Man's Worldly Goods

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John Riley introduces 'Man's Worldly Goods' (Monthly Review Press)

AN understanding of history and economics is very important if working people are to fully understand and eventually change the processes that shape our lives. Leo Huberman's Man's Worldly Goods is a book which covers history and economic theory from a Marxist point of view.

History books are usually about the history of ruling classes. Working classes are for the most part hidden from history. Thus it was the Pharaohs who 'built the Pyramids", not the thousands of slaves whose identities have been lost forever...

At school we learn abolt the backgrounds and lineages of royalty, but can remain unaware of great events such as the Peasants Revolt or the Chartist Movement.

Economies, too, is very much the economic theory of the capitalist class. Their oppressive system is presented as an inevitable fact of life, with timeless laws which nobody can hope to avoid.

Man's Worldly Goods attempts to "explain history by economic theory, and economic theory by history" : In the Preface Huberman explains his approach.

•'The 'dismal science' (economics) will remain dismal so long as it is taught and studied in a historical vacuum. Ricardo's law of rent, by itself, is difficult and dull. But place it in its historical context, see it as one battle in the struggle between landlord and industrialist in the England of the early nineteenth. century, and it becomes exciting and meaningful.

Huberman begins economic history in the Middle Ages; with the opening chapters examining the agricultural basis of feudalism.

''The directors of the earliest movies often did queer things. One of the most curious was their habit of showing you people riding about in a taxi, then piling out and walking away without paying the driver ... No payment necessary.

It was very much like most of the books on the Middle Ages that go on for pages and pages about knights and ladies all decked out in shining armour and gay dresses, at tournaments and games. They always live in splendid castles and have plenty to eat and drink.

'You get very little hint that some one had to provide all these things, that armour doesn't grow on trees and that food has to be planted and looked after and worked over But it does.

"Just as you have to pay for a ride in a taxi, so some one, in the tenth and twelfth centuries, had to pay for the fun and good things the knights and ladies enjoyed ...

* This was quite plain to at least one person who lived at that time, and who commented on it in this way:

For the knight and eke clerk Live by him who does work.

Man's Worldly Goods shows that the working people and their struggles for freedom and dignity are a crucial part of history. Moreover, this is not a history of ideas but of the economic forces behınd ideas and struggles.

The book is full of interesting pieces of information which demystify and lay bare the economic basis behind social relationships.

The Church in medieval times was a repository of scholarly learning and spir-. itual advice, but it was also the biggest owner of land. Huberman tells us that it was because of this wealth, and the need for a tight bureaucratic hold over it, that the priests were forbidden to marry.

If they had been able to, their children could have had a claim on the church land and so the property of the church would have been lost and dispersed.

After cataloguing the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, the book then looks at the transformation of oncerevolutionary capitalism into the ossified obstacle to socialism and progress that it represents today.

Huberman explains how monopoly capitalism grew out of the earlier competitive phase with the analogy big boxers beating, and growing bigger at the expense of smaller, weaker ones.

Nineteenth century capitalist economic theory is examined and compared with marx's i economic ideas.

In the last part of the book, the writer's Stalinist illusions lead to somewhat misleading and weak conclusions. The chapter 'Russia has a plan" is an uncritical contrast of Stalinist 'Socialism' with the depressed capitalism of the 1930s (when the book was written).

But the book remains an exciting and approachable introduction to the marxist view of economics and history.

CORRECTION:

A mistake in last week's Socialist Organiser inadvertently omitted the Israeli Socialist Left from the list of organisations supporting the Bir Zeit Committee. which has been campaigning against Israel's invasion of Lebanon.