‘Only by treasuring that we are stewards of planet Earth, and the finitude that comes with it, will be able to avoid humanity pitting its many powers against itself.’

On the Origin of Time is an important book in two respects: it develops our thinking about the nature of the universe and it calls for a fundamental change in the way that humans are living on this planet.

Firstly, the nature of the universe. Hopefully, you are familiar with the wave-particle duality of light. If not, very short version: a photon has the properties of both a wave and a particle. You can make light behave like a wave and see, for example, the interference patterns it makes when it ripples through two holes. Just as with ordinary waves, when streams of light meet they reinforce each other or cancel each other out. The other aspect of light is that it is a particle and you can measure it as a stream of individual pulses as it passes by a detector. Light has both those qualities simultaneously, making it something very different to waves of water or particles of sand, something very hard to imagine and outside our usual experience. Well this book explains a new duality that has been explored in the last twenty years: that between the universe we are familiar with and a boundary filled with quantum information that projects the universe as a hologram: quantum holography.

The kinds of holograms we normally come across are three dimensional images created by projections from information recorded in two dimensions. Recent developments in physics argue that you can create a three-dimensional boundary hologram that projects the four-dimensional universe as we know it. This holographic revolution, says Hertog, ‘ranks among the most important and far-reaching discoveries in physics of the late twentieth century.’

There are a lot of implications to work out from this idea, but one of the most interesting concerns time. The boundary hologram does not feature time: time only emerges as you make the transition from the boundary to the universe we are used to.

I should pause here. That last paragraph needs a lot of unpacking. For a start, I need to make clear that when I write that the universe is a hologram, I don’t mean that it’s a rather flimsy, ghostly affair like a laser hologram. No, it’s the same universe we are familiar with. You can shape it, taste it, hear it, rub up against it and feel it rub back. The new idea is not that our experience of the universe is different, but that we can now understand that we are only accessing it from one side of a duality. It’s a bit like only ever having encountered light as a wave but finding out that it is just as valid to experience it as a sequence of particles.

Returning to the question of time: what are the implications of the fact that the boundary with holographic information is without a dimension of time? Well, I found that reading about this forced me to try to do something very difficult, which is to access the universe as being a time-not-time duality. Viewed from within the projection, it feels like there is time: there is causality and a progression from the Big Bang to where we are today. But that’s only a partial grasp on the situation. Viewed as a hologram, the universe is timeless and if you could translate the information from the boundary where the hologram is described, you could see the entire history of the universe. We are immersed in time and simultaneously in a timeless state.

If you are like me, you will have been brought up in an empirical philosophical tradition that is repelled by the thought of something being itself and something quite different at the same time. Pudding is pudding and don’t be telling me anything else. Either there is time, or there isn’t. How can you have a universe that’s a time-timeless one? Like a battery-driven toy bashing repeatedly into a wall, however, such an insistence on travelling only in straight-line paths misses the fact that the toy is in a maze and it won’t get out via straight lines.

Again and again in the history of thought, apparently insuperable clashes of rival theories have been resolved by adopting a wider perspective that reveals that they were only portraying part of a deeper picture. Rest turns out to be best understood as a special form of motion; Newton’s laws are best understood as a particular case within relativity.

In principle, therefore I’m willing to believe that there is a perspective for understanding the universe from which one can appreciate that the full picture involves both time and timelessness. In fact, this thought is rather appealing to me, exciting even (what effect would it have on your behaviour if you thought that everything you did was preserved somewhere?). The book doesn’t offer any of the maths behind quantum holography. We’re told that ‘it requires a sophisticated mathematical operation’ to decipher even a constrained physical universe from a holographic surface description, which means the reader only gets the gist of the argument. Given that this is a bit ropey and there is currently no explanation of where such a surface might exist, the book’s claims about the holographic nature of the universe might be a bit premature.

As an aside, a certain amount of the book is taken up with explaining how impressive was the mind of Stephen Hawking and how Hawking and the author anticipated many of the recent developments in physics. I think that in places the pages of the book are stained by the discolouring marks of our current celebrity culture and proprietorial approach to ideas, which is unfortunate because the core ideas in this book are valid and important.

The book is at its most persuasive with regard to black holes. One crucial paradox that this new approach resolves is that arising from black hole radiation. In 1974, Hawking demonstrated that black holes radiate energy. By classical general relativity, black holes destroy all information falling through the event horizon, infinitely. In contrast, by Hawking’s formula, black holes have a complex inner life and a finite capacity to absorb information. This capacity is massive – the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way can store 10⁸⁰ gigabytes (the entire corpus of data currently stored in Google’s servers could fit in a black hole the size of a proton) – but it is finite and a black hole will gradually evaporate.

Quantum Holography and the Black Hole Information Paradox

The fact that black holes can radiate themselves out of existence creates a major paradox. What happens to all the information that fell into the black hole? If it is gone forever, this violates a fundamental and well understood feature of quantum physics, which is that the wave function of any system has to preserve information. This is connected to the probabilistic nature of a quantum event. The sum of the probabilities has to be one. Suppose we’re trying to pin down a subatomic particle’s position. Quantum physics gives us a formula for doing this that is probabilistic. There is a chance of finding the particle at position x. And if we add up the probabilities for all the possible x’s, this has to come to 1 since the particle is definitely somewhere.

The headache that Hawking Radiation posed for quantum physics is that if a black hole has evaporated but in the course of its life it has destroyed all the information that crossed into it, then the universe has a net loss of information. All the probabilities for the position of a particle no longer add up to 1. And this makes a nonsense of the laws of physics and quantum physics in particular.

What about if the black hole radiation contained the missing information? That would work very well for keeping quantum mechanics consistent across the universe. The problem was that for a long time – two decades – the maths of Hawking Radiation said that the emitted radiation was featureless: once a black hole fully evaporated, all that was left was a cloud of thermal radiation with no history.

The breakthrough of quantum holography allowed a solution to this paradox. You can describe a black hole using a boundary hologram and by doing so, the life cycle of the black hole that is so complex and paradoxical in the universe as we experience it turns out to be very simple. As the projection of a boundary hologram a black hole is not much more complex than the heating and cooling of a plasma of subatomic particles. These fairly ordinary clusters of particles can be described with wave functions that preserve information. So by appreciating the duality of black holes – that they are simultaneously relativistic objects that are destructive of everything and yet obey information-preserving quantum laws when understood as holograms – you can, in principle, conclude that the black hole information paradox is only superficial.

In the last few years, a model has emerged of how, more precisely, the information inside a black hole can be preserved. Subatomic particles that arise as particle-antiparticle pairs are entangled and if you can measure one you simultaneously learn about the other. If one of the pair falls into a black hole, in theory we can still know a great deal about it by measuring the partner particle. Entanglement between the inside and outside of a black hole can be described mathematically by a wormhole.

Relativity and Quantum Physics

Another huge discrepancy in science addressed by the idea of the boundary hologram projecting the universe is the paradox that relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible. Relativity is the science that traditionally informs our picture of the universe, especially with regard to large objects and gravity. The domain of quantum mechanics is typically the tiny realm of subatomic particles. The two theories are both enormously successful and yet they aren’t consistent with each other and this shows up when you consider black holes or the Big Bang, where quantum effects are massively magnified to become of fundamental importance at the macro level, which is supposed to be relativistic.

Quantum holography offers a standpoint to resolve the crisis, again by allowing us to appreciate that there is a duality at play, where it is not either / or but both. The quantum description of the boundary hologram gives rise to the relativistic content of the universe with planets and stars. Again, like the treatment of light as both wave and particle, we need to understand the universe in a totality where it is simultaneously both. As Hertog puts it, ‘Gravity and quantum theory need not be water and fire but can be like yin and yang, two very different yet complementary descriptions of one and the same physical reality.’

You can see this is an ambitious book. It tackles the deep challenges at the boundaries of our knowledge and any theory that offers a breakthrough on the decades-long problem of making relativity and quantum theory compatible would be worth reading for that topic alone.

