Class Perspective on Classical Chinese and Roman Ideology as Used in Contemporary Political Theory: Review of Early China: A Social and Cultural History by Li Feng and The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the bibliographical help of Harold M. Leich (Russian Specialist, Library of Congress), Patrick Largess (retired, Boston Latin Academy), Betty Clark and Sveta Stoytcheva (the University of Illinois Slavic Reference Service).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Toby Terrar is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he majored in history. He has published essays in Journal of San Diego History, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice and The Journal of Military History.

Dean Richards is a graduate of UCLA where he majored in classical studies. He teaches social studies in the Compton California secondary public school system. He has published essays in Film Criticism, International Journal on World Peace, Journal of Beliefs & Values and Review of Radical Political Economics.

Notes

¹See customer review of the book by R. Clark Carpenter at www.amazon.com/review/R15U6C5IWJGWIR, accessed July 24, 2012.

²See also, Nash (1979, 343, 347) speaks of the egalitarian and communal nature of evangelical religion, which led to the sabotage of the market system and celebration of the seventeenth-century Civil War levelers.

³In speaking the logic of the small producers, Thomas Cooper contended that “If wars are necessarily attendant upon commerce, it is far wiser to dispense with it: to imitate the Chinese and other nations who have flourished without foreign trade: your commodities, the nations who want them will fetch away. If they will go to China for tea cups, they will come to America for Bread” (quoted in Malone 1961, 99).

⁴Parenti (2003, 18) mentions the historian Edward Gibbon as illustrative of the “eighteenth-century English gentleman . . . in the upper strata of . . . society.” In contrast, the satirist Juvenal “offers a glimpse of the empire as it really was, a system of rapacious expropriation.”

⁵In Parenti's analysis of capitalist politics, the system from top to bottom is the product of petroleum, military, bank, public utility, insurance, agricultural and other special interests whose vote-graft pays to elect politicians in order to obtain special privileges. The three branches of government and both mainline parties are bought off. The real government is corporations and by eliminating them and establishing a planned economy, communism ends graft.

⁶Those who discuss the political nature of Chinese historiography include Gao (2008), Liu (1981), Harrison (1969), Hsu (1979), Rozman (1984), Feuerwerker (1962), and Hulsewe (1965).

⁷See also, Harrison (1969, i) and Mao Zedong (quoted in Liu 1981, 303).

⁸Historian James Harrison (1969, 3–4) starts his analysis of Chinese politics with the comment, “Where Confucianism emphasizes social harmony, Marxism emphasizes social conflict.”

⁹A contemporary, Lu Chia (Lu Jia) (circa 216–172 BC) in A Chinese Mirror for Magistrates: The Hsin-yu of Lu Chia (trans. Meigao Gu [Mei-kao Ku], Canberra: Australian National University, 1988), observes, “The more powerful the armies of Chin grew, the more its enemies multiplied” (quoted in Tung 1959, 48).

¹⁰The poem, The Peacock Flies to the Southeast tells the story of a couple, Chiao Chung-ching and his wife, who fought against Confucian prejudices. Among the folktales as depicted in figure 4 was the Cowherd and the Weaving Maid, which describes the struggle of a young woman to obtain a decent life. After the 1949 communist revolution, the story was updated. The weaver was given a job in a textile factory on the commune, the cowherd became a tractor driver and the collective helped the couple overcome obstacles such as the custom of arranged marriage, superstitions and over-emphasis on sex. See Allen and Phillips (2012, 64), and Chen (1956).

¹¹The frequent nong min qi yi so reduced the Han regime that in the period from 8 AD to 23 AD Wang Mang, a nephew of the empress, seized power. With this came renewed agrarian reforms. Land monopolies were nationalized and divided among landless families in usufruct tenure. Slave trading was outlawed. The Hans eventually regained control from Wang Mang, so that historians divide the era into the earlier Western Han (206 BC–8 AD) and the later Eastern Han Empires (25–220 AD).

¹²In their migrating, the Chinese were more successful than the 70,000 agrarians led by Spartacus. Despite their insurrection between 73–71 BC, they failed to achieve their goal of resettling north of the Alps.

¹³Initially there was peace with the restored Eastern Han rule in 23 AD after the Wang Mang interlude. This was because the government was conciliatory toward the peasantry in terms of land rents, slave emancipation and labor service. Frontier areas were able to take advantage of the weakened military to prevent imperialism. In this period, the Qiang nation along the steppes of Gansu blocked the Gansu Corridor leading to the western regions and brought the central government under continued threat.

