A People’s History of the World

A People’s History of the world. London: Verso Publishers. 728 pages.

This book got me as excited as I was when I was a college student and reading was my vocation, and, more importantly, reading books on socialism and psychoanalysis. As a college student I lived and walked Karl Marx’s Der Capital and other writings on communism.

In graduate school, however, my enthusiasm was dampened when I fully appreciated what Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong did.

These men were totalitarian, authoritarian dictators; they were every bit as evil as Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were. Stalin and Mao each killed, at least, thirty million people (Hitler was instrumental in killing over fifty million people). I gave up on my youthful enthusiasm and its belief that with good intention we could change man and make him a caring person.

I got swamped by America’s capitalism and its cynical belief that people are born with a proclivity to competition, whereby the fittest get most of the goodies and the many are losers. I got conditioned to thinking like an American, the barbarians of our time who believe that we should each live for ourselves only and not care for other people and do so while cynically calling themselves Christians.

One would think that Christians would be like Jesus, love all people, and forgive those who offended them. Eric Fromm, in his book, The Art of love, had told us that to love is to care for people, but American savages masquerading as Christians tell us that to live the good life one only must care for oneself, work hard, and make billions of dollars and then drink oneself to death or do drugs or have sex with men and women and soon with children, animals and trees.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in Brothers Karamazov, said that without God all behaviors are permitted, so godless Americans do whatever they feel like doing, no need for morality.

The capitalist American’s conception of life is something out of hell. Thus, most idealists like me got hijacked and try to make sense of the madness that is America.

And here come an Englishman called Chris Harman. His erudite and systematic scholarship has returned me to my hitherto youthful enthusiasm for life. This man is a scholar of the first order.

He began his book by describing man in the so-called state of nature. Contrary to what Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, told us, that in the state of nature we were self-centered and warred with each other, the strong killing the weak and the weak banding together to fight the strong and that as a result life was nasty, brutish and short, thus, disposing them to seek security by establishing a commonwealth, selecting one of them and making him a king and giving him the authority and power to make laws that protected all of them and punishing, including jailing and killing those who disobeyed the law, Harman tells us that that was capitalist propaganda.

In his state of nature, people were hunters and gatherers, they hunted and gathered fruits and vegetables and shared them among the band. When the band, usually up to forty people, got large they split, and some went to other lands where they could hunt and gather what they needed to survive. That way, Africans from the Niger-Benue confluence in contemporary Nigeria left and gradually got to all over sub-Saharan Africa and got to South Africa.

The same process took place in Asia, Europe and the Americas and Australia. Thereafter, folks began settling in villages, the so-called Neolithic age; they farmed and helped each other farm. No one owned land. They lived collectively.

They learned to domesticate some fruits, vegetables and animals and began producing surplus food. That surplus food made it possible for some people to specialize in certain functions, such as craftsmen, and priests and warriors instead of all of them being farmers.

Surplus production of food led to the emergence of urban areas, cities, for now some people could live in urban areas and not have to worry about starving to death, for villagers brought their food and sold it to them.

The emergence of urban centers created a need for a different form of social organization. When people live together in large numbers, they are bound to rob each other the wrong way. Thus, leaders emerged to settle social and interpersonal conflicts.

Government was formed to pass laws that protected the people. The process apparently began in the fertile crescent, in today’s Iraq and gradually spread to the entire Middle East, North Africa, Egypt, India, and China.

With the emergence of cities and the presence of government, leadership of society took a turn for the worse; the leaders segregated themselves into a social class of rulers and began enslaving those who are not rulers.

In classical Marxian categories (see the Communist Manifesto and Der Capital) society has gone from primitive communism to slave society, to serfdom and the emergence of aristocrats and kings and finally to the rise of the Bourgeoisie.

Karl Marx, building on Hegel’s understanding of how History progresses, talked about dialectical materialism; here, society is a situation where people struggled for economic survival; this struggle pitted the extant ruling class, thesis, with an oppressed class, antithesis, and their struggle led to the emergence of a new kind of society, a synthesis that combines the old and the new.

