above) to the way the French revolutionaries referred to ancient Rome, as a mask for their tawdry bourgeois objectives. It provided the revolutionaries with: “…the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their passion at the height of the great historical tragedy”.

The French Stalinist historians, following Lenin and the Bolsheviks, drew an explicit parallel between the French Jacobins and the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 Russia. In 1920 Albert Mathiez wrote:

“Jacobinism and Bolshevism are two dictatorships born of civil war and of war, two class dictatorships operating through the same means: terror, requisitioning and taxes; and having, in the last resort, the same goal: the transformation of society and not only of the Russian or French society, but of the universal society.”

The Jacobins under Robespierre’s leadership, and the Bolsheviks with Lenin’s leadership, acted in the belief that their small elites represented the real will of the people, even though they were not accountable to them. The French revolution, of course, was the classic bourgeois revolution. Robespierre and the Jacobins employed the means and objectives appropriate for such a revolution. The Russian revolution, as Matthiez unwittingly revealed, used the same methods for the same goal: a capitalist revolution. The Bolsheviks abolished feudalism and constructed a society based on wage labour and capital, but under state control. This, historically, is the bourgeois role of Bolshevism.

Lew Higgins

Letters: Blaming Technology (1998)

Letters to the Editors from the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blaming Technology

Dear Editors,

I read with interest the article on technology in May’s Socialist Standard. The consequences of the industrial revolution have been a terrible disaster for the human race, in fact had it not been for this revolution the need for socialism perhaps would not have arisen. Technology has only provided more and better exploitation. It has destabilised society, making life unfulfilling and subjecting us to the indignities of wage slavery, psychological suffering and starvation in the “third world” and untold damage to the environment by its need for natural resources. For socialists to champion technology seems to me to be a contradiction. One only has to read William Morris’s News From Nowhere to see the need for people to be near to nature. Socialism is not just the redirection of yet more goods towards the working class by yet another set of bureaucrats, but people working hand in hand with nature and the earth, to produce goods for need not a greed which has been fostered by capitalism.

Albert Knox, 

Norwich

Reply: 

You seem to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. We weren’t criticising technology as such but the abuse of technology under capitalism. Today, under capitalism where the means of wealth production are owned and controlled by a minority, technology is developed and applied in their interest with the aim of maximising profit. To blame technology, rather than capitalism, for our problems is a mistake which leads to wrong, indeed absurd, conclusions.

The industrial revolution, carried out as it was within the context of capitalism, certainly worsened conditions of many people at the time but it also created the material basis for a socialist society of common ownership and free access to wealth.

It is neither possible nor desirable to abolish industrial technology. Without it we would have to go back to a much harsher form of living. What is required is to change the basis of society so that technology can be developed and applied in the interests of the majority and not for profit.

We are all in favour of humans living in a balanced, sustainable relationship with the rest of nature but, even in the field of ecology and the environment, industrial technology is useful, indeed essential. Renewable energy sources such as solar power, wind power, tidal power and so on all involve the necessary use of quite sophisticated machinery and equipment which we would not be able to make and operate without the technological knowledge acquired since the industrial revolution.

William Morris, incidentally, wasn’t an advocate of abolishing technology. If it has no place in News From Nowhere this was because he wanted to bring out the changed social relationships that would obtain in a socialist society, and it is as an exploration of these relationships as compared with those that obtained under capitalism that his “utopian romance” is to be read. Even so, technology wasn’t entirely absent: there are the “force barges” and “banded workshops”, both powered by a non-identified source of energy (which was, in Morris’s mind, probably electricity which at the time was just beginning to be applied to production, so making it possible to move beyond the steam-from-burning-coal technology he certainly did hate).-Editors.

Reading Marx

Dear Editors,

In your reply to Prof Sakiranjan (Socialist Standard, July), I don’t think that your particular quotation from the Communist Manifesto supports the view that socialism must be brought about democratically.

“The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, which is the struggle of democracy”, is simply saying that the achievement of democracy (in the Greek sense that the people rule) is dependent on the working class first establishing control over the state, in the place of the capitalist class. This quotation says nothing about how this control is to be achieved.

Your reply implied that the Manifesto uses the word democracy to describe a particular organisational procedure or method, where in fact the word is properly used to describe the possession and exercise of state power. If you are the class holding power, you do see it as democracy in that you can exercise power to further your interests. If you are not the class holding power, you see it as dictatorship, in the sense another class has power and is using it to act against your interests.