Quantum Holography and the Origins of Time

What does quantum holography reveal with regard to the origin of the universe? It shows a vast emptiness, where you have scrolled so far out and blurred the resolution of the information to the point that there is just one entangled particle-antiparticle pair. This translates as the pre-origin of physics.

‘One ventures into the past in holographic cosmology by taking something like a blurred viewpoint on the hologram… It is like zooming out… A hologram of an expanding universe inscribes the far past in qubits spanning huge distances in the surface world… in effect, eventually, one runs out of entangled bits. This, then, would be the origin of time.’

Note how different this is to the classical query about what existed before the Big Bang. From within the universe and especially within the flow of time, it seems to be a reasonable question to wonder what happened before the Big Bang. By treating the universe as a quantum hologram, however, we appreciate that all the laws of physics themselves, including those concerning time, are emergent. It is not like there is a giant clock standing outside of the universe; nor fundamental laws that when we apply them to the initial conditions will allow us to model the development of the universe. What lies beyond or before the universe? We can’t say because there is nothing to speak with: there is no information on the hologram about this.

Note too how in the cosmological holograph there is no sign of multiple island universes. No multiverse. The idea that the Big Bang occurs momentarily after our universe has dropped away from a seething stream of chaotic energy has many advocates. The main appeal of this version of the multiverse argument (universes are constantly bubbling from primordial froth) is that it allows for a selection process to arrive at a universe where life is possible, despite that being extremely unlikely. But as Hertog points out, such a multiverse model requires us to believe in a place of infinite information whereas a boundary hologram is finite and for me there’s something more persuasive about that.

Moreover, On the Origin of Time has its own answer to the challenges of the Anthropic Principle (the laws of this universe are perfect for the evolution of life. A tiny change to any of the physical constants, however, would have resulted in very different universes. So how has this perfect universe come about?). In order to understand the hologram solution to the Anthropic Principle, we also have to understand the difference between this new book and the ideas Hawking put forward in A Brief History of Time.

A Brief History of Time

‘I now object to the idea that the universe has a global classical state. We live in a quantum universe so it should be described by superposition of histories à la Feynman, each with its own probability… I think that a proper quantum outlook will lead to a different philosophy of cosmology in which we work from the top down, backward in time, starting from the surface of our observations.’

One of the strangest features of the quantum world is that observation is integral to understanding it. If you had a conventional Western education like mine, then science is taught as the discovery of laws of nature that are always exact, regardless of whether anyone or anything is watching. In the quantum world, a particle is in a superposition of possible positions and velocities, described by a wave function, until one of these is fixed by an observation (the other one then, necessarily, becoming unknowable). The observer doesn’t have to be human or sentient. Any record of quantum events is a form of observation, so when a quartz crystal preserves the path of a subatomic particle that passed through it, the crystal acts as an observer.

The quantum universe does not branch without observation and this is true for fixing time as well as for space. Suppose a beam of light from a very distant quasar takes billions of years to reach us and that on the way it encounters a galaxy, which bends the light along one of many possible pathways to our telescopes. This really does happen and is called gravitational lensing. Only when we observe the light do we find out which route it actually took, which fragment of the quantum universe we are in. Until then, it is in a wave function travelling through all possible routes.

This is what Hawking and Hertog mean by ‘top-down’ cosmology. They believe the universe is a quantum universe and that even the distant past, when no observers existed, can be selected by observation today. Note that this is not at all the same as time travel. Nothing is being sent into the past. It’s more like an archaeologist finding a new type of bone and therefore being able to explain the path that evolution took. Except that for the archaeologist, the past has already been observed (by environmental events a fraction of a second after the gene mutation that gave rise to the new creature) and the branch of the universe we live in fixed long before their discovery of the bone. In the example of light crossing space for billions of years, the difference with archaeology is that the quasar light is still in a state of superposition until we switch on the telescope. The history of quantum activity isn’t fixed until an observation has taken place; current and future events select the past.

Since 2015, experiments have confirmed that the history of the motion of subatomic particles is fixed by observation and that before the observation they are in a quantum state. As Andrew Truscott put it after conducting an experiment with atoms of helium, ‘It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behaviour was brought into existence.’

This is an elusive but crucial point. It is perhaps best understood with a simple game designed by John Wheeler, a physicist whom Hawking and Hertog came to value very highly for his pathbreaking ideas in the 70s and 80s. The game is like Twenty Questions and you have to guess the item the other players are thinking of, with them giving Yes/No answers. The other players, however, haven’t agreed on what that item is. The only rule they have to obey is that their answer (Yes or No) must be compatible with the previous answers. After several questions, the possibilities are more and more constrained until the game converges on an answer that might be extraordinarily unlikely at the start (what are the odds, for example, that the result would be a black pawn from a chess set made in 1928?) but which is consistent. Notice how the questions being asked by you make all the difference to where the game ends up. If you ask, ‘is it something to do with chess?’ and the person whose turn it is to answer says ‘yes’, that creative intervention by you narrows down the possible results considerably.

In the same way, when we make observations about the universe, we are assisting in creating the answer. Hawking once told Hertog, ‘The history of the universe depends on the question you ask.’ We live in a participatory universe.

Wheeler drew an image to help make this insight clearer. The universe develops to the point where there are observers and these observers fix the past, including the distant past long before any observers exist.

If we imagine the line in the Wheeler diagram as the outcome after a quantum field has been fixed by an observation, then we get to the top-down cosmology of Hertog and Hawking.

Resolving the Anthropic Principle with Quantum Holography

Taking a top-down, observer inclusive, approach to the conundrum of the Anthropic Principle makes it a non-paradox. From a classical perspective it seems extraordinary that the laws of physics should have, at every choice, taken the path that resulted in a life-compatible universe. But if we are only now switching on the telescope and observing the fragment of the wave function that we live in, then it necessarily has to be one that supports life. We might be fixing a fragment that was very unlikely, statistically, to have arisen from repeated rolls of the dice. But then all the options are more or less unlikely.

Again, it is helpful to compare the situation with Darwinian evolution. If you repeatedly run a simulation of evolution on Earth, the chance of arriving at human beings is almost inconceivably remote. But if all the evolutionary paths are in flux until an act of observation fixes the exact route taken then there is no mystery. Or rather, there’s a different kind of mystery. The way in which we got here is settled: what might have happened has been fixed by observation of the very early universe. There are other mysteries, though, such as why is there life in the universe at all?

This brings me to the other sense in which the book is revolutionary. It is an appeal for us to salvage something very precious, human life, while we still can.

Saving Human Life on Earth

The final chapter of On the Origin of Time points out that our way of life is dangerously precarious and it’s our own fault. Human-made existential risks (global heating, nuclear war, AI, etc.) threaten disaster. It’s curious, given how amenable the universe is to life, that there is no evidence for extraterrestrial civilisations. Perhaps, Hertog speculates, following the thought of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, there is a roadblock that prevents most species from being able to spread into the cosmos. We might be approaching that roadblock. Or perhaps it is that humans are dangerous and best avoided. As Hawking once put it, ‘we only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.’

It’s interesting to read how a scientist contemplates the social issues involved in saving the Earth, as opposed to a socialist or anarchist thinker. Hertog believes we can still avoid the precipice and that to do so scientists and scholars will need to act together for the common good. In particular, the current path humanity is on has to change. To analyse that mistaken path, Hertog discusses a 1963 essay by Hannah Arendt, The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man. Arendt argued that the more humanity obtains the knowledge to control the physical environment, the more we threaten our own freedom.

This is an unusual point of view in the West at least. Here we tend to believe that the scientific revolution is very positive and that the rational goals of science are bringing us towards higher truths. This is the ethos of the Enlightenment, which in turn can be seen as a significant acceleration of a way of life begun with systematic agriculture and the early class societies of about seven thousand years ago. As an aside, Marxism tends not to counterpose itself to this positive view of the scientific revolution, but usually sees itself as completing the full emancipation of humans from nature, overcoming the fetters imposed by capitalism.

