Proper Gander: Processing progress (2026)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 2020s is a particularly unsettling decade to be living in, and the whole of the 21st century so far hasn’t been the utopia which our forebears might have expected it to be. Cultural historian Matthew Sweet explores this current bleak mood by asking What Happened To Progress? in his BBC Sounds documentary series. The premise is that there is a ‘polycrisis’ in the realms of technology, the economy, the environment and global politics. As none of these are working in a way which benefits most people, our attitude towards progress has been affected. Sweet and other academics, writers and specialists give their views around how ‘one of the foundations of our economic system – progress understood as endless growth and rising prosperity – is looking pretty brittle right now’.

According to artist James Bridle, we have come to think of progress as being a line on a graph, swooping upwards and to the right. The background assumption has been that our children will inherit a better world where they can be happier, healthier, wealthier and wiser than ourselves. As other contributors explain, this concept of progress hasn’t always been part of our collective psyche. In previous societies, expectations for the future were more aligned with the cyclical patterns in nature, or had a ‘rise and fall’ narrative. Classicist Edith Hall reminds us that acquiring knowledge led to a fall in both the Adam and Eve story in Abrahamic religions and Pandora’s Box in Greek mythology. There’s a consensus among the contributors that our modern understanding of ‘progress’ emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries, through the philosophical works of figures such as Francis Bacon, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Progress became more practical with the technical achievements of the 19th century. As author John Lanchester tells us, resources were seen as limitless as economies expanded through industrialisation.

There were improvements in many communities’ living standards, healthcare and literacy which carried on into the 20th century. Sweet says that the First World War ‘broke the link … between technological and moral advancement’, with the slaughter enabled by the knowledge to manufacture ‘tanks, submarines and razor wire’. As a response, multi-national institutions were formed, such as the League of Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations, although these haven’t led to world peace, and war is now more of a threat than ever. As well as weaponry, Artificial Intelligence is another instance of how the results of scientific progress prompt fears about their impact, although climate change is described as the ‘ultimate example’. Contemporary uncertainty around progress comes from the tension between realising it isn’t a simple upward curve and a need for its reassurance, as described by psychoanalyst Adam Philips. Philosopher John Gray expands on this with a lively definition of progress as ‘the crutch, … balm, … therapy, … talisman … to stave off dread or even despair’. Our expectation of progress, as writer Philip Ball says, is out of kilter with how the natural world and society function.

Karl Marx’s views about how society functions are cited occasionally through the series, such as his ‘rival proposal’ to Kant’s ‘fanciful’ idea about a peaceful coalition of states. Historian Margaret MacMillan promisingly describes Marx’s Capital as being about progress to ‘a world in which there are no national borders, no classes left’. But this is only briefly mentioned, confusingly (but predictably) alongside references to Lenin and the so-called ‘communism’ of the USSR and China which had different aims entirely. On the other occasions when Marx is discussed, he’s presented as a poet, with an evocative reading of the ‘all that is solid melts into air’ quote from chapter one of The Communist Manifesto.

What Happened To Progress? is edited so that each contributor only speaks a few lines at a time before the emphasis is changed by someone else. Although this means that a range of perspectives are given, there isn’t the space for explaining in much depth. As indicated by the disparate references to Marx, the fundamental role of the economic structure of society in creating the material conditions for ‘progress’ isn’t explored in any detail. Many of the contributors’ observations and stances would snap into place with the context that progress and our understanding of it are moulded by how capitalism has to function. Goods are produced, services are operated and governments are run according to what is advantageous to the minority who own industries and wield power. Profitability for the few is directly or indirectly the defining factor in whether an innovation takes hold. This means that progress is shaped by what is in the interests of the capitalist class rather than by what benefits humanity in general.

The consequences of this are shown by the ‘polycrisis’ in society and the weakening of our belief in progress. As this notion became established through the advancements of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, it came from an era when capitalism was a progressive force in developing society’s infrastructure. But we have already reached the point where technology and administrative structures can potentially provide a decent standard of living for everyone. The decline in a belief in progress reflects how capitalism is no longer progressive. The documentary winds down with the contributors considering whether we should reject, retain or reclaim the idea of progress, with John Lanchester wondering whether we’re now on a ‘shift to something else’. In our view, to get the world out of its current rut, this would have to be a collective shift to replace capitalism with a social system where progress can mean improvements for all.

Mike Foster

William Godwin, Shelley and Communism (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just over a hundred and fifty years ago died William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, one of the seminal works in Britain of radical criticism of existing class society. Godwin had been born in 1756, the son of a nonconformist preacher, as he himself had been for a few years before coming to see through religion as untrue. The first edition of his Political Justice appeared in 1793, his contribution to the ferment of social and political ideas sparked off by the French Revolution, then still in progress. In 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneer feminist work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Godwin was also the author of a number of novels expressing his views, one of which—Caleb Williams—has been a television serial. In addition his Of Population, written in 1820, was the classic contemporary refutation of the nonsense peddled by Malthus.

Godwin has been described as a “utilitarian anarchist”. This is not an unfair description since he was very much in the Age of Reason philosophical tradition which saw humans as isolated individuals pursuing happiness as a measurable quantity and he could be described as an anarchist insofar as he looked forward to the “euthanasia of government”.

In Political Justice Godwin set out to examine what form of society would have to be established to conform to the principles of justice as laid down by Reason. Defining government as “regulated force”, he came to the conclusion that this would have to be “a simple form of society without government”. What he envisaged was the division of a country like Britain into self-administrating districts which would run their own affairs without the need for laws, or prisons, or “regulated force” in any form and which would send delegates to a central confederal assembly in the rare event of any situation requiring co-ordinated action on a national scale. It is this proposal for a “society without government” that has led to anarchists regarding him as one of their forebears.

But Godwin was not simply an advocate of a society without government. He was also an advocate of “equality of conditions”, “a state of equal society” as he called it. “Equality of conditions”, he wrote, “or, in other words, an equal admission to the means of improvement and pleasure, is a law rigorously enjoined upon mankind by the voice of justice” (All quotes are from 1976 Pelican Classic edition). His argument went as follows:

Human beings are partakers of a common nature; what conduces to the benefit or pleasure of one man will conduce to the benefit or pleasure of another. Hence it follows, upon the principles of equal and impartial justice, that the good things of the world are a common stock, upon which one man has as valid a title as another to draw for what he wants.

In every society, the produce, the means of contributing to the necessities and conveniences of its members, is of a certain amount. In every society, the bulk at least of its members contribute by their personal exertions to the creation of this produce. What can be more desirable and just than that the produce itself should, with some degree of equality, be shared among them?