If you fail to be clear that “the struggle of democracy” (“the battle of democracy”, depending on the particular version read), has a fundamental class basis which is to establish the power of the working class, “the struggle of democracy” can start to sound abstract, suggesting socialists should be fighting for democratic rights under capitalism as well as for socialism.

In my view, the struggle for rights under capitalism is a reformist diversion from the political task of winning a majority of workers for socialism. Another quotation you use, that the struggle for socialism “is the independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority” describes much better the principle that socialism can only be established democratically and by workers ourselves.

Andrew Northall, 

Kettering, Northants

Reply: 

We are far from sure that the passage in question from the Communist Manifesto bears either the interpretation you say we implied in our reply or your interpretation that it means that the achievement of democracy is dependent on the working class first establishing control over the state.

Of course full, social democracy, in which everyone has an equal say not just on administrative matters but also with regard to the use of the means of production, can only be established by the working class consciously using their control of political power to bring this about. But the context shows that Marx was not talking here about such social democracy (i.e. socialism) but only about political democracy as a form of state with universal suffrage and a sovereign elected assembly. So, what he was saying was that the first step in the workers’ revolution was the establishment of political democracy.

This is confirmed by Engels’s draft of the Manifesto where he answers the question “what will be the course of this revolution?”:

“Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution and through this the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England where the proletarians are already a majority of the people” (Principles of Communism, Engels’s emphasis).

This was the point of view of the Chartists which Marx and Engels shared. As Marx wrote a few years later, when in exile in England, in an article on the Chartists:

” . . . Universal Suffrage is the equivalent for political power for the working class of England . . . Its inevitable result, here, is the political supremacy of the working class” (New York Daily Tribune, 25 August 1852, Marx’s emphasis).

Marx’s assumption that political democracy would be the equivalent of working class power was clearly based on an overestimation of the degree of class consciousness amongst workers, but at least it showed that he thought that socialism would have to come about democratically-though, as you point out, this was already more than implied in his statement that “the proletarian movement is the independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority”.

You are right on another point too. Marx did not believe that political democracy could be achieved peacefully, not even in England (Marx and Engels identified themselves with the “physical force” wing of Chartism). In fact, the translation as “battle of democracy” or “struggle of democracy” of the original German “die Erkämpfung der Demokratie” is a bit weak. The German means literally something along the lines of “the winning, by battling, struggling, fighting, of democracy”, which would be better conveyed by some such phrase as “the conquest of democracy”. If the English translation had said this (as most other language translations do) then the ambiguity would have been removed, both as to what kind of democracy Marx was talking about and as to how he envisaged it being achieved.

When, later, political democracy of a sorts had been established in some countries, whether by violence or other means, and Marx had had a chance to see how it worked in practice, he was obliged to abandon his earlier naïve assumption that it amounted to placing political power into the hands of the working class. He still held that this was the case, but only potentially, and that it opened up the possibility of the working class winning control of state power peacefully. But he now realised that winning control of political power required a higher degree of class consciousness than he had originally assumed. Political democracy could be used to dupe workers as well as being a means they could use to win power for socialism. Hence his call in 1881—which we wholeheartedly endorse—to transform universal suffrage (i.e. political democracy) from “the instrument of fraud that it has been up to now” into “an instrument of emancipation”.-Editors.

Teaching history

Dear Editors,

As a “time serving” History teacher (I must be serving time as I seem to have so little of it for myself) I have to admit to a certain measure of pique over Paddy Shannon’s assertions (“History as Mystery”, July Socialist Standard). He may well be describing his own unfortunate experiences, but he does not reflect mine.

When I studied History for GCE in the 1960s I was certainly taught about the Chartists. I also knew of the Luddites, extensively studied the nature of late 18th and 19th Century capitalism and the workers’ response, and briefly considered the ideas of Marx along with Adam Smith and Malthus. I was also informed about the 1848 European revolutions as the context for the later Chartist actions.

Thirty years later as a teacher I have recently covered the economics of the feudal system and the early glimmerings of capitalism in medieval towns with Year 7. The second year became quite heated recently when I explained the motivation of Richard Arkwright in terms of profit and how profit is generated through labour. The imperialist manoeuvrings and blatant competition that led to the First World War and the subsequent economic problems leading to the Second have been an important part of Year 9’s work on the 20th Century.

These are a few examples of how the teaching of History, whilst not Marxist, is nothing like the process of mystification the article suggested.

