Successive human endeavors: Chris Harman's A People's History of the World
Here in the US, many readers are introduced to radical history with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which challenges the conventional understanding of history as, in the words of mass-murder Henry Kissinger, "the memory of states."
British writer Chris Harman tackles 100,000 years of human history in a similarly defiant act of independent scholarship with his excellent A People's History of the World (Verso, 2008), a book that will appeal to veteran Zinn fans and those investigating the world beyond the History Channel for the first time.
Harman generously took time to respond by email to some questions about his work.
GR: In the US, the "people's history" format is often associated with Howard Zinn's pioneering work. Was Zinn an influence on A People's History of the World?
CH: I wrote the book out of frustration at the fact that although there were many radical accounts of particular episodes and phases in history, mainly influenced by the insights of Marx and Engels, there was not over-reaching account. In the earlier part of the book the major influence was the Australian archaeologists of the first half of the 20th Century, Gordon Childe. But his account had to be updated to take into account new research by archaeologists and radical anthropologists like Richard Lee and Eleanor Leacock since his death in 1957. For the Roman period there was the writing of St Croix, for India the work of D D Kosambi, Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar, for the rise of slavery, Eric Williams and CLR James, for Britain that of Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson, for the French revolution Albert Soboul and Andre Guerin,...and so on.
My approach differs in one respect from Zinn's. One aim"and important one"of his book is to debunk myths about US history that have been used to justify US imperialism. I do some debunking of my own, particular when it comes to myths of innate European superiority. But my main aim is to provide an account of history as successive human endeavours to make a livelihoods that gets twisted into successive forms of class organisation and of the struggles that of the oppressed classes that then follow, culminating in the rise of capitalism on the one hand and of working class struggle against it on the other.
I did not decide on the title for my book until the last minute before publication, and then I was not mainly influenced by Zinn's title, but by that of A People's History of England by the British Marxist Alan Morton that was first published 70 years ago.
G&R: You write that the outcome of future class conflict will depend on the emergence "within the 'universal' working class (of) a core of people who understand how to fight and know how to win their fellows to this understanding," and write that the purpose of A People's History of the World is to assist in the creation of such a group. Do you find evidence of such core groups in the world at present?
CH: There are the elements with the potential to coalesce into such core groups in virtually every country in the world. Capitalism cannot avoid forcing people in opposition to it and then cannot prevent some of those discovering the ideas developed by earlier generations of opponents of the system. The problem for many years was that those opposed to exploitation and oppression in the west and the third world tended to identify with the Stalinist regime of the old eastern bloc, while those opposed to those regime all too often accepted western imperialism's claim to stand for freedom. The problem persisted in the first decade after the collapse of the eastern bloc in a slightly different form: people felt that this had discredited an idea of an alternative to capitalism. But in the last 10 years, with the movement that arose after the Seattle demonstration against the World Trade Organisation in 1999 and then with the huge worldwide movements against the Iraq war, there has a revival everywhere of an interest in alternatives. And in the last four or five years there has been a revival of interest in Marx's ideas, with even papers like the Financial Times having to list him as one of the world's great economists. At the same time, the incessant downward pressure of the system on people's lives has given birth to a rash of new struggles against the system"from the Zapatistas and the French public sector strikes of the mid 1990s, through the struggles in Latin America and the beginning of the present decade, to the waves of strikes in Egypt, Bangladesh and South Africa in the last couple of years. The question is whether those radicalised intellectually over the last decade can learn to make connections with those involved in the struggles of the world's eight or nine hundred million workers, and forging revolutionary organisations in the process.
GR: You write that in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991, the US lost "not a single soldier," but the US government reported 382 killed, far fewer than the number of Iraqis who died during the war and during the US imposed sanctions that followed, but still, hundreds of lost lives. Are you claiming that the US government fabricated these casualties?
CH: My account was based on reports that appeared in the British media at the time. They gave the impression that the only US losses were due to "friendly fire", accidents and illness. I have no problem if there is evidence that their accounts were wrong, based on press handouts from the US military designed to hide the reality on the ground.
GR: In this month's European Parliament elections, the British National Party won MEP seats for the first time, and far-right-wing parties across Europe did well. To what to do you attribute the appeal of the right to European voters at this time?
CH: The appeal of the far right is a product of the failure of parties of the parliamentary left to provide the mass of working class people with an alternative to the increasing pressures the system exerts on them through increased joblessness, shortages of affordable housing, increased workplace stress---in general, a sense that things are going from bad to worse. If people are forced to queue for jobs, housing, decent schooling for their children, health provision, and so on, it is very easy turn against individuals who are in front of them in queue. This scapegoating is encouraged in the first place by the multimillionaire owners of the tabloid press and by mainstream politicians who want to deflect attentions away from their responsibility for the queues. The far right can then claim they are the only ones to be consistent in the policies they pursue against minorities.
GR: In 1941, George Orwell wrote, "One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. ...(A)s a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it." As one who has examined the long history of national and class conflict, do you agree? And do you believe that patriotism and internationalism are inherently exclusive?
CH: Nationalism is not something innate to human beings. It is a product of a particular historical period"that of the rise of capitalism on the fringes of western Europe and then its spread to the rest of the world. This led to a situation where people in particular localities were tied to state structures which bound together local market networks and encouraged the use of a single language within them"and so diffentiated them from people who might in reality be their quite close neighbours. Those who ran the states had every interest in using the differences from other people as a way of blurring over the much sharper differences that existed between the classes within each state. In this they were aided by sections of the intelligentsia whose livelihoods were associated with propagating the national language, the imagined historical antiquity of the nation and so on.
As the first such states conquered much of the rest of the world, the reaction of those oppressed by them was to see the way out of oppression as lying in the formation of their own capitalist states with their own languages. The appeal in the first place was mainly to sections of local middle class, but they were able to frame projects which drew behind them both some local capitalists and the mass of workers, peasants and poor people. Here nationalism had the contradictory effect of mobilising people against one form of exploitation and oppression while blinding them to another form. It still plays this role in place like Palestine.
But the predominant feature of nationalism today is to disguise the hardship and suffering people experience at the hands of their own ruling classes. The methods used to create national feeling vary from the seemingly innocuous, like the glorification of national sporting teams and medal winners, to the horrific, like the scapegoating, internment, deportation and sometimes wholesale murder of ethnic or religious minorities.
For these reasons, the extolling of national identity is opposed to the struggle for a better world. Even where people have to fight against national oppression, the fight should not be on the basis of some shared national identity but as part of the international struggle of workers, peasants and poor people of all national identities and the global system. The only patriotism can be an international classs patriotism not a nat'ional patriotism.
Nick Holt's website is gritsandroses.org