Posted 7:10 pm by Ken

When I were a lad, this were all fields

Over the past few days I've had a worse sense of insecurity and instability than I had after 9/11, and far more unsettling than I anything I felt when I was actually, ah, present at scenes of considerably more consequent rucks, not to mention rocks. Seeing Lewisham's clock tower on the telly had me thinking along the lines that when I was that age we knew what we were fighting for. There's probably a blue plaque there in our memory.

On Monday evening I watched The Grand Experiment, a documentary in a series on Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words - their words to, and on, the BBC: which institution, we are reminded, was a grand experiment in itself. I spent the rest of the evening and too much of the small hours watching BBC News 24 on the riots, the night Croydon burned.

The Grand Experiment was, of course, the postwar Keynes-Beveridge full-employment welfare state. Supported by the main parties of left and right, by the end of the sixties it was coming under attack from both flanks: you can see Tariq Ali calling for the abolition of money and the power of the soviets, and Milton Friedman calling for the ascendance of monetarism and the freedom of the markets, and in the middle some floundering mouthpiece of the consensus, such as poor old Lord Balogh marching into the lions' den of Chicago to defend the Labour Government.

It seems obvious now that the postwar settlement had reached its limits by 1979. But I sometimes wonder if a more rational left than I was part of could have carried it forward, rather than helped to bring it down.

I blame the parents, and the parents were us.

Labels: far left, history, libertarian, Marxism, politics

Posted 2:48 pm by Ken

The battle of Tahrir Square means we can all be human again

For the past thirty years humanity has existed only as an animal species. The appropriate science for its study has been zoology. Great advances have in fact been made in that field, notably through the application of genomics. But humanity as a rational and political animal died in 1979, and went to hell. There it did what the damned do: tormented others and itself. The instrument of torment was identity. As some philosopher said, identity politics is zoological. If we don't see our partial struggles as part of a general project of human emancipation, we turn on each other and fight over crumbs.

In Tahrir Square last week thousands of people stood up to a counter-revolutionary mob and fought it back, yard by yard over a long day and night, with sticks and stones. In those few hours they proved in practice that the human being's conscious will can change history. They brought the human subject and human emancipation back into politics. Whatever the immediate outcome in Egypt, this consciousness will not go away. We can all go back to being human. That doesn't mean we will all love each other. It means we can fight each other for good reasons.

As someone said on Twitter: 'Yesterday we were all Tunisians. Today we are all Egyptians. Tomorrow we will all be free.'

And that's your grand narrative, all you post-modernists, rising up and coming right back in your face!

Labels: history, Marxism, politics, revolution

Posted 8:45 am by Ken

Space Rockets

Going to space with rockets: path dependent locked-in fluke or inevitable result of technological synergy?

We report - you decide.

(Thanks to Jack Crow in comment to post below for pointing these out.)

Labels: history

Posted 7:40 pm by Ken

Jim Cannon's socialist hope

Speaking of optimism, here's the peroration of a speech that James P. Cannon, an American socialist, made in 1953.

All will be artists. All will be workers and students, builders and creators. All will be free and equal. Human solidarity will encircle the globe and conquer it and subordinate it to the uses of man.

That, my friends, is not an idle speculation. That is the realistic perspective of our great movement. We ourselves are not privileged to live in the socialist society of the future, which Jack London, in his far-reaching aspiration, called the Golden Future. It is our destiny, here and now, to live in the time of the decay and death agony of capitalism. It is our task to wade through the blood and filth of this outmoded, dying system. Our mission is to clear it away. That is our struggle, our law of life.

We cannot be citizens of the socialist future, except by anticipation. But it is precisely this anticipation, this vision of the future, that fits us for our role as soldiers of the revolution, soldiers of the liberation war of humanity. And that, I think, is the highest privilege today, the occupation most worthy of a civilised man. No matter whether we personally see the dawn of socialism or not, no matter what our personal fate may be, the cause for which we fight has social evolution on its side and is therefore invincible. It will conquer and bring all mankind a new day.

It is enough for us, I think, if we do our part to hasten on the day. That’s what we’re here for. That’s all the incentive we need. And the confidence that we are right and that our cause will prevail, is all the reward we need. That’s what the socialist poet, William Morris, had in mind, when he called us to

Join in the only battle
wherein no man can fail
for whoso fadeth and dieth
yet his deeds shall still prevail.