This was a familiar argument with advocates of an equal society in place of existing unequal class society. It led some of them to advocate “a community of goods to be maintained by the vigilance of the state” as Godwin described one such proposal current in his day. Naturally, as an advocate of a society without government, he strongly rejected this speaking of “how pernicious the consequences would be if government were to take the whole permanently into their hands, and dispense to every man his daily bread”.

What, then, did he propose? How did he envisage goods being distributed in his “free and equal state of society”? Here a misunderstanding has sometimes arisen due to the fact that, in Book VIII (“Of Property”), Godwin defends a right to property. He distinguishes three “degrees” of property. The first is property in the goods an individual uses personally. The second is property in the product of an individual’s own labour. The third is property which entitles the beneficiary to appropriate the labour of others.

For Godwin, this third type of property was unjust as it involves exploitation:

All wealth, in a state of civilised society, is the produce of human industry. To be rich is merely to possess a patent entitling one man to dispose of the produce of another man’s industry.

Privilege entitles a favoured few to engross to themselves gratifications which the system of the universe left at large to all her sons.

This “monopoly of property”, exercised by both landlords and capitalists (Godwin actually uses the term), should simply be abolished by the state ceasing to uphold it. The other two types of property should remain inviolate. Nobody, neither another person nor the community, had a right to deprive a person of their personal effects nor the produce of their own labour. This is where the misunderstanding has arisen, with some misinterpreting this defence of a right to property as meaning that Godwin was not a “communist” but merely a “leveller”, somebody who did not want to abolish property but merely to equalise property holdings within the framework of a commodity society.

But this was not at all what Godwin meant. For although he argued that no-one, not even the community as a whole, had the right forcibly to deprive someone of the product of their own labour, he argued equally forcefully that it was the duty of everyone to make available to other people the products of their labour over and above their own needs. In other words, instead of selling their surplus produce for money and accumulating wealth from the proceeds, they ought to make it available free for other people to satisfy their needs. Godwin did not go into the practical details of how this would work but he was quite clear that buying and selling would not enter into it. Discussing the division of labour, he wrote:

Shall each man manufacture his tools, furniture and accommodations? This would perhaps be a tedious operation. Every man performs the task to which he is accustomed, more skilfully, and in a shorter time than another. It is reasonable that you should make for me that which perhaps I should be three or four times as long in making, and should make imperfectly at last. Shall we then introduce barter and exchange? By no means. The moment I require any further reason for supplying you than the cogency of your claim, the moment, in addition to the dictates of benevolence, I demand a prospect of reciprocal advantage to myself, there is an end to that political justice and pure society of which we treat.

And in The Enquirer, a collection of essays he published in 1797, he was even more explicit:

Were the members of any community sufficiently upright and disinterested, I might supply my neighbour with the corn he wanted, and he supply me with the cloth of which I was in need, without having recourse to the grovelling and ungenerous methods of barter and sale. We might supply each other for this reason only, because one party had a superfluity and the other a want, without in the smallest degree adverting to a reciprocal bounty to be by this method engendered; and we might depend upon the corresponding upright and disinterested affections of the other members of the community, for the being in like manner supplied with the commodities of which we were in want.

So Godwin resolved the problem of who, in his “free and equal state of society”, was to distribute goods according to people’s needs by saying that it would be the producers of particular goods of their own free will. His equal society was to be a “spontaneous equality of conditions” not an enforced one. Although he did not use the term “communism” (which was not then in use) or even that of” community of goods”—in fact, to tell the truth, he was too much in the individualist tradition to have used such terminology—his system was equivalent to what might be called a “voluntary” communism (as opposed to one “maintained by the vigilance of the state”). For, if we assume that the producers deposit the surplus over their needs of their particular product in some general storehouse from which they can take the products of other producers that they need, then we have the classic distribution system proposed by previous pre-industrial communists such as Thomas More and Gerrard Winstanley.

Although the social change Godwin advocated—the euthanasia of government and the abolition of “the monopoly of property”—was a radical one, the method by which he saw this coming about—the slow and gradual “progress of the human mind”—was in stark contrast and led him to oppose any kind of organised political action to further the cause of an equal society. In fact the only kind of organised activity he would accept were philosophical debating societies. In this sense, Godwin was a classical armchair philosopher. However, as often happens in such cases, his radical social criticism was taken up by others who did not share his qualms about political action.

One of those to be influenced by Godwin’s ideas was the poet Shelley, who the previous year had been expelled from Oxford University for producing an atheist pamphlet. Shelley came across Godwin’s works at the age of 18 and was very impressed. He was eventually to marry Godwin’s daughter who, among things, wrote the original Frankenstein story.

So impressed was Shelley by Godwin’s proposals for a new society in which people would be motivated by “disinterestedness” rather than selfishness that he set out to express them in verse, in a long poem called Queen Mab which he published privately in 1813. This is a vision of the past, present and future of mankind. In it Shelley attacks kings, war, commerce and, in particular, priests and religion. In fact the criticism of christianity, in the poem as well as in prose notes attached to it was so hard-hitting that when it was republished in the 1820s the publisher was sent to prison for blasphemy. Queen Mab became the work that publishers used in defiance of the restrictive press laws of the time. Each time they were convicted of blasphemy. But as a result Queen Mab, and thus Godwin’s social ideas, came to be widely read in Chartist and radical circles.

In part V of Queen Mab Shelley attacks commerce which he sees as a product of selfishness in the sense of people wanting to sell their surplus for money rather than give it to others to satisfy their needs:

Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange

Of all that human art or nature yield;

Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,

And natural kindness hasten to supply

From the full fountain of its boundless love,

For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now.

Commerce! Beneath whose poison-breathing shade

No solitary virtue dares to spring,

But Poverty and Wealth with equal hand

Scatter their withering curses, and unfold

The doors of premature and violent death,

To pining famine and full-fed disease,

To all that shares the lot of human life,

Which poisoned, body and soul, scarce drags the chain,

That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind,

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,

The signet of its all-enslaving power

Upon a shining ore, and called it gold:

Before whose image bow the vulgar great,

The vainly rich, the miserable proud,

The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,

And with blind feelings reverence the power

That grinds them to the dust of misery.

But in the temple of their hireling hearts

Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn

All earthly things but virtue.

Later Shelley continues his criticism:

All things are sold: the very light of Heaven

Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love,

The smallest and most despicable of things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep,

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the laws allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man,

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively,

Are bought and sold as in a public mart

Of undisguising selfishness, that sets

On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign,

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe

Is turned to deadliest agony, old age

Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,

And youth’s corrupted impulses prepare

A life of horror from the blighting bane

Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs

From unenjoying sensualism, has filled

All human life with hydra-headed woes.