David Alton, 

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Reply: 

We are sorry that you got the impression that we think history teachers are time-servers. That was not our intention and in fact was not what the author actually wrote (he was only describing his own particular experience at school). Nevertheless, we take this opportunity to make it absolutely clear that this is not what we think.

We can also accept your point that a history teacher who is a socialist does have some leeway, in some schools at least, to introduce a class rather than a nationalist element into their teaching and that this does happen and it’s a good thing. However, given that we are at present living in a non-revolutionary situation where most people see no alternative to capitalism and think in nationalist terms, this is going to be the exception for the great majority of school students.

In a non-revolutionary period, the ruling ideas, as Marx put it, are going to be the ideas of the ruling class and the school system will inevitably reflect this. Also, given the division of labour within the workforce under capitalism, there are two types of schools for the working class: those turning out workers for routine factory and office work, and those turning out workers for jobs that require a certain amount of critical thinking (engineers, managers, doctors, teachers, etc). The minority who are admitted to the latter type of school will be able to get somewhat less crude history lessons than the majority.-Editors.

About New Books (1952)

Book Reviews from the May 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

Professor V. Gordon Childe is probably the foremost pre-historian of the day. By pre-history we mean the study of the development of human society prior to the time when written records were made. Professor Childe’s newest book is entitled "Social Evolution," and is published by Watts & Co.

Professor Childe is an archaeologist, and, as he says:

  " . . . archaeologists to-day have realised that they are dealing with the concrete remains of societies, and that these societies, albeit illiterate, have left concrete embodiments not only of their material equipment but also of their social institutions, superstitions and behaviour, fragmentary and ambiguous though these undoubtedly be."

So he has taken the theories that Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan deduced from their comparative studies of the pre-historic societies that were still in existence during the nineteenth century, and he has examined them in the light of recent archaeological discoveries, or, as he puts it, ... “ in the light of the science which presents societies in a chronological sequence."

The book is not easy reading. In fact Childe himself refers to it as a “ . . . rather tedious examination of archaeological data." All the same, to the student of social evolution, it is a landmark in the study.

Lewis H. Morgan, in his book, “Ancient Society” (1877), divided human history into three main “ethnical periods’’--Savagery, Barbarism and Civilisation. He then made sub-divisions of the former two periods. Morgan made his divisions and sub-divisions on the basis of the technological development of society. The objects of archaeological study are, therefore, useful in an examination of Morgan’s theories, providing proof that Morgan was unable to obtain.

Prof. Childe warns us against a common error. We should not judge the rank of any technical device or process from a general principle. Each device and process must be considered in relation to the conditions in which it was used.

 “Any superiority possessed by an automobile over, say, a bullock-cart cannot be inferred from comparing their respective efficiencies on English roads, but only from the historical fact that automobiles do supersede bullock-carts wherever conditions for their employment can be created.” (P.9.)

Prof. Childe shows that human needs change just as much as the “efficiency" of the instruments for their satisfaction.

  "Did a reindeer hunter in 30,000 B.C., or an Ancient Egyptian in 3000, or an Ancient Briton in 30, really need or want to travel a couple of hundred miles at 60 m.p.h.? . . . . To a Magdalenian society in the last Ice Age a harpoon or antler was just as efficient as a steam trawler is to-day. With the former, tiny groups could get all the fish they needed; the load of a trawler would have been an embarrassing nuisance.” (P. 9.)

You cannot legitimately take some discovered object from one part of the world, give it a label, compare it with something similar from another part of the world, and so deduce its origin and the nature of the society to which it belonged. Professor Childe shows us how, in Ancient Egypt, when the habitable land was seldom as much as two miles away from the River Nile, which was a splendid highway, wheeled vehicles were less useful than they were in Syria which had no natural waterways. Wheeled vehicles were used in Syria fifteen hundred years before they were used in Egypt, but this does not prove that Egypt was more backward than Syria.

So, the professor marshals his evidence in the main part of his work, to show the successive steps through which different societies have actually passed on their way to civilisation in contrasted natural environments.

In his concluding chapter Prof. Childe examines the effects of intercourse between societies at different levels of development, even modern civilised societies, and he takes to task, very successfully, those who would claim an analogy between social evolution and organic evolution.

A very useful book.

Whilst we are dealing with Professor V. Gordon Childe we must mention another of his books that is well worth reading—"History” published by Cobbett Press, 1947. In this excellent little book the professor examines the various theories of history that have held the field at different times. One is astonished at the number of theories of “Historiography.”

