Notes from 'A People's History of the World' Part 1

Harman C. 2008.

Harman begins with a one page time line that covers the period between 4 Million Years Ago (MYA) and 2,000 years ago. Here is an abreviation of the portion up to 5,000 years ago (YA):

4MYA Australopithecus, First ape to walk on two legs.
1.5-0.5 MYA Human species, Homo Erectus, emerge.
400,000 YA - 30,000 YA: Neanderthals are spread to Europe and Middle East. Culture and Language first emerging.
150,000 YA Homo Sapiens species emerge in Africa. They live in small groups foraging. No class, states or sexual oppression.
80,000 YA Homo Sapiens arrive in Middle East.
40,000 YA arrive in Australia.
30,000 YA arrive in Europe [They make it to Australia before Europe?! Cool].
14,000 YA arrive in Americas.
13,000 YA stable climate. Villages of a few hundred members, still living by foraging.
10,000 YA First agricultural revolution. Pottery, stone tools, domestication of plants and animals. Village living spreads. Evidence of the first wars, but no class society.
7,000 YA use of the plough in Africa and Eurasia. Agriculture reaches Northern Europe.
6-5,000 YA 'Urban revolution' in Middle East and Nile river valleys. Some use of copper.

5,000 YA: Emergence of states in Mesopotamia and Old Kingdom Egypt. Bronze Age. Social classes, gendered division of labour and women tend to be viewed as inferior. Religious hierarchies and temples, alphabet.

The prologue is titled "Before Class" and criticises the charactures of human nature which our society produce. Our society projects warlike tendencies, hierarchy, class and greed into an unchanging history of humanity, and blames our unhappy lot on the tragedy of human nature. But this is a fiction. Instead it is argued that these aspects of human society only become visible around 5,000 years ago with the rise of class societies. Harman quotes the following from anthropologist Richard Lee:

"Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations." pp 3

This is compared to Engels' notion of 'primitive communism'. Human society, such as it existed for over a million years, and 150,000 years as modern humans, never contained class or inequality as we know it, until the last 5,000 years, and even then only in very specific places until these cultures spread across the world. For most of our history the emphasis has been on cooperation, coordination and community. Therefore modern notions of human nature are fictitious accounts of the past used to justify the present order of things.

In fact, the distinctive aspects of the human animal is that we are 1. Flexible and 2. Cooperative. We use our hands to make tools and our voices to communicate, our brains to analyse and empathise and share tasks and fruits. The emergence of consciousness is left as a mystery but linked to the development of language and the analytic ability to conceptualise things in the world. But this means that our very consciousness comes out of the sharing of ideas, of the partaking in society.

We emerge, 150,000 YA as foragers (hunters and gatherers) in Africa with these attributes already. We spread across the world over the next 90,000 years, displacing other human species such as Neanderthals. Although the small bands were fairly isolated and diverged in culture and language, genetic differences remained small and were always greater within groups than between them. Humans have remained entirely one species. Culture varied in response to the every day needs of humans in their different environments. Until about 10,000 YA all human cultures obtained their food, shelter and clothing in roughly the same way - foraging (what is normally called hunting and gathering).

Some of these same societies survive today, but very very few. The expansion of the society in which we live has all but obliterated alternative societies. However, for more than 95% of modern human history, life was the same for most people all over the world.

"People lived in loose-knit groups of 30 or 40 which might periodically get together with other groups in bigger gatherings of up to 200. But life in such 'band societies' was certainly no harder than for many millions of people living in more 'civilised' agricultural or industrial societies... there were no rulers, bosses or class divisions in these societies. As Turnbull wrote of the Mbuti pygmies of Congo, 'There were no chiefs, no formal councils. In each aspect of... life there might be one or two men or women who were more prominent than others, but usually for good practical reasons... The maintenance of law was a cooperative affair'... Ernstine Friedl reported from her studies, 'Men and women alike are free to decide how they will spend each day: whether to go hunting or gathering, and with whom. Aleanor Leacock told of her findings: 'There was no... private land ownership and no specialisation of labour beyond that of sex... People make decisions baout the activities for which they were responsible. Consensus was reached within whatever group would be carrying out a collective activity." pp9

In these societies there did tend to be a sexual division of labour, but never male supremacy. Men tended to do most of the hunting, and women tended to do most of the gathering, primarily because when pregnant or breast feeding to hunt would expose them or an infant to more danger. But hunting and gathering were equally valued, and decisions were made by all. Additionally there was no private property as such because everything one had had to be carried between one camp and another. There was no accumulation of private wealth.These points are repeated: that everything is shared, that cultural customs prohibit hoarding, greed, selfishness, boasting and arrogance, that there is no one above and no one below.

Such is the structure of society before class, for most of human existence. The developments that take place over the last 10,000 years, fragmented, piecemeal, and made by innumerable men and women forgotten to history, are what we usually call 'history' and the development of civilisation. Two tendencies develop: the increase of humanity's ability to extract what it needs from nature, and eventually to dominate and domesticate it, and

"the rise of successive forms of organisation of society that oppress and exploit the majority of people to the benefit of a small, priviliged minority." pp9

 The development of which will be covered in the next part.