It is strange to live in times when a leading practitioner of science should argue that, ‘the flight from our earthly roots that is the hallmark of modern science has also led to a chasm between our human goals and the supposedly objective workings of nature,’ but Hertog strongly agrees with Arendt. Earth alienation, the detached view, is intrinsic to much of science and is leading to world alienation. Modern science of this sort, says Hertog, ‘will ultimately prove to be a self-defeating paradigm.’

The pursuit of science and technology, stripped from all humanity is fundamentally flawed. Be it the conquest of space in the hopes of geo-engineering another planet; the search for powerful biotechnology; or the quest for a final physical theory; Hertog agrees with Arendt that these are ‘acts of rebellion against our human condition as dwellers on this planet’.

Planet Earth becomes an object like any other, something to use, and not our home. We transform ourselves from subjects of Earth to objects. We are on course to cease to be human by, ‘lowering the stature of mankind to that of a large-scale ant colony, collectivised and monitored, deprived of all freedom.’

There is a connection between Hertog’s belief in quantum holography and his opposition to the alienation of humanity from the Earth. ‘A genuine quantum outlook on the universe counters the relentless alienating forces of modern science and lets one build cosmology anew from an interior viewpoint.’

Observers have a creative role in cosmic affairs, introducing a backward-in-time element. We read the fundamentals of the history of the universe from the top down. It turns the apparent design of the universe upside down: ‘at a quantum level the universe engineers its own biofriendliness. Life and the universes are in some way a mutual fit, according to the theory, because, in a deeper sense, they come into existence together.’

Freedom. Creativity. Imagination. Participation. These are ideas usually expressed by socialists and anarchists rather than scientists addressing humanity’s relationship to the early universe. So it is encouraging and a source of hope that millions of people are reading a bestselling book about the origin of time, with its call for an about turn in practice of science. There’s a zeitgeist at play here, perhaps the owl of Minerva taking flight, because Wengrow and Graeber’s radical deconstruction of primitive communism and re-telling the story of early human societies is also a bestseller.

The skies are darkening but it is not just revolutionaries who can see this and want to find a way out while we still can.

The Neuro Pride Ireland festival 2022 took place in August and Eoghan Neville of Independent Left prepared a webinar on capitalism and disability for Neuro Pride Ireland, based on his reading of Roddy Slorach’s A Very Capitalist Condition: A History and Politics of Disability. He spoke to Conor Kostick about the book and disability rights.

Conor: What do you think is the main value of the book?

Eoghan: This book acts as an introduction to socialism, to anti-capitalist thought, to all kinds of left-wing discussion. When you’re introducing someone to socialism, more experienced left-wingers will have a list of books that they say, “Oh. These should be your introduction.” This book should absolutely be there among them because I think if you can understand disability under capitalism, you can understand why the system doesn’t work for anyone.

If you take a particular issue – in this case disability – you can really begin to understand how capitalism fails us. This book really goes into a lot of details about disability under capitalism, and how this contrasts with disability before capitalism and why it has to be addressed with the social model. The book helps you connect the dots and say, “Well, if capitalism doesn’t work for this group, it doesn’t work for this other group, and it actually doesn’t even work for non-disabled white people.” You know? The stereotypical privileged people. Capitalism only works for the very people at the top, the very top.

Conor: Capitalism constantly seeks to divide the working class; it is a system that promotes racism, and sexism, and so on. Would you think there is a difference, though, to how capitalism treats people with disability? Despite discrimination, big business still wants women in the workforce and still wants black people in the workforce. But with disability, maybe the governments and companies don’t want the cost of providing equality of access to the workforce?

Eoghan: On the one hand, I think capitalism doesn’t want disabled people. No one would say it, of course, but they want to cure us. They want to make us normal. That’s what capitalism wants to do ideally, which is what it was doing in the late 1800s and the early 1900s with the eugenics movements. That’s what eugenics was: either curing or exterminating. There is a very important chapter in the book – Chapter Seven ­– about eugenics and Nazi Germany, that is well worth reading to understand the point about eugenics and Nazism when it comes to disabled people. But note that it is very distressing, a very hard read. I actually had to put the book down myself halfway through the chapter because of how just shocking it was, the details.

A trigger warning about that is key, but the main point of the history is that eugenics was just so normalized. A lot of people took Darwin’s theory of evolution and twisted it into eugenics. They said, “This is where evolution is. This is what nature is, and this is where we should arrive at,” and from that view, disability is kind of like a glitch, like when your computer stops working. It’s not meant to be, so we have to either fix this or delete it like you would delete broken files on a computer or something.

There were famous people at the time who had those views, such as George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. There was an American scientist in the early 1900s who was doing openly eugenics experiments. Charles B. Davenport was getting praised in all the newspapers being described as, “This great humanitarian.” And they openly talked about him doing eugenics.

The only reason that eugenics fell out of favor is because of Nazi Germany, but now it’s kind of coming back. There’s more than a tinge of it around. It’s like with how capitalism kind of reinvented itself into neo-liberalism. There’s almost a kind of reinvention of the crude eugenics of the past into what I’d call neo-liberal eugenics. It’s like they’re trying to put a bow and tie on it or something and trying to make it look nice.

Conor: Is this just the far-right – the sort of Trumps, and Le Pens – or is there a kind of mainstream return to isolating and pushing aside people with disability?

Eoghan: It definitely is the far-right because obviously they are the successors to the Nazis, but you have elections in various countries where a center-right government will need the support of the far-right to make up the numbers electorally, so then they have the usual thing of, “Oh. We have to make concessions,” and that’s where it can appear.

Often, disability is one of the first areas that’s targeted by any kind of government because if you go after disabled people, there’s not so much of an uproar. They kind of think, “Well, this is something we can concede to the far-right and not get much backlash on.” Social welfare benefits for disabled people are often the first to be cut by an incoming government. That’s the playbook of going after disability. Again, it’s in a new way. It’s in a neo-liberal way.

Conor: What I see is less of an overt eugenics position but discrimination around the question of resources. A lot of organizations like universities, hospitals, and so on have on paper really good policies. We want to be inclusive. We want to be diverse. We want everybody to have an access to education, health, and so on. They would like that, they say, but then when it comes to what does that actually mean, that’s when I see all the obstacles pile up really fast.

Just 24% of visually impaired people in Ireland have employment and when you go to find out why, it’s not that anyone says aloud, “Well, it’s just not worth investing in you. It’s a waste of money,” although I think ultimately that’s the logic, but no one that I meet expresses it that way.

What they say is, “Well, we can’t give you that magnifier. No. I’m sorry. We don’t have the resources or the staff to install it.”

Eoghan: I’m talking about the more political sphere when I’m talking about eugenics, but in terms of wider society like, say, access to education or something, Ireland very much has the charity model. Again, this is capitalism trying to reinvent itself moving away from the medical model, shutting down the ‘insane asylums’, and moving towards a charity model, so now you have the care homes. I mean, they have the approach in the name. They call them care homes.

Another example would be with respect to refugees. You’re not putting them in ‘refugee centres’. No. No, no. These are ‘community hubs’ or whatever term is acceptable by the charity model. The message is that these are resources we generously provide for you. You should consider it a privilege to be given this. You should be thankful you’re getting this. Rather than it being a right. It’s like as if accommodations that allow for equal access or independent living are a luxury. This is a luxury good. We can’t really give you this. That’s what I think it comes down to.

Conor: The book covers the rise of disability rights of people with disabilities organization despite the difficulties and challenging the system, so do you want to say a bit about that?

Eoghan: The main change it covers is the rise of the social model of disability, that was movement in England in the 80s with Mike Oliver and Vic Finkelstein. On a side note, Finkelstein is an interesting character because he was actually arrested for being involved in the anti-Apartheid movements in South Africa and then went to England. Basically, he was kicked out of South Africa. The book covers a great example in the US of a battle over a university who were trying to select members for a board and when it came to having someone with knowledge of disability they picked someone who had studied the subject rather than someone equally qualified who had a disability. Just because you’ve studied disability doesn’t prevent you having a negative view of disability or disabled people.

