Poor old Professor Pinker. He’s got himself in a right proper pickle. With one foot barely in the camp of historical materialism ie, the real world, and the other firmly in the camp of metaphysical pycho-babble, he has taken himself and his readers through seven hundred pages of meandering pseudo-science, meaningless anecdote and bar-room chat, all in an apparent effort to prove that we humans are becoming less violent and more civilised. And he furnishes us with mountains of graphs and statistics to prove it too. Well you know what they say about statistics. They and he prove nothing.

Ok, I’ve got a few statistics of my own. One in three people on our planet today live on or below the absolute poverty line. Millions of those literally starve to death every year in a silent, degrading death that is most certainly a man-made catastrophe. If that is not human violence on a mighty industrial scale I don’t know what is.

Another one in three of our fellow citizens eke out some sort of patchy existence but live continually in the shadow of economic debt and ruination. Such citizens are unable to develop themselves fully because the dead weight of wage slavery slowly but surely saps out all the creative juices and replaces it with a mind-numbing combination of alienating consumerism and equally alienating celebrity culture. Bread and circuses as the Romans would have it. This is a form of life-long violence to the human spirit that our Mr Pinker makes absolutely no reference to, but it is a violence nevertheless, a violence that robs us of our human potential.

And finally, a fortunate third of our citizens might be said to live in relative comfort and safety in the so called developed world, but even they must live perpetually in the shadow of economic meltdown, nuclear and biological warfare, acts of nihilistic terror, sparodic acts of lumpen working class retaliation, and an environmental catastrophe that is slowly but surely consuming the entire planet. Within this fortunate third there are the obscenely rich who lock themselves away in their gated communities and their missile defended yachts, but even they are not immune from the violence that surrounds us all. Yes, one-to-one violence probably has declined in the developed metropolitan centres, but it has been replaced with an institutional socio-economic violence that is so all pervasive that no member of the human tribe, not even the most fortunate, can be said to be immune. And even as I write these few paragraphs, another few thousand children have wasted away after an agonising but ultimately futile battle against malnutrition and disease.

So, although our Professor Pinker makes no reference to it, it is clear that a planet wide war rages continually, for a while simmering away and then exploding into bloody life. A perpetual class war, to use the twentieth century parlance, where countless millions rot away in urban slums while the global financiers enrich themselves while the politicians boast about the wondrous benefits of a new globalism. A war wrapped up sometimes in religious garb, sometimes in national, but always with an economic pulse. A war, incidently, that has violently targeted women without respite. That that has been the history of our human race for the past five thousand years. A history of a material scarcity that is cleverly manipulated by merciless elites ready and willing to take advantage, usually by a devilish combination of divide and rule, religious and tribal chicanery and in the final instance, brute force . It is a history pregnant with violence every step of the way. To put the matter far more precisely and poetically:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruination of the contending classes. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

To deny this glaring reality, as Pinker so deliberately does, is to connive in its perpetuation. Comfortable in his Ivy League university, Pinker has time on his hands to create fictitious worlds where we are all supposedly becoming more civilized, our better angels learning to get the better of our inner demons. But he has created nothing but a Harry Potter style fantasy. We cannot possibly escape our violent pre-history until we return to and complete one decisive task, a task that has been dreamed about throughout the centuries, scientifically outlined in part during the nineteenth century, and heroically if brutally attempted in the twentieth century. The task in question is to return all significant human wealth back to social ownership so it can finally be distributed fairly, rationally and humanely. It is a task that we humans will need to return to repeatedly until we have some measure of success, but until that is achieved violence by man to his fellow man will be the order of the day. And if our twenty-first century global economy collapses into the black hole of global depression then expect that violence to mirror the bestial fascist violence of the twentieth century. Good table manners, of which Pinker obsesses about, simply won’t come into the equation.

Pinker makes a distinction between our long hunter-gatherer past and our very recent transition to settled communities, what we loosely refer to as civilisation. The defining feature of this recent 5000 year epoch, according to our learned Professor PInker is not class divisions, as so lucidly spelled out by Marx, but a benevolent and neutral state that has, more than anything, according to our good professor, been responsible for our pacification and civilisation. Here lies Pinker’s fundamental error. The state is never neutral, quite the opposite. The state is nothing but the organising committee for the ruling elite. And when the interests of that elite are threatened it unleashes the most unholy violence against its opponents.

The partisan nature of our current state in Britain can best be witnessed by its collusion with finance capital where decades of light touch regulation of the financial system has in reality been a regime of no regulation. As in Britain, so it has been across the capitalist world. This collusion has allowed wholesale tax avoidance and money laundering on a truly gigantic scale. It has also involved the criminal corruption of entire swathes of public institutions who have allowed themselves to be bribed by the corporate lobby and their associated media empires. The end result of this collusion has been the near total collapse of the worlds financial structures throwing hundreds of millions of families onto the economic scrapheap. That represents state violence on an epic scale. Pinker has nothing to say about this. But why would he when he is one of the happy beneficiaries of all this state and corporate criminality and mismanagement. We should never allow ourselves to forget that the relatively fortunate third live off the impoverishment of the other two thirds, and that the criminally wealthy 1% live off the labours of the 99%. This is the true definition of violence on our little planet. But poor old Professor Pinker just doesn’t get it.

I enjoyed reading Pinker’s work, particularly his defining opening chapter, because although I disregard most of his findings, he does raise timely and fascinating questions about the very nature of what it is to be human. But despite arguing in his conclusion that:

Declines of violence are a product of social, cultural and material conditions, he all too often departs from the material conditions and lapses into a commentary about cultural and psychological factors and relegates the material conditions of human existence to a distant second place. For Pinker the whole equation revolves around, predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology (being) overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality and reason. P672

This is where Pinker gets the dialectic, even assuming he grasps the dialectic at all, hopelessly the wrong way around. Always, in the final instance, it is the material conditions of life how we feed and clothe and shelter ourselves, that give rise to our human culture and our human psychology. That is not to deny that we, as evolved apes, do not have innate animal impulses, but that it is our real, economic world that will ultimately determine how those impulses are expressed. As for the inherent violence of our so-called inner demons, these can be more permanently laid to rest by completing our six million year journey from animal scarcity to human abundance. Only then will the elites and their accompanying state apparatus start to wither away. We have the technology to succeed, and the economic and social imperative is there for all to see. We now just need to summon the collective political will. Until that time, expect the violence inherent in our present historical juncture to increase rather than decrease.