Customer Reviews

A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is an ambitious work. Chris Harman attempts to place the entirety of human life in terms of the class and class consciousness. Yes, that is incredibly vague and does no justice to the extremely important work (which is nearly a decade old now, but just released in paperback).

Harman is an optimist. My personal favorite thing about "A People's History of the World" is his insistence that 'human nature' is a construct:

"Human beings, we have been told, have always been greedy, competitive and aggressive, and that explains horrors like war, exploitation, slavery and oppression of women. I argue very differently. 'Human nature' as we know it today is a product of our history, not its cause."

For Harman, all humans make a choice. Choices are not the same for everyone. He mentions slave and slave owner, employer and employee or male and female, for examples. These make up history and explain his theory that "understanding the material basis of history is an essential, but not sufficient, precondition to understanding everything else."

Harman begins where all standard 'histories of the world' begin: the trees. From there, we survived in bands as hunter-gatherers (which Harman displays as the reason for our survival and directly contradicts the theory of 'human nature' discussed above). From there he distinguishes the importance of people's adopting agriculture, but he is interested in the first people to accumulation harvest's above subsistence means, which created the first classes. Those who worked to supply the surplus food and those who guarded the food. From this beginning, the world as we know it takes shape.

A history of the world does not require much summary. From the rise of ancient civilizations (Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, etc.) to the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR - Harman includes it and provides in class struggle.

I found his take on Christianity after the fall of the Roman Empire, his take on the beginnings of the Soviet Union to it's demise, and his breadth of knowledge in European affairs in general to be the highlights of the book. It also doesn't help that he is an outstanding writer (a little dry at times, but this is a history book). He understands history and never shies away from his thesis and is convincing with evidence to support his thoughts.

Obviously one cannot agree with everything. Personally, I did not agree with the downplaying of certain factors for the overall congruence of 'class struggle' as the overriding factor, period. I understand his focus on European history, but his forays in Asia, Latin America and especially Africa are too short and could use a lot more analysis.

Like Howard Zinn says on the cover, "An indispensable volume on my reference bookshelf." I found myself compulsively highlighting this book with interesting tidbits and other facts and opinions that I find myself wishing I wrote. This is book is brief for a history of the world, but it fluid and packs a punch - especially from where it is coming from. For those skeptical, try this out against any standard history to open your mind to a different view on our impact on the world.

This book truly proves that individuals can write great works of history without a PHD. The methodology seems to focus on social movements and the plight of the lower classes rather than praising "heroic individuals". Each summary is quite short, yet it contains a thoroughly critical analysis. Additionally, it exposes readers to works that contain a more narrowed focus for further reading. I would recommend this book to ALL historians, as it is a great reference for other reading and teaching. Certainly, this book is not all-inclusive and the author mentions this flaw, but it is a crucial perspective on a wide range of historical events.

there are many books which attempt to give us man's history. Harman, one of the leading Marxist writers of our time, try to write the history of man from marxist point of view. Just for this reason it is wortwhile to read. It is an important effort against the ideological/theoretical offensive of the so-called individualistic reading of our history.

The late Chris Harman was the editor of the Socialist Workers Party's paper. In this book, he attempted to write a Marxist history of the world.

His method was to rely on good Marxists who did the best studies of each period of history. So for the rise of class societies, he relied on V. Gordon Childe, for the ancient world, on Geoffrey De Ste Croix, for the Middle Ages, on Rodney Hilton, for the great transformation, on Christopher Hill and J. V. Polisensky, for the spread of the new order, on George Rudé, and for the world turned upside down, on Albert Soboul, Marx and Engels. Unfortunately, when it came to the 20th century, he relied only on Trotsky and Tony Cliff.

How did Harman, this self-proclaimed revolutionary, deal with the 20th century's defining revolution, the great October revolution? He wrote that in 1926 Stalin adopted 'a completely new doctrine known as 'socialism in one country''. This ignored Lenin's article The United States of Europe slogan, where he wrote, 'Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world.'

Harman wrote that Stalin represented a ruling group whose 'chief characteristic was inertia and complacency'. Yet this inert and complacent group 'did break the backbone of private capitalism in Russia, and later did the same in Eastern Europe and China.' Even Harman had to acknowledge 'the economic success of the USSR' in the 1930s and its 'rapid industrial advance' in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Harman's account of World War Two is provably false (see Grover Furr's Khrushchev lied for details). Harman wrongly wrote that Stalin ignored the Nazi threat and the warnings of war, that the Red Army was 'utterly unprepared', that Stalin 'panicked' when the Nazis attacked, that he turned to 'chauvinism', that he 'deported whole peoples' for no good reason, and that he ordered Soviet forces to stand back from Warsaw when the Nazis crushed the rising. Harman denied that World War Two was a war between progress and reaction, between democracy and fascism, and even doubted that the Grand Alliance was anti-fascist.