Anyway, a campaign sprang up that occupied the university until someone with a disability got the position. The book covers a lot of direct action like this, and that feeds into the social model of disability in a sense because the social model is created by disabled people. It’s a radical model made by socialists, by the people on the far-left.

Conor: Could you just give us a very quick recap on what the main points of the social model of disability are?

Eoghan: The main point is that disabled people should be able to live independently: so no care facilities; no medical model; none of that; not being ‘cared for’. Obviously, you have to have supports, like having a personal assistant. That’s what groups like the Independent Living Movement in Ireland are pushing for, so you’re able to live, work, and contribute to your community in whatever area you want. You can get an education, get a job, volunteer, do as you want. It’s very much focused on a disabled person-led approach.

We are the ones who are choosing. Living independently is us employing the personal assistant. So it’s not a case of that person coming in and saying, “I’m going to do this or that for you”. We are saying, “I need help with this. Can you assist? Grand.”

Also, that point about direct action such as occupying buildings to actually get rights for disabled people is part of the idea. It contrasts with a centrist government-funded disabled persons’ organization that has people in it who are not disabled. These just making a few gestures and shake their fist but without forcing change on the government. You need actual, radical change and the radical approach to it as.

Conor: Presumably there are allies for disability campaigners, perhaps in trade unions? Are there any case studies of where good alliances ran successful campaigns?

Eoghan: In relation to Ireland, I think a good link that you could get is between disabled people and travellers because these are the most oppressed communities in Ireland, and there have been recently people, disabled travellers, who have spoken about linking the two in together.

In terms of specifically here and now, those are two communities that could link in together, but I think in terms of history the movements that have been led by disabled people are a recent enough thing, like from the 80s, and 90s. It comes back to a kind of intersectionality because there will be people in other campaigning communities who have disabilities.

In America, you’d have people in the Native tribes that are also disabled, so they will have the dual understanding of why both communities are oppressed, and they can act as the link between the communities.

Other than this intersectionality though, I can’t really think of any kind of proper, big mass movement where you’ve had a proper coming together. The book does look at the Soviet Union and their disability movement before Stalin came to power. It is really interesting because it really goes into depth about how there were proper discussions, actual empowerment of disabled people and disabled academics and serious studies and research to understand various impairments and disabilities. But that really comes to an end when Stalin comes to power.

Conor: That is interesting because it’s not well known, that history. When you look at modern post-Communist countries, they seem to be particularly bad, in fact, for people with a disability. They seem to have a model that institutionalizes people with disabilities rather than hold out the prospect of them being able to play an equal part in society.

Eoghan: It’s kind of ironic. When Khrushchev comes to power and he’s trying to distance himself from all the failings of Stalin, he’s like: “We can’t do this anymore. We can’t do that anymore,” but he didn’t think about disability. He probably just went, “Oh, no. That’s grand. That’s fine. Disability doesn’t matter. We don’t need to distance ourselves from Stalin on that. That wasn’t too bad.”

Conor: Returning to today, you mentioned them earlier but the Independent Living Movement Ireland (ILMI) campaign seems to have a lot of energy and a lot of potential to be able to win progress for people with disabilities. Do you know something about that campaign and where it’s at?

Eoghan: This has been going on since 2018. They’re trying to get a motion passed in the Dáil that basically calls for the independent living structure to be the model of disability: so to have a personal assistant service, to have that fully funded; to allow for the social model of disability basically.

I think it’s gone back and forth through the Dáil. It gets passed, but it then just gets hung up. Recently they did have a good win at least with the all the councils of Ireland, with the exception of Dublin City Council, passing the Independent Living motion unanimously.

Of course passing the motion is purely symbolic act, but it is one that says, “We’re calling on the government to bring in a model of independent living for disabled people.”

Conor: Well, it’s valuable that the groundwork is being laid. You can’t win equality without winning the argument and being clear on what you need, so that’s really important work, but in terms of then going the next step of actually trying to get some funding for the implementation of this, how do things stand? What’s the plan for the next step of the campaign?

Eoghan: Well, the funny thing is that we already have the personal assistant service. We’ve had it since the early 1990s, but it’s still in a trial phase. It is very hard to access, unless you have a good amount of money on yourself and can go through all the bureaucracy because there are a lot of hoops.

The structure is there in a sense, but obviously the funding isn’t and that’s the sticking point. The government saves 15 to 20 billion euro a year from carers. So they don’t have any incentive to replace family carers with paid assistants.

Conor: How does the book conclude?

Eoghan: They wrap it up with a rallying cry that if you are going to bring about change, disabled people are going to have a campaign for this themselves. It’s a simple point, but it’s often missed. The movement needs to be disabled-led. As simple as that. The book lays it out very clearly.

Conor: Whilst we want to win as much as we can at the moment and make as much progress as we can, is there ever going to be equality for people with disabilities under capitalism?

Eoghan: No. Simple answer. It is an obvious answer, but there’ll never be equality for disabled people under capitalism because there’ll be never equality for anyone under capitalism. It’s as simple as that, and what it all comes back to is linking the struggle of disabled people with the struggle of any other group, any other group throughout history, like women, like people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community. They cannot get equality under capitalism, and we cannot.

Conor: Is there anything else that my questions haven’t given you a chance to talk about that you wanted to talk address?

Eoghan: A very interesting point is made in the book about disability and war veterans. People who go off, fight war, and get a particular injury and end up in a wheelchair or losing a leg, lose an arm, they’re venerated. They’re lifted up on a pedestal and seen as good. This is what the Nazis did, actually. It’s quite ironic. For the Nazis, who were all about eugenics, put disabled people on a pedestal, and they were there with Hitler.

Disabled people have been divided in that regard, and especially with the mainstream media now. It’s a weird thing because disabled war veterans generally speaking are quite well looked after and generally there is an expectation that they be given and afforded anything they need, and as soon as there’s discrimination against a war veteran like, say, someone with a guide dog or a support animal is kicked out of a building there’s uproar in the media. National media is covering it. Everyone is going on social media and saying, “This is disgraceful. How dare they do this? This is shocking,” but if a non-war veteran disabled person was to be discriminated against, nothing.

The war veterans themselves may not want to be used in this way. But their disability is seen as a mark of honor whereas other people’s disability is portrayed as a shame. It is a bad thing. It is a scar. You should hide that.

Conor: On the question of shame, is Neuro Pride a new development? Can you say something about that?

Eoghan: Neuro Pride Ireland were founded last year. They held a festival last year, and they’ve done one this year, and now they’re doing kind of meetups as in public meetups in person which is for neurodivergent people, various impairments. Autism especially I think. Well, obviously all neurodivergencies, but I think a particular focus on autism because I think that’s the one that’s really stigmatized in the media.

At the moment, they’re trying to organize to end Applied Behaviour Analysis, ABA, which is a negative kind treatment plan often used by non-autistic ‘experts’ who are trying to cure autism or make the impairment lesser. If you look at kind of the people who founded the modern kind of medical model of autism, how to approach it, they have a eugenics mindset.

Neuro Pride has a community-led, bottom-up approach. They’re very much going down the route of being an NGO, which is grand. There’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, you can still work with that because they genuinely want to change things, and also they’re community-led which is a radical thing in and of itself, but there’s loads of people in that movement who are radical, who are anti-capitalist.

When I joined that group, I started talking about the book and everyone was genuinely interested. It’s actually really great to be in that community.

Read Eoghan’s review of an inspiring book about dyspraxia here. Learn more about Neuro Pride Ireland here and about ILMI here.

What is the meaning of The Carpet Crawlers? The Genesis song, whose lyrics were written by Peter Gabriel, has a dense, religious imagery leading to considerable discussion over the years as to what is the meaning of the The Carpet Crawlers lyrics. Here I’ll offer an interpretation that it is, at heart, addressing a terrible truth: that our world is hellish and those whom we believe we are following out of our own choice are keeping us trapped in illusion.