It is quite clear that Shelley was expressing Godwin’s idea that, in a just society, producers would give away their surplus produce free rather than sell it for money, Hence his opening description of commerce as “the venal interchange of all that human art or nature yield; which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, and natural kindness hasten to supply”. When he later describes what will happen when people are motivated by the “consciousness of good” he naturally states that they will have no need of “mediative signs of selfishness”—of money—and that “every transfer of the earth’s natural gifts shall be a commerce of good words and works”.

This commerce of sincerest virtue needs

No mediative signs of selfishness,

No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,

No balancings of prudence, cold and long;

In just and equal measure all is weighed,

One scale contains the sum of human weal,

And one, the good man’s heart.

Part V of Queen Mab ends as follows:

But hoary-headed Selfishness has felt

Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave:

A brighter morn awaits the human day,

When every transfer of earth’s natural gifts

Shall be a commerce of good words and works;

When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,

The fear of infamy, disease and woe,

War with its million horrors, and fierce hell

Shall live but in the memory of Time,

Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,

Look back, and shudder at his younger years.

It is only by completely ignoring these passages that Paul Foot is able to claim in Red Shelley (1980) that “Shelley was not a socialist. Shelley was a leveller”. Shelley, at least at this time, was just as much an advocate of a “spontaneous equality of conditions” that amounted to a voluntary moneyless communism as was Godwin.

In one sense this argument as to whether or not Godwin and Shelley were socialists is anachronistic since the modern idea of socialism, as the solution to the problems of a majority wage-working class within a capitalist industrial society, had not yet come into being. This is partly why in this article we have used the word “communist” rather than “socialist” to describe the moneyless equal society advocated by critics of the essentially agrarian class society that existed before industrial capitalism developed. It was of course the low level of development of the means of production that accounts for the frugal, even Spartan, character which the pre-industrial communists were obliged to give to the egalitarian society they advocated, but it still remains true that people like (in England) More, Winstanley and Godwin and Shelley and (in France) Morelly, Babeuf and Buonarotti were forerunners of the socialist industrial society of abundance that we modern socialists now advocate.

Adam Buick

The Ruin of Christ. (1916)

From the October 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

A note on a newspaper's wish for a United Church.

For nearly two thousand years people have been told that Jesus Christ came to the earth for the well-being of humanity, left a stock of immortal truths and after great sorrows returned to his Heavenly Father. From the Scriptures we read that The Man of Sorrows worked miracles, put beautiful parables into his public speeches, and was superior to the powers of Death and the Sea. In history we learn that his parentage was so obscure, the evidence of either his existence or his work so debatable, that opinion drift between two extremes, Renan believing him to be a humble, considerate man and Shelley an ambitious man who aspired to the throne of Judea.

Interest was centred on Christ until quite recently because of the nature of the claims on his behalf ; the divine power with which his name was invested, the singularity of his birth, the lowliness of his habits, his nobility and his patience. If, when we consider Jesus in the most favourable light, we find his parables not entirely uninstructive, we also see that under the care of the Church they have become either wretched or villainous. Jesus, like King Lear, gave his property into cruel hands. By popes and archbishops his ethics have been falsified ; by philosophers he has been stript of his divinity ; his Godliness has become the faith of the fool and the target of Historians. In the future, interest will centre on Christ chiefly in consequence of some articles and letters which lately appeared in the “Daily Chronicle.”

The editor of that newspaper is urging the adherents of the two-and-seventy jarring sects to unite into a common brotherhood. He thinks that with a little trimming of faiths, a modification of the gospel to meet the advancements of science, and sundry other things, that Christianity might still be a power in the land. Alas ! why do not your friends tell you, poor ”Chronicle” Editor, that a writer on such a theme may nowadays wear out a mine of nibs and use a sea of ink before a sceptic will even smile. Am I alone to tell you that you should close the lid of your pot and pack up your pens ? Your God has made another error in judgment ; you are born too late in the day. Somewhere in the sixteenth century your kith and kin in Spain did not use pens. I learn on good authority that the founder of the Spanish Inquisition, Torquemada, was never the editor of a newspaper.

But as I do not wish to be thought inconsiderate, or in any unworthy way to gloat over the downfall of Christ and his Church, I would like to openly consider some of the reasons for your proposals. Although I am an Atheist I see something infinitely pathetic in the fact that a people once so prosperous and proud, with abilities, as they once had, to construct their old giant crusades, with energy to war, with cunning enough to arrest the growth of science and art, should at last lose the power of their science-riddled Jesus and become dependent upon London newspapers.

In your columns you hint, as we have been told so often before, that religion is a necessity of national life : that God’s hand is in the work of the scholar and his influence felt in the life of the savage. With the latter half of your contention I am in complete agreement. Knowing something of the history of Christianity, and a little of the life of savages, it is difficult to see how they would lose anything by exchanging a crucifix of Christ for the images of wood and hobgoblins of stone to which they are devoted. But whatever loss they sustained, or whatever hostility the substitution aroused among the base Indians or the cannibals of Tierra del Fuego, the proposal should be insisted on English manufacturers would thus be able to export a large number of ivory Christs which are lying stagnant in the workshops. The other of your contentions I cannot so easily endorse. Voltaire, Tom Paine, Marx, Spencer, Darwin, were all great men ; so if it is true that the scholar cannot work without God’s help, then God alone is responsible for some of the deadliest arguments against his own existence and some of the wittiest satires on his own son.

We learn also that the Christian has worked and does work in the service of God. As a little pamphlet which we issue, entitled “Socialism and Religion,” deals with the birth, life, and death of the Idea of God, it will not be necessary for me to speak of it here ; I will alone consider the world’s work of his servants.