¹⁴In the popular religion God took the side of the working people against the landlords and merchants. Its liturgy and music celebrated equal distribution of land and substantive rights for all people, female and male, foreigner and local.

¹⁵Helping to lead this was Cao Cao, who was labeled a villain by court-centered Confucians, just as their Western counterparts label Julius Caesar as evil. Cao lived a Spartan life and the land reclamation and military farm colonies that were implemented with the Han overthrown improved the agricultural production available to the peasants.

¹⁶Gao Mobo (2008, 199) reports that when Chinese farmers compare Deng with Mao, they negatively refer to the former as “ai zi,” meaning the dwarf. Mobo explains that when Mao's forces controlled areas in the 1930s such as the Yan'an Soviet, the workers confiscated the landlords and redistributed their land to those who worked it. They also set up workers councils, free health clinics and schools and gave equal rights to women. In contrast, using Han historiography to justify himself in the 1980s, Deng confiscated from the workers and gave it to the merchants and foreign corporations. Garry Wills (1984) describes the similar use of Roman history by George Washington. He posed as a farmer-patriot in order to justify land speculation and slave repression.

¹⁷Commenting on the continued use of Marxism-Leninism by the Communist Party, Gao (2008, 193) comments:

An essential part of Marxist-Leninist ideology is the value of socioeconomic equality and justice. The disadvantaged in China can and do still use this value regime to justify their protests and resistance. Yu Jianrong (2005) points out that the values embedded in state socialism are still useful for resistance. He notes that urban Chinese workers usually appeal to the state for support in their protests against their employers, whereas the targets of rural peasants are state agents of the local governments. In other words both rural and urban residents take central government's declared socialist values as justification of their protests, a justification that the Chinese authorities in the name of the CCP find difficult to renounce.

¹⁸Among the commercial reforms undertaken by Caesar that Parenti discusses are the conversion of Ostia to a major port and cutting of a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. Caesar also ordered the rebuilding of Carthage and Corinth. He extended Latin rights throughout the Roman world. He abolished the tax system and reverted to the earlier version that allowed cities to collect tribute however they wanted, rather than needing Roman intermediaries. Militarily, he sought to conquer the Dacians, Parthians, and avenge the loss at Carrhae. Thus, Caesar instituted a massive mobilization. He originated a term limit law applicable to governors. He encouraged a debt restructuring law, which ultimately eliminated about a fourth of all debts owed. He promoted a law that rewarded families for having many children, to speed up the repopulation of Italy. He outlawed professional guilds, except those of ancient foundation, since many of these were subversive political clubs. He ordered a census to be taken, which resulted in a reduction in the grain dole. He established that jurors could only come from the Senate or the equestrian ranks. He passed a sumptuary law that restricted the purchase of certain luxuries. He established a police force and he appointed officials to carry out his land reforms. Like Parenti, the Soviet historian Serge L. Utchenko focuses on the positive nature of Caesar's accomplishments. See Utchenko (1976) and Utchenko (1998). These are not translated to English, but his Cicerone e il suo tempo (1975) is available in Italian and Spanish.

¹⁹One way to translate into English from a Cyrillic or other foreign language is to scan it into a JPG graphic file. Then an optical character recognition (OCR) application such as “http://www.free-ocr.com/” is used to turn the Cyrillic graphic file into a text file. The text can then be translated into English using a service such as Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/). This process will be speeded up by 2020 when Google Books has completed digitizing the world's 130 million individual book and journal titles. Starting in 2004, some 30 million are now completed, but no Cyrillic or Chinese titles have yet been processed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books. The editors of Vestnik drevnei istorii (Journal of ancient history], established in 1937, are digitizing their early volumes. See http://vdi3.igh.ru/index.php. A complete list of their titles and authors with the content of some articles digitized is at http://annales.info/sbo/contens/vdi.htm. East View Information Services (Minneapolis, Minnesota) has digitized the complete run of Voprosy istorii (Questions of history), which began in 1926 under the title Istorik-Marksist (Marxist history).

²⁰See Franz Bömer (1963); ValeriiÌ Semenovich Durov (1991); Roman Kamienik (1957); Roman Kamienik (1965); Roman Kamienik (1984); Bokshchanina and Kuzishchin (1971); Gennady Mikhailovich Levitsky (2010); Nikolai Mashkin (1947); Lev Abramovich Osterman (1997); Elena M. Shtaerman (1956b); Elena M. Shtaerman (1961); Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf (1957).

