this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Surely Rome wasn't a warmongering, genocidal, capitalist-colonialist society with the rich elite hoarding untold wealth and trading in slaves 1500 years earlier, right?
The Roman mode of production wasn't capitalist exploitation of wage earners who sold their labor, but through their exploration of slaves in an agregarian system. There's some arguments to be made that capitalist systems start as early as 12th century Italy, but it becomes dominant in 1600s England and is able to radically transform that society.
There's actually a lot of interesting recent work that points to wage labor being very prevalent in the Roman economy! The idea of slavery as the main driver of the production of the Roman economy is not nearly as popular now even amongst academics who take a 'primitivist' view of the Roman economy (ie that it resembled the customary economies around it more than later, early modern economies). Though, obviously, either way it had significant social influence and implications, and was far from economically inconsequential.
I, eh, would think that Phoenician societies and a lot of Ancient Greece could be called that too.
In any case, if everything involving markets and mutually voluntary deals and trade is called capitalism, then everything is capitalism. But that doesn't make any sense.
Capitalism is specifically what Marx was talking about - where the economic system is kinda free and equal, but to be a subject in it you have to own some capital, allowing you to create enterprises. You can't do it with just your head and two hands, because it's very expensive. So you need to ally with some generational wealth. Quite often that of aristocrats.
So-o things like VC and more recently crowdfunding and what not, which everybody blames for enshittification and such, are what ended the original capitalism in some sense. People who have some kind of a business plan and skills, and small capital (something realistic to assemble), can try. Also the startup incubators and all that.
A lot of it is BS, but in general you don't have to make an appointment with some Victorian dude with a monocle, wait for him a few hours, then explain your whole idea to him a few more hours, and then - that dude will be very polite and knowledgeable and interested, by the way, - likely get a commendation letter to some acquaintances of the dude, his written commentary with advice on your ideas, and a polite refusal.
I guarantee you have never read a page by Marx. Your understanding of capitalism and socialism is shocking.
I have read Capital in full. Is there anything else?
What is your guarantee worth?
Not a soul here believes that. Your post history is visible. You spell 'bloc' as "block" and your understanding of capitalism is that of a very young person's. Not to mention, nobody would reply that they read Capital in full — they would say they've read Marx's volume of Capital. You're transparent.
Once again, I guarantee you've never read a page by Marx. You really should try it.
How do we call a person ignorant of there being plenty of languages other than English, sometimes without such distinction between these words?
Anyway, spelling errors are indicative only of spelling errors.
My "understanding of capitalism" - ignorance and arrogance go together, and Marxists are a premier example of both.
Personal insults are forbidden here, but some time from now you might learn that people reply to all kinds of things differently.
I have already told you that you've shat yourself and asked what is your guarantee supported with. You are wrong. What will you do?
Wrecked. Better luck next time, liberal.
Holding a marxist to their world - and being called a liberal (what that even is). Classic
Oh, so now you don't know what 'liberal' means, yet you're content claiming you've studied Marx? Come on. Aren't you embarrassed?
I'm really not sure what your point is or how it is a response to my comment. I'll respond to what I understand.
First, I agree, Phoenecian and ancient Greek societies would be classified as slave modes of production according to Marx. I wasn't suggesting otherwise, just responding to OP's comment that Roman society was capitalist.
I'm not quite sure what argument you're building in the second paragraph, but there is a curious absence of proletariats in regards to subjects.
From here on our, I'm rather confused and I don't think you have a clear grasp of what Marx means by capitalism. You seem to be most concerned with initial funding sources and not how one social group is able to exploit another through various economic means and subsequent social means as the capitalist class becomes the ruling class.
Again, how does any of this relate to my comment?
Do you?
I'm not most concerned with them, just look at them closely. The word "capital" is from there. If an ideology is functional, you may come from every its part to every other via logic.
And, of course, I have described how there's less exploitation with more competition for labor between easily born small enterprises, which result from more agility in investment and capital, and that "middle class".
Proletariat by Marx does not exist today in any notable capacity in Western countries. It, however, exists in poorer countries. It's funny how right-wing types were fearmongering about globalization and left-wing types were optimistic, while in the end result globalization combined with Western labor protections resulted in both benefiting from oppression of Chinese, Bengali, Indian, Vietnamese etc proletariat.