What has the Christian done in the world which the Atheist has not ? Point to an achievement of a saint who has the advantage of intimacy with the Almighty and I will counterbalance it with an important work of a Freethinker who is on no friendly footing with a divinity. Against the literary value of the Bible I place Shakespeare ; against “Genesis” and the “Book of Job” I place “King Lear” and “The Tempest.” We are told that St. Francis of Assisi held conversation with the sparrows and by the sea-side lectured the fishes. In contrast to these second-hand records of this laughable saint I place the beautiful lament of Burns over the field-mouse, written in subtle sweetness, not for the instruction of the simple creature which lost its nest under the ploughshare, but for the enjoyment of humanity. In the Psalms God gets praised in choice language, but no more tremendous melody of praise and sorrow has been penned than Shelley’s elegy on the Death of Keats—”Adonais.” Blake was intimate with the Almighty and kept in touch with the events of Paradise. Blake saw Eden and Hell. Blake had God as a model in his studio. Blake, so Blake claimed and many believed, passed through all the celestial and infernal valleys. He claimed that he had a special invitation, but I am inclined to think that it was just the result of an unsettled disposition. In any case his work has little artistic value or topographical importance. They are neither pictures nor maps of hell, so we must conclude that Blake was utterly foolish and could not learn, or that his divine instructor was out of touch with the modern French artists. I incline to the latter view after having read a biography of Blake by G. K. Chesterton. You may now agree with me, nearly-forgotten editor, that in works of beauty the saints are not supreme. But still the question remains—what have the religionists done which the sceptics have not ? For an answer we must look slightly at the noble work of the world.

Look to the early days of astronomy and you will find religion there as a worm in the bud. The slightest slip from the ritual of the Church, the publication of the feeblest heresy or the mightiest truth, was followed by hellish punishment. From the time when the priests first got power until the time when they lost it they struck right and left in a mad, blind fury. Up till the time when Voltaire lived eight million people had perished in Holy Crusades. There is no doubt the biblical God made priests in his own image.

Bruno suffered after Copernicus ; homes were ruined, arts and sciences enslaved ; authors, reformers, philosophers were blinded, branded, tortured, poisoned, or burned. Blind with the love of Christ, the Inquisitors did not know their own kith and kin. The friend of superstition died with its enemy. The poet was exiled and the astronomer murdered. Not a soul must breathe a syllable of any fresh thought. Those among our friends who know the joy of listening to or uttering fresh truths will understand the deep gloom of this enslavement. It is not alone to those rare and lonely martyrs of the cause of progress that we must always feel grateful, but also to those nameless thousands who have gone to their graves with the fire of truth in their hearts, with wonderful thoughts unpublished. Well we may remember the intellect and honesty of those olden mortals who braved the smiles, bribes, and fury of Christ’s ministers and dealt the first mortal blow to superstition, but we shall never know the details of the unhappy lives of those who were forced to let their poetry wither away—not so much as whispered—hide their yearnings, stifle their young dreams, as a mother the child she loves and yet fears to keep. We shall never be able to count the lost lives of the people, nor measure the infamies of the Church during those miserable years. The Church may do good by stealth, the rest of its work is on record,

Yet I am not of a spiteful nature, so I will offer Christians a few words of advice on how they may, if they will, become united. Do not write books, do not distribute crusts of bread, do not wage wars, for the love of God ; but sow and gather corn, weave clothes, build houses, on communal principles, for the love of humanity. Study the poets, historians, scientists, and architects, then in the music of their sentiments you will forget old hells, conjurors, and tricky heavens. In the knowledge of architecture and the love of nature which follow you will burn all the churches that have corrugated iron roofs ; in the strength of character which follows you will possess the foundations of future happiness.

No doubt you will often be told that an Atheist’s life is black and vacant. The men who repeat this stale nonsense are all men of less brain than Bacon, who says in his “Moral Essays” that “Atheism leaves to man reason, philosophy, natural piety, laws, reputation, and everything that can serve to conduct him to virtue ; but superstition destroys all these and erects itself into a tyranny over the understanding of men.” Irreligion certainly accompanies an understanding of Socialism, but we Socialists can enjoy the picturesque parts of all religions, from the beautiful mythology of old Greece to that of the “Daily Chronicle.” We may enjoy the beauties of the country, the wonders of the cities, the solitude of the sea, or its commerce. The riddle of the universe is still with us to test our wits and keep them keen. Books, music, and art are now strongly established as the elements. It is not much that we lose when we lose a Christ, a priest, and an iron chapel. We are progressing. The Bible can no longer be used as a weapon against us. It is rapidly becoming an entertaining book in our hands. With our complete freedom from superstition, political and industrial as well as religious, we shall have reached the time when the Chapters of Genesis may be raised to the superb dignity of the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The religion of Christ was no more fit for the guidance of the world’s workers than the fishing boat of Peter was fit for the circumnavigation of the world or the sandals of Joseph fit for a journey from Bethlehem to the North Pole.

But the old Church, the old slave-ship of Christ, last century was sinking fast and the wish to sail in solitary triumph was gone. Truth has been treated by their flinty clerics as a wolf with a small belly and a moderate appetite whose pursuit may be delayed with morsels of flesh. But Truth, instead, is like the sea on which no unprincipled ship can sail for long in security. The billows have been hammering at the old hulk of the Church for some ages now. Starting a voyage from Galilee, Christianity sailed smoothly for a thousand years or so, gathering up the slaves, stealing the treasures of free thought ; its blight was terrible, absolute, and swift. Thus astronomy rose like a whirlwind ; geology was as lightning. The surrounding sea beat harder and faster. The crumbling ship’s sails were ruined, its masts were snapped at the roots. The passengers and slaves rebelled and after much turmoil managed to get some kind of a Reformation. No one cared what was tossed to the sea so long as the crippled ship was saved. Year after year the storm grew worse and Christ’s compass led it astray. When their provisions were gone they turned cannibals : sect devoured sect. Last century the “Origin of Species” and the Socialist Philosophy were published and fell like thunderbolts in the old, rotten, rat-riddled, shattered ship. Amid the howling billows and gusts of wind the vessel sunk. In the wilderness of the waves it was lost with all its pretensions, tyrants, conundrums of Heaven, spectres of Hell, and the rest of its ghastly cargo.

I am afraid you cut a miserable figure, London Editor, as you stand on the shores of Fleet Street crying pitifully to the tempest: “Peace, be still !” Yet it will be interesting to see for how long an editor may sit by a grave trying to restore a corpse to health and strength, and remain free from pity and contempt.

H. M. M.

50 Years Ago: Origin of the idea of justice (1965)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Locke, who, like the philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, used the deductive method employed in geometry, came to think that private property engendered the idea of justice. In his “Human Understanding” he expressly says that “Where there is no property there is no injustice, is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to anything, and the idea to which the name injustice is given being the invasion or violation of that right . . .”

If the idea of Justice, as Locke thought, can only appear after and as a consequence of private property, the idea of theft, or rather the tendency to take unthinkingly what one needs or desires, is on the contrary, well developed, before the institution of private property. The communistic savage and barbarian behave in regard to material goods as our savants and writers do in regard to intellectual goods: whenever they find them they take them, to use Molière’s expression. But this natural custom becomes theft, crime, from the time when common property is replaced by private property.