Prof. Childe accepts the theory deduced by Karl Marx, the “materialist conception of history,” or, as Mr. Childe himself calls it, “Marxist historiography.” He uses this theory throughout this book. The professor has one misfortune. Like many others his eyes are turned towards Moscow and “the promised land” behind the iron curtain. But his vision does not appear to have become impaired—not yet.

B. Traven is claimed to be a mystery man. He lives somewhere in Mexico, operates through an agent in Mexico City and cannot be interviewed, photographed or “got at” in any way. He is one of the world’s best-selling story writers. His latest book is “The Rebellion of the Hanged,” translated by Charles Duff and published by Robert Hale, Ltd.

Capital must always have wage-labour and it has always been ruthless in the methods by which it has built up its armies of wage workers. B. Traven in this book shows the trickery, the callousness and the vile “legal” practices by which the Mexican Indians were dragged away from their small plots of land and poverty stricken farms in order to be made wage-slaves in the great lumber camps of Mexico.

The story of Candido Castro, Celso, Martin Trinadad and other Mexican Indians is set in the period just before the Mexican revolution which deposed President Porfirio Diaz in favour of Madero. It tells of the brutality and the abominable tortures inflicted upon these poor natives in order to make diem work ever harder and harder. The output of logs demanded from them is continuously stepped up by the lumber camp bosses and failure to satisfy the demand results in floggings, hanging naked by the feet in the tropical sun or being buried up to the nostrils in the sand with the uncovered head exposed to the sun and insects. The hanging is the favourite form of torture with the bosses and foremen and it is that which gives the book its title.

The Indians finally rebel and become more ruthless and cruel than their erstwhile employers. They torture, maim and kill, partly in revenge and partly because they know that they have no hope of clemency if their uprising is suppressed. Their adventures as they march through the tropical forests in the rainy season make stirring reading.

Mr. Traven has no illusions about rebellions. He sees their limitations and knows the difference between a rebel and a revolutionary. When Mexican peóns are killing the landowners their object is to claim the land for themselves, to share it out amongst them. Says Martin Trinadad towards the end of the story:

   ". . . the instinct of possession and property are more anchored than before in this ranch. Only the name of the owner has changed, and I can predict to you, comrade, that to-morrow or the day after the new proprietors will fight like devils amongst themselves with machetes until only one is left, if even one, to enjoy the property. The man who gets possession of the revolver will be the new master, the one who has the shotgun will be overseer. And those who by chance survive will become peóns again.”

And again:

  “Ease and speed are not worth anything to revolutionaries. These here have changed ownership of fields and pigs. What ought to have been changed are the ideas on which the whole system rests. Yesterday the master was called Don Churcho. He'll be called Florencio tomorrow, after now being called Eusebio. There will always be a master; that is to say, nothing will have changed.... A revolution which is explained and needs motivation is no revolution. It's merely a fight to get property and jobs. The true revolution, the one that is capable of changing systems, is deep in the character of all revolutionaries. The real revolutionary doesn't think in terms of the personal benefit he may get from the revolution. He tears down the social system in which he suffers and sees other men suffer. He sacrifices himself and dies in order that he may destroy and bring about other ideas.''

Now that I have read "The Rebellion of the Hanged,” whenever I see the name of B. Traven on the cover of a book I shall be searching through my pockets to find if 1 have enough ready cash to buy it.

W. Waters

A common humanity (2006)

Book Review from the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ancient Americans: Rewriting the History of the New World’. By Charles C. Mann. (London, Granta Books, 2005)

This book has three central claims, put forward with all the skill and understanding of a working popular science journalist. That pre-Columbus the Americas were more populous than many have previously supposed; that humans have been in the Americas longer than supposed; and that the people there had shaped their own environments to a terrific extent – far from being the unspoilt wilderness of colonial lore.

In most of this Mann is merely communicating an emerging academic consensus that still has not filtered out into the popular domain. He highlights how children’s schoolbooks still repeat stories about Indian life, culture and history that have subsequently been disproven. He also highlights how various vested interests have used the ideological constructions based on the previous histories for opposite ends, both aggressive industrialists and ecologists promoting various simplifying myths of naive Indians living in harmony with untamed nature.

Essentially, whilst without giving any definite backing to any particular population estimate, the book avers that the ‘high counters’ are now the dominant strand of demographic historiography. That most of the Americas were covered by human civilisations that would have been a match for most of the colonialist forces, if they had not succumbed to disease – disease that spread in advance of the European’s arrival (indicating intercourse between the Indian civilisations) – disease that possibly wiped out about a fifth of the human race at that time.