He kinda ignored that European colonial empires relied on slavery a lot and the transition from that to his capitalism wasn't very noticeable. He wrote something that on the surface seemed applicable to Germany of his time.
Marx is atrociously reductionist with taking real world's complexity and making some very rough approximations, which would be acceptable in some situations, but he doesn't see how his approximations work one way only and builds a system based on them working both ways. Marx would be a bad mathematician or software architect or cryptographer or construction engineer, because everything he'd make would last less than clay huts in Somalia.
Asking the important questions, I see. Yep, I initially intended to answer another comment. Missed, then in process made some changes looking at yours (my head wasn't too good then).
I don't think you've read Capital. You haven't displayed an understanding of what the proletariat is, what class and class relations are, how it functions in capitalism, or the role of slavery when it exists in a capitalist society. All of this is discussed in Capital.
You're responses are filled with insinuations, ad hominens, tangents and non sequiturs. We won't have a productive or interesting discussion.
Disagreement with its contents doesn't mean I haven't read Capital.
In any case nobody owes you a summary of its contents or some other way to persuade you, a statement is enough. You are taking too much upon yourself.
Also having a list of Latin buzzwords doesn't help you one bit when you are unwilling to dispute honestly.
~~Tangent is Greek.~~ <-- this is wrong, it is Latin.
You display no working understanding of even the basic concepts. You haven't read it. And you won't.
I have re-checked and no, it's not Greek.
EDIT: wow, edited your own comment to appear something completely different ; your typical marxist right here.
EDIT2: as to what you made it look - see, I don't fucking care what a marxist of all kinds of people thinks about my working understanding of anything. If you'd have that, you'd not be a marxist. And of course the argument is absolutely fruitless when you are repeating that I haven't read some book, because I disagree with your wrong opinion on it.
I wrote that, posted it, and check it. I discovered it was wrong in under 30 seconds and didn't think you would have read it. I was wrong. I had finished editing it before you posted your reply. I've edited the link to reflect my edit.
As for your second edit, if you see no fruits in understanding the basic concepts then you and I operate in different ethical worlds. Reading your writings is difficult. It's meandering and unclear without a clear idea that you're building an argument around. Layered on top of it a sense of certainty that you haven't earned and allergic defensiveness when others notice and point it out. It's not worth discussing anything with you until you have some ability to demonstrate even the most basic understanding of the core concepts.
You are using words you don't understand to create some respectably-appearing text, except one can have a good intelligent discussion constantly swearing and making spelling mistakes in half the words and using "that thing which ..." and analogies instead of terms, but just not losing logic and deontology, and one can have a pretentious text like yours after trying insults and arrogant statements about things you can't possibly know anything about.
I don't remember what my argument was and about what, and I don't care, because you yourself chose to address things irrelevant to it with ridiculing tone and all that and are only now playing a virgin, pretending you can have a civilized discussion.
And what's more,
you're still lying while pretending, trying to put words into your opponent's mouth, and all that.
People doing something useful don't try to prove that such cheating is wrong, they simply discard those who are trying to cheat.
That really does not apply to Rome. There was some private industry and profit, but at the end of the day, it was all about enriching the empire and giving the people bread and circuses to keep them quiet. Every Roman citizen got fed. Which is pretty anti-capitalistic.
Less than you might think! The Imperial state apparatus was actually very skeletal compared to what we think of it, at least during the height of the Empire. We're talking entire provinces with only a few dozen actual imperial officials to manage it, most of whom brought their own private staffs. Senators were formally barred from large-scale commerce, but they got around this by investing their money with non-office-holding individuals to engage in business on an obscene scale. Most of the resources moving around were moved by private trade, and at immense profit. Only a few resources were subject to imperial monopolies or had widespread imperial control; everyone else was playing a more-or-less recognizable hustle of commerce - buy or lease cheap, produce at low cost, sell at high profit.
Not even close, I'm afraid! Even in the city of Rome itself, and it was only in the city itself where the grain dole was in effect, it was limited to a certain number of citizens, and most of it was sold subsidized by the state rather than free. Those citizens who received the grain dole, furthermore, were not selected out of the poorest of the poor - it was largely the established working families - semiskilled workers, artisans. small merchants and the like, who might be expected to have times of hardship but not be in constant danger of starvation - it was a political subsidy to these people, who still had some social pull and connections in the city but were not integrated enough into the power structures to have a firm interest in sustaining it, to keep them from calling for anything dangerous, like more democracy!