His analysis of revolution is fatally flawed by his embrace of the counter-revolutionary notion of state capitalism. Capitalist classes have used the state to develop the economy, but when a working class used the state to develop the economy, the SWP denounced it as practising capitalism. Any use of the state has, apparently, to be capitalist. This dogmatic opposition to the state is anarchism, the polar opposite of Marxism.

A truly fantastic book which tells history from the perspective of the vast majority of those who lived it. If history was taught, as this book does, in a way which shows how the decisions of the elites effected the masses, we would all have a greater understanding of human history, sociology, and psychology. (It is time for schools to stop being useless knowledge factories, and to start teaching an engaging form of history that students can actually relate to: a history of the people.) The book also provides an anthropological study of pre-capitalist humans who lived in democratic societies without knowledge of possession or class, proving that human nature is malleable. We do not have have a desire built into our DNA to oppress those around us. Human greed is a product of our current insidious social environment which twists human nature to reflect societal demands for profit.

I applaud you, Christopher Hartman, for taking the time necessary to create an accurate historical account of the forgotten masses who have experienced oppression and privation, for the benefit of the few elites. I find your analysis of historical facts to be spot on. Your book, and the uprisings in Northern Africa, give me hope that humanity will not be forever doomed to the ubiquitous barbarism concomitant to the rise of capitalism.

Best corrective to "history as seen from the top" yet. A great companion to Howard Zinn's PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Introduction to historical materialism.

Great book. Nice to read something that focuses on people, not just great men. There should be more works like this, and I hope this is just the begining.

This is a significant history text. It's readable and engaging, and provides a definite point of view. I would recommend it as a useful adjunct to a more neutral/objective account of world history.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to kvetch briefly about the blurb for the book, probably written by the publisher, that appears on this page (above). It claims that this book has special value today in a world that's "riven as never before by suffering and inequality." This is a strikingly ahistorical comment, not worthy of the publisher of a history textbook. The idea that the world today is more beset by suffering and inequality today than ever before is, IMO, not merely laughable, but, worse, stupid. And, in fact, even though it was probably written by the publisher, maybe it generates a little bit of skepticism about the book itself.

More "riven by suffering and inequality" than in 1944 as the Nazis shoved millions of souls into gas chambers? More than in 1844 when slavery cast a dark stain across the U.S.? More than in 1744 when slavery was basically an accepted fact of life in virtually every corner of the world? More than during the long centuries when medicine was essentially incapable of alleviating any serious disease, when chronic pain was a daily companion for billions of humans? More than in the 14th century when the Bubonic Plague killed one-third of Europe? More than in the 1100s when the Mongols joyfully slaughtered millions? More than when the Assyrians scythed their region? Etc., etc., etc., etc. So, there's my kvetch, for what it's worth.

Howard Zinn aptly stated that this was "An indispensible volume on my reference bookshelf". While I agree with his statement I also feel that this book was meant to be read cover-to-cover as I did. The author himself, Chris Harmon, being an active member of the Socialist party, presents past history not only through the eyes of the people themselves, but through the eyes of one who feels that capitalism is both doomed to eventual failure and as the cause of the class rivalries that have existed throughout time. It is very hard to argue with the author's logic and projections that human societies cannot peacefully successfully exist with the few "haves' ruling the masses of "have nots". This is not the history book of our high school years where dates and names and countries were what painted the happenings of the times in question. It is a history book that views the past as an unending series on conflicts and disasters that originated from the ruling elite's desire for more power, more money and more prestige and how these desires have devastated the working classes. Equally stated is the fact that the only time that the middle class becomes involved in these struggles is when it is to their benefit or that their status is likewise threatened. Will history continue to repeat itself? It certainly has throughout the past and I have no confidence that this credo will fail in the future.

A most humanist approach to an area which is ripe for manufacturing a platable "reality" for any author with an agenda. No reconstruction of the past is immune to this bias but this author gets close if the result is measured by critical plausability. The pity of it all is how well it reflects the observation that if we forget history we are bound to repeat it. Unforunatly, it appears that we do not need to forget at all and progressing through this book makes that realization quite clear. We appear to repeat history because we seem compelled to do so--why? We may all ponder.