A People's History of the World
by Chris Harman
Any attempt to write a history of the world is an especially daunting undertaking, and raises with special clarity the underlying questions in all studies of history: what to include, what to exclude, and what counts as being the most enlightening insights. An arbitrary recital of everything that has happened would be merely impossible; but, far worse, it would be worthless.
The all-important accomplishment of Harman's ambitious book is that he does a good job of identifying one of the most important lessons that we should learn from history. His most basic insight takes a page from Marx: the thread underlying much of history is class conflict.
Historians who have sworn their allegiance to capitalism loathe this highly inconvenient insight, and do everything they can to paper it over, or deny it outright. To do this, however, is to engage in Orwellian anti-history, and merits brisk dismissal (and should also result in the firing of a lot of pseudo-historians). To show us this dynamic in detail is, therefore, essential; but it is worth keeping in mind that it does tend to overlook another sort of history, which aims to show us how true progress comes about - in those relatively rare cases where it actually does. Harman has a few words to say about this, but a stronger history would have had more.
The Most Urgent Challenge of Today
However, as the world is hamstrung in its attempt to address the truly urgent issue of climate vandalism, this perspective becomes even more important than it otherwise would be. Climate vandalism is promulgated by energy corporations and their CEOs, who have enormous political clout. And it is just one of many manifestations of class warfare. Harman brings us down to the late 1990s, and among his last observations is this:
"There was another side to the growing poverty . . . and growing insecurity in the west. It was the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the ruling classes. By the late 1990s some 348 billlionaires enjoyed a total wealth equal to the income of half of humanity."
This tendency has only worsened in the two decades since Harman wrote these words - and with it has gone the devolution of an ever-more corrupt Republican party, which obstinately refuses to take even the first of the urgent steps that must now be taken.
To understand what has brought us to the threshold of this crisis, as well as many expensive, tragic, and discretionary wars, declared unilaterallly by Presidents who do not have this authority, one must read Harman's book. We consider this to be so important that we've made it one of the three books of our canon of the most essential 21st century reading.
