A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (85 page)
Read A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium Online
Authors: Chris Harman
Finally, the process of transformation from the class
in itself
to the class
for itself
is continually interrupted by the restructuring and enlargement of the working class as capitalism itself develops. New groups of workers emerge and have to undergo a learning process afresh at each stage of the system. In Britain, for instance, the core of the working class in the 1840s at the time of Chartism was made up of textile workers; in the years before the First World War it consisted of workers in heavy industry like shipyard workers, miners and steel workers; in the early years after the Second World War it was made up of engineering workers. Each had to go through the process again of developing notions already embodied, to some degree, in the consciousness of preceding groups. The differences between old and new workers can be even more pronounced when there is massive and rapid industrialisation, as happened through much of the 20th century in many countries: the working class which made the revolution of 1917 in Russia was drowned in a vast sea of new workers by the late 1930s; the Italian workers who shook the Mussolini regime in 1943 were diluted by very much larger numbers of workers fresh from the countryside by the 1960s; very few of the tens of millions of China’s workers in the late 1980s were direct descendants of those who waged the great strikes of the 1920s. Yet in each case, after a longer or shorter time lag, new traditions emerged with similarities to the old: the Italian strikes of 1969 and after; the Chinese workers’ support for the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989; the Russian miners’ strikes of 1989 and 1991. In none of these cases did workers show full revolutionary consciousness. But they did, in each case, begin to break with the values and assumptions of the old society. They began to move towards becoming a class for itself, even if they did not complete the journey.
What we witnessed in the last quarter of the 20th century was not the extinction of the working class or of the development of its consciousness as a class. Instead, we saw the fruits of its massive expansion—an expansion which simultaneously gave it more power to shape society than ever before, but which also forced large sections to have to learn anew what smaller sections had already known three quarters of a century before. The learning process involved precisely the deflection of the struggle that characterised these years. It left behind a mass of confused and contradictory notions in the minds of tens of millions of people. This was far from the class in itself fully becoming a class for itself. But it was also very far indeed from the disappearance of workers’ struggles as an active shaping force in history.
Writing at the beginning of the century the future leader of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, commented that, far from the economic struggle of workers automatically leading to revolutionary consciousness, ‘the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology’. This was because ‘that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, is far more fully developed and…has at its disposal
immeasurably
more means of dissemination’.
10
His famous conclusion was, ‘Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without’.
11
It was a conclusion criticised by Rosa Luxemburg, among others, and Lenin himself admitted later that he had underrated the role of workers in developing socialist ideas.
12
But he rightly focused on a point taken up and developed a quarter of a century later by the often misunderstood Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci pointed out that the members of a class are usually exposed to conflicting views of the world—those that arise out of the everyday practice of existing society and those that arise in so far as the class (or a section of it) has experience of fighting to transform that society. As a result, anyone’s personality ‘is made up in a queer way. It contains elements of the caveman and principles of the most modern advanced learning, shabby prejudices of all past historical phases and intuitions of a future philosophy of the human race united all over the world’.
13
These contradictory elements are combined in different ways among different individuals and groups. Some are trapped almost completely within the views characteristic of existing society, and some have gone a very long way into breaking from these, but most are stuck somewhere in the middle, pulled first one way then another under the impact of those with more homogenous views at either extreme. The concrete action of a class at any point in history depends on which of the ‘extremes’ is most successful in attracting the middle group as social upheavals (wars, economic crises, strikes and civil wars) open it up to new ideas. The degree to which a class in itself becomes a class for itself depends not only on material changes in the world around it, but also on the formation of rival parties within it.
This was also shown in the rise of capitalism. The ‘great transition’ was not just a result of objective economic factors. It also depended upon successive attempts by sections of the new burgher or bourgeois classes to organise themselves around views of the world very different to those of the old order—and of other sections to work with representatives of the old order to subvert such organisation. It is the history of movements of revolt or reform in the 8th century Islamic Empire and the 11th century Chinese Empire, and of the suppression of those movements; of the movements of the Renaissance and Reformation, and of the succumbing in Italy, Germany and France of those movements to the old order; of the victories of the Dutch and English revolutions, and of the horrific impasse of the Thirty Years War; of the Enlightenment, and of the obscurantist reaction against the Enlightenment; of the struggle of the French Assembly against its king, and of the Jacobins against the Girondins. The transition was not achieved in one great leap, and nor was it a result of slow, piecemeal change. It depended on the formation, defeat and reformation of parties built around a new developing worldview over several hundred years.
