[Marxism] looking for articles

[Haines Brown]

> David Walker, head of the US Government Accountability Office, said
> there were “striking similarities between the US's current situation
> and the factors that brought down Rome, including declining moral
> values and political civility at home, an overconfident and
> overextended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility
> by central government”. He condemned current US policies on
> education, energy, the environment and immigration as
> ‘unsustainable’.  “It's time to learn from history and take steps to
> ensure the American republic is the first to stand the test of
> time”.

I hope everyone took this paragraph with a grain of salt.

Historical parallels have little significance, for history is an
emergent process in which every new situation is in important ways
unique. To parallel the trajectory of a capitalist system with that of
an ancient mode of production (slave economic formation), is utter
nonesense. We indeed learn from history, but it sure isn't general
rules.

To illustrate that the author is really not speaking from any real
knowledge of history, he offers a Hollywood caricature of late
Rome. Declining moral values; lack of political civility? This derives
almost entirely from the Historia Augusta, which for the most part is
bogus propaganda fabricated by a senatorial faction. No one takes it
seriously as history except Hollywood. I see no decline of moral
values at all, and in fact the opposite case could be made. Likewise
for political civility. Before Caesar Augustus, things were a real
mess. That's why the empire was constituted. Besides, one always has
to ask, civility for whom?

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       Haines Brown, KB1GRM