Mann demonstrates how much of the habitat inhabited by Indians was inhospitable, but that they had, to use his metaphor, terraformed their environment. He uses the example of the Maya collapse – hundred of years prior to the arrival of the Europeans – to show how the environment humans had created could fall apart when neglected (as in this case) by civil war.

In this context, he demonstrates that the Americas had an independent discovery of agriculture, to the point of suggesting that Amazonian Indians effectively planted orchards to make good use of the forests difficult soil. He suggests that there were civilisations as venerable in their size and antiquity to equal the more famous supposed homes of civilisation in China and Sumeria (present day Iraq).

He uses one case, the domestication of maize, to show what American civilisation has contributed to the sum of human achievement, and highlights the crushing irony that it was the importation of maize to Africa, which allowed the population growth that made the slave trade possibly (the slaves were, it should be remembered, needed in part because the indigenous population of the Americas had died out).

Mann suggests that the image of the pristine wilderness was created by the fact that humans had ceased to manage these environments, that the so called savagery found in part of the Americas was not stone age tribes living lives without time or change, but the products of collapse and devastation.

This is hopeful stuff for socialists. If true, it confirms a common humanity shared by all the humans on the planet, and offers the prospect of adding rich unbroadcast stories of human achievement.

Pik Smeet

"The French Revolution." (1922)

Book Review from the January 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

The French Revolution has been a favourite topic with historians of all countries, and it has probably called forth more books than any other event in the history of the world. Yet in the whole literature of the subject one can find little that is consistently good; there is a disproportionate amount of chaff. A book that has just come into my hands, "A Brief History of the French Revolution," by F. W. Aveling, is, however, so really bad, that I think it deserves notice, if only to warn those who might, in their hurry, confuse the author with Edward Aveling, and buy it.

In his preface the author states that the book is intended primarily as a school textbook. No doubt it will have success as such, for it is moulded on the true lines of all modern school histories. It is a string of events, with nothing to connect them, each one seemingly an accident. The true causes of the revolution and its meaning, the knowledge of which might cause pupils to grow interested in a dangerous field of inquiry, are hidden, and instead the reader is offered a few trumpery excuses, which explain nothing and lead nowhere, but which satisfy that craving for sensation which springs from faulty education and the degrading influence of the press. Aveling's causes of the Revolution bear the same relation to the real origin as does the popular idea of profiteering to the profit-making system. They serve only to hide the relevant facts.

Three reasons are given, viz. :

1. The vices and extravagances of the kings and their court.
2. The writings of the philosophers and literary men, particularly of J. J. Rousseau ; and the growth of unbelief in religion.
3. Bad government on the part of the rulers of the land : the oppression of the poor by aristocrats : the absence of any political power on the part of the great mass of the people.

No mention is made of its being a Revolution of the bourgeoisie ; rather it is made to appear as working class in its objects, and this, although it is now agreed that the French Revolution was the homologue of the English Revolution of 1640-60, 1688, that it was the triumph of the Capitalist class and the final overthrow of feudalism. Such an omission might be excused to a contemporary, but in a modern history it becomes a suppression, and one is compelled to think that the author is deliberately misleading.

The immorality of the Bourbons had as little to do with the French Revolution as did the morality of Charles I. with the English.

And in view of the fact that the poor in France had always been oppressed by the aristocrats and had never had any political power, it is useless to suggest that this oppression and lack of political power alone could have precipitated the Revolution of 1789. Why 1789 rather than 1400?

The prominence of the philosophers and their sceptical teaching themselves require an explanation. Our author does not, or will not, see this, and so it is not given.

Let us see why the revolution came in the eighteenth rather than in the fifteenth century.

In the first place, it is necessary to remember that this, like all others, was an economic revolution. It arose owing to the necessity to industrialism of the abolition of the remnants of the feudal barriers. It was a revolution of the French bourgeoisie, which was confronted with impotence and ruin unless it could seize political power and enter on the same course of expansion as England and the newly-freed American Republic.

Up to then political power was concentrated in the hands of a bureaucratic despotism. The nobles and clergy retained their social positions, feudal privileges, and rights. This hampered the development of the industrial and trading classes, for which a free working-class, as opposed to feudal serfs, and a free circulation of commodities were essential. The Gabelle, a government monopoly of the sale of salt, and the Banvin, or the right enjoyed by the lord of the manor to sell his own wine in the parish, to the exclusion of any other, are but two examples of the many feudal privileges which stood in the way of free development of commerce and industry.