²¹See Masaoki Doi (1977), Hugh Graham (1967); Emily Kazakevich (1945); K. P. Korzheva (1976), translated from Istoriia SSSR (1974), no. 10 (Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Institute of History); and Zvi Yavetz (1988).

²²Feuerwerker (1962, 33–331) discusses the contention among Chinese historians in classifying Han history using Marx's stages of history. Anderson (2002, 91–94) reviews Marx's multilinear later writings on the class struggle in the Roman Empire during the Gracchi period, the communal property of the proletarian family and their rejection of paterfamilias, thus being an embryo of communism. Also of interest is Shanin's (1981, 118–119) discussion of historical stages in relation to Roman history. His work questions those such as Marquit (2014, 547, 578), who advocate unilinear and modernist concepts of “premature communism,” “irresistible laws of history” and “stages of history following each other with the inevitability of clockwork.” Such minimization of working people in history is used as a license to tear down as in the USSR what working people have achieved. According to Marquit's neo-liberal “communist” analysis, the Spartacus rebellion, the Roman Empire downfall and the Abraham Lincoln slave emancipation were premature, just as were the Vietnamese peasantry's defeat of American technology and the establishment of Cuban communism. Marquit (2014, 486) mentions that in a January 2002 tour of Vietnam which he led for American scholars, Michael Parenti, who was a tour member, “was so hostile to the idea of a socialist-market economy, and what he saw as its negative consequences, that he ended up cutting short the tour and returned to the United States early.”

²³Mishulin [1936] 1950, 89–93, 133–34) and Zhebelev and Kovalev (1934, 180) call the Republic to Empire transformation the first stage of a “slave revolution” with the fall of Rome in the fifth century the second stage. They note that Joseph Stalin adopted this concept in his speeches.

²⁴Pavel Oliva (1960, 181–87) in his study of working-class culture discusses the use of Spartakiads both to oppose and supplement the Olympics. The name symbolized proletarian internationalism because Spartacus’ revolt united slaves from diverse ethnic backgrounds within the Roman Empire. As a classical figure, Spartacus also stood directly in contrast to the aristocratic nature of the ancient Olympic games on which the modern “capitalist” Olympics were based.

²⁵Worker resistance was such that on a regular basis the military was used against it. Other rebellions besides that involving Spartacus on which the communists focus include the Servile or Slave Wars during the second half of the second century BC on the island of Sicily. These were of longer duration and involved greater numbers than the Spartacus rebellion. The first war (138–132 BC) with 200,000 workers in the ranks was led by the Syrian, Eunus. He was a religious leader, taking the name Antiochus and preaching a theology of liberation. A Cilician named Cleon who was based at Agrigentum was another leader. They captured the towns of Tauromenium, Catana, Messana, and possibly Syracuse. The second war (104–99 BC) began in the rural areas of Sicily where they leveled the landlords and captured the entire island. It was headed by Salvius, who took the name Tryphon and by Athenion. See the Soviets A. P. D'iakonov (1940) and Kseniia Mikhailovna Kolobova (1967).

²⁶A. Bodor (1981, 87) and F. W. Walbank (1981, 16) discuss the constant and often successful slave militancy at the local level.

²⁷Other Soviets who study the influence of slavery and insurrections in the republic-to-empire transition of ancient Rome include Aleksandr V. Mishulin (1936), who lived from 1901 to 1948 and joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1927; Sergei I. Kovalev (1964); O. O. Kriuger (1934); Petr Fedorovich Preobrazhenskii (1965); and Sergeil Aleksandrovich Zhebelev (1922). Preobrazhenskii (1965, 58) comments:

The Roman slave owners were entirely aware of the power and danger of the Spartacus insurrection. For a long period thereafter they thought of the leader of the rebel gladiators as on virtually the same level as the greatest enemy of Rome and the greatest military leader of antiquity—Hannibal. The feelings of the class enemy here provided a correct yardstick for measuring the significance of Spartacus's insurrection.

²⁸Walsh's class-conscious biblical scholarship, as he alludes to in the book's first paragraph, owed to his life as an industrial laborer in Ford Motor's coke ovens at Dearborn, Michigan during the 1960s. Another industrial worker, Milt Felsen, found in his Jewish tradition as quoted in his biography, that the Ten Commandments were communism and breaking them was capitalism (Felsen 1989, 137). See also Miranda (1982).

