In his new book, Alvin Finkel tells the story of the 99% who have constantly sought to live in a society of equals
Alvin Finkel / December 5, 2024
A detail from Diego Rivera’s “Exploitation of Mexico by Spanish Conquistadors” (1929-1945), which is located in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The “world history” that has been taught in Western countries for centuries claims that “democracy” began with the Athenian experiment from 508 to 322 BCE. It’s a Western-centric tale that scholarship has disproved. Most foraging societies for millennia before Athens’ aristocratic rulers granted free commoner males a degree of political participation were both egalitarian and truly democratic. So were most early agricultural societies. In the century before Athens toyed with democracy, there were about 800 Indian republics with democratically elected assemblies. Athens was less democratic than any of them because Athens was a slaveholding society.
The existence of slavery alongside democracy was no paradox, as sometimes claimed. The aristocrats owned almost all the land and faced constant revolts by both slaves and commoners. They feared being overwhelmed if those two groups rebelled simultaneously, particularly if they joined forces. The aristocrats considered their options. They could free the slaves, who were war captives, and make them a bulwark against Athenian commoners. But then who would do the work? The other option was to bind commoners to aristocrats and increase their social distance from slaves by letting commoners participate in an assembly without power to change land distribution but able to legislate about local feasts charged to the aristocrats, the building of infrastructure, and making war on other city-states. In short, class struggles explain the Athenian top-down experiment.
My global history book, Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality, captures the real origins of democracy and the bogus character of Athenian democracy by focusing throughout on the struggles of the common people—slaves, peasants, and workers—and the resistance of elites. With that focus it also challenges everything most global histories claim about now underdeveloped societies in the period before European colonization, about the so-called Dark Ages, and about both the origins and collapse of feudalism.
Social histories since the 1970s have challenged traditional elitist histories by making workers, women, colonized peoples, visible minorities, and sexual minorities the centre of attention. While the national histories taught in schools have changed little, some university survey texts reflect the social history studies. In Canada, for example, the two-volume History of the Canadian Peoples, which I co-authored with Margaret Conrad for four editions beginning in 1993 (we were joined by Donald Fyson for the fifth to seventh editions), was an instant success with survey course instructors. But rival text authors accused us of subordinating the “real” history of the country—the political history—to tales of women’s daily lives, workers’ struggles, suppression and resistance of Indigenous peoples, and other conflicts. Jack Granatstein produced the best-seller, Who Killed Canadian History? that indicted us, with others, for that alleged national murder. Our emphasis on people’s struggles rather than the alleged achievements of elites failed to engender patriotic pride among Canadian citizens, he charged.
In the area of global histories, the opponents of “bottom-up” history, in my view, have largely triumphed to date. While bits of social history may creep into these usually long, dense tomes, the essential thrust is that the history of our species has been made by tiny elites, mainly Western and male.
Even the best of them, such as Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, which attempts to show historical linkages among nations that other global histories have missed, see a world in which only tiny groups matter. Frankopan ignores “the world” before about 2,500 years ago, and only rarely comments on the lives of the common people afterwards.
The sales-blockbuster Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, deserves credit for recognizing that a history of humankind begins with the appearance of our species rather than the slow beginnings of writing and archives. Harari challenges the assumptions of earlier global histories that the foraging societies that prevailed for about 98 percent of the history of our species were inferior to the so-called “civilizations” that succeeded them. Indeed, he argues that to survive, early humans were peaceable, cooperative, and egalitarian. They deserve close attention from scholars, and have lessons to teach us. Harari then proceeds to lament post-foraging societies as unequivocal disasters. In his estimation, the technologies associated with agriculture and industry inevitably create hierarchies within given societies that in turn produce competition among societies with wars and domination of some groups over others. His assumption that elites always triumph and the masses submit is profoundly ahistorical. The contradiction between the humans whom he portrays in the foraging period with all other humans since agriculture began to spread is so bleak and so contemptuous of efforts to return to collectivist values that it earned praise from such titans of inequality as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Harari built on earlier work by Jared Diamond that also made technology and geography rather than humans themselves the centre of the historical story, and Diamond too was often praised by captains of industry.
The “world history” that has been taught in Western countries for centuries claims that “democracy” began with the Athenian experiment from 508 to 322 BCE. It’s a Western-centric tale that scholarship has disproved. Most foraging societies for millennia before Athens’ aristocratic rulers granted free commoner males a degree of political participation were both egalitarian and truly democratic. So were most early agricultural societies. In the century before Athens toyed with democracy, there were about 800 Indian republics with democratically elected assemblies. Athens was less democratic than any of them because Athens was a slaveholding society.
