Seriously, did not expect this much easily comparable shit coming out of the mouths of elites. It’s the same exact rhetoric used by conservatives and other anti-communist mouthpieces today.
I never disagreed that Amerika was Rome 2.0., but wow did I not know the extent of it. First tragedy, then farce.
Polybius and Cicero really be out here saying “we should take the best of both capitalism AND socialism” in the years of our lord ~200-40 B.C.
based Engels
Silly but god damn, I might get a tattoo of Gaius Gracchus (revolutionary populares) just to flex on SPQRaboos. The Gracchi brothers and their movement were absolutely horrifying the Roman ruling classes, just badass. Of course they were murdered in broad daylight.
They were imperialists, like nigh all Roman politicians. I see them called the “socdems before socdems” and I think it’s rather fitting. Still, in relative terms to the annals of history, their proposed land, tax and democratic reforms would seem downright communist to the capitalist world today. Just wild.
Fuck Cicero and the optimates.
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Wait until you study Roman religion under social function and how the adoption of Abrahamism as a privileged one works as since pricesely Roman Empira… And even fucking Sumeria.
And even fucking Sumeria.
Note that it is precisely how the first class society formed there. Priests used the religion as ideological leverage and superstructure to take ownership of the means of production which were at first owned by entire society and only administered by them. Entire priestly caste started essentially as clerks. Hell, first human we know by name - Kushim - was not a king or hero but priest and a clerk (though it could be also a title or office, but context suggest name). First temples were literally storage and distribution centers.
The first therm for war, literally meant “one god fighting against other”, when the main sacerdot declared a fight against another city, and it ended when THE FUCKING TEMPLE AND IDOL WHERE CAPTURED. The fucking Bible is even a compendium of this mentality and the struggle between the monarchy against the sacerdocy.
And people here pretending history and class struggled began in the fucking Industrial Revolution, having to endure opportunist theocracist motherfuckers larping as socialists.
And people here pretending history and class struggled began in the fucking Industrial Revolution
I doubt people HERE have problem with that, and libs elswhere cathegorically refuse to even acknowledge class war exist and only use the term “class” in liberal meaning of overall wealth or income instead of the relation to the means of production.
And bourgeois historians are the same.
Marx famously wrote:
The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.
With Engels later added as the knowledge about prehistory expanded:
- That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan’s (1818-1881) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]
But to admit there was a class struggle in the past would mean admitting the Marx was right and the class struggle is going now too. Parenti have few words about this.
I’ve seen this problem too in this sort of groups where they pretend religion has nothing to do with class nor that sacerdocy is in power with any sort of religion. And yes, everything you said. Libs and reactionaries in general will try to suffocate themselves the day they realize Marx and communists breath air too.
Also, a call to see that the ones owning metalurgy in the chalcolithic, having the monopoly on copper production by family and clan, before the bronze age, where the main elite.
Yeah, that’s the class society, means of production and military power always gravitate to the same people. If they are held by different classes, the one end up dominating and swallowing the other pretty fast.
Yes a great book and you got the central idea: that the propaganda is still the same, that the class society still functions the same, and that the history is written by the owner class.
His descriptions of Roman slavery affected me. Parenti doesn’t let you go until you feel how fucked up something is. I should re-read it, I miss reading Parenti.
This book does sound interesting, and one can never read too much Parenti
What I told parenti after meeting him after I sped ran this book. He was watching a Rome show on Netflix.
