Labour Monthly

The History Of The Roman Empire

Communication: The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West response to J.B.S. Haldane
Critical Remarks by J. WINTERNITZ


Source: Labour Monthly October 1947, pages 317-318
Publisher : The Labour Publishing Company Ltd., London.
Transcription/HTML markup: Ted Crawford/D. Walters
Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2013). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. Published here under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license 2013.


Professor Haldane’s review of Walbank’s book (October issue page 317) seems to overlook a basic weakness of Walbank’s analysis. Certainly, this is an interesting study. He points out clearly the main cause of decay of ancient Rome: the inability of a slave society to develop the productive forces. Revealing light is also thrown on the origin of the elements of feudal society in the womb of decaying ancient society. This is an important point which is frequently neglected so that one gets the wrong idea of a mechanical end of the ancient world and the building of an entirely new society by the barbarians.

The weakness of Walbank’s analysis, however, is an insufficient analysis of the facts of production, the production relations and, which is only another aspect of the same thing, class relations. Walbank gives a lot of details about the development of trade, but hardly anything about the way in which commodities for this trade were produced. Walbank uses the expressions “bourgeoisie” and “capitalism” freely as if large scale production and trade were the only characteristics of capitalism. This ignoring of the essential difference between slave labour and wage labour blurs the whole analysis. (p.30 there is an odd suggestion that “normal” capitalism with free labour preceded slavery!) Wage labour is mentioned in various contexts: on p.40 we are told that rising wages were a sign of decline in 1st and 2nd centuries, on p.45 we are told that masses were driven to strikes and insurrection by failing wages in the 3rd century.

As the essential differences between slave society and capitalist society are not sufficiently analysed, analogies — which certainly exist and are very interesting — are over-stated.

Walbank writes, “Between the two systems of modern fascism and the Roman Corporative State there is complete political, social and cultural correspondence.” (p.76). A despotic State power trying to conserve a decaying social system by regimentation, control, etc., certainly affords interesting analogy to modern fascism. But to make the comparison scientifically valuable, the differences have to be worked out as well. State controlled compulsory organisations of craftsmen and traders, the “collegia” of the Roman Empire (Walbank translates “guilds”), are obviously essentially different from the fascist “Syndicates” and the Nazi “Labour Front,” into which wage earners were forced under the control of capitalists and their agents. Walbank mentions in the same context the branding of “those working in the mines and quarries and in the arms-factories.” (p.49). These were certainly slaves. Their conditions might be compared with those of foreign workers in Hitler’s Germany, but workers who are not allowed to change their jobs in a war economy are still far from being slaves in the proper sense.

Fascism arises when tremendous productive forces have developed and, as they cannot be made use of for the needs of the working, people, are turned to the purpose of expansion by War. Roman decay sets in when expansion has ended, the State squeezes the subject masses — and to a certain extent the rich upper class which Walbank calls the “bourgeoisie” — for the purpose of maintaining a top-heavy parasitical superstructure built on an insufficient basis of productivity.

Walbank fails to sec this difference. He ascribes to the Roman Empire the same need to find external markets which is a driving force of modern capitalism. (p.79), Slave society needed war and expansion to get its labour force and — with the growing decay of the ruling nation which became ever less able to produce what they needed — also subject nations to pay tributes. This is quite a different thing from the, capitalist development of tremendous productive forces which cannot be used without expansion.

Professor Haldane in his review asks the question, “Why could Rome not take the course of China which outlived Ruine by nearly 2,000 years?” The answer obviously is that Chinese society was fundamentally different from ancient Roman slave society, and that Marx was right when he distinguished “Asiatic society” both from Ancient society and from Feudalism. A comparison between slave society and Asiatic society (with its state-controlled agriculture based an irrigation) would also make it clear that low productivity, combined with stagnation of technique, alone does not account for the downfall of a social system. For these conditions prevailed under various circumstances for thousands of years. It is the combination of low productivity with a rich, powerful, luxurious, parasitical upper class and the costly state apparatus this class needs which leads to the decline of slave society.

Having made this criticism, it is only fair to add that Walbank closes on the note that the decline of ancient society need not find an analogy in the decline of modern civilisation and that he hints at the Socialist solution of the crisis in our time. J. WINTERNITZ.

(Other letters, including one from S. Mill also raised points of criticism of F. Walbank’s book. — Ed. L.M.)