Cannon's deeds have prevailed all right. You may never have heard of him, but the world we live in would be noticeably different if Cannon had never lived, or had made different choices. Ignazio Silone once said that the final conflict would be between the communists and the ex-communists. One less-than-final but still significant conflict today, that over the left's response to war, is between those who work and think along the lines that Cannon laid down and those - the inheritors, whether they know it or not, of Shachtman on the one hand and of Stalinism on the other - who don't. Without Cannon, there wouldn't be an antiwar movement. There would be a 'peace' movement, begging the warmakers to see sense. There would be a 'Decent left', cheering the warmakers on. And that - give or take a few fringe intransigents - would be that.

How did Cannon acquire the confidence that the cause for which he fought had 'social evolution' on its side? As a youth he walked into a meeting to hear a lecture on 'Marx and Darwin'. That lecture, and further study, convinced him 'theoretically - and that is the firmest conviction there is' that capitalism is inseparable from crises and wars, that the great majority of working people would sooner or later be compelled to move into action against these crises and wars, and that they would establish as capitalism's successor system one of global co-operation for abundance, peace, and freedom. 'The victory of Socialist America is already written in the stars.'

Nothing that has happened since his death in 1974 would have surprised him if he'd lived to see it, or disillusioned him. He had no illusions. Cannon's theoretical conviction allowed him to face unflinchingly the terrible realities of the 20th Century: World War, the rise of Stalinism, the Depression, the Yezhovschina, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the atomic bombings, the Stalinist labour camps, the Cold War and the colonial wars. Unlike some, he faced and fought them all while they happened, in real time. He never gave an inch.

We're all so much more sophisticated now.

Labels: far left, history, Marxism, War on Terror

Posted 1:33 pm by Ken

Ghosts

Scenes from the Great Patriotic War superimposed on recent colour photos from the exact places where the original photographs were taken. Sometimes subtle, sometimes less so, always haunting. (Via.)

Labels: amazing things, history

Posted 5:07 pm by Ken

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943

What it says. Go look.

Thanks to Shawn Raiford for the pointer.

Labels: amazing things, history

Posted 2:52 pm by Ken

The famous Café Bristol

The Moscow Trials of the late 1930s, during which leading Soviet and Communist officials (among others) confessed to (among other things) plotting to murder Stalin, seize power, and restore capitalism, all with the direct aid of hostile foreign powers including Nazi Germany, were among the defining events of the Twentieth Century.

Anyone who has looked at the controversy over the Trials in any detail, if they know anything at all, knows this:

'Investigation of the few tangible “facts” alleged in the [first] trial proved fatal to the frame-up. For example, one of the defendants, Holtzman, testified that in November 1932 he had met [Trotsky's son] Sedov in the: “lounge” of the “Hotel Bristol” in Copenhagen and went with him to meet Trotsky and receive terrorist instructions. It was proved conclusively that Holtzman was not among the people who called on Trotsky and his wife, their friends and guards during the short time Trotsky visited Copenhagen to lecture in defense of the Soviet Union. Still more devastating, it was discovered that the Hotel Bristol had been torn down in 1917 and not rebuilt until 1936!'

Shortly after the non-existence of the Hotel Bristol in 1932 was established, the Stalinists countered as follows:

'Holtzman testified that when he arrived at the station he crossed over to the Bristol Hotel. Now opposite the station there is no Bristol Hotel. There is, however, the Grand Central Hotel, and in the same building there is a Bristol Café. Further, at the date mentioned, it was possible to obtain entrance to the hotel through the café. It may be that Holtzman, seeing the sign above the café, was confused as to the name of the hotel.'

(Soviet Policy and its Critics, J. R. Campbell, Left Book Club (Gollancz) 1939, page 264.)

To which Trotsky's defenders, in turn, countered thus:

Harking back to one of the mysteries of the first trial, the DW [Daily Worker] gave a sizable bit of its valuable space in the issue of February 26 [1937] to a plan of the Grand Hotel, Copenhagen, allegedly showing that one could enter a café said to be called the Café Bristol through this hotel – though how Holtzman could have proposed to ‘put up’ at this café still remained unexplained!

(Holtzman's exact words had been: 'I arranged with Sedov to be in Copenhagen within two or three days, to put up at the Hotel Bristol and meet him there. I went to the hotel straight from the station and in the lounge met Sedov.')