Thus, in primitive communism strong men emerged, thesis, anti-thesis those the strong oppressed, struggled, and the result is a synthesis, feudal society; in turn, in feudal society aristocrats and the serfs struggled and the synthesis is the bourgeoisie.

In bourgeois society, the owners of capital struggle with their oppressed workers, the proletariats and Marx visualized the emergence of a classless communist society.

We live in the age of the bourgeoisie, here, a few has all the money and teach their self-serving clap trap that Americans are befuddled with, that that which is unnatural, exploitation, is natural.

Bourgeois scholarship teaches that human beings are always ruled by the strong hence that history should only document the exploits of kings and other so-called great leaders but ignore the men and women that produced the food that these social parasites lived on.

As we talk, the social media talks about the neurotic goings-on in the house of Windsor; we are told ab nausea about Elizabeth and her brood, Charles, Diana, Andrew, Edward, Ann, William, Harry and their idle life styles; these folks have not produced food for anyone to live on; we are led to talk about these idle rich but ignore the men and women laboring in factories and on the fields producing what we need to survive.

Harman wants to change this warped trajectory of history and talk about the people who produce what we all need to survive with, the people’s history, not the idle leaders that traditional history talks about.

In my perception, human beings are neither only cooperative nor competitive; they are both. We do compete and we also do cooperate.

Without the cooperation of man and woman to raise children we would die off, today, not tomorrow. But brain-dead American economists, the idiots at the University of Chicago, Department of economics, under the influence of the mad man called Milton Friedman, tell us that Charles Darwin is right, that we are born to compete and the strong win and survive and the week lose and die out and that that is all there is to us.

You look at these fools and ask are they insane or has the devil taken over their minds. Competition must be balanced with cooperation for society to survive, and for people to live harmoniously.

Yes, some people are born more intelligent than others and or have more marketable skills than others, but history tells us that we are peaceful and happy when we use our talents to serve public good and social interests, not just to live for ourselves only.

If we have a situation where winners take all and losers are left poor, what exactly prevents the losers from killing the winners and appropriating their wealth? Phony religion that tells the people to fear a bogyman called God? No wonder that Marx saw religion as the opium of the masses.

Mr. Friedman, what exactly prevents the ghetto dwellers around your University of Chicago from killing you?

Only love prevents people from engaging in antisocial behaviors, and love can only prevail when people care for each other, not ignore each other.

Unchecked capitalism may be productive, but it is a recipe for disaster, for revolution. And in coming years, poor and homeless Americans will start killing idle rich Americans.

The endless American frontier that used to offer opportunity for losers to go try for a new beginning is now ended; now, people must share or fight for the scarce resource they have.

The 1789 French Revolution and the 1917 Russian revolution and their bloodletting would be child’s play when, finally, revolution comes to the USA (not the phony bourgeois revolution of rich farmers fighting their British cousins to keep most of their profits; they were angry at the then mercantile economic system that rewarded those in England and penalized those in the colonies).

All the military and police of this world would not prevent a bloody revolution from occurring in the USA; what would do it is restructuring the American society and while allowing the industrious to make money but tax them and use the revenue to help the poor.

The only rational political economy is a mixture of capitalism and socialism. Both capitalism and socialism have good and bad in them but either alone is disastrous.

We can combine the good in capitalism and socialism; capitalism and its appeal to self-interest is very productive, people work hardest when they are seeking their personal goods; socialism cares for all people but it tends to destroy individualism.

We can combine both economic systems to produce a realistically ideal society, such as exists in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.

We must do better than the state of barbarism called the USA, or the other state of barbarian called the USSR.

As noted, I am just getting into this excellent book. It should take me about two weeks to complete reading it. I will then tell you what I made of this admirable Englishman, my kind of man.

Harman, like me, is a social democrat and a mixed economist. Hang around and I will give a final report on his book.