A RADICAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD
By Neil Faulkner
(Pluto Press – Left Book Club 2018)
Latest, in the worthy successor series
to the first Left Book Club (1936-48), this is outline history at its best,
itself a worthy successor to that pioneer of the genre, HG Wells’ The Outline of History (1920) and
various others since. Outline history is far from hack-work from secondary
sources. It is the art of significant – and comprehensive – compression and
interpretation. Neil Faulkner’s is the only modern one I know of that deals
with this from an explicitly revolutionary Marxist viewpoint. It shows, for
example, that it is perfectly possible to demonstrate an historical materialist
analysis of (say) Sumerian civilisation, as of Roman, Medieval European,
Japanese and contemporary Western history. Above all, to draw Marxist analysis
from facts, and not facts from Marxist analysis. It is fact-driven Marxism that
I hope non-Marxist historians will respect. Its attitude is that there is no validly ‘neutral’ history (whoever
claims neutrality is putting up a front for one ideology or another) and no
reason to be ‘neutral’ in this case especially as historical materialism
provides an unparalleled basis of understanding of historical processes and
developments.
It takes its cue from Hegel’s saying: ‘The
truth is the whole’. Whatever bourgeois historians have made of it, history is
not a ragbag of disparate and unconnected happenings in a process described by
Henry Ford as ‘one damned thing after another’. History has meaning only when all of history is taken into account,
not some of it left out or ignored.
Faulkner pauses, in his chapter on
the first class societies, to outline just exactly how history works, and all
of the subsequent book convincingly proves his (and Marx’s) thesis by encyclopaedic
examples (33): ‘Three engines drive the historical process. First, there is the
development of technique. Progress can be defined as the accumulation of
knowledge that makes possible better control over nature, increases in labour
productivity, and a bigger store of economic resources available for the
satisfaction of human need….
‘The second engine is competition
among rulers for wealth and power. This takes the form of conflict within ruling classes – among rival
aristocratic factions, for example – and conflict between ruling classes, as in wars between rival states and empires…
‘The third engine of the historical
process is the struggle between classes. In the ancient world, competitive
military accumulation required the ruling class to increase the rate of
exploitation and extract more surplus from the peasantry. But there were two
limits to this process. First, the peasantry and the economic system had to be
able to reproduce themselves: over-taxation would – and sometimes did – destroy
the material foundations of the social order. The second was the peasants’
resistance to exploitation.’
Faulkner shows how these three
interrelate, combine, or dominate unevenly against one another at one
conjunction of circumstances or another. On rare occasions all three have combined
together to bring down particular socio-economic orders.
One thing I had not realised was that mass
environmental degradation at the hands of human beings is nothing new, though
it has become progressively all-encompassing and planetary. The very reason for the so-called ‘agricultural
revolution’ of around 10,000 years ago and the widespread abandonment of
hunter-gathering after countless centuries was that all the game were
eventually hunted down to virtual extinction, which meant that human survival
would have gone the way of the game had the domestication of animals and the
planting of seeds not sprung up virtually everywhere – except in isolated areas
where hunter-gathering continues today.
Farming was no picnic: compared to the relatively easy life of hunting
and gathering it was – and as it remains especially for more than a billion or
so poor peasants – ceaseless heavy toil and exposure to the dangers and
disasters of drought, disease or blight, hailstorms and all sorts. And before
the discovery of self-manuring by the use of draft animals in ploughing, whole
tracts of land were abandoned when the soils gave out. Faulkner implies that
humankind did not take up farming by choice but through crucial necessity. Farming
especially as it expanded through the use of heavy ploughs drawn by oxen
or horses also signalled the growth of
patriarchy after a previous aeon of matriarchy, since women had not the
strength for the new ploughing and in any case were burdened with child-raising
and other concerns, whereas in previous cultures (the Iroquois provided the
most recent well-known example) women were either politically equal with men or
in some areas dominant over them because they produced as much of the food
wherewithal as men did – and sometimes more when the hunting was poor. With
farming men became the dominant food producers. It is interesting that we see in
our times a return to women’s empowerment (in part, anyhow) with the situation
of society not being wholly dependent on one sex or the other and women in
modern times being fully able to ‘bring in the bacon’ as effectively as men.
A constant feature of the rises and
falls of civilisations is that increases in productivity are invariably
accompanied by claims on its fruits by one ruling class or another. And without
effective resistance on the part of the producers the empowered rich come to
grab more and more of the spoils, thus forcing extreme poverty on the have-nots
while engaged both in conspicuous consumption of one kind or another or in the
huge wastage of military expenditure due to conflicts and potential conflicts over
potential spoils with rival ruling classes or nations. Only in polities where
the lower-downs have managed to garner a significant portion of the goods have
the systems stabilised, at least until the further demands from ruling classes
become once again insatiable – the result of the politico-military failure of a
working class or middle class (or alliance of the two) to corral and safeguard
to themselves sufficient of the necessities of life. In our own time the
extreme lop-sidedness of wealth versus poverty on a global scale simply repeats
the pattern of old, and will continue to do so unless there comes to be a
decisive superiority in the power and willpower of those in the majority determined
to beat back the very rich. If there is not, the given society will tend to end
in stalemate and in ossification, as happened with unerring frequency in the
past. As for example to the Roman Empire (making the Roman Empire easy pickings
for the northern barbarians in the end); but it has happened innumerable times
in other civilisations and seems to be happening in our present global
civilisation. It lies at the root of modern economic depressions and
recessions. Only for us the crucially
emerging reality out of the ceaseless plunder for profit is wholesale
environmental destruction which may – and certainly will – lead to our
extinction unless before then we can overpower those in the minority who
expropriate too much of the social product. This would appear to have been the
fate, for example, of the ancient Mayans of Mexico, and possibly of the Easter
Islanders and others.
These are my extrapolations from
Faulkner, not Faulkner himself though I would hope he would not feel I had
misrepresented him too much!
I have been a lifelong student of
history, and at one time or another a professional in the field myself, and I
am no stranger to Marxist takes on the past, from Marx and Engels themselves
onwards. But this highly accessible book by Neil Faulkner provides a genuine
grasp on the whole mighty subject.
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