Furthermore, the only photograph of 'the famous Café Bristol' that the Stalinist press produced showed an establishment with the conspicuous sign 'KONDITORI BRISTOL' above its entire frontage, and with an entrance apparently several doors away from the nearby (also clearly signed) entrance to a hotel. Two witnesses to the Dewey Commission testified:

Directly next to the entrance to the hotel, and what appears as a big black splotch in the photo, is actually the location of the Café next to the Grand Hotel; and it is not the Konditori Bristol! The Konditori Bristol is not next door, but actually several doors away, at quite a distance from the hotel, and was not a part of it in any way, and there was no door connecting the Konditori (“candy store” it would be called here) and the Grand Hotel! Although there was such an entrance to the café which is blackened out in the photo, and which was not the Bristol.

In other words, between the Grand Hotel and the Konditori Bristol there was a café and between the hotel and the café there was an entrance, but there was no entrance at all connecting the hotel and the Bristol Konditori. B.J. Field and Esther Field were actually in that café and they were also in the hotel, so they are speaking from personal knowledge. They say further.

As a matter of fact, we bought some candy once at the Konditori Bristol, and we can state definitely that it had no vestibule, lobby, or lounge in common with the Grand Hotel or any hotel, and it could not have been mistaken for a hotel in any way, and entrance to the hotel could not be obtained through it.

And there, for nearly seventy years, the matter rested.

Then a Swedish-resident researcher, Sven-Eric Holmström, did what no one (it seems) had done in all those decades. He went to Copenhagen, where the very same Grand Hotel stands to this day, and investigated for himself. The result has now been published (PDF) by the American online Marxist journal Cultural Logic. I must admit that I would never have thought of tackling the problem the way he did. I would have assumed that any investigation at this late date would have to involve memoirs, or the testimonies of very old people - which would, of course, have left the question still open. I would have been wrong. Whatever one thinks of Holmström's wider argument in the article, he has settled the specific question of the connection between the Café Bristol and the hotel beyond a reasonable doubt, and in a way that does not rely on testimony. What it does rely on is so obvious that one can only wonder why no one thought of doing so before. It appears to be conclusive.

But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, chapter 7 (Penguin Modern Classics, 1970, p66)

Some readers may - as I did - have this same uncanny sensation when they look at the photographs in Figures 7 and 8 of Holmström's remarkable piece of historical sleuthing. They may also appreciate the grim irony, in this and its own context, of the above Orwell quote.

Labels: far left, history, Marxism

Posted 10:06 pm by Ken

Mammoths! Zeppelins! Hitler!

Last week I received my contributor copies of The Alternate Book of Mammoth Histories The History Book of Alternate Mammoths The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories, edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates. The covers of all anthologies of alternate history must, by law, include a picture of a Zeppelin or Hitler (just as all American libertarian books must, under some obscure interstate commerce regulation, show a picture of that big government statue in New York harbour) and this one scores on both counts, in both its (alternate) versions. I'm very proud indeed to have one of the three original stories in it, alongside no less than 22 reprints, some of them classics and some quite new to me. Ian Whates gives the contents list here. I haven't read them all but I haven't had a let-down yet. James Morrow's 'The Raft of the Titanic' is going to be a future classic, and among the reprints Keith Roberts' 'Weinachtsabend' is one of the best SF short stories in a number of highly competitive categories (alternate history, 'Hitler wins', British New Wave, and, indeed 'short stories by Keith Roberts') and it's good to see it back in print.

Labels: history, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 8:24 am by Ken

Bogus Science: or, some People Really Believe These Things by John Grant

I first came across the name and ideas of Charles Fort in the SF stories and novels of Eric Frank Russell - most likely in Sinister Barrier. A little later in my teens I read Damon Knight's biography Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained, and was inspired to write the following teenage poem:

Fortitude

Skulls fossilised in coal, Sargasso seas,
frog-showers, flying lights, and coloured rain,
writing engraved on meteorites - all these
and more he could record, but not explain.
Aristotle called theories 'likely stories',
and this man, also, was not deceived:
all his deductions and hypotheses
were tales he went on telling, but no more believed
than he believed that two plus two make four -
an abnormal attitude that was completely sane.
Gripped by such facts, how could he set much store
in the fragile constructions of the brain?