The conquest of the world by capitalism has speeded up the historical process enormously. There was more change to the lives of the great majority of the world’s population in the 20th century than in the whole preceding 5,000 years. Such sheer speed of change meant that again and again people were trying to cope with new situations using ideas that reflected recent experience of very different ones. They had decades to undergo a transformation in their ideas comparable to that which took the bourgeoisie in Europe 600 years. The fact that at the end of the century the process was not complete cannot be interpreted as proving it was not still underway. The history of the 20th century was the history of successive generations of people, ever larger in number, resisting the logic of subjection to the world of competitive capital accumulation. Once, in Russia, they were briefly successful. Sometimes—as in Germany in 1918-19, in France in 1936 or in Poland in 1980s—they settled for half-success, only then to be defeated. Sometimes they were defeated terribly, as in Germany in January 1933, without even joining the battle. But none of this provides the slightest excuse for claiming the class struggle is over. The sort of struggles carried out by a small working class in the 19th century, a bigger one in the first half of the 20th century, and a much larger one in the last quarter of the century will be repeated by sections of the billions-strong working class of the new millennium.
Out of these struggles will emerge new attempts to remould society around the values of solidarity, mutual support, egalitarianism, collective cooperation and a democratically planned use of resources. The ruling classes of the world, like their predecessors for 5,000 years, will do their utmost to thwart these attempts and will, if necessary, unleash endless barbarities so as to hang on to what they regard as their sacred right to power and property. They will defend the existing capitalist order to the end—even if it is the end of organised human life.
There is no way to tell in advance what the outcome of such great conflicts will be. That depends not only on the clash of objective class forces—of the growth of classes
in themselves
—but also on the extent to which there emerges within the expanded ‘universal’ working class a core of people who understand how to fight and know how to win their fellows to this understanding. There will be no shortage of groups and movements in bitter opposition to one or other aspect of the system. Its very barbarity and irrationality will ensure this in the future, as in the past. But the history of the 20th century shows that these elements can only be truly effective when they crystallise into revolutionary organisations dedicated to challenging the system in all its aspects. The bourgeoisie needed such a crystallisation with the New Model Army in the 17th century and the Jacobin Club in the 18th century. The Russian working class needed it with the Bolshevik Party in 1917. The massively expanded world working class is going to need it again and again in the 21st century if humanity as a whole is not going to face destruction. The need can only be met if there are people who apply themselves to the task. The Irish revolutionary socialist James Connolly once pointed out, ‘The only true prophets are those who carve out the future’.
Understanding the past helps. That is why I wrote this book.
Part one: The rise of class societies
1
In fact, such arguments certainly cannot be drawn from the genuinely scientific study of genetics. See, for example, S Rose,
Lifelines
(London, 1997); R Hubbard,
The Politics of Women’s Biology
(New Jersey, 1990); R Lewontin,
The Doctrine of DNA
(London, 1993).
2
D Morris,
The Naked Ape
(London, 1967).
3
R Ardrey,
African Genesis
(London, 1969).
4
R Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
(Oxford, 1976).
5
R Lee, ‘Reflections on Primitive Communism’, in T Ingold, D Riches and J Woodburn (eds),
Hunters and Gatherers
, vol 1 (Oxford, 1988).
6
The ability to use language is, according to the generally accepted theory of Noam Chomsky, a genetically determined feature of all modern humans. The connection between language, abstraction and human consciousness is spelt out in the books written by the Russian Marxist Voloshinov during the 1920s, and in part two,
Labour
, of the
Ontology
by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács.
7
I am here giving a very brief precis of very long debates. For fuller details and references, see the earlier parts of my article, ‘Engels and the Origins of Human Society’, in
International Socialism
65 (Winter 1994).
8
There has been a century-long scientific debate on the exact relation between the Neanderthals and modern humans—over, for instance, whether they could have interbred. I cannot go into the debate here. Suffice to say, the displacement of the Neanderthals did not necessitate their butchery by modern humans, as some ‘born in blood’ accounts of our origins, like those of Ardrey, would have us believe. See my article, ‘Engels and the Origins of Human Society’, for an amplification of this point.
9
‘Hunting and gathering’ is a somewhat misleading term, since gathering of vegetable food usually played a bigger part in providing people with a diet than hunting animals.
10
Hence the old use of the word ‘savagery’ used to describe such societies—a term used even by those like Lewis Morgan, Frederick Engels and C Gordon Childe who attempted to provide a scientific account of their development.
