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This article undertakes a critical review of the lecture on “The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation” which the left-wing Cape Town intellectual Ben Kies makes in Cape Town in 1953. The argument is made that the lecture signals not only a break with dominant thinking about human progress, but in its framing of world history both anticipates the contribution of the Indian subaltern movement and offers new analytics for explaining social, cultural and economic development. In redrawing the lines of human development over the last 5,000 years it not only introduces to socio-cultural history what Jaffe called a world systems theory, but, also, critically, a decentred explanation of how the world system worked. In prioritising, however, the place of human beings in the world, he essentially re-centred his explanation behind a modernism which was premised entirely on the subjugation of nature. In this he was firmly invested, as was almost every other socialist tradition of the time, in what O’Connor describes as a “productivist” view of human life – the idea that greater productivity, economic growth in the main, is needed to create more free- or leisure-time for human beings to develop to their full potentialities.

A re-reading of Ben Kies’s “The Contribution of the Non European Peoples to World Civilisation”