In more recent years I read Fortean Times fairly regularly - I may even have subscribed - and although my reading became intermittent, the magazine came to occupy many a long railway journey home from Inverness. And then, quite suddenly a couple of years ago, I read an article in the October 2007 issue on the life of the psychic investigator Harry Price - an article that made pretty clear that he was a hoaxer and chancer, astonishing only for his brass neck - and I thought, well, there are better things to do with one's time. I began to suspect that by taking seriously - even if sceptically - an endless parade of tosh, the magazine was not as harmless a diversion as it had seemed. Because its abiding impression is that, while this or that claim might be false, this or that guru a charlatan, there might, you know, after all be something spooky lurking in some yet uninvestigated thicket ...

John Grant's Bogus Science gives much of the genuine pleasure I used to get from Fortean Times, with a far more bracing scepticism, and a harder line on the damage done by indulging credulity. Fort himself, Grant points out, trawled most of his anomalies - the frog-showers, flying lights, and coloured rain - from assiduous research in files of American local newspapers whose editors and reporters were, if a quiet day left them with space to fill, quite happy to fill it with bunkum. They just made the stuff up.

Grant's book ranges widely, from ancient and modern geocentrists and flat-earthers to inventors of perpetual motion machines, promoters of zero point energy, discoverers of Atlantis (my favourite is the Swedish polymath Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) who found it a few miles from his own university, and proved to the satisfaction of many that the pyramids of Egypt were mere imperfect copies of the mounds of Gamla Uppsala) and hunters of Bigfoot (for whom Grant allows more latitude than most sceptics), taking in a lot more along the way. There's something very satisfying in seeing that every design for a perpetual motion machine (weights! magnets! no, wait, water ...) that I ever scribbled on the back of a physics jotter in high school was anticipated centuries earlier by people much cleverer than myself.

Bogus Science is a kind of rubble skip of what the author had left after taking a hammer to Discarded Science and Corrupted Science, and none the worse for that. Beautifully produced, endlessly entertaining and highly recommended.

Labels: history, reviews, skiffy, writing

Posted 1:24 pm by Ken

Decades

Some mercifully lost diary records my excitement at the first decade rollover I was old enough to be aware of, in 1969. I remember being excited about it, because I'd read enough science fiction set in or referring to the 1970s to think of the 1970s as the beginning of the scientifictional future. I wondered where I'd be in 1979: maybe fighting for king and country against China? (Why king? Possibly because some near-future political novel by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond - The Smile on the Face of the Tiger? Scotch on the Rocks? - had Elizabeth making a graceful handover to Charles. Why China? Well, that was probably in the novel too, but it was also in the geopolitical wisdom of the age, which saw the big war to come as pitting an alliance of the US/UK, Europe and Russia against China and its allies in the Third World.)

Within a couple of years, of course, Nixon went to China and Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

In 1979, the war with Eurasia had just turned hot in a cold place. My new girlfriend, Carol, rather aptly impressed my family by winning a game of Risk, though that wasn't why they took her to their hearts.

My recollections of late 1989 include watching the BBC news from Romania in the cafteria of a shopping centre with Carol and our children, just before or just after Christmas. I quit smoking on Christmas day, had one cigarette at Hogmanay, and then none for a couple of months. Some time in February or March I took our daughter on a Woodcraft Folk weekend. Woodcraft Folk kids tend to be free range. By the time the adults had some time on their own on the first evening I was cadging roll-ups.

In 1999 we all went into Edinburgh for the big century rollover. I had flu and was a bit feverish, but it still felt joyful. We'd made it out of the twentieth century alive! Firework residue and drops of sprayed beer fell on happy upturned faces. I had an elated hope that the new century might develop unencumbered by the ideologies that had dominated the old. Hah!

Here in the last day of 2009, I have absolutely no idea what the world will be like in 2019, or what we can expect in the ten years ahead. All I know is that 2019 seems a lot farther in the future than 2009 seemed in 1999.

Labels: history, writing

Posted 10:42 pm by Ken

Why Kepler's Somnium is (or isn't) hard SF, and other more interesting questions

Last month BBC producer Louise Yeoman invited me to the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh to contribute to a 20-minute BBC radio programme about Kepler's Somnium, which also featured Andrew Brown, the observatory's Professor Avery Meiksin, and science historian James Connor.

You can now hear it on the BBC iPlayer, and it's worth a listen. Prof Meiksin is a joy to listen to. As for me, well ... I sound a lot more coherent and fluent than I sounded to myself at the time. (Good editing, probably.) Whatever argument I may (or may not) have made to justify the fine distinction I drew between Kepler's speculation and hard SF (some ramble about Gernsback, I suspect) is lost to my memory as much as to the recording, if it was ever there in the first place. Also, I got Hal Clement's name slightly wrong - from nervousness rather than ignorance.

Andrew Brown evidently enjoyed his visit, particularly to the library:

So there I was on Tuesday, touching the vellum of a 13th century manuscript of Alhazen, another of Aristotle, and then a first edition of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and one of Kepler's Nova Astronomia. In the shelves on the wall were Galileo's works.

We were meant to be making a radio programme – an interval talk for Radio 3 – but the producer and I and our guest Ken MacLeod just frolicked round that room of priceless books like salmon woken by a spate. Serious work was impossible for a while. There was nothing to say that was adequate in the face of so much beauty and so much history; for anyone who writes, the feel of a physical object which has been read for 800 years is a quite extraordinary thrill.

'Oh monks, monks, monks,' I heard him murmur, looking at a volume of hundreds of pages of minute invariant uncial script, 'that this labour of yours should be used as a cheap analogy for DNA replication!'

Labels: genomics, history, local, self-promotion, writing

Posted 10:39 am by Ken

Chris Harman, 1942 - 2009

Chris Harman, who since the 1960s was a leading thinker and activist in the Socialist Workers Party (Britain), died on Friday. Although I didn't know him personally, his writings had a huge effect on my life, as they did on many thousands of others.

Condolences to all those who did know him, particularly his family and friends.

Labels: far left, history, Marxism

Posted 7:45 pm by Ken

The Trease Project

Farah Mendlesohn is blogging her research and reading on the influential writer of children's historical fiction, Geoffrey Trease. Who he was:

Geoffrey Trease published his first historical novel for children, Bows Against the Barons in 1934. His last novel was published in 1997, in the year he died. I think it can be plausibly argued that he created the modern version of the historical novel for children, that lasted for most of the twentieth century, and he certainly helped to create a market for the likes of Rosemary Sutcliffe, Hester Burton, Ronald Welch and Henry Treece and many others. But he didn't just do that. Trease was quite left wing. He never joined a party as far as I know, but he set out to write a new form of history for children, which didn't focus on great men and women, but on the you and me of history. His works are full of sly little digs at the traditions of Empire, the assumptions of Progress, and the questions people should ask when they read history.

Labels: history, Marxism, writing

Posted 8:11 pm by Ken

The Prophet's Suitcase

Tim Wohlforth's memoir The Prophet's Children, which I found in the Oxfam bookshop on Byres Road, Glasgow a couple of weekends ago, is a dismaying and enlightening read for anyone who has ever taken Trotskyism seriously. And I have - it's creepily apt that the photograph facing page 157 almost has me in it.

Kids these days - heck, anyone under thirty - in Britain, France and a handful of other countries, probably think it's a small but normal part of the gaiety of nations to have Trotskyists running for President, sponsoring big talk-fests of leftwing politicians and trade unionists and public intellectuals, performing stand-up comedy, sitting on the executives of major unions, getting elected to the European Parliament, bringing about the fall of an Italian government, and so on and so forth, all the while upholding the charming old Trotskyist customs of selling newspapers, splitting and fusing and underestimating the peasantry.

It wasn't always like this. In the 1950s and 1960s even the largest Trotskyist organizations (apart from the one in Sri Lanka, which quite uniquely was the mass working-class party in the country, and one in Britain, the Socialist Labour League (SLL), which had about a thousand) had memberships in the hundreds, and the rest had tens at most. So the past few decades could be counted a success - 'the resurgence of the political formations associated with [Trotsky's] name', as a New Left Books back cover once pompously put it.

The man most responsible for that success, small as it was, being a lot smaller than it could have been was Gerry Healy, the very man who had built the SLL. Remarking on Healy's death in December 1989, the anarchist Nicolas Walter said to me that Healy was the most evil person ever to come out of the Marxist movement. What about Ceausescu (then in the news), I asked? I don't recall Walter's reply, by I do remember the impatient look and gesture that accompanied it. Britain's best-known anarchist wasn't given to cutting actual Communist tyrants any slack, but my guess is that he thought Ceausescu's character was better than Healy's. If so, he may have had a point. Say what you like about Ceausescu, he railed at his accusers, stood by his Elena, and died like a man.