The Carpet Crawlers first appeared on the 1974 Genesis album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. In writing The Carpet Crawlers, the lyrics came first. And this is important in any attempt to understand it. Often a band will start with the music and fit lyrics in to suit the music; with The Carpet Crawlers, Peter Gabriel came to his band members with the lyrics already written and they created the D, E-minor, F-sharp minor sequence against which Gabriel then spent ‘hours and hours’ developing the melody on an out-of-tune piano. The sense of movement in the song feels simplistic when you isolate the keyboard or drum parts, but combined with the vocal melody the song becomes complex, unpredictable (even after multiple listens), and builds in a sinister fashion.

After an early version of The Carpet Crawlers was written, Peter Gabriel decided to add more lines and, again, the rest of the band provided the music, although they were under the impression an instrumental part was required and were surprised to hear his new vocals.

The lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers describe a scene where the narrator is in a hellish and surreal environment wanting to get out. Everyone else is being encouraged to get out by working their way upwards towards heaven, but all is not what it seems. In fact, listening to those who pretend to know that you ‘have to get in to get out’ will only doom you to remain stuck.

A Close Examination of the Lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers

Thinking about the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers in detail makes it more difficult to grasp the overall meaning of the song but also helps appreciate the skill, subversion, and powerful imagery of Gabriel’s lyrics.

The opening lines of The Carpet Crawlers introduce a first-person narrator, who in the The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album is a character called Rael. Treating Carpet Crawlers as a self-contained work, the narrator could be any of us. At first, the narrator is aware of a pleasant, cocooning sensation.

There is lambswool under my naked feet

The wool is soft and warm

Gives off some kind of heat

The lamb is a traditional symbol of innocence: a newborn animal whose gentleness is the opposite of the ferocity of the tiger in William Blake’s Tyger, Tyger. All is not well, however. A disturbing sight now appears to indicate that close by to the narrator this mild heat turns into an inferno.

A salamander scurries into flame to be destroyed

Mythology portrays the salamander as a creature that can dance in flames. Nor is this just a tradition in legend. Aristotle believed that the salamander was proof that ‘animals do actually exist that fire cannot destroy’. Yet here the lizard ‘scurries’ toward its own death. This lyric indicates that far from being in a protective and gentle environment, our narrator is somewhere hellish, and this sense of uncanny dread is enhanced by the following lyric in The Carpet Crawlers.

Imaginary creatures are trapped in birth on celluloid

Whatever these imaginary creatures are, the cinematic presentation of their birth is made all the more troubling by the fact of their being caught in the agony of being born and unable to properly come into being.

The fleas cling to the golden fleece

Hoping they’ll find peace

Now we come to a crucial moment in our the experience of the song. The fleas are us. A somewhat disgusting association, perhaps, but with Gabriel taking delight in inverting tropes, these fleas are not simply pestilent bloodsuckers, but have potential. In particular here, they want only peace.

We live in the lambswool (golden coloured and described in a fashion to evoke the Golden Fleece of legend), which while seemingly offering warmth and protection cannot provide lasting happiness. Not only are there horrors beyond the safety of the wool, but even within the wool there is no hiding from our self-created miseries.

Each thought and gesture are caught in celluloid

There’s no hiding in memory

There’s no room to avoid

The Carpet Crawlers: the Meaning Within the Lyrics

The crawlers cover the floor in the red ochre corridor

For my second sight of people, they’ve more lifeblood than before

As the music of the song becomes darker and begins its long, slow build, the narrator views humanity from above, having this additional dimension from which to view the crawling fleas. The narrator can see our bloodsucking nature, as we draw sustenance from the red ochre corridor.

‘Red ochre’ is a carefully chosen colour and appears in the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers not simply to make the line scan. Ochre is a clay and sand mix of yellow-to-orange colour; red ochre is closer to the colour of dried blood, because the clay contains iron oxide. When blood leaves the body, the iron in haemoglobin turns to iron oxide. Red ochre represents the blood, life-force.

Drone-like, we have a shared rhythm as we move to a heavy wooden door that – by association with the Biblical idea that it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle than a rich man enter heaven – is heaven’s gate. The needle’s eye is winking, mockingly. And it is the poor who are excluded from this journey. Like with the salamander, this place is not what it seems. It is a mockery of the journey to heaven. Again too, there is a sexual aspect to the needle’s eye, which suggests the vulva.

According to Gnosticism, our current world is hell and we are deceived when we think the path to heaven consists in following the preaching of those telling us the god of this world is good (the truly good god exists elsewhere). These lines in The Carpet Crawlers are thoroughly Gnostic. A sense-dulling refrain that the way out of hell requires us to get past the door is causing us all to move as one in that direction. But should we be doing so when the anti-Biblical needle is winking at us?

Gnosticism and the Meaning of The Carpet Crawlers

From this point – the introduction of the idea that the callers are calling humanity to a route that promises escape from hell but which will not deliver it – the song drives forward with increasing intensity: via the drum beat, the plaintive guitar, the increasing volume of the keyboard arpeggios, and the exchange of vocals between Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins.

There’s only one direction in the faces that I see

It’s upward to the ceiling, where the chamber’s said to be

Like the forest fight for sunlight, that takes root in every tree

They are pulled up by the magnet, believing they’re free

The carpet crawlers heed their callers:

“We’ve got to get in to get out

We’ve got to get in to get out

We’ve got to get in to get out”

The narrator can see that the pull of the callers is upwards (the conventional direction for heaven) and a rumoured chamber exists there, full of promise. Note that the narrator is unsure whether the chamber is actually to be found there. Everyone believes they are freely choosing this path to the chamber, but like trees striving for sunlight or iron aligning to a magnet, we are allowing the callers to lead us without any real freedom on our part. We are trapped in an illusion but cannot see it.

The next line introduces a strangely modern cultural reference to what up to now has been a largely (with the exception of celluloid) timeless atmosphere.

Mild-mannered supermen are held in kryptonite

While one could imagine dozens of Clarke Kents fixed in place, the real meaning of this lyric is to challenge the idea from Nietzsche that with God dead, the way out of the restraints and limitations of existence is to become an Übermensch, a superhuman. But in the hellish world of our narrator those – cerebral rather than athletic – superhumans are just as trapped as everyone else.

And the wise and foolish virgins giggle with their bodies glowing bright

Through the door a harvest feast is lit by candlelight

It’s the bottom of a staircase that spirals out of sight

With these lines the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers return to Christian imagery. The Biblical parable of the ten virgins – five wise, five foolish – is spoken by Christ when he is asked what sign will indicate the end of the world. Unlike the Biblical women, half of whom miss the crucial moment (the Day of Judgement) through being ill-prepared, in the song they are all aglow and inappropriately cheerful. Again, the route of our escape from hell is not what it seems. And this makes the ostensibly heaven-sent harvest festival and ascending staircase uninviting, despite the chant of the callers continuing to dominate the minds of the crawlers.

The carpet crawlers heed their callers:

“We’ve got to get in to get out

We’ve got to get in to get out

We’ve got to get in to get out”

The Final Images in the Lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers

The porcelain mannequin with shattered skin fears attack

And the eager pack lift up their pitchers, they carry all they lack

The liquid has congealed, which has seeped out through the crack

And the tickler takes his stickleback

Leaving aside the porcelain mannequin for the moment, our narrator witnesses the end of the journey of the carpet crawlers as they eagerly lift up their pitchers, whose contents are the lifeblood they will need having left their source of sustenance, the blood of the red ochre corridor. But the pitchers are broken, as Ecclesiastes 12:6 puts it when introducing the subject of death and the return of the dust of our bodies to earth. The lifeblood has seeped away and congealed.

At this point, the tickler takes his stickleback.

This final line before a long repetition of ‘we’ve got to get in to get out’ may seem humorous. Isn’t a tickle a pleasant experience? In fact this line is the awful climax of the song. No English child of Peter Gabriel’s generation will have grown up without attempting to catch sticklebacks, tiny fish which used to be abundant in fresh water. To tickle these fish is to wait for them to enter the trap of your hand and pluck them out of the water.