Into the head and heart of savages and barbarians common property put ideas and sentiments which bourgeois Christians, those sad results of private property, will find very strange.

Heckwelder, a Moravian missionary who in the 18th century lived fifteen years among North American savages, not yet corrupted by Christianity and bourgeois civilisation, said:

“The Indians believe that the Great Spirit created the world and all that it contains for the common good of men; when he stocked the earth and filled the woods with game, it was not for the advantage of some, but of all. Everything is given in common to the children of men. Everything that breathes on the earth, everything that grows in the fields, everything that lives in the rivers and waters, belongs jointly to all, and everyone has a right to his share."

[From a lecture by Paul Lafargue on Idealism and Materialism, Socialist Standard, May 1915.]

Pirates (2024)

Book Review from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pirate Enlightenment, Or The Real Libertalia. By David Graeber, Penguin, 2024

The Age of Enlightenment is usually said to be the intellectual movement that occurred mainly in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, based on knowledge learned by reason and evidence. Graeber argues that the Enlightenment did not begin in Europe and that its true origins are to be found on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was in the Golden Age of Piracy which lasted no more than fifty years, but it was also an experiment in radical democracy as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land. Those also involved were Malagasy women, merchants, traders and escaped slaves. They were exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice in Europe a century later.

This short book was first written to be a chapter of a book on ‘divine kingship’ Graeber co-authored with fellow anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Graeber obtained a doctorate under Sahlins doing ethnographic research in Madagascar. Graeber died in 2020. This book answers the question: since they were wanted men who couldn’t go home, what happened to the pirates who wanted to escape or retire? The answer seems to be: they often settled in north-east Madagascar, a large island (one thousand miles long) to the east of Africa. Libertalia is the name given to the utopian pirate experiment, even if there was never any actual settlement that bore that name. Piracy is still practised in that part of the world.

Graeber’s treatment of piracy and Madagascar is convincing. He argues that what unifies the pirate Enlightenment of Libertalia and the later Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which was conversational. In Libertalia there was an expectation of rational conversation, on an egalitarian basis, of such subjects as liberty, authority, sovereignty and much more. There is however no persuasive evidence of the pirate Enlightenment feeding into the later Enlightenment, as Graeber claims. He admits that he is being ‘intentionally provocative’ as if he knows the evidence he presents is flimsy and speculative. In this respect he is following in the buccaneering tradition of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story.

Lew Higgins

Material World: Nation or class? (2024)

The Material World Column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nationalist sentiment was the form of collective consciousness that emerged as the one best adapted or suited to the needs of capitalism. The nation-state, after all, constitutes the most fundamental unit of spatial organisation from the standpoint of the accumulation of capital and the coalescence of capitalist interests into separate and competing groupings – namely national groupings whose interests the state broadly serves as the primary source of state income in the form of taxation.

Furthermore, as capitalism's collectivist expression par excellence, nationalism neatly complemented individualist ideology. Indeed, nation-states were themselves thought of as quasi-individuals, and so it became possible to think of something so abstract and amorphous as a ‘nation’ as possessing a particular character and evincing certain ‘traits’. In short, the nation came to be ‘naturalised’ and rendered timeless in nationalist mythology.

The 18th century Swiss jurist, Emerich Vattel, author of The Law of Nations (1758), defined nation-states as ‘bodies politic, societies of men united together for the purpose of promoting their mutual safety and advantage by the joint efforts of their combined strength’. In legal terms, the nation-state amounted to a ‘moral person’. As Vattel put it: ‘Such a society has her affairs and her interests; she deliberates and takes resolutions in common; thus becoming a moral person who possesses an understanding and a will peculiar to herself and is susceptible of obligations and rights’.

In short, the ‘nation’ has pre-existing moral claims on the citizens who comprise it, claims which also work to ensure the compliance of those citizens to the capitalist mode of production that gave birth to this very concept of nationhood,

It was in the 19th century that nationalism became particularly significant and influential although, of course, it had been gradually building up to this point in preceding centuries. Benedict Anderson in his seminal work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), describes the origins of the nation-state as lying in capitalism itself and particularly ‘print capitalism’ – a reference to the spread of literacy in the modern world that allowed people to ‘imagine’ themselves to be part of a much wider community in the guise of the ‘nation’. Greater mobility and improved transport links would also have contributed to this development.

No doubt there were many other factors besides these implicated in the rise of 19th century nationalism, but what is relevant here is the impact of nationalist ideology on popular consciousness – the point being that nationalism served as a kind of glue that bound people together in a modern capitalist society in the way that religion had in traditional society. Being a secular religion its devotees paid homage to, and worshipped at the feet of, this abstraction called the ‘nation’. Indeed, religion itself was pressed into the service of nations, the latter’s armies being blessed by the priests as they embarked on some holy war against some other nation. Confusingly, God always appeared to be on every side engaged in the bloody business of warmongering

Any functioning society, even the most ruggedly individualist of them, needs some kind of collectivist substratum to hold it together. However, while nationalism was pre-eminent in performing this particular role in a capitalist society it was far from being the only conceivable form of collectivist sentiment that might arise in this society; ‘class consciousness’ was another.

Marx wrote much about the changing circumstances of early capitalism and how the rise of the factory system, along with the concentration of large numbers of workers this brought about in the rapidly expanding urban centres, fostered a growing sense of class identity. This identity came to be forged out of the realisation of a common class interest in opposition to the interests of the owners of capital, and expressed itself in various ways – most notably in the rise of an organised trade union movement.

However, with hindsight it seems clear that Marx gravely underestimated the strength and potency of nationalist ideology and its ability to constitute itself as a kind of overarching value framework that can encompass, co-opt and subsume all other forms of collectivist expression, including ‘class consciousness’. Belief in nationalism of any kind and the existence of some supposed overriding ‘national interest’ (including, it should be noted, the Left´s endorsement of ‘national liberation’ and a programme of ‘nationalisation’) has the obvious effect of blunting the class struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and blurring the distinction between the classes and their diametrically opposed interests in this struggle.

We can see how this, in turn, is likely to have had a seriously retarding influence on the goal of establishing a post-capitalist society. Such a society must necessarily entail the complete removal of class monopoly ownership and control of the productive forces of society. Needless to say, this is something that will naturally be resisted by the class that exercises that monopoly – the tiny capitalist or ruling class. Consequently, the very objective of getting rid of capitalism inescapably has to oppose nation and nationalism and promote class and class consciousness – a post-capitalist society being, by definition, a classless society.