The existence of slavery alongside democracy was no paradox, as sometimes claimed. The aristocrats owned almost all the land and faced constant revolts by both slaves and commoners. They feared being overwhelmed if those two groups rebelled simultaneously, particularly if they joined forces. The aristocrats considered their options. They could free the slaves, who were war captives, and make them a bulwark against Athenian commoners. But then who would do the work? The other option was to bind commoners to aristocrats and increase their social distance from slaves by letting commoners participate in an assembly without power to change land distribution but able to legislate about local feasts charged to the aristocrats, the building of infrastructure, and making war on other city-states. In short, class struggles explain the Athenian top-down experiment.
My global history book, Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality, captures the real origins of democracy and the bogus character of Athenian democracy by focusing throughout on the struggles of the common people—slaves, peasants, and workers—and the resistance of elites. With that focus it also challenges everything most global histories claim about now underdeveloped societies in the period before European colonization, about the so-called Dark Ages, and about both the origins and collapse of feudalism.
Social histories since the 1970s have challenged traditional elitist histories by making workers, women, colonized peoples, visible minorities, and sexual minorities the centre of attention. While the national histories taught in schools have changed little, some university survey texts reflect the social history studies. In Canada, for example, the two-volume History of the Canadian Peoples, which I co-authored with Margaret Conrad for four editions beginning in 1993 (we were joined by Donald Fyson for the fifth to seventh editions), was an instant success with survey course instructors. But rival text authors accused us of subordinating the “real” history of the country—the political history—to tales of women’s daily lives, workers’ struggles, suppression and resistance of Indigenous peoples, and other conflicts. Jack Granatstein produced the best-seller, Who Killed Canadian History? that indicted us, with others, for that alleged national murder. Our emphasis on people’s struggles rather than the alleged achievements of elites failed to engender patriotic pride among Canadian citizens, he charged.
In the area of global histories, the opponents of “bottom-up” history, in my view, have largely triumphed to date. While bits of social history may creep into these usually long, dense tomes, the essential thrust is that the history of our species has been made by tiny elites, mainly Western and male.
Even the best of them, such as Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, which attempts to show historical linkages among nations that other global histories have missed, see a world in which only tiny groups matter. Frankopan ignores “the world” before about 2,500 years ago, and only rarely comments on the lives of the common people afterwards.
The sales-blockbuster Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, deserves credit for recognizing that a history of humankind begins with the appearance of our species rather than the slow beginnings of writing and archives. Harari challenges the assumptions of earlier global histories that the foraging societies that prevailed for about 98 percent of the history of our species were inferior to the so-called “civilizations” that succeeded them. Indeed, he argues that to survive, early humans were peaceable, cooperative, and egalitarian. They deserve close attention from scholars, and have lessons to teach us. Harari then proceeds to lament post-foraging societies as unequivocal disasters. In his estimation, the technologies associated with agriculture and industry inevitably create hierarchies within given societies that in turn produce competition among societies with wars and domination of some groups over others. His assumption that elites always triumph and the masses submit is profoundly ahistorical. The contradiction between the humans whom he portrays in the foraging period with all other humans since agriculture began to spread is so bleak and so contemptuous of efforts to return to collectivist values that it earned praise from such titans of inequality as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Harari built on earlier work by Jared Diamond that also made technology and geography rather than humans themselves the centre of the historical story, and Diamond too was often praised by captains of industry.
Harari’s characterization of agriculture as necessarily marked by inequality was amply challenged by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Looking at the early millennia of the establishment of agriculture, they find a continuation of the egalitarianism and peaceful, reciprocal relations across communities that Harari found among foragers. But, if Harari believes that reciprocity ends once agriculture appears, Graeber and Wengrow have the same view of the appearance of the state. Their “new history of humanity” comes to a crashing end as state structures appear which, from their point of view, crush the human spirit of collective enterprise. Their unwillingness to examine state-governed societies with anything approaching nuance results in their bracketing the very different Inca, Aztec, and Mayan societies as equally oppressive top-down regimes in which elites mercilessly extracted large surpluses from the masses. They cite almost no literature to make that case. But while the literature on the Aztec suggests a brutally oppressive, homicidal leadership, both the Inca literature and the opinions of most Bolivian and Peruvian Indigenous people convey a cooperative, equitable polity in which the central government was a voluntary creation of autonomous communities that chose a coordinating body that could supervise storage of surpluses to be quickly transported to communities whenever they experienced food shortages. By contrast, Graeber and Wengrow praise Mesopotamia before it became an imperial slaveholding power. Focusing on its lack of formal state structures rather than on labour relations, they portray a cooperative society in which local communities enjoy autonomous decision-making. But studies focusing on labour relations paint a quasi-slave society in which the rulers, informal as they may have been, exploit the masses mercilessly to build temples and monuments in the period before captured slaves performed those activities.