11
The phrase is from the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but it sums up the ‘common sense’ attitude which pervaded most accounts of these societies until the 1960s and which is still to be found in popular books like R Ardrey,
African Genesis
.
12
M Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
(London, 1974).
13
C Turnbull,
The Forest People
(New York, 1962), pp107, 110, 124-125.
14
E Friedl,
Women and Men: the Anthropologist’s View
(New York, 1975), p28.
15
E Leacock,
Myths of Male Dominance
(New York, 1981), pp139-140.
16
R Lee,
The !Kung San
(Cambridge, 1979), p118.
17
The ! at the beginning of !Kung denotes a ‘click’ sound which does not exist in Indo-European languages.
18
R Lee,
The !Kung San,
p244.
19
Le P P LeJeune (1635), quoted in M Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
, p14.
20
E Friedl,
Women and Men: The Anthropologist’s View
(New York, 1975), pp15, 28.
21
All the quotes are from R Ardrey,
African Genesis
, pp300, 399.
22
R Lee,
Reflections on Primitive Communism
.
23
Quoted in E Gellner,
Plough, Sword and Book
(London, 1991).
24
Engels was right in insisting that there was no systematic domination of women in these societies. However, he was wrong in one important detail—he vastly overestimated the role played by lineages in most hunting-gathering societies. For the full argument on this, see my ‘Engels and the Origins of Human Society’.
25
Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, southern Turkey and Iraq.
26
For full accounts of what happened along the lines presented here, see D O Henry,
From Foraging to Agriculture
(Philadelphia, 1989); J V S Megaw (ed),
Hunters, Gatherers and the First Farmers Beyond Europe
(Leicester, 1977); the essays by P M Dolukhanov and G W W Barker in C Renfrew (ed),
Explaining Cultural Change
(London, 1973); C K Maisels,
The Emergence of Civilisation
(London, 1993), chs 3 and 4.
27
J Harlan, ‘A Wild Wheat Harvest in Turkey’,
Archaeology
20 (1967), pp197-201, quoted in C K Maisels,
The Emergence of Civilisation
, pp68-69.
28
Gordon Childe’s term.
29
Various estimates and calculations in C K Maisels,
The Emergence of Civilisation
, p125.
30
R M Adams,
The Evolution of Urban Society
(London, 1966), p96.
31
Although others have argued that the statuettes are connected to fertility rites, and no more imply a high status for women than does the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary.
32
A point strongly stressed by the Western anthropologists who carried out pioneering studies of them in the 1920s and 1930s. See, for instance, R Benedicts,
Patterns of Culture
(London, 1935).
33
J-F Lafitan, quoted in R Lee,
Reflections on Primitive Communism
, p252.
34
E Evans-Pritchard, quoted in R Lee,
Reflections on Primitive Communism
, p252.
35
This is one of the key arguments in M Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
.
36
R M Adams,
The Evolution of Urban Society
, p96.
37
See J V S Megaw (ed),
Hunters, Gatherers and the First Farmers Beyond Europe
, and the essays by P M Dolukhanov, G W W Barker, C M Nelson, D R Harris and M Tosi in C Renfrew (ed),
Explaining Cultural Change
.
38
F Katz,
Ancient American Civilisations
(London, 1989); W M Bray, F H Swanson and I S Farrington,
The Ancient Americas
(Oxford, 1989), p14.
39
As the biologist Jared Diamond has pointed out, no one has yet succeeded in domesticating animals or plants in these regions properly. See J Diamond,
Guns, Germs and Steel
(London, 1997), pp163-175.
40
This point is made very well in J Diamond,
Guns, Germs and Steel
, p139.
41
R Lee,
Reflections on Primitive Communism
, p262.
42
C Levi-Strauss, quoted in M Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
, p132.
43
H I Hogbin, quoted in M Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
, p135.
44
Before him the pioneer 19th century anthropologist Morgan wrote of a transition from ‘barbarism’ (meaning a purely agricultural way of life) to ‘civilisation’ (one centred around cities). The terms were used by Frederick Engels, but have fallen out of use as it has become increasingly clear that ‘civilised’ societies in Morgan’s sense can be much more barbaric than early agricultural ones.
45
See the example given by M Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
.
46
V Gordon Childe,
What Happened in History
(Harmondsworth, 1948), pp59-62.
47
See, for example, F Katz,
Ancient American Civilisations
, pp78-79, 81, 102, 113, 128.