The carpet crawlers have been lured into the hands of death and a return to hell by the promise of the callers, along with a mistaken belief in the location of the escape chamber, as well as the illusions of the virgins, the candlelit harvest feast and the staircase.

What about the porcelain mannequin? It could well be the narrator, feeling vulnerable at the moment that the mass of crawlers leave the lambswool. An individual who has become a mannequin has had their unique features replaced by generic forms, making them able to represent all humans. A mannequin is designed to be moveable by others and an already shattered porcelain one is particularly vulnerable to harm. It would be frighting to be a porcelain mannequin and part company with the mass movement of the people around you because you intuit their final destination is not what it seems. That fear might bind you to their collective folly.

The proximity of the sound of ‘mannequin’ to ‘Manichaeism’ suggests an alternative reading of the line: that the porcelain mannequin is the Prince of Darkness, Satan. Manichaeism was the Gnostic-inspired religion that believed that it was necessary to release the light within us and become free from rebirth and pain. From this perspective, the porcelain mannequin who fears attack is the Prince of Darkness, the ruler of Earth, a hellish realm. He is fragile and vulnerable to the collective action of the carpet crawlers, should they ever change direction, for we carry light within us and for all our faults – every one of them on view – we carry the answer as to how to get out within ourselves.

If the porcelain mannequin is Satan, he need not worry. He can reabsorb our light (our death also being a moment of fertilisation to bind our light into the material world once more), causing us to be reborn in darkness, thanks to the assistance of the callers and their illusory religion.

And the tickler takes his stickleback

The pull of the music, which peaks after these lines during the repetition of We’ve got to get in to get out, implies the increasing pull of that argument, and reinforces how impossibly difficult it is to resist submission to that refrain and thus defeat.

Why are the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers so powerful?

Peter Gabriel has a strong engagement with William Blake, the revolutionary poet, something that was evident in his setting Songs of Innocence and Experience to music for the millennium, with performances eight times a day in the Greenwich marquee. And while there are no direct references to Blake in The Carpet Crawlers there do seem to be some in Supper’s Ready, Gabriel’s other lyrical masterpiece for Genesis.

Peter Gabriel took a Blakeian approach to writing the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers in this sense: he drew on Christian imagery and mythic creatures of his own invention to condemn orthodox religion and the way that people become trapped in the illusion that they are freely following the philosophies that bind them. It takes a prophet to write a song like Carpet Crawlers and I think that reading Blake helped Gabriel assume that mantle, at least in 1974.

As with all prophetic writing, the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers affect us because they are addressing a fundamental truth. There is something real and important about the nature of human experience that is touched on here. And that’s why our bodies shiver on listening to the song, regardless of the extent to which we comprehend the exact meaning of The Carpet Crawlers.

Humanity is living in hell and is constantly recreating the conditions of our immiseration by callers who think they know how to direct us to heaven. And while atheists and materialists baulk at the thought that the Prince of Darkness orchestrates all this, just ask yourself, what if that evil god was Mammon? If you lived in a world that sacrificed everything to the pursuit of profit, while telling you everything was going to end well, what would that world look like?

The hell of the carpet crawlers.

Conor Kostick is the author of the international bestseller Epic , in which the people of a dystopian world are obliged to play a fantasy RPG for their living. Conor Kostick’s science fiction can be read on Substack.

A review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow and an explanation of why the concept of primitive communism is mistaken.

The way in which we imagine the first human societies is intimately connected to our current political beliefs. Conservatives believe in repression, the need for police, prisons and legal systems. To justify this, they argue that humans are inherently warlike and exploitative. Otherwise, we’d be in some kind of Mad Max scenario of everyone fighting each other over resources. And you don’t have to be an extreme conservative to still have a bleak take on humanity, based on your assumptions about the lives of hunter gatherers.

By contrast, for liberals and radicals, especially for Marxists, the idea that early humans existed in a state of primitive communism is an inspiring one. At the stage of primitive communism, it is believed, everything was shared and everyone looked after one another. Both conservatives and socialists look for evidence to support their views in anthropology and archaeology. And, as Graeber and Wengrow’s new book shows, both have created images of the distant past that are little better than fictions.

In this review of a book of enormous importance, I’m going to focus on what the evidence it presents and the arguments it makes mean for socialists. Conservatives can have their own battles over it.

From Primitive Communism to Class Societies

In 1877, Frederick Engels wrote a polemical book, Anti-Dühring, which presented the following influential passage about the reason primitive communism gave way to class societies:

All historical antagonisms between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes to this very day find their explanation in this same relatively undeveloped human labour. So long as the really working population were so much occupied with their necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society – the direction of labour, affairs of state, legal matters, art, science, etc. – so long was it necessary that there should constantly exist a special class, freed from actual labour, to manage these affairs; and this class never failed, for its own advantage, to impose a greater and greater burden of labour on the working masses.

Almost all Marxists follow this idea: that for tens of thousands of years (100,000 BCE – 10,000 BCE), people lived barely above subsistence level. As Alex Callinicos puts it,  ‘Almost all the working day was taken up with necessary labour to meet society’s basic needs.’ An important conclusion that follows from this idea is that the eventual loss of egalitarianism among the small communities of hunter-gatherers was a tragic necessity. Although it brought exploitation, war, the oppression of women, and other injustices, the ending of primitive communism was a necessary step for science and art to advance.

A small surplus allowed a caste of priests, planners, builders and organisers to devote themselves full time to their duties. And over centuries, these people coalesced into a ruling elite. Despite the burden on the rest of the population, this was a necessary phase for humans to pass through, in order that these specialists could bring about the advances in the productive forces that would lead to food abundance (and widespread obesity); the discovery of the atom (and nuclear bombs); penicillin (and antimicrobial resistance); air travel (and global warming); etc.

Only now, with the enormous wealth that modern production can create, can we return to the lost spirit of sharing that existed in the era of primitive communism.

For many years I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the UK and Ireland. Before reading The Dawn of Everything, I might not have followed John Molyneux’s crude generalisation that ‘to the American Indian, private ownership of land was unnatural,’ but I definitely did repeat the argument expressed by Chris Harman, that a phase of primitive communism, where people lived in small groups of thirty to forty people, gave way to the first class societies as a result of an agricultural revolution, around 8,000 BCE, which was followed by an urban revolution around 4,000 BCE in Mesopotamia and 1,500 years later a similar development took place in Meso-America.

Harman leaned very heavily on the work of the Australian archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe and in particular Childe’s seminal works Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942). Probably, most socialists and Marxists follow the schema in these books, which first formulated the idea of an agricultural and urban revolution having taken place that transformed human society and led to the first classes. No doubt those in the tradition of the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and perhaps socialist republicans and anarchists too, have their own pre-history ‘experts’, whose talks, writings, and educational materials explain the origin of classes in these terms.

Well, they were all wrong. We were all wrong.

Primitive Communism never existed

For some years now, the evidence has been growing for a pre-history of humanity that shows an extraordinary richness, both in terms of material production, like massive settlements of thousands of people, and in terms of cultural exchanges over immense distances. It will come as a surprise to everyone on the left who held to the ‘undeveloped human labour’ model for the origin of classes – just as it came as a surprise to me – to read of sites like Çatalhöyük in modern day Turkey, where perhaps 10,000 people flourished around 7,000 BCE. Or Göbekli Tepe, also in southern Anatolia, which dates from about 9,500 BCE and is another massive centre, whose stone pillars are covered in intriguing animal-dominated images. Poverty Point, in present day Louisiana, USA, is a site of massive earthen ridges distributed over 5km and constructed some time between 1700 BCE and 1100 BCE, that is, during the pre-farming period in the Americas.

With these examples and very many more, David Graeber and David Wengrow completely overthrow Childe’s timeline and his conclusions about the agricultural and urban revolutions. For millennia before the supposed agricultural revolution of the Near East, humans were experimenting with all sorts of ways of organising themselves, including moving to sites like Stonehenge for certain times of the year, then dispersing; mixing horticulture with hunting; and in settling together in their thousands. Large settlements came first, not agriculture.