The one global history claiming to be a “people’s history” is Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. It’s a solid Marxist account of the emergence of different modes of production. But the people are largely absent. Their oppression is emphasized, but their resistance is either ignored or belittled. A leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, Harman dismisses early popular resistance movements as lacking a Leninist vanguard and therefore doomed to failure.
National Geographic summarizes the characteristics of “civilization” that historians until relatively recently agreed upon: “large population centers; monumental architecture and unique art styles; shared communication strategies; systems for administering territories; a complex division of labor; and the division of people into social and economic classes.” That definition denigrates societies with flat class structures, cooperative labour, and emphasis on human interactions rather than elite monuments, control mechanisms, and propaganda. Here are some examples of historical distortions that the imperial-minded view of civilization has bequeathed.
1. Remember learning of the “Dark Ages” that descended after the Roman Empire fell, only being lifted when the allegedly stable, civilized system of feudalism prevailed? During those Dark Ages, monument-building took a breather, and former slaves and tribute-payers of the oppressive Roman Empire established communities of peasants with equal land, popular assemblies, and strategies of cooperation with neighbouring communities in times of drought or floods. Few willingly abandoned such communities to let a mafia of would-be lords and kings sell “protection” in return for giving up half the crops they grew to a lord and another eight percent to the Roman Catholic Church. The peasants fought the imposition of feudalism and where the people’s militias were particularly strong and geography helped, as in much of the Netherlands and Belgium, feudalism was never successfully imposed. Everywhere else it was fought continuously and in parts of Spain, even as Ferdinand and Isabella began their imperial adventures abroad, they recognized in law popular governance in areas where feudal lords had been routed. The eventual replacement of feudal landholding with capitalism was a desperate strategy of lords under siege by peasants who wanted to eliminate lords altogether rather than an orderly transition from one system of oppression to another.
2. Similarly, while anthropologists and archaeologists have been fascinated to determine why Mayan communities of the “high civilization” period collapsed, leaving spectacular temples to crumble, they have only recently studied the communities that replaced them. Those communities were marked by democracy, egalitarianism, and reciprocity. Those who equate civilization with glitz and high drama unsurprisingly dismiss such studies.
3. Academic studies of Indigenous societies in North America until relatively recently shared prejudices paralleled by John Wayne movies. Indigenous people were rarities in the academies. As Indigenous activism challenged such racism, historians who once ignored Indigenous societies as “prehistory” and anthropologists who treated them as curiosities akin to early primates began recording oral histories. Those revealed mostly egalitarian, complex, spiritual societies. Revisited colonial records demonstrated that missionaries, despite their prejudices, were impressed with Indigenous peoples. Missionaries commented that the “infidels” generally reflected Christian values better than nominal Christians in Europe. The Indigenous people often rejected pressures to convert to Christianity, noting that they had never abandoned their Creator and so the Creator sent a son or daughter to proselytize them. Explorers and fur traders were even more likely to be laudatory about the collectivist values of the Indigenous peoples.
4. There were significant Indigenous victories in wars with colonial powers. In today’s Canada, the United States, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, Indigenous wars with Britain and Spain forced considerable land concessions to First Nations. The First Nations returned to communal, egalitarian practices before settlers won independence from Europe and brutally assaulted First Nations.
5. The agricultural societies of southern Africa before the bloody European scramble for Africa in the second half of the 19th century are now known to have been as egalitarian as predecessor foraging societies. But Europeans portrayed Africans as uncivilized and warlike to justify slavery and dispossession. Liberation from the devastation of settler colonialism led to many attempts to restore earlier democratic models of nationhood. Neo-colonialism, imposed both by American warfare and by international financial bodies including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank permitted westerners to retain their view that these were irreparable “shithole countries.” A similar story can be told about the Middle East.
Efforts by Western governments to suppress evidence-based history, whether through banning “critical race theory” or a focus on ideologically sifted “facts and dates” must be fought. But, what Humans demonstrates is that we need to insist on national histories being told from the point of view of the common people with that history placed in the context of the whole history of our species. Much of that history is a search for equality and protection of natural environments.
Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus of History at Athabasca University and president of the Alberta Labour History Institute. For 18 months in 1970 and 1971 he was assistant editor of Canadian Dimension. Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality was published by Formac Lorimer in 2024. Chapters named it one of the 100 best new books of 2024.
The one global history claiming to be a “people’s history” is Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. It’s a solid Marxist account of the emergence of different modes of production. But the people are largely absent. Their oppression is emphasized, but their resistance is either ignored or belittled. A leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, Harman dismisses early popular resistance movements as lacking a Leninist vanguard and therefore doomed to failure.
National Geographic summarizes the characteristics of “civilization” that historians until relatively recently agreed upon: “large population centers; monumental architecture and unique art styles; shared communication strategies; systems for administering territories; a complex division of labor; and the division of people into social and economic classes.” That definition denigrates societies with flat class structures, cooperative labour, and emphasis on human interactions rather than elite monuments, control mechanisms, and propaganda. Here are some examples of historical distortions that the imperial-minded view of civilization has bequeathed.
1. Remember learning of the “Dark Ages” that descended after the Roman Empire fell, only being lifted when the allegedly stable, civilized system of feudalism prevailed? During those Dark Ages, monument-building took a breather, and former slaves and tribute-payers of the oppressive Roman Empire established communities of peasants with equal land, popular assemblies, and strategies of cooperation with neighbouring communities in times of drought or floods. Few willingly abandoned such communities to let a mafia of would-be lords and kings sell “protection” in return for giving up half the crops they grew to a lord and another eight percent to the Roman Catholic Church. The peasants fought the imposition of feudalism and where the people’s militias were particularly strong and geography helped, as in much of the Netherlands and Belgium, feudalism was never successfully imposed. Everywhere else it was fought continuously and in parts of Spain, even as Ferdinand and Isabella began their imperial adventures abroad, they recognized in law popular governance in areas where feudal lords had been routed. The eventual replacement of feudal landholding with capitalism was a desperate strategy of lords under siege by peasants who wanted to eliminate lords altogether rather than an orderly transition from one system of oppression to another.
2. Similarly, while anthropologists and archaeologists have been fascinated to determine why Mayan communities of the “high civilization” period collapsed, leaving spectacular temples to crumble, they have only recently studied the communities that replaced them. Those communities were marked by democracy, egalitarianism, and reciprocity. Those who equate civilization with glitz and high drama unsurprisingly dismiss such studies.
3. Academic studies of Indigenous societies in North America until relatively recently shared prejudices paralleled by John Wayne movies. Indigenous people were rarities in the academies. As Indigenous activism challenged such racism, historians who once ignored Indigenous societies as “prehistory” and anthropologists who treated them as curiosities akin to early primates began recording oral histories. Those revealed mostly egalitarian, complex, spiritual societies. Revisited colonial records demonstrated that missionaries, despite their prejudices, were impressed with Indigenous peoples. Missionaries commented that the “infidels” generally reflected Christian values better than nominal Christians in Europe. The Indigenous people often rejected pressures to convert to Christianity, noting that they had never abandoned their Creator and so the Creator sent a son or daughter to proselytize them. Explorers and fur traders were even more likely to be laudatory about the collectivist values of the Indigenous peoples.
4. There were significant Indigenous victories in wars with colonial powers. In today’s Canada, the United States, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, Indigenous wars with Britain and Spain forced considerable land concessions to First Nations. The First Nations returned to communal, egalitarian practices before settlers won independence from Europe and brutally assaulted First Nations.
5. The agricultural societies of southern Africa before the bloody European scramble for Africa in the second half of the 19th century are now known to have been as egalitarian as predecessor foraging societies. But Europeans portrayed Africans as uncivilized and warlike to justify slavery and dispossession. Liberation from the devastation of settler colonialism led to many attempts to restore earlier democratic models of nationhood. Neo-colonialism, imposed both by American warfare and by international financial bodies including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank permitted westerners to retain their view that these were irreparable “shithole countries.” A similar story can be told about the Middle East.
Efforts by Western governments to suppress evidence-based history, whether through banning “critical race theory” or a focus on ideologically sifted “facts and dates” must be fought. But, what Humans demonstrates is that we need to insist on national histories being told from the point of view of the common people with that history placed in the context of the whole history of our species. Much of that history is a search for equality and protection of natural environments.
Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus of History at Athabasca University and president of the Alberta Labour History Institute. For 18 months in 1970 and 1971 he was assistant editor of Canadian Dimension. Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality was published by Formac Lorimer in 2024. Chapters named it one of the 100 best new books of 2024.
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