Wohlforth, it's fair to say, doesn't use his memoir to shine a flattering light on himself. He adds little to the exposure of Healy, of whom enough and more than enough has been said. As early as 1959, one of Healy's biggest catches - Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker journalist who'd covered the Hungarian uprising of 1956, found his reports spiked or distorted, and broken with the Communist Party as a result - gave a disturbing account of Healy's violence, lying and paranoia. Unfortunately it took another quarter of a century before the whole farrago imploded.

No, what's actually disillusioning is seeing the relatively decent characters in this long-running farce - Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, Joseph Hansen, George Novack, even James P. Cannon (once described as 'a Healy who never found his Gadaffi') not to mention Wohlforth and his comrades and rivals, from James Robertson to Lyndon Larouche portrayed as little more than assiduous writers of internal documents that tried and failed to interpret a world being changed by others.

A perennial problem of Trotskyism has been trying to understand the post-WW2 social revolutions within the framework of Trotskyist theory. If you actually look at what actually happened, whether it's Czechoslovakia or Cuba or South Yemen, it's not at all hard to understand what was going on. Understanding it and making your understanding compatible with Trotskyist theory is an exercise in futility, like squaring the circle or getting a dent out of a ping-pong ball. I once made the effort, ploughing through: a whole load of the American SWP's and the Fourth International's internal documents reprinted decades later as 'Education for Socialists' bulletins; one of Wohlforth's tyro attempts; and a later document, 'The Theory of Structural Assimilation', which he authored on realising the first one didn't work. How depressing to see how Wohlforth himself had set about the task:

'That winter I took a suitcase full of old documents to a Miami Beach kosher hotel.' (p113)

It would be churlish to begrudge Wohlforth his second career.

Labels: far left, history, Marxism

Posted 11:54 am by Ken

A stone age social revolution

We begin with 'a patriarchal society of bitter destructiveness: the gloomy temples dug into the mountain like caves served to maintain power in a society that was obviously rigidly organized through open terror: human sacrifices. In the temples of all building levels huge amounts of blood were shed which the excavators retrieved in thick crusts on daggers, altars or draining funnels which were designed specifically for that purpose. The analysis of the isolated blood pigment haemoglobin revealed that it was generally human blood. In the chambers of one of these temples there were the skulls of more than 70 people and parts of skeletons of more than 400 different individuals "neatly stacked up to the ceiling".'

So far, so familiar. We've all seen depictions of societies like that, in Conan movies if nothing else. However ...

'On a certain day 9200 years ago the manorial houses at the north side of the large square in Çayönü were burnt down, and this happened so fast that the owners were not able to save any of their treasures. The temple was torn down and burnt, and even the floor was ripped open, the stone pillars around the free space were taken down and the taller of them were broken up. The place itself - previously maintained and kept meticulously clean for more than 1000 years - was converted into a municipal waste dump. After a short chaotic transition all houses had been torn down. The slums in the west disappeared for good, but only a few steps away from the spot where the ruins of the manorial houses had burnt the new Çayönü was erected. The new houses were comparable in size to the old manors but there were no more houses or shacks built to an inferior standard. In all houses, work was done and all hints to social differences were erased.'

I can't help being thrilled at the thought of these stone age revolutionaries, burning the big houses of the masters and storming that terrifying temple, perhaps fearfully at first, then joyfully turning the gruesome house of the gods into a tip.

But we all know what happened next, don't we? The new society of equals was crushed by outside invasion, or a new caste or class of officials arose and things were soon worse than before ... something like that, yes?

Actually, no. The new type of society spread for thousands of miles and remained free, equal, happy and peaceful for three thousand years.

The site from which I've excerpted the above quotes (stripping out the numerous references to the archaeological literature) interprets this stone age classless and stateless society as communism. (Thanks to the latest issue of International Socialism for the pointer.) This may be controversial, but the archaeology is entirely mainstream, and there is no disagreement that the neolithic societies of ancient Anatolia, whose best-preserved site is Çatalhöyük, were very remarkable indeed.

Labels: evolution, history, Marxism