The image of small, precarious bands of hunter-gathers that is so dominant in our image of pre-class societies is a backwards projection from people like the !Kung of the western edge of the Kalahari desert or the Inuit of the arctic. Pushed by modern societies to regions in which are difficult to exploit for profit and deeply affected by interaction with the rest of the world, it perhaps should not be too surprising that these examples turn out not to be good ones for the re-creation of the distant past.

Similarly, the idea that life was desperately precarious in the ‘primitive communist’ era is shattered by these examples. What makes us believe that people in these societies were barely surviving? Mainly, that it fits a schema where there has to be some reason why an elite would be allowed to dominate the population. Yet there’s no evidence to say that these early settlements were perpetually on the brink of starvation.

Given their stable existence for far longer periods than say New York, or Paris, or even Dublin, it might well be that the people of Teotihuacan – a Mesoamerican settlement near modern day Mexico City, whose peak was around 450 BCE when it had a population of around 200,000 spread over an area of ten square kilometres – would pity us if they could see us now. Pitied for several reasons, including the fact that we work far harder and longer than they did, just to pay rents and mortgages, let alone save up for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Disneyland.

And yes, we have Netflix and they didn’t, but by the evidence of the sophistication of the legal practices of the population of Teotihuacan they might well have had more impressive self-government, storytellers, musicians, artists, sculptors, jewellery makers, and better drug taking experiences, and better games, etc. than we do. After all, in our day we have our own god to whom almost every aspect of our lives is sacrificed: Mammon. There’s no escaping the drive of the market, especially in music or art, where all sorts of anaemic production is foisted onto us.

Does the adoption of agriculture always lead to hierarchy?

Engels’s argument about the origin of classes is mistaken in the assumption that pre-agricultural societies required most people to be ‘occupied with their necessary labour’ for most of their time. And this book made me reconsider the logic of his next step: that therefore affairs of state, legal matters, art, science must fall to specialists who become an elite.

Modern day socialists have no problem imagining that workers today can have valid opinions on a wide variety of matters, including politics, law, art and science. So why would it be any different for our predecessors? Indeed, they probably had a lot more time for mass participation in such affairs, including the regulation of their societies. Over the thousands of years of society presented by modern archaeology, it seems that societies with permanent elites were the exception. Graeber and Wengrow give plenty of examples, indeed, where civilisations seem to have consciously been on guard against the formation of ruling elites and even carried out revolutions against those who tried to take over.

Taking Taosi in modern day north China as a case study, archaeologists have found evidence that around 2,000 BCE, ‘the city wall was razed flat, and … the original functional divisions destroyed, resulting in a lack of spatial regulation. Commoners’ residential areas now covered almost the entire site, even reaching beyond the boundaries of the middle-period large city wall. The size of the city became even larger, reaching a total area of 300 hectares. In addition, the ritual area in the south was abandoned. The former palace area now included a poor-quality rammed-earth foundation of about 2,000 square metres, surrounded by trash pits used by relatively low-status people. Stone tool workshops occupied what had been the lower-level elite residential area.’

Moreover, commoner graves suddenly appeared on the elite cemetery and in the palace district a mass burial with signs of torture and grotesque violations of the corpses appears to be an ‘act of political retribution.’ As Graeber and Wengrow observe, this strongly suggests a revolution against an elite and it was a probably a successful one given that the phase of commoner housing and burial on former elite grounds lasted two or three hundred years and the city grew in size. ‘At the very least,’ they conclude, ‘the case of Taosi invites us to consider the world’s earliest cities as places of self-conscious social experimentation, where very different visions of what a city could be like might clash – sometimes peacefully, sometimes erupting in bursts of extraordinary violence. Increasing the number of people living in one place may vastly increase the range of social possibilities, but in no sense does it predetermine which of those possibilities will ultimately be realised.’

‘Primitive Communism’ does not fit the archaeological evidence

Another even more persuasive example of the mass participation of the population of an early city in their civic affairs is that of Teotihuacan, mentioned above. Again, the city went some way down the road of authoritarian rule, but around 300 CE reversed course to live without elites. Around that time, a practice of building massive pyramids stopped, as did the practice of human sacrifice. From around 200 CE a new phase of housing construction had taken place, accelerating after 300 CE: these were impressive masonry apartments laid out on regular plots from one end of the city to another until most of the city’s 100,000 residents had comfortable accommodation with integrated drainage and plastered floors and walls that were often painted with bright murals (reading about which will make any Irish reader living amidst a deep housing crisis envious).

Even the most modest households of Teotihuacan after 300 CE had what seems to be a comfortable lifestyle, with a varied diet and access to imported goods. When their vivid art depicts human activity, no one is of a greater size than any other (in contrast to the art of early class societies) and no one is depicted in a role of authority. One archaeologist has described the citizens as not just anti-dynastic but engaged in a utopian urban life. That this claim is more than plausible is demonstrated by a neglected text written by one of the Spanish conquerors of Mexico, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’s unfinished Crónica de la Neuva España (c.1558 – 63).

Salazar describes how when the Spaniards dealt with the city of governing council of city called Tlaxcala they found no royal court to deal with but an urban council of representatives. One of the eldest (and farsighted) of these representatives was Xicotencatl the Elder, who advised against an alliance with the Spaniards even if that would lead to the defeat of their hated Aztec foes. Xicontenal pointed out that the Spanish invaders were, ‘like ravenous monsters thrown up by the intemperate sea to blight us, gorging themselves on gold, silver, stones, and pearls; sleeping in their own clothes; and generally acting in the manner of those who one day would make cruel masters… There are barely enough chickens, rabbits, or corn-fields in the entire land to feed their bottomless appetites… why would we – who live without servitude, and never acknowledged a king – spill our blood only to make ourselves into slaves?’

Another Spanish account describes the procedure for becoming a representative in Tlaxcala, which is summarised by Graeber and Wengrow as follows. ‘Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate a personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation – even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then – with one’s ego in tatters – a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiations ended with a “coming out” of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration.’

This tradition of complex safeguards against ambitious representatives coming to the fore strengthens the idea that Teotihuacan had no royal rulers. Nor is the idea of self-government and caution against the formation of elites with real power limited to the Americas. It was, after all, a feature of democracy in Ancient Greece that representatives were chosen by lottery, rather than vote, precisely to avoid the rich, ambitious, and charismatic politician being able to dominate proceedings. Just think how much healthier our own democracy would be if instead of having a majority of wealthy TDs who are networked into various business and property interests (25% are landlords), we chose them by lottery. Yes, we might get some duds but so too does the current Dáil: I’m thinking especially Michael and Danny Healy Rae. We’d be spectacularly unlucky if the lottery picked someone with more bizarre views than theirs.

Are there any weaknesses with The Dawn of Everything?

All books have their strengths and weaknesses. And in discussing a few areas I found problematic in The Dawn of Everything, I am not at all taking away from the core arguments, which I think are irrefutable: there was no ‘primitive communist’ stage of human existence; massive settlements appeared before the widespread development of agriculture; there was no necessary connection between underdeveloped agriculture and the appearance of class societies and these societies were every bit as intellectually and artistically rich as our own (probably more so).

I have a dislike of arguments that despite acknowledging weak foundations then charge towards their conclusions as if those weaknesses aren’t present. An extreme example is Donnchadh Ó Corráin’s The Irish Church, its Reform and the English Invasion, which is heavily dependent on a belief that a key document, Laudabiliter, is genuine. Yet there are strong reasons to think it a forgery. These are dismissed by Ó Corráin in a footnote and he’s thus able to present his conclusions as if they are much more convincing and certain than the evidence actually allows for.

I have a concern that this type of practice is at work in The Dawn of Everything i.e. of a tendency to overstate the evidence in favour of their argument and under-represent caveats and doubts. What makes me say this is that for the most part, the case studies are entirely new to me and I am completely dependent on Graeber and Wengrow’s presentation of them. But I have some knowledge of the reign of Ashurbanipal, ruler of the Assyrian empire 668 – 631 BCE. According to The Dawn of Everything, despite the brutal conquests of emperors Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal, ‘when dealing with loyal subjects they were strikingly hands-off, often granting near-total autonomy to citizen bodies that made decisions collectively.’

