George Novack’s

Understanding History

Written: 1956 through 1968

Source: © Resistance Books 2002 ISBN 1876646233; Published by Resistance Books, 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale NSW 2008, Australia

Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters Special thanks to David Holmes of Resistance Books who made this transcription possible.

Copyright: © Resistance Books 2002 Reprinted here with Resistance Books permission.

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Table of Contents

About The Author

The Long View Of History

Foreword

1. How Humanity Climbed to Civilisation

2. The Main Course of American History and Its Next Stage

From Lenin To Castro

Major Theories Of History From The Greeks To Marxism

Uneven And Combined Development In History

1. The Uneven Course of History

The dual nature of the law

The historical background

An example from Lenin

The formulator of the law

Uneven development in nature

The uneven evolution of primitive societies

The new world and the old

The backwardness of colonial life

The inequality of continents and countries

Internal inequalities

Irregularities in society

From barbarism to civilisation

The march of civilisation

The uneven evolution of capitalism

Same causes different effects

National peculiarities

The limits of national peculiarities

2. Combined Development and Its Consequences

Fusion of different historical factors

The dialectics of combination

Britain’s social structure

Forward leaps in history

Historical reversions

The disintegration of combinations

Slavery and capitalism

The substitution of classes

The penalties of progressiveness and the privileges of backwardness

The twisted course of the Russian Revolution

3. Disproportions of American Development

The “War of Independence”

Major sources of unevenness in American life

Prospects of American development

The contrast of British and American labour

“Explosive expansion”

4. Appendix: How to Apply a Law of Sociology

The material source of unevenness

The further course of evolution

“Circumstances alter cases”

Russian development

China and Japan Under imperialism

After the Russian Revolution

“The truth is concrete”

The Problem Of Transitional Formations

The exceptional duality of transitional states

Problems of classification

The transition from food gathering to food production

Village, town and city

The transition from Roman slavery to feudalism

Manufacture: the stepping stone from the craft guild to machine industry

Transitional regimes and societies in the 20th century

Sociology And Historical Materialism

The place of sociology among the sciences

Sociology and the philosophy of history

Types of sociological theory

Historical materialism

The class character of sociology

Positivism And Marxism In Sociology

Marxism Versus Existentialism

Science and the absurdity of reality

The predominance of ambiguity

Individuals and their environment

Freedom, necessity and morality

The destiny of humanity

Alienation in modern society

The meaning of life and death

Can existentialism and Marxism be reconciled?

Is Nature Dialectical?

A comment and a response

Trotsky’s Views On Dialectical Materialism

Alienation

PART 1

The people and their rulers

The new socialist humanists

Hegel’s contribution

The young Marx

Development of the concept of labour

Primitive source of alienation

Dialectical development of alienation

Alienation of labour under capitalism

PART 2

The great fetishes of capitalism

Alienation between the state and society

Alienation of science from society

The humanism of Erich Fromm

Is alienation everlasting?

Prime cause of alienation in deformed workers’ states

The ultrabureaucratic state and the workers

Organisation of industry

Dictatorship of the lie

Cult of the individual

The cure for bureaucratism

Stalinism and capitalism

Toward the abolition of alienation

Labour time and free time

Appendix: Existentialism And Marxism by Doug Lorimer

The origins of existentialism—

Sartrean existentialism

Althusserian structuralism

Existentialism and post-structuralism

NOTES