Again, taxation was high, and owing to the exemption from it enjoyed by the nobles and clerics, its burden fell on the propertied commercial class. In the army aristocrats held the chief posts, so that the ambitions of bourgeois officers were checked. This explains the willingness of the lower officers to usurp authority and lead their troops against the dominant class.

It was the growth of the bourgeoisie in France, with its accompanying necessity for a new philosophy and set of ideals, which gave rise to the liberal spirit noticeable earlier in the century. In particular, intercourse with other countries and with England, from which the newly invented machinery was beginning to be imported, fostered this spirit, of which the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau are but the expression. To place too great an importance in the effects of their books is dangerous, especially as only about 4 per cent. of the population could read.

They were the philosophers of the rising capitalists, and it was among the members of this class in the main that they found readers and popularity.

To say, as the author does, that they spread democratic ideas among the masses, is to show a complete ignorance of their works.

Rousseau looked longingly to the Roman State and a return to nature. Montesquieu and Voltaire aimed merely at adopting the English constitutional system. Buckle, in his "Civilisation in England," lays great stress on this, and Gustave Le Bon, a middle-class author, writes : "Although the philosophers, who have been supposed the inspirers of the French Revolution, did attack certain privileges and abuses, we must not for that reason regard them as partisans of popular government " ("Psychology of Revolution").

When Louis XVI., owing to the financial difficulties of the government, was forced to summon the States General, the time for the seizure of political power by the revolutionary bourgeoisie had arrived.

To obtain control of the Tiers Etat, they, with their cry of "Free the land!" obtained the support of the peasants, but "they were as undemocratic at bottom as men well could be; their feeling for the masses was nothing but a mixture of scorn and fear; the perfect type of the bourgeois of '89 combined hatred of the nobles with distrust of the mob " ("French Revolution," Louis Madelin).

Thanks to the support of the lesser clergy, who suffered from the tyranny of the great prelates, they obtained control in the National Assembly, and at once proceeded to destroy all that remained of feudalism. In a short time seigneural rights were abolished, serfs were freed, and later the Church lands were confiscated.

Meanwhile, in the, towns unemployment, consequent on machine production superseding hand labour in many trades, together with lack of bread, occasioned by bad harvests, destruction of the crops by agents of the bourgeoisie, and the speculations of the grain merchants, who were holding back supplies, caused the workers to support the rising class. This provided them with a force which at need they could bring out to overcome the Royalists.

The weakness of Louis and the need to crush the nobility and clergy completely, rendered the introduction of a constitutional monarchy impossible, although certain sections favoured it. And so Louis was executed and a Republic proclaimed.

The rising of the Revolution from the National Assembly to the Directory, which paved the way for Napoleon to consolidate the gains of the triumphant class, is a history of struggles between sections of the bourgeoisie, and of their efforts to drive back the workers into subjection after they had served the needs of their masters.

Even the Terror is a period of bourgeois domination.

But our author would not stain the honour of the master class, our present rulers, so he reviles the workers for the executions. And this in spite of the fact that "out of 2,750 victims of Robespierre only 650 belonged to the upper or middle classes. The tumbrils that wended their way daily to the Place de la Revolution and afterwards to the Faubourg St. Antoine were largely filled with working-men" ("French Revolution," Belfort Bax).

Robespierre himself was merely a tool, although perhaps an unconscious tool, of the bourgeoisie; he served them by destroying the more liberal-minded Herbertists, and was destroyed himself when his task was accomplished.

But although it was not, and could not be, a working-class revolution, study of the French Revolution is of value to the proletariat for two reasons. Firstly, it demonstrates the truth of the Materialist Conception of History.

Society rests on an economic basis and it is only by examination of this foundation that one can understand the nature and development of the institutions, ideas, and cultural activities of the classes of which the particular society is composed, and explain outstanding historical and political movements and events.

Secondly, it shows the futility of working-class action without class-consciousness.

The workers allowed themselves to be stirred up to do the behests of a higher class, they fought their battles for them, and then, when they had clone all that was wanted of them, they were forced into a new and worse servitude. They were surrounded and disarmed on their return from the army. Their organisations were broken up by "Jeunesse Dorée" (the White Guards of the period) armed with weighted canes!

And attempts of the workers to achieve their emancipation will always end in failure until they, by study, learn their position in society as slaves of the propertied class, and then, acting as a class, gain control of political power and the force it commands.

W. J. R.