A great passage from a truly great book. Thanks for highlighting it. The phrase "where the working class was in the saddle" has been burned into my consciousness since the first time I read this book. A society "where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites" still appeals to me.
Most historians have ignored: the constant efforts of ordinary people throughout history to create and sustain societies based on equality of all individuals. Contrary to traditional historical writing, he finds that the earliest human communities usually treated all individuals as equals. In the histories of societies all around the world, he records how individuals who found ways to gain wealth and power have faced constant, often successful, resistance from the rest.
From the first recorded communities in Mesopotamia to the COVID-19 pandemic, this book features the resistances, uprisings, struggles, and solidarities of the majority against those seeking to dominate. The result is a fresh and challenging interpretation of the history of our species, one that casts a new light on the true nature of humans.
Thanks for this summary of my book, Glen. I don't know you and was surprised and delighted to see your comment on Luke's Substack, which I always read. The book is a response to Yuval Harari's Sapiens, which folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates loved because it suggests that any post-foraging society inevitably produces people like themselves and there is nothing that the rest of us can do about that. It's nonsense and Humans is an attempt to show that in every era including ours there are many examples of uprisings and solidarities, more of them successful than we are often told, that have re-established the communitarian, egalitarian alternative to exploitative, hierarchical social structures. Unsurprisingly only readers of journals like The Tyee, The Maple, Canadian Dimension, Alberta Views, Active History, Monthly Review, and the Literary Review of Canada, and David Moscrop's Substack are likely to know the book exists. So far, the corporate media in Canada have been united in not being willing to review the book or interview me about it, though someone is planning to do a review for the Montreal Gazette that might change that.
My pleasure Alvin. Your book made it clear that surplus from agriculture did not cause hoarding.might is right from the invasion of hierarchical powers did. You busted the myth that fair sharing and abundance are incompatible.
Thanks. I'd add that not only are fair sharing and abundance compatible but there are lots of examples, such as the post-Roman-Empire, pre-feudal Europe, pre-colonial Africa and North America, inter-war Vienna, and today's Cuba and Kerala, that show that a fairly low level of "abundance" can create enough wealth to have societies with excellent social programs and recreation. The argument of the "economic growth" folks that environmental destruction is necessary if we want to look after those currently at the bottom of the social heap is both bogus and disastrous.
A great passage from a truly great book. Thanks for highlighting it. The phrase "where the working class was in the saddle" has been burned into my consciousness since the first time I read this book. A society "where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites" still appeals to me.
Orwell was tasting what humanity tasted quite a bit in the last 300,000 years. See Alvin Finkel's Humans: The 300,000 year Struggle For Equality.
Most historians have ignored: the constant efforts of ordinary people throughout history to create and sustain societies based on equality of all individuals. Contrary to traditional historical writing, he finds that the earliest human communities usually treated all individuals as equals. In the histories of societies all around the world, he records how individuals who found ways to gain wealth and power have faced constant, often successful, resistance from the rest.
From the first recorded communities in Mesopotamia to the COVID-19 pandemic, this book features the resistances, uprisings, struggles, and solidarities of the majority against those seeking to dominate. The result is a fresh and challenging interpretation of the history of our species, one that casts a new light on the true nature of humans.
Thanks for this summary of my book, Glen. I don't know you and was surprised and delighted to see your comment on Luke's Substack, which I always read. The book is a response to Yuval Harari's Sapiens, which folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates loved because it suggests that any post-foraging society inevitably produces people like themselves and there is nothing that the rest of us can do about that. It's nonsense and Humans is an attempt to show that in every era including ours there are many examples of uprisings and solidarities, more of them successful than we are often told, that have re-established the communitarian, egalitarian alternative to exploitative, hierarchical social structures. Unsurprisingly only readers of journals like The Tyee, The Maple, Canadian Dimension, Alberta Views, Active History, Monthly Review, and the Literary Review of Canada, and David Moscrop's Substack are likely to know the book exists. So far, the corporate media in Canada have been united in not being willing to review the book or interview me about it, though someone is planning to do a review for the Montreal Gazette that might change that.
My pleasure Alvin. Your book made it clear that surplus from agriculture did not cause hoarding.might is right from the invasion of hierarchical powers did. You busted the myth that fair sharing and abundance are incompatible.
Thanks. I'd add that not only are fair sharing and abundance compatible but there are lots of examples, such as the post-Roman-Empire, pre-feudal Europe, pre-colonial Africa and North America, inter-war Vienna, and today's Cuba and Kerala, that show that a fairly low level of "abundance" can create enough wealth to have societies with excellent social programs and recreation. The argument of the "economic growth" folks that environmental destruction is necessary if we want to look after those currently at the bottom of the social heap is both bogus and disastrous.
Thank you Luke. Love the podcast, love the writing.
A good reminder as always that the heart is on the left