“EVERY document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism,” remarked Walter Benjamin, pointing to the reality of life for most of our forebears which is ignored or denied by so many history books. 

That’s certainly not the case with Willie Thompson’s new history of humanity, from the emergence of homo sapiens in Africa to the current debates about inequality and climate change.

It’s a sobering and sympathetic account of the lived experience of most people.

Thompson’s work, firmly grounded in Marx’s historical materialist method, accepts and explains the basic importance of economic arrangements in conditioning human agency and consciousness.

Yet it does not shoehorn the realities of failed struggles, and the myriad class, gender and personal accommodations which constitute the bulk of human history, into a crude and overdetermined framework.

A pithy but comprehensive account, it focuses on the central importance of the transformations of work and the relations of production which occurred 10,000 years ago in the shift to settled, agricultural communities and the more recent transformation to the modern industrialised world of wage labour and market economies built on the technologies of fossil-fuel extraction.

The focus on gender and kinship illuminates the history of oppressive, misogynistic personal relationships and social structures closely linked to the development of class-based societies.

Both genders, subjected to the contempt of the upper orders, have been terrorised by the threats of lords, laws and priests and treated like dirt.

Their lives have been held cheap and readily ended. Yet one half of the species has endured the greater suffering.

Men have exploited women at all times and in all societies — from making women serve as domestic drudges and brutally driven field workers, to the domestic violence, physical mutilation and systematic sexual exploitation of young girls currently being revealed almost daily. 

If human history has been one of forced labour and misogyny, it has also been of the subjection of most people to ruling elites and Thompson’s focus on power clarifies the interlinked mechanisms of political, economic, military and ideological might through which a few get the majority to do as they’re told.

Yet his materialist approach does not prevent understanding the importance of belief systems in motivating humans.

There is a cool but balanced appraisal of religion, in which its power is explained both as an ideological instrument to ensure conformity and obedience to existing power structures and its disruptive and sometimes revolutionary capacity to inspire massive political change, as well as provide some personal consolation and social solidarity.

Along with the accounts of multifarious man-made suffering, Thompson also shows how resistance has occurred for millennia, from the strikes by ancient Egyptian pyramid-builders onwards.

But he concentrates mainly on the large- scale resistance to elite and male power that has developed in the modern era. There’s an insightful chapter on the “promise and paradox” of socialism and its — mostly failed — attempts at world transformation, ranging from utopian socialism to anarchism, communism and the communist bloc of the 20th century.

Yet, as the book’s inspiring conclusion makes clear, the socialist project of human emancipation may have had only partial success so far, and may have underestimated the time needed to succeed, but it remains a viable if by no means inevitable solution to our problems, including combating “bankers stuffed with bonuses who take off in their private jets to preach austerity to everyone else.”

For Thompson, the choice between socialism and barbarism has never been more urgent and important.

Perhaps, he suggests, Benjamin’s aphorism could be reversed, and documents of true civilisation might emerge from the shameful history of barbarism.

Review by Mike Quille