²⁹Patrick Largess (2000, 81–90) offers a bibliography that ties Roman and Chinese studies to current developments.

³⁰See also Mashkin (1935, 1938) and Stecchini (1950). Arnold Toynbee (1934, 90, 167, 223) similarly contended that the fall of the empire was due to the “secession of the proletariat” and its alliance with the “external proletariat.” He saw a parallel between the empire's fall and the pressure of internal and external Marxist forces in the political system of Western Europe in his own era.

³¹Also in the east were the Egyptian Bucolian rebellions in 152–56 AD and in the 170s AD, the latter led by the priest Isidore. They defeated the Roman legions, captured lower Egypt, and rushed to Alexandria. This resulted in food shortages and riots in Rome (Oliva 1962, 119; Dmitriev 1946, 95–97).

³²Oliva (1962, 114–15, 118) writes about the relation of brigandage to nationalist and class struggle (see also, Dmitriev 1951, 65; Shtaerman 1956a, 520; Shtaerman 1957, 76–81):

The outbreaks of “brigandage” (latrines) were for the most part an elemental expression of the opposition of the common people to their oppressors, a form of class struggle by the oppressed . . . The local population gave the “brigands” their support. The Roman state sent special forces which were to prevent the spread of disorders; they were charged with the maintenance of peace and order in their district, i.e., they were to help the Roman authorities and protect the property of the wealthier inhabitants. In the province of Asia, for instance, the ειρηναρχαι (peacekeepers) performed the function from the first half of the second century, being charged with the fight against “brigandage” . . . The whole history of the Roman Empire is full of rebellions in the provinces. The Romans tried to gain the co-operation of the local nobility . . . Rebellion in the provinces began to lose its characters of a general struggle by the conquered against the Roman conquerors, and take on the character of a struggle by the oppressed and exploited against the rich and powerful. The frontier provinces were swept by these rebellions, and in them we find the first signs of the people allying themselves with the “barbarian” neighbors of the Empire in their attacks.

³³As viewed from the left (Morris 1953, 7) the early Christian communities were distinguished by their simple organization and an absence of clergy; the members organized communal meals and meetings at which sermons were preached. There was no established form of worship and to the extent there were unified doctrines, these were not worked out until after 100 AD.

³⁴Michael Grant (1968, 142) states in explaining figure 9, “the tombs of the early Christians stress not Christ's Passion but Old Testament tales of Deliverance: such as the story of Jonah, seen here with the Sea-Monster.”

³⁵John Morris (1953, 10) remarks about the Book of Revelation:

In a class by itself stands the last great product of Jewish Christianity, the Apocalypse of John, a paean of burning hatred against the Roman state and all it stood for, gloating over the impending destruction of the city by fire, bewailed by the kings of the east and the merchants, foretelling the rule of the saints on earth for a thousand years before the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.

³⁶Moscow State University instructor Viacheslav Petrovich Volgin (1879–1962) (1928, 30) and the Italian Pasquale Masiello (1966) contrast early Christianity's proletarian perspective with the imperial Dionysiac cult and its temples that honored savior-creator deities such as Augustus (reigned 27 BC–14 AD). He declared himself pontifex maximus in 12 AD. In this religion wealth (ploutos) and peace (eirene, Pax Augusta) were the ideal and the coming of the emperor was announced with soteriological symbolism as “glad tidings” (euangelion).

³⁷Paul's Epistles emphasized that every earthly authority is established by god and must be obeyed. Children must obey their parents, wives their husbands, and slaves their masters (Ephesians 6:5). A radical break with Judaism was expressed and the Jews for the first time were accused of killing Christ (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Whereas during the first century all the members were considered equal and there was no special governing apparatus, from the 150s the organization of some churches became more complex. In them the well-to-do Christians, who had donated money or who represented those who had, occupied the post of bishop or deacon, charged with managing the community's property and economic affairs. The bishops and deacons stood increasingly aloof from the mass of believers. To justify their privileged position, a doctrine was worked out according to which a special “grace” bestowed by god gave these officials the exclusive right to perform religious rites, to be the mentors of the other members of the community, and to decree principles of doctrine. In this way a church organization was formed that was divided into clergy and people.

³⁸The American cleric Thomas McGrady popularized the militant theology of early Christians such as Papias, Irenaeus, St. John the Revelationist, Melito Bishop of Sardis, Cerinthus, Marcus, Lachtantius and Nepos. See Terrar (1983, 220); Sullivan (2012, 141); Grant (1968, 215). The British historian John Morris (1953, 12) comments about the egalitarian governing structure among the of Montanists:

The Montanist movement in Phrygia, in central Asia Minor, was unshakably orthodox in theology. It differed from tradition in rejecting the authority of urban communities and their bishops, modeled on the tradition of civil government. The supreme authority of the Montanist “prophets,” who included several women, assisted by subordinate traveling Bishops, has some resemblances to the structure of the Celtic church, centuries later, based on a tribal peasantry. Montanism was the first of a series of peasant movements, whose schism lay in points of policy and organization rather than of theology.

³⁹As described from the proletarian perspective (Morris 1957, 7), the formation of landlord-controlled church organizations brought ritual and dogma that was favorable to the established order and that was increasingly complex. To create a unified doctrine, the landlords designated a canon for the New Testament and both rejected and redacted works that reflected the democratic tendencies in primitive Christianity and its rebellious spirit. In the imperial church, the ruling doctrine was not blessedness attainable by the poor, as was often stressed in the early stage of Christianity, but blessedness by all believers in Christ who performed church rituals, submitted to church discipline, and showed humility and patience. The original community gatherings and suppers were turned into worship services. Rituals became increasingly complicated, assimilating rites of the ancient religions. In this way were worked out the basic Christian sacraments, holy days, and liturgy, which have survived with slight modifications to this day.

⁴⁰Aleksandr P. Kazhdan (1962, 1965) notes that for working people in North Africa and Western Europe such as the Goths in the 300s and 400s, Arian (Christian unitarianism) heresy was positive. It weakened the empire by preventing Christianity from being a monolithic force that could be co-opted by the ruling class.

⁴¹Historian Terry Sullivan (2012, 87) comments, “The question is whether the ‘Donatist’ Church preached and substantially practiced love your enemies, turn the other cheek. There is good evidence that they did.”

⁴²Terry Sullivan (2012, 131) summarizes about the graft, “Constantine decreed that new converts should receive a white robe and 20 pieces of gold. He decreed far more substantial rewards for those upper class Romans who came into the Church at the higher levels.”

⁴³Mashkin (1949, 225–27) writes that while the ruling class used popular religious cults, including Christianity, to justify its authority, “Not all the population were favorably inclined toward Roman rule. The majority suffered exploitation.” As a result, the masses had their own cults and also read their ideologies, interior class psychology and economic needs into the popular religions.

⁴⁴In Spain, the empire was never able to gain control of the mountainous northern and northwestern regions, where the Gallacci and Basque peasantry retained control. In 409, the Vandals, Alans and Suevi invaded and it took a Roman counter-offensive 20 years to force them into Africa in 429. Soon after came bagaudae revolts in 441–443, 454 and 456. In 449, under the leadership of Basilius, they captured the city of Turiasso in the province of Saragossa and killed a compromising local bishop, Leo, in his church (Thompson 1952, 16–17).

⁴⁵The largest early revolt in Gaul was led by Civilis in 69–70 AD. A century later, in 186, Maternus, a deserter of the Roman army, led another rebellion. Lasting 20 years, he and his runaway slaves, coloni, ruined farmers and military deserters attacked the provinces’ largest cities and leveled landlords. Thompson (1952, 12–13) writes (see also, Belova 1952, 47, 53; Oliva 1962, 123),

It is only possible to explain the unusually rapid growth of the rebel army, and the considerable territory it covered, if we assume that the local people helped the rebels, particularly those classes of the population that suffered most from Roman oppression.

Along the same lines, A. D. Dmitriev (1940, 103) commented on the rebellion led by Maternus, “this was an important uprising among the poverty stricken and oppressed masses of Gaul, the beginning of the Bagaudae movement.” In time the Western resistance was aided, beginning in 250 AD, by the increasing pressure of the German peasantry migrating into Gaul.

⁴⁶John Morris (1953, 11) quotes Irenaeus, “It is just that men should receive the recompense for their suffering in that creation in which they have suffered.” Morris continues:

The problem is like that of the captivity of Israel in Egypt. If a free man is forcibly abducted and slaves for many years for another, so that he increases his substance, and then runs away with a small proportion of the great “acquisitio” of wealth which his labor has created, it is not he who is to blame, but the unjust employer, whose wealth was gained through the labor or others. (Morris 1953, 11)