Robin Cox

The Anti-God Squad (2007)

Book Reviews from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who Was Jesus? by Kamal Salibi, Taurus Parke Paperbacks, 2007

Against All Gods by A. C. Grayling, Oberon Books, 2007

God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books, 2007

It has long been acknowledged by Christian theologians, and by anyone else who cares to study the evidence, that the Bible does not give a coherent account of the life and sayings of Jesus. There are just too many contradictions and inconsistencies within and between the various books which make up the New Testament. Not only that, many of the historical and geographical references involving Jesus are not confirmed by modern scholarship. For instance, the earliest known archaeological record for the existence of Nazareth in Palestinian Galilee dates from no earlier than the third century AD, which undermines the case for a “Jesus of Nazareth.”  Salibi, a Christian, does a good job of pulling together many of these problems in his book Who Was Jesus?. He draws on the Koran and other sources to argue that “Jesus” is actually a compilation of two people: an Arabian named “Issa” who lived around 400 BC, was a Jewish preacher but was not executed; and about four hundred years later “Jeshu,” a preacher who was crucified in Jerusalem (though the Koran insists that only the first is the real “Jesus” and the latter account is false). Salibi’s method is to reconstruct the Jesus story so as to iron out the contradictions and inconsistencies, using careful selection and a fair amount of his own speculations (“it could well have been true”). But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that the Biblical evidence is so unreliable as to be worthless.

One of the sources Salibi believes early Christianity drew upon was the ancient fertility cult of  the “god” of “life-giving water” — that is, semen. Grayling doesn’t swallow this and sticks mainly to a philosophical critique of religion, as befits a professor of philosophy at the University of London. His Against All Gods is short and bluntly put (64 pages and no index). Religions are not deserving of respect just because they are religions; they must be subject to the same scrutiny as any other belief and cannot hide behind the notion that they are personal beliefs. Are atheists themselves fundamentalists? Is atheism itself an act of faith? These claims are often found coming from religious folk who are somewhat taken aback by the plain speaking of people like Grayling. His humanism is guided by reason and respect for the evidence, the antithesis of fundamentalism and faith. And then there is the familiar objection that secular Stalinism and Nazism were worse than religion. Grayling’s response is to point out that  Stalinism and Nazism were basically the same as religions in that they were monolithic ideologies of oppression and control.

However, Grayling also argues that most wars in the world’s history “owe themselves directly or indirectly to religion.” Granted that in the Crusades of the Middle Ages religion was an important causal factor, but are religions a cause of war in the modern world? Were the First and Second World Wars (where a largely Christian Britain and France declared war on Christian Germany in both cases) caused, even indirectly, by religion? Even if we accept Grayling’s description of GW Bush’s foreign policy as “conducting jihad for American/Baptist values,” this is not convincing as an explanation of the war against Iraq. Because he doesn’t take into account material interests, Grayling confuses cause and consequence: propaganda instead of the underlying cause; religion invoked in the furtherance of material interests.

In contrast, Hitchens’ God Is Not Great is lengthy and detailed. The title is his riposte to the Arabic-Islamic phrase Allahu Akbar: “God is Great,” which is brave considering what happened to his friend Salman Rushdie. Subtitled “The Case Against Religion” (in the American edition it’s “How Religion Poisons Everything”), it’s a powerful and vehement denunciation of all religion and its practitioners. According to Hitchens, religionists allow themselves “permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.” All the usual arguments and some you may never have heard of are here. Like Grayling, Hitchens deals with the secular-Nazism-and-Stalinism-was-worse-than-religion argument, only in much more detail. He makes what should be an obvious point, that Hitler claimed to be a defender of Christianity against the “Christ-killer” Jews. (Incidentally, it was not until the 1960s that the Vatican officially absolved “the Jewish people” from collective guilt in Jesus’ death.) And prior to Stalin’s political career he did have a strict religious upbringing and did train to be a priest, so he would have conformed to the Jesuit saying: “Give me the child until he is ten, and I will give you the man.” Hitchens claims to have been a Marxist in his youth but now says its “glories” were in the past, without specifying what those glories were or why they are in the past. And Marxism is “no longer any guide to the future,” again without giving any reason. He was a Trotskyist however and he may be really talking about his loss of faith in that dismal ideology. If he had taken a Marxist stand against capitalist imperialism, he would have avoided having to, as he saw it, support the Bush-Blair war against Iraq.

Grayling and Hitchens see themselves as defenders of the Enlightenment tradition of respect for reason and evidence against its traditional foe, religion. But they see nothing wrong in capitalism. Socialists share in the Enlightenment inheritance but recognise that the main source of irrationality in the modern world is to be found in the capitalist system of society. For socialists, therefore, the struggle against religion cannot be separated from the struggle for socialism. We fight religious superstition wherever it is an obstacle to socialism, but we are opposed to religion only insofar as it is an obstacle to socialism.

Lew Higgins

The Ire Of The Irate Itinerant (2009)

From the September 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Wisdom of China? (1958)

From the August 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Porcelain, Filigree and Philosophy

Ever since those many delightful commodities— porcelain, silk, embroidery, cloisonné enamel ware, carved jade and ivory, paintings, wallpaper and the like—were brought into Europe in quantity, there has also been an invisible import. A civilization that could produce such works of art stimulated curiosity, and many thoughtful people tried to understand the remarkable and impressive social theories that dominated Chinese life at the time. They saw a chance to use these ideas, which, though old in China, were newly imported into Europe. Chinese philosophy propounded theories which were particularly useful to the spokesmen for those who were finding that the feudal system of society on the Continent was becoming outmoded.

Did China influence the French Revolution ?

Confucianism became popular, though it was not generally recognised that this was only one of three systems of thought in China. Chinese philosophy, in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, meant only Confucianism which was so eminently to the taste of those who wished to overthrow feudalism. As Maurice Collis remarks in The Great Within, men had freed themselves from the limitations imposed by mediaeval theology and its scholastic metaphysics; they were tiring of the half-mythological speculations of the Renaissance: they had set their feet in a new rational world. The condition of society and the structure of the state, these were the practical problems which they were trying to pose and solve. What was therefore their surprise at perceiving that 2½ thousand years ago in China a philosopher had devoted his attention almost precisely to the same problems and found an answer that worked out in practice.

Similar conditions anywhere at any time give rise to comparable thoughts. Some present-day sinologists say that China thus had its effect on the French Revolution. But history shows that new economic classes in society have little difficulty in rationalising their aspirations. If they cannot find a ready-made philosophy then their thinkers will produce one. If the French bourgeoisie had not been introduced to Confucianism it is doubtful if there would have been any difference in subsequent events. The thinkers in Europe felt that their men must act well if possessing right knowledge and this could only be acquired by the reasoning mind. This was all very modern at that time: it was clearly connected with the great advance then taking place in mathematics and the natural sciences.

