[Marxism] Fall of the Roman Empire was not so bad after all

[Haines Brown]

> Notwithstanding a predisposition towards a western perspective, the
> fall of the empire in the fifth century was really only in the west.
> The eastern part of the empire lasted until the fall of
> Constantinople.  It wasn't a second Rome or anything, but the real
> thing.

My point was about what actually fell: was it a structure or a regime?
I was objecting to points like yours above, not because they are
wrong, but because they are not Marxist; they reflect a very old
fashioned political view of the historical process which even bourgeois
historiography has largely abandoned.

The context was the Western Empire, I assumed, and so the discussion
of fall was of course in reference to it.

My point about Rome II and Rome III should obviously been seen as
tongue in cheek, for I was referring to the idealist notion of Rome,
not any material reality. Of course the whole notion today strikes us
as absurd.

Actually, government continued in the West after 476 in the hands of
the able Odoacer, who in principle represented the emperor (now ruling
from Constantinople) as a local king. All this seems quite in accord
with Roman tradition. That a general like Odoacer acted in terms of
local needs and therefore often did not pay much attention to the
whims of the distant emperor is hardly new to the Roman Empire. It was
only because Odoacer did a fairly good job because he began to win
the support the local aristocracy (whom the emperors since the Third
Century tended to see as an implicit threat) the emperor began to
consider how he might get rid of him.

Given that military power in the West was in Odoacer's hands, the only
way the emperor could get rid of Odoacer was to promise the royal
title to a branch of the Ostrogoths, headed by Theodoric. Theodoric,
like Odoacer before him, became an able and loyal king whose
legitimacy as ruler of Italy derived from imperial service. Theodoric
was very particular about perpetuating imperial prerogatives, such as
not issuing any coinage in his own name. Under Theodoric the Roman
system actually flourished and in some respects reached a high point.

I elaborate a bit to illustrate a point: we need to define what Rome
_is_ before we can begin to speak of its decline and fall. If we speak
of culture, politics or the economy, for example, the Western Roman
Empire was actually better off under Theodoric than it had been for
some time. But such an empiricist approach can get us nowhere.

Because he had aristocratic support, Theodoric enjoyed remarkable
success (the pax gothica), which again upset the emperor, who again
granted a royal title if it were used to get rid of a ruler who was
doing too well. He authorized a Frankish kingdom in the West in
exchange for its countering the Ostrogoths. This pattern of imperial
futile resistance to growing aristocratic private power was a pattern
that is really fundamental to Rome's decline.

In antiquity, the aristocracy enjoyed privileges and power by virtue
of its participation within a "political community", where power was
shared with many people who not at all aristocratic in our sense of
the word. Slaves could be members of the ruling political
community and actually rule. However, starting in the third century,
the aristocracy slowly built its private power outside the constraints
of the political community, and it reached the point that it's private
power was a better problem-solver than the state. The emperor's attack
on Ostrogothic Italy could not reverse this trend, but only accelerate
it. The general sent to regain Italy for the emperor was made king by
the aristocracy because he was successful, and the emperor (Justinian)
eventually found that he had to replace him with General Narses (as a
slave eunuch, he could not be king, and so Justinian trusted
him). This long standing dialectic finally any real state in the West
really subject to the emperor (the little Exarchate of Ravenna was all
that was left and had no power, as the City of Rome within it becomes
a malarial swamp). Real power by now was in the hands of the
aristocracy, now led by the Franks thanks to Justinian. 

The Franks, like the Ostrogoths, were at first anxious to find a legal
function within the Roman system, and that was the case with the
Frankish Merovingian Dynasty. It was a perfectly legal structure
within the now (theoretically) unified Roman Empire. True, by this
time, Roman culture, economy and political structure were in bad
shape, but until the seventh century this was more a decline than a
fall, and it is to miss the very constructive and sometimes brilliant
(as in the Luxovian renaissance - don't try to look this word up - it
is an obscure term) new forces at work at the time. They may have
often been rather crude, but were brilliantly imaginative and new. The
Franks began to cook up a different kind of structure that was based
on a shared aristocratic private interest. This, I believe, represents
the structural change that really brought the Western Roman Empire to
an end, and arguably in the East as well, as the Eastern Roman Empire
gave way to the Byzantine Empire. 

It's literally been decades since I've worried at all about these
things, and so all this off the top of my head and likely subject to
error. However, my main point is the simpler one that we can't talk
about a "fall" until we have defined what it is that is falling. The
significance of 476 only came up in modern times when history was
reduced to dynastic history, and it had little significance at the
time; it simply marked the re-unification of the Empire.

476 did not represent any obvious break in culture, political
structure or the economy. But these kinds of issues are really beside
the point. A Marxist position must reject this empiricist way of
seeing things and MUST grasp the system as a contradictory whole (as a
mode of production), and therefore find itself in a position to
represent "decline" as a deepening contradiction and "fall" as a
restructuring of the system such that the developed potentials of the
old system support a new structure free of the old contradiction, and
because of the structural change able to address developed needs by
drawing upon developed resources.

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM