Exploitation, Misery, Suffering, Poverty, Illness, Torture & Ignorance

Willie Thompson, Work, Sex and Power: The Forces That Shaped Our History

Pluto Press, 288pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780745333403

reviewed by Stuart Walton

The first of four epigraphs to Willie Thompson's global human history is Marx's dictum from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: 'Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand'. The historian, on the other hand, makes it out of just what he or she chooses to, and the abiding themes of any historical narrative, whether of biological evolution or of economic development, of the movements of culture or the vicissitudes of a single life, are taken to be illustrative, structurally formative, of the events they recount.

Thompson's last epigraph is Lenin's rhetorical query to the political education departments of Bolshevik Russia in 1921: 'Who, whom?' This is actually the condensed form given it by Stalin five years after Lenin's death, the original enquiry having been 'Who will overtake whom?', which forces in society will prevail, now simplified for Central Committee colleagues into a straightforward matter of who will bash whom into extinction. This too might serve the historian in ways that its first author at best only partially intended. History's narrative is concerned above all else with who did what to whom.

What Thompson essays here is a materialist history of the whole human shooting-match, from the Upper Paleolithic to last year's reports of the International Panel on Climate Change, through the triple lens of labour, reproduction and power relations. At least, that is what the title promises. In the event, these matters are not particularly given thematic prominence in the work, other than in the sense that all societies from hunter-gatherer groups on the grasslands to the nomenklaturas of the Soviet bloc have been characterised by relations of inequality of various intensities. Work does receive some treatment in the book, inasmuch as its various manifestations, beginning with slavery and ending with capitalist wage labour, are duly classified, but it features as a function of social development rather than as any sort of shaping force, and many potential readers will be bitterly disappointed to learn that there isn't much sex in the book at all, beyond an early chapter on gender differentiation and kinship structures.

The narrative is unremittingly grim, as anybody even tangentially familiar with the topic will probably already have been led to expect. When you zoom out, as Thompson has, the historical fabric shows only exploitation, misery, suffering, poverty, illness, torture and ignorance. Until the late Victorian age, we learn, medicine killed more people than it saved. Only through sheer idiotic contingency did humanity save itself from its own annihilation by nuclear catastrophe in the 20th century, and now it faces the even more devastating possibility of environmental collapse, which will wipe away the past 5,000 years of cultural evolution and achievement, leaving the survivors living in a perilous geophysical edgeland, quite likely envying the multitudes of the dead. Jellyfish are taking over the seas, while the unseen tyrants throughout biological time have been bacteria, without which we couldn't live, but to the arbitrary mutable power of which we are helplessly in thrall.

Not much of this after all is contestable, for all that its monumental horror might benefit from a healthy dose of the kind of dialectical thinking that Thompson doesn't much go in for. Dialectics doesn't just come with the territory of a Marxist account; it has to be applied energetically and imaginatively, otherwise the historical forces that have indeed shaped human affairs remain brutally one-dimensional in their functioning. Early on in the book, Thompson rehearses the theory that the control of fire in the distant Stone Age marked not just a technological development, but also the beginning of 'an existential separation from nature', which is precisely what turns the headline themes of the book from simple biological forces into the generators of human history, but this argument isn't methodically followed through. History is the departure from nature, the self-alienation of a species that has found many resourceful ways of outwitting nature for its own survival.

For all the mighty range of its reference, in which a lifetime's researches have been potently distilled, the book is vitiated by the kind of reflective incuriosity that is the risk of adopting so Olympian a view. Nowhere is this more evident than in Thompson's relentless contempt for religion, which is stripped of even the residual consolatory role Marx assigned it as 'the heart of a heartless world', and instead is merely a pungently toxic amalgam of arrogant power, repression and, among the end-users, hopeless stupidity. These ugly forces are indeed over-represented throughout religious history, but are not used as the means here by which religions might be subjected to immanent critique, and any sense that the established churches might ever have been the only defenders of the powerless in feudal societies, or the countervailing restraint on executive tyranny, is brushed aside.

At least, the Judeo-Christian tradition repeatedly gets it in the neck. In a move depressingly typical of much of the British left, Islam is more or less absolved of crimes against humanity, and is commended for its simplicity and straightforwardness, indeed its delightful rationality in the theological estimation of the German convert (now apostate), Muhammad Sven Kalisch. Of the present-day rapacity of its fundamentalist wings, their murderous fury and grotesque subjugation of women, not a word is breathed.

If consciousness produces more suffering than it cures, as a late passage of Thompson's asserts, it is also the means by which humanity might pull itself out of the mire by its own pigtail. The problem has so far been that all emancipatory movements have degenerated into chaos and failure, either through sustained external assault, or through their own refusal to relinquish antique power-structures. A monolithic state communism dividing its flagging energies between managing scarcity and repressing internal dissent was hardly the beacon of liberty it had intended to be, but even a successful, permissive communism, which may yet come to pass, would still be savagely resisted by global capitalism, the more so precisely because it might begin to look tempting.

Thompson's final chapter refers glancingly to the self-destructive fate of revolutionary projects when they fail to convince their potential clients of their merits. Much of the internecine dissension turned, as western communist parties dissolved into the bourgeois slush of social democracy, on whether they had envisaged a suitably attractive picture of the redeemed society. A footnote refers nostalgically to the monitory lesson the author used to impart to his Glasgow students in the 1970s, that in the future we would all have to learn to live less luxuriously and more simply than we do now, which will probably mean giving up the ghastly indulgences skewered in the final chapter: pornography, video-games, drugs. Good luck with that, as the youngsters say.

In an earlier volume, Postmodernism and History (2004), Thompson mounted a thoughtful and effective critique of the counter-factual assumptions that motivate much of the contemporary approach to historical narration. There are famously no grand narratives, but nor there is much in the way of factual underpinning, since facts are so often the ideologically suspect currency of the dominant. What there is instead is desire, the limitless polyvalence of corporeal and sensual impulse.

The primary demerit of such an approach is that it barely notices the tidal wave of human misery that historical materialisms such as Thompson's properly refuse to scant. Its productive side, which could have led the present work into deeper and richer strata of historico-philosophical inquiry than the scratching of surfaces is capable of supplying, underwriting the book's ostensive demonstration of its three themes, is the revelation that what drives them is nothing other than the complex of desires unleashed by human alienation from nature. If work, sex and power have ever abided, the greatest of these is power, which is shot through by desire to the core. Power isn't, though, just the vehicle by which suffering is inflicted on defenceless victims, in some undialectical one-way street. It is also what might equip them to abolish it.
Stuart Walton is the author of An Excursion through Chaos; In the Realm of the Senses; A Natural History of Human Emotions; Introducing Theodor Adorno; Intoxicology; and a novel, The First Day in Paradise.