Famous men who plugged Chinese Philosophy

Leibniz (1646-1716) made great use of Jesuit missionary publications and in his correspondence mentions “the work of Confucius, the King of Chinese philosophers, which has been published this year in Paris.” In 1697 he published his Novissima Sinica, in which he argued that just as Europe had sent missionaries to China so should China send to Europe to give instructions in government and morality.

Holding such views it is not surprising to find that his metaphysics are tinged with Confucian ideas.

Quesnay (1694-1774) was known as the European Confucius. It was he who, after a study of the Chinese classics, formulated a political philosophy derived from them with the practical object of inducing the Monarchy in France to model itself upon the Imperial Government of China. He saw that the French government was heading for revolution but argued in his book Le Despotism de la Chine (1767) that it could be reformed and saved if Louis XV should become an enlightened despot in the Chinese classic sense.

Voltaire (1694-1778) was another enthusiastic follower of Confucius, and in his play the plot turns upon the thesis, of which the Chinese were so fond, that as soon as the Outer Barbarians (as Europeans were called in China) come under the influence of Confucian culture they mend their ways and lead the moral life.

The feudal system of society in France at this time threw up the theory that the king can do no wrong. Some sinologists declare Chinese theories (including that of the Emperor ruling on approval, so to speak, and that if his rule does not win popular approval he must be dismissed), were a revolutionary force in feudal Europe and helped to influence the social revolution to capitalism which followed. Though men can learn from early history, in general it is the prevailing economic set-up that forms the basis upon which men build their ideas and policies.

Some say “ Good old Confucius,” but we say . . .

Even at the present time it is quite normal for the professional sinologists to advocate that the West would do well to follow the teachings of Confucius, and it may be a coincidence, but they seem to find in the teaching of the Old Master many virtues which it would be in the interests of our ruling class to inculcate in us. Such as humbleness in the presence of superiors and submissiveness to the State conservatism of ideas. Some even plug the old French Jesuit theory that Confucius was practically God.

The object here is to delve into this controversial subject to see if the tenets of Confucius can be helpful to the working-class movement

But first let us consider what Confucius advocated. He lived about 2½ thousand years ago and China at that time was in a period of great change. Until then there was ample land for expansion, but the population was increasing along with wealth. State boundaries became contiguous and this was a further cause of the friction which developed into internecine warfare as the more powerful Chinese States swallowed the weaker. But on the other hand, the people still obtained their livelihood from agriculture. Farms in river valleys had to be drained, then dykes built to contain floods. Farms on higher ground necessitated water systems to supplement the rain which in that country is uncertain. The maintenance work on these water installations was heavy and done by human power. Fairly large groups were required to co-operate in this work and so large family groups composed of several generations was the normal unit of society. This, then, was the milieu into which Confucius came. The prevailing insecurity induced him, as is quite usual in such circumstances, to look back to the good old days when the ruling classes exploited their subjects without having to fight for this right. They needed a code of ethics in order to enable their subjects to live peacefully together in these great family units and to keep the unit always submissive to the State, and Confucius, the conservative sage, obliged by consolidating the philosophy which bears his name, though the tenets were practised before his time.

Chinese Ship of State drops the Pilot

This philosophy was useful in China just as long as this system of farming lasted, but in 1949, when a capitalist government seized control they promptly dropped Confucianism as no longer suitable. Workers work harder if their income is kept for their wives and children and not shared amongst many relatives. The modern State taking over control of waterworks dispenses with the need for the old organisations. Ring out the old, ring in the new, cut out the deadwood, including Confucianism —this is Capitalism in China. Mao tse-tung, himself a Confucian scholar, leads this refrain. The ancient wisdom of China arose in an ancient system of society, but now, both have passed away. It is futile to try to resurrect the past.

Why Socialists reject Confucianism

Confucianism does not arise from Capitalist conditions and cannot be used by those living in Capitalism— the Chinese themselves recognise this. It is doubtful if any philosophy makes anything but nonsense outside of the conditions which give rise to it. It is no accident that Christianity, the religion of the slaves of the Roman Empire and which was found such a consolation for the slaves of later times, has failed so utterly to take root in China, a land of yeoman farmers living since time immemorial in civil service controlled State where, domestic work apart, slavery was virtually unknown.

We in the working-class movement have a Socialist philosophy which is all-embracing and leaves no vacuum to be filled by other systems of thought. It deals with the labour theory of value, the class struggle and the materialist conception of history, which point the way to a classless system of society where the means of life will be held in common. Arising from this we have an attitude towards trade unions, war, morals, marriage, property rights, the wages system, trade, religion, yes, and even Chinese philosophy. We leave the nostalgic yearnings of Confucius to the spokesmen who find part of it useful to capitalism, while we are content to explain it, and in so doing, demonstrate the correctness of the materialist conception of history which is the pillar of our Socialist outlook.

Frank Offord

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 Monistic Conception of History by G. V. Plechanoff (part III) (1927)

From the February 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

[Plechanoff’s Famous Work now translated.]

Link to Part II

Chapter II.

“One of the most important conclusions to which one must come through the study of history is that the government is the most potent cause in shaping the character of the people; that the qualities and defects of nations, their strength or their weakness, their talents, their education or ignorance, are almost never due to climate or racial peculiarities; that nature gives everything to everybody, and the governments preserve or destroy the gifts of nature that constitute the common possession of the human race.” In Italy there were no marked changes either in climate or in race; “nature was the same for the Italians of all times; the only thing that did change was the government—and these changes always brought with them, or came together, with changes in national character.”