The ultra-impoverished largely were left to the issue of charity and political patronage (which was big in Rome), and starved about as much as any impoverished pre-modern group. Maybe a little less, considering votes were almost literally bought long after voting ceased to be meaningful. One supposes that's a bit more money than most would have.
So capitalism isn't the problem, then.
There is no the problem. But there are certainly a whole lot of problems that can be traced to capitalism.
Not every citizen in a capitalist system gets fed. People starve to death because to do otherwise would be to give them a government handout.
And not every citizen in communism gets fed when they want to prioritize the party or remove some undesirable minorities, so why do they get a free pass for genocide?
What are you even talking about now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Are you suggesting that capitalist countries have not also been responsible for genocides? Would you like me to list a few, starting with the current one going on in Israel? Although we can go as far back as the colonization and exploitation of the Americas for corporate profits. You do know the Jamestown colony was set up as a private corporate venture, right? How about the East India Company, that was started just a few years earlier?
That's not what I said at all. What I'm saying is that decrying capitalism for its crimes while pretending communism hasn't been doing the exact same thing like OP is doing is pretty disingenuous and frankly evil. Both systems are extremes that cause more harm than good and there are middle roads that work significantly better and don't have a history of torture yet.
Fed and entertained.
Since @[email protected] seems to be the expert in all things Roman, I'd be interested in seeing their take. Seems to me from what I've read that Rome was capitalist as hell and that was a major reason for expansion.
The notion that they gave out "bread and circuses" somehow made them other than that seems pretty facile. The bread and circuses was usually a quid-pro-quo to the colleges for their votes. There were very, very rich civilians and dirt poor nobles, and that doesn't seem to happen in an inheritance feudalism very often. Funding an army as a general and taking the wealth it conquered seems about as capitalist as you can imagine. Yah, you had to wait for an appointment as a governor for the areas you conquered, but that was usually just a matter of form.
That's a very funny question, and you can get a lot of answers, but generally the thinking, since Peter Temin's work on the Roman economy, has shifted predominantly to a "Proto-capitalist" view, at least during the height of the Empire. Nonetheless, the answer remains incredibly contentious. I'll try to give a rundown as best I can - as a supporter of the proto-capitalist view myself:
spoiler
First, much of the expansion of Rome happened during the mid-Republic, in which the customary/traditional economy predominated, so don't put too much stock in capitalism or protocapitalism as a reason for Rome's expansion. Rome, ultimately, was an incredibly aggressive, proud, and strangely assimilationist (for the time) polity, so it had the relentless warring with its neighbors to maintain an experienced and well-tested military system, the arrogance to take over everyone and anyone who seemed ripe for it (I would like to note that the arrogance of a Classical republic is a funny and dangerous thing, because civic pride is much more sustainable than the ambitions of autocrats), and the ability to both use their new human resources not simply as slaves, but also as members of the polity (and thus, both assistants in further expansion and, in the long-term, stable and loyal populations in their own right - to varying degrees),Second, the Roman Empire's financial customs were, by modern standards, primitive, but by Classical standards incredibly advanced. They effectively united the Mediterranean into a single market, or at least a series of closely connected markets, complete with mobility of labor and capital. Crude forms of joint-stock companies and corporations had legal standing, contract enforcement was rigorous, and while credit was tracked on an informal basis, moneylending (from both individuals ad hoc and dedicated professionals/businesses) and debt were essential parts of the overall functioning of the economy. Roman aristocrats largely held a very rationalist financial-oriented mindset, unlike, say, Medieval nobility or Chinese bureaucrat-scholars. They were quite literally investing capital and managing businesses for (sometimes grotesque) profit. So while you can certainly make arguments about the relative balance of the traditional economy to these very advanced parts, on the whole, I think it's very fair to regard the Roman Empire as capitalist or at least some form of protocapitalist, like the Netherlands in the 15th-16th century, just making the transition.
Third, the Roman Empire's capitalism or protocapitalism definitely pushed forward economic development, if not necessarily expansion. Some recent work suggests an average GDP growth rate of 0.1%-0.2% per year through the first 200 years of the Empire - incredibly sluggish by modern standards, but an unheard-of sustained rate of growth for pre-modern polities that would not be matched until the Netherlands and England in the 17th century AD. It would be hard to argue that this was technological as, for all the losses experienced after the fall of the Empire, technology in Europe did continue to improve after its fall. It seems pretty intuitive to attribute this not to technological advancement, but economic organization - ie the development of a capitalist or protocapitalist mode of production.