The point Graeber and Wengrow are making here is that the Mesopotamian cities had town councils that were reflective of ‘participatory government’ and that ‘city dwellers (even under monarchies) largely governed themselves, presumably much as they had before kings appeared on the scene to begin with.’ The references for these ideas are a paper by Gojko Barjamovic discussing the term ‘citizens of Babylon’ in the sources and  the archaeology of Mashkan-shapir from around 2,000 BCE. Now, I’m perfectly happy with the idea that the earliest Mesopotamian cities, Uruk especially, had popular government and no royal rulers. But to use evidence from 1,500 years earlier to presume self-government was intact in Ashurbanipal’s day is too big a stretch. Moreover, Brajamovic’s argument is not that ‘citizens of Babylon’ was a term implying every cook could govern (a phrase Graeber and Wengrow use for these Mesopotamian cities) but rather that the ‘overlords’ and ‘superiors’ of Babylon were local figures who would meet to discuss important matters such as whether to stay loyal to Assyria or join a revolt against the empire.

To say that in a time of civil war, a body of people coming under the term LÚ.GN.KI.MEŠ (‘the citizens of the city GN’) were a distinct civic institution is interesting. The examples given by Brajamovic indicate there was in Babylon c.650, some kind of assembly of elders of local inhabitants, who held executive power. This body of citizens might well point to a pre-existing tradition of non-royal government. It does not, however, provide any evidence for popular self-government, of widespread involvement of the whole of the people in how the city was run. And even if we allow popular autonomy for Babylon around this time, it is clearly a mistake to make the generalisation that across Mesopotamia collective decision making allowed cities to run pretty much as they had been before the rise of royal power. By the time of Ashurbanipal, most Mesopotamian cities were being micro-managed down to the assignments of individual workers by the central authority via their governors and officials.

You don’t have to be a specialist in the field to see this. If you open up the State Archives of Assyria, and browse the letters from kings and princes to their servants, you’ll see no end of detailed instructions that show an absolute authority over the military, economic and religious affairs. Taking one at random: SAA 18.006:

A tablet of the crown prince to the deputy (governor) and Nabû-dini-a [mur]. Mar-Biti-ibni, a citizen of Der, helped thirteen men run away, and brought them where you are.

You (sg.) gave five of them to Šiyu, but eight (remain) in [yo]ur (pl.) presence.

No[w], send (pl.) […]!

There are thousands of these types of instruction for the Neo-Babylonian period, covering every aspect of city life. My concern therefore is that if Graeber and Wengrow are exaggerating their case here, which I think they are, might they be doing so for other case studies where I have no firm ground to stand on which allows me to interrogate their examples?

What does the collapse of the concept of Primitive Communism mean for the left?

Whether or not Graeber and Wengrow have tried a little too hard to add extra examples to their case, the evidence of cities like Taljanky, Maidenetske, Nebelivka, Çatalhöyü, Göbekli Tepe, Poverty Point, Uruk, Mohenjo-daro, Teotihuacan, Liangchengzhen, Yaowangchen, and Caral, is that cities of thousands of inhabitants existed in pre-history. Talkanky and its neighbouring Ukrainian mega-settlements had a definite surplus produce from their sustainable mix of hunting and foraging, orchard keeping, livestock and household plots for grains. Yet over centuries there is little evidence for warfare or the development of a ruling class.

Engels’s idea about Primitive Communism and the transition to the first class societies turns out to be just as much a thought experiment as Rousseau’s idea that there was probably an innocent state of grace for humanity in our distant past, but that this time of noble savagery gave way to the appearance of injustice with the introduction of property relations. Engels is Rousseau plus the language of surplus value. Neither of their speculations have any foundation in the actual human experience.

What this means for those who believe in the possibility of humans living as equals again in the future, without war or exploitation, is very exciting. There have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of examples of non-hierarchical societies that didn’t just exist as small foraging bands but also in communities of 10,000 – 100,000 people. Note that these were far from utopias, many of them practiced human sacrifice. But they governed themselves without a warrior aristocracy. It turns out that humans are good at creating sophisticated political systems to avoid being controlled by elites and that our predecessors were a lot better at it than us.

Graeber and Wengrow introduce their argument with the example of the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk, who witnessed French society and provided a devastating critique of it. That his own world was superior in terms of quality of life is evident not just from the fact that no individuals died of destitution as they did in France, nor enslaved themselves for money, but that time after time, those Europeans who made the effort to learn the language and customs of the Iroquoian-speaking people chose to leave their European past behind and live out their lives with the native Americans.

Why do we assume the times we live in are superior to those of the distant past? In many important ways, including the distinct possibility we might bring about an apocalypse, ours is inferior. This book will play an important part in shifting our perception of our times and helping appreciate that we don’t have to live in a class society.

So is it a book to be welcomed by the socialists and the left? It certainly should be, but there are going to be large numbers of people in the old left who will resist it. First of all, there is a kind of Marxist – typically someone inclined to look at Russia or China through rose-tinted glasses – who has a notion that history passes through logical stages: primitive communism, agricultural revolution, urban revolution, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and communism. Probably, the most extreme form in which I ever encountered this argument was that of David Laibman’s Deep History, in which his Abstract Social Totality concept drove history through these stages.

Even parties with a less dogmatic approach to Marxism and with a more critical attitude towards nations calling themselves communist will also struggle to accept the evidence of The Dawn of Everything. Why? Because the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Network, RISE, etc. come from a tradition that also has ossified their thinking about history into stages driven by changes in the forces and relations of production. I should know, for years I gave educational talks on the origins of class societies, on how one type of class society was overthrown and replaced by another, until we get to capitalism when the working class will end the dialectic of history.

To be clear, I still am convinced that only a world-wide revolution of the working class can bring about a sustainable, socialist world. And Marx’s concepts around exploitation and class struggle remain essential tools in analysing a particular historical moment, but the attempt to generalise an entire system for the progress of society out of what seemed to be the logical origins of history has fallen apart. The Dawn of Everything shows that we were just telling ourselves a story on the flimsiest of examples.

The concept of Primitive Communism and the Enlightenment

The problem many Marxists are likely to have with the book is not simply that they were mistaken about the evidence. That is easily corrected. It runs deeper. Typically, Marxism is considered a science (a ‘scientific research programme’ as Alex Callinicos puts it) by its practitioners and one that completes the Enlightenment. Where the bourgeoisie veered away from their own drive against superstition because clear-sighted rational thinking would expose the injustices of their own system, a philosophy based on the working class – who have nothing to lose by complete honesty and constant self-criticism – can implement the goals of the Enlightenment in full.

Framing Marxism in this way, as the culmination of the Enlightenment, inherits Rousseau’s belief that for all the faults of our modern world, there was no other way forward out of an ignorant past. Humans in prehistory might have been happier, possibly, and moral, perhaps, but they were unaware of the real workings of the universe. The various stages of history that we have passed through to progress to capitalism (ready to progress again to communism) were all necessary ones to reach our modern, rational world. Marxists who concentrate on structure and see the emphasis on human spirit in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as an immature work that was surpassed by Capital and other later texts by Marx and Engels, are especially keen on this model. They will find it very hard to accept the findings of The Dawn of Everything.

And there’s another reason why the old left will struggle to champion this new book. Parties like the Socialist Party and the SWN, not to mention the Communist Party, have elderly leaders who don’t like to be challenged. Insofar as they are on record as having written about the origins of class society, these senior figures will have committed themselves to a position that is mistaken. And they won’t be comfortable with acknowledging that.

Personally, I think this book has to join the cannon of essential reading for socialists. Because at heart it is inspiring and leaves the reader believing in human emancipation. Dozens of early civilisations speak to our ability to live rich and sophisticated lives without a ruling elite.