48
V Gordon Childe,
What Happened in History
, pp80-81.
49
C K Maisels,
The Emergence of Civilisation: From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture, Cities and the State in the Near East
(London, 1993), p297.
50
C K Maisels,
The Emergence of Civilisation
, p297.
51
According to F Katz,
Ancient American Civilisations
, p29.
52
V Gordon Childe,
Social Evolution
(London, 1963), pp155-156.
53
For a discussion on these pre-urban stone constructions, see C Renfrew,
Before Civilisation
(Harmondsworth, 1976).
54
Thus it is certain that developments in the Aegean were encouraged by what had happened on the Asian mainland to the south east and the African mainland to the south. It is likely that some of the developments in Egypt (the sorts of grains which were sown, some of the artefacts) were influenced, to a limited degree, by contacts with the earlier developing Mesopotamian civilisation, and it is just possible that the Latin American civilisations had had some contact with those of east and south east Asia.
55
R M Adams,
The Evolution of Urban Society
, pp95-96.
56
R M Adams,
The Evolution of Urban Society
, p98.
57
R M Adams,
The Evolution of Urban Society
, p103.
58
R M Adams,
The Evolution of Urban Society
, p104.
59
V Gordon Childe,
What Happened in History
, p88.
60
T B Jones, quoted in C K Maisels,
The Emergence of Civilisation
, p184.
61
C J Gadd, ‘Cities in Babylon’, in I E S Edwards, C J Gadd and N G L Hammond (eds),
Cambridge Ancient History
, vol 1, part 2 (Cambridge, 1971).
62
F Katz,
Ancient American Civilisations
, p38.
63
G R Willey and D B Shimkin, ‘The Maya Collapse: A Summary View’, in T P Culbert (ed),
The Classic Maya Collapse
(Albuquerque, 1973), p459.
64
As Michael Mann puts it in his own sociological jargon, they were not willing ‘to increase their collective powers because of the distributive powers involved’, M Mann,
The Sources of Social Power
, vol 1 (Cambridge, 1986), p39.
65
For one account of such changes, see D R Harris, ‘The Prehistory of Tropical Agriculture’, in C Renfrew (ed),
Explaining Cultural Change
, pp398-399.
66
M Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
, p140.
67
See Christine Ward Gailey’s account of the attempts between AD 1100 and 1400 by the highest ranking chiefly groups in Tonga to cut themselves off from their obligations to lower ranking people to attempt to form themselves into a ruling class, in C W Gailey,
Kinship to Kingship
(Texas, 1987)
68
V Gordon Childe,
Man Makes Himself
(London, 1956), p155.
69
See, for example, R Tharper,
Ancient Indian Social History
(Hyderabad, 1984).
70
R M Adams,
The Evolution of Urban Society
(London, 1966), p114.
71
See the account of the Incas in A J Pla,
Modo de Produccion Asiatico y las Formaciones Econimico Sociales Inca y Azteca
(Mexico, 1982), p151.
72
R M Adams,
The Evolution of Urban Society
, p90.
73
V Gordon Childe,
What Happened in History
, p72.
74
V Gordon Childe,
What Happened in History
, p72.
75
This is the argument in K Sachs,
Sisters and Wives
(London, 1979), pp117, 121.
76
For a much fuller development of my argument on the way women’s oppression arose, see my ‘Engels and the Origins of Human Society’, pp129-142.
77
I M Diakhanov, ‘The Structure of Near Eastern Society Before the Middle of the 2nd Millennium BC’,
Oikumene
3:1 (Budapest, 1982).
78
Both on the outskirts of modern Cairo
79
B J Kemp, ‘Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period’, in B G Trigger, B J Kemp, D O’Connor and A B Lloyd,
Ancient Egypt: A Social History
(Cambridge, 1983), p176.
80
V Gordon Childe,
What Happened in History
, p117.
81
V Gordon Childe,
Man Makes Himself
, p227.
82
V Gordon Childe,
The Pre-History of European Society
(London, 1958), p7. The central theme of this work is that the ‘barbarians’ were more innovative because they were less held back by an all-powerful despotic state structure. But Childe tends to see the innovative ‘barbarians’ as almost always European, and fails to take into account the way in which those outside the established empires in other continents—in Asia, Africa and the Americas—also made enormous advances (for instance, the whole series of innovations in central Asia in the first millennium AD which were, as we will see later, then adopted in China before spreading to Europe, or the independent development of iron technology in parts of Africa).