Fourth, independent funding of armies was a very temporary thing. That was only really major in the Late Republic, and it caused a lot of civil wars. Furthermore, individuals could not raise an army nor make war without consent of the Senate (at least not in their capacity as Roman citizens), and command was only granted by appointment of political office - typically by the Senate (or by the popular assemblies). So there wasn't quite that level of independence in plundering and looting the surrounding states - Rome liked to have a pretext for its wars, and generally frowned on large private forces. Caesar himself, for example, only was in command of forces to begin with because he had been granted command of a province (which he lobbied hard for, mind), and then had to get special permission from the Senate to raise additional Legions (which he himself had to fund) when he started his conquest of Gaul (under the pretext that a Roman ally had been attacked and he HAD to intervene - to save the allied Gauls, of course!). His level of independence in starting such a massive conquest was only rendered possible because he was one of the most politically influential men in the Republic at the time (in an alliance with two other incredibly powerful politicians) - and even then, despite having one of the most glorious and republic-expanding/enriching conquests in Roman history, almost got him arrested and executed for illegal warfare at the end of it all (the suspicion of which kicked off the civil war which Caesar eventually won). So even that lower level of independent conquest was far from the norm.
Fifth, Bread and Circuses is a bit of a funny thing. The initial grain dole was part of an overall reformer effort in the Late Republic to restore prosperity to the (at the time) hard-pressed working classes... by returning them the power of a traditional economy in which the majority of citizens would engage in subsistence farming. By the time of the Empire, the importance of bread and circuses was political - less about the economy, more about the fact that, for the 1st century AD, into the 2nd, and arguably into the 3rd, the population of the city of Rome was still aware of its informal political power (however reduced), and could make and break imperial officials, up to the Emperor himself in particularly dire cases. So there was a definite urge to keep the city of Rome as placated as possible.
tl;dr; yes, it would be fair to call the Roman Empire capitalist or protocapitalist.
Well, thanks for that! It fleshed out some layman's impressions I had and disabused me of some others.
Love me some Roman history, keep that up.
Always happy to ~~infodump~~ help! 🙏
The cura annonae went way beyond the "bread and circuses" claim and was a pretty important thing in the lives of the plebs. It was also expected. Juvenal mocked it as "bread and circuses," but there would have been both riots and probably mass starvation without it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_annonae
As it says in that link:
Now it is true that the cura annonae would be increased in order to gain favor or quell the populace for one reason or other, but that's not the same thing.
As far as the "circuses," free entertainment for the masses is not exactly capitalistic either. And it's not like it was a one-time thing. That was true for centuries. And remember the free entertainment wasn't just gladiatorial combat. It was also things like chariot racing and theater.
On top of that, there was massive investment in public artworks. Artworks that were designed specifically to glorify the empire and its leaders. That sounds positively Soviet to me.
Only some seats were subsidized or free; many seat tickets would have been paid, as in the modern day. A lot of the time, free games and entertainment were done by private politicians as a form of political advertisement - "I, Gaius Julius Caesar, have spent my own money to provide entertainment to the good people of Rome! Please take note I'm running for office in a few months' times!" Even after all meaningful political power had been centered in the position of the Emperor, such popular support remained important in political jockeying for the Emperor's favor.
Ah, that's a curious thing there - there are certainly examples of imperial-funded art and architecture for the purpose of glorifying the state (and also for some Roman legal oddities), but much of it was in the tradition of Greek euergetism - ie the ultra-rich funded such things both to show the poor why they shouldn't kill them, and to suck up to the powers-that-be. Much of the time, there are inscriptions or plaques on major works like that that will say things like "Tiberius Flavius Aurelius and his two daughters paid for and dedicate this statue of the Emperor to the Res Publica, the people of the town, and to our fair and noble Emperor himself!" And the money acquired in order to make such 'magnanimous' donations? Usually quite commercial in origin.
Rome wasn't capitalist.
Rome was like that already when it was just a town, some argue that is one of the reasons why it became a ~~bully~~ superpower.
I enjoyed this insight into that mentality: youtube/P3IIRiSTc3g.