Thus argued Sismondi against those who tried to make the fate of nations dependent upon their geographic environment. His arguments contain some truth. Geography can really not explain much in history, especially because it (geography) is part of history, and because, as Sismondi says, governments do change, though the geographic environment remains the same. But this is only by the way ; we are interested in an other question. The reader must have already noticed that the fluctuations of the historical fate of nations is opposed to the stability of geographic environment. Sismondi knows of only one factor that can explain these changes : government—that is, the political order of a given country. The character of a nation is wholly determined by the character of its government. It is true that after dogmatically stating this theory, Sismondi tries later to soften it. Political changes, he says, come either before changes in national character or after them. That means that the character of the government is sometimes determined by the character of the people. Sismondi then has before him the same contradiction that the French “Enlighteners” had. The character of a nation is determined by the character of its government; the character of a government is determined by the character of the nation. Sismondi could just as little solve this contradiction as the French “Enlighteners.” He was therefore compelled to take as foundation for his discourse at one time one, at another time, another, member of this antinomy, But, as long as he has once taken the view that the character of a government determines the character of a people, he had to exaggerate out of all proportions the concept of government. It meant for him the whole social environment, all peculiarities of social relations. It would be more correct to say that for him, all peculiarities of a given social environment are affairs of government, the results of the political order. This is the stand point of the eighteenth century. When the French materialists wanted to express, in a short and vigorous manner, their convictions as to the all-powerful influence of the environment on man, they said : “C’est la Législation qui fait tout”—and whenever they spoke about legislation, they always meant political legislation, political order. Vico has a small article called Essays on a System of Jurisprudence in which the Civil Rights of the Romans are Explained by Their Political Revolutions. Though this essay was written just at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the ideas expressed in it, on relations between civil rights and the forms of government, were the accepted views until the restoration period. The “Enlighteners” reduced everything to politics.

But since the activity of a legislator, though not always teleological, is invariably conscious, and the conscious activity of a man is always dependent on his “opinions,” we come again to the thought then, that opinion is above everything else, although we set out to prove the supremacy of environment. The younger set of French historians took an entirely different view of this problem.

The course and results of the French Revolution, with its numerous surprises, was in itself a flaring denial of the power of “opinions.” Many had become entirely disappointed with “reason,” and others, who did not succumb to disappointments, became more and more inclined to the view that environment is all-powerful, and the investigation of its development became all-important. But their views on environment were also changed. The great historical happenings have demonstrated the weakness of legislators and political constitutions to such an extent that to declare them as the determining historical cause was ridiculous. Political constitutions began to be viewed not as a cause but as a result that is to be explained.

“A large number of writers, learned historians and publicists,” says Guizot in his Essais Sur L’histoire de France, “tried to explain the given state of society and state of civilisation through the prevalent political order. It would be far wiser to begin with the study of society itself in order to understand its political institutions. Before these institutions can become causes they are results ; society creates them before it begins to change itself under their influence. Instead of judging a people according to its political institutions, we must first study the people to find out what sort of a government it must of necessity possess. Society, its constituents, the life of its individual members, their dependency on their social positions, the relations between various classes of men—in short, the civil life of men (L’etat des personnes), these are the problems that should first engage the attention of the historian who wishes to know how people lived, and the publicist who wishes to know how they were governed.”

This view is just the opposite of Vico’s. The latter would explain civil laws through political revolutions; Guizot, on the contrary, would explain political institutions through civil life, that is, through civil laws. But the French historian goes even further in his analysis of society. According to him, the civil lives of all nations that entered the historical arena after the fall of the western Roman Empire, are strongly tied to their land relations (état des terres). The study of their land relations must therefore precede the study of their civil life : “In order to understand political institutions, it is necessary to study the different groups that constitute a given society, and their mutual relations.” In order to understand these groups, it is necessary to know the nature of their land relations. From this standpoint Guizot studies the French history of the first two dynasties. For him it is the history of a struggle between various groups of society. In his history of the English Revolution, he goes a step further, describing it as a struggle of the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy, and thus silently admits that in order to explain the political life of a country, it is necessary to study not only the land relations, but their property relations in general.

This view was not only held by Guizot, but was also shared by Mignet, Thierry and others.

In his Vous des Révolutions d’Angleterre, Thierry represents the history of the English revolution as a struggle between the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. “All those whose ancestors belonged to the conquerors,” he says in speaking about the first English Revolution, “deserted their castle for the King’s camp. At the time it could be said that the armies assembled—one in the name of leisure and power and the other in the name of labour and freedom. All those who did not work, all those who looked to life only for the pleasures that they could get without working for them, assembled under the King’s banner, to protect their common interests; all the descendants of the conquerors that were drawn into commerce fell in with the party of the people.”

The religious movements of that time were, according to Thierry, only reflexes of real life interests : “Both sides fought for real interests. All the rest was only for pretext. Those who were on the side of the subjects were mostly Presbyterians, that is, they did not want any subjection even in religion. Those who fought on the other side were Anglicans or Catholics, that is, they strove for power and taxes, even on the religious field.” Thierry quotes from the History of the Reign of James the Second the following words : “The Whigs looked on all religious opinions as politicians ; even their hate of the Pope was caused not by the prejudices and idol-worship of that unpopular sect, but by their desire to make the power of the state absolute.”

In Mignet’s opinion “social movements are determined by ruling interests. These proceed to their goals, stop as soon as the goal is achieved, and make place for other movements which are unnoticed at first but which grow to be predominant in time. This was the way of feudalism. Feudalism exists in the needs of men—but not yet in practice—this is the first epoch; in the second epoch it existed in practice, slowly ceasing to correspond to man’s needs and finally ceased to exist entirely. No revolution was accomplished in any other way than this.” In his history of the French Revolution Mignet interprets these events from the standpoint of the “needs” of different social classes. The struggle between these classes is for him the mainspring of what happened. Of course this standpoint did not find favour in the eyes of the eclectics of that time. The eclectics accused the new historians of fatalism, and the spirit of system. As it usually happens in such cases, the eclectics did not see the really weak points in these new theories and energetically fought against its strong points. At all events this conflict is old and at present uninteresting. It is more important to note that these views were defended by the St. Simonist, Bazar, one of the most brilliant representatives of socialist thought of that time.

Bazar did not think that Mignet’s book on the French Revolution was perfect. As one of its defects he considered the fact that according to Mignet the French Revolution was a thing in itself, without any connection with “that long chain of efforts which, after destroying the old social order, were to make the introduction of the new order easier.” He knows, of course, that the book undoubtedly has its good qualities. “The author strove to characterize those parties that led the Revolution consecutively. He wanted to show us the connections between those parties and the interests of certain social classes, to show how the development of events put first one party and then another at the head of the movement and caused them to disappear entirely afterwards. The spirit of system and fatalism, for which these historians have been so severely criticised by the eclectics are, in Bazar’s opinion, most valuable assets.”

If one should have asked Thierry, Guizot or Mignet whether the character of the people determines the form of its government, or the form of the government determines the people’s character, every one of them would have answered that in spite of the fact that between these two there is always a strong mutual influence, they must, nevertheless, both be explained by a third, more important factor : “by the social life of the people and their property relations.” And the contradiction that could not be solved by the French materialists of the eighteenth century, could thus be solved now.

(To be continued.)

Trans.: H. Kantorovitch for the "Modern Quarterly".