archive (dot) org/stream/ClastresArcheologyOfViolence/Clastres%20-%20Archeology%20of%20Violence_djvu.txt
relevant, especially chapter 10. inb4 butthurt ML's
Marxist analysis of Ancient Civilizations
Grayson Morris
Parker Collins
This article is good at drawing out the potential analogy made by modern historians between ancient democratic Athens and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
spectrerouge.com
Lucas Fisher
was Julius Caesar the ultimate vanguard
Matthew Baker
A dictator, that's all he was.
Eli Butler
Michael Hudson is doing a 3-part series on this subject. Here's part one.
Zachary Jackson
Jaxon Foster
Austin Sanders
A People's History of the World by Chris Harman has a brief chapter (which I haven't ready yet) on "Rome's rise and fall" from a Marxist standpoint. PDF attached. His sources are mostly the "Class struggle in Greece" book you cited along with P.A. Brunt's Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic.
I'm interested in the fall of the Roman empire because of its significance to Rosa Luxemburg's slogan "socialism or barbarism!". The notion being that if the social revolution isn't completed in time, society will not just stagnate, but actually regress into barbarism. The historical example she referenced was the collapse of the Roman empire and the regression to the "dark ages" in Europe. It's an evocative concept for agitation, but I don't know enough history to substantiate the theory.
Her contemporary prophecy of regression to barbarism was that capitalist society would annihilate itself in a series of devastating world wars. In the era of the hydrogen bomb, this thesis no longer has to be substantiated.
Connor Bell
he created the first ever proletarian dictatorship
brainlet detected
Levi Gutierrez
Great book, thanks for the link.
It makes a lot of sense. If the Roman oligarchs went along with Caesar's reforms instead of murdering him like the US oligarchs went along with FDR, I'm 99% sure Rome would still exist today.
Instead of defecting to the barbarians, Roman workers and peasants would fight against them. There would be no rebellions of workers and peasants against the regime, like there were IRL.
By wiping out every democratic-egalitarian reformer, myopic and selfish elites like Cicero might have saved their obscene riches in the short-term, but they ensured Rome would collapse in the long-term.
Lots of interesting parallels to the modern day.
Here I mentioned Caesar instituted a proletarian dictatorship:
But I think it's more accurate to compare him to someone like FDR - a wealthy elite himself who was smart enough to realize that his class would be destroyed in the long-term unless it gives up a little something to preserve everything