The Class Struggle’s Forgotten Man.
Not Marx, Livy.

By Kenneth G. Pringle
Oct. 22, 2020

     The class struggle returned as an issue in American politics after the Great Recession, with the worst economic downturn in generations leading many to question the basic tenets of capitalism and the market economy.

     Occupy Wall Street provided a potent symbol for protest, popularizing the issue of economic inequality and painting a stark picture of the battle between society’s 1% and 99%.

     Bernie Sanders, an obscure democratic socialist from Vermont, was transformed into political rock star, dragging the Democratic Party in his direction and reviving long-dormant left wing of American politics.

     The Republican Party has played its role, lashing out at this left-hand turn with Cold War rhetoric.

     “Democrats are kicking in the door to Marxist, totalitarian rule,” Rep. Andy Biggs, Republican from Arizona, wrote in an op-ed.[1]

     President Donald J. Trump has echoed that language, even condemning Black Lives Matter as a "Marxist" movement.[2]  

     Karl Marx would be gratified that at least Republicans are mentioning his name; you won’t hear Sanders or the other democratic socialists invoking the specter of the father of communism on the campaign trail.

     The class struggle is back but not the man who wrote that the “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”[3]


     But if Marx is the new forgotten man of the class struggle, he has company in Titus Livius (59 BCE-17 CE), the first chronicler of the struggle. He's known today as Livy.
Lucius Sicinius Vellutus leads the Roman commons off to the Sacred Mount in the first secessio plebis -- basicaly a general strike -- in 494 BCE.
The Roman Republic was born from revolution, when in 509 BCE patricians and plebeians joined together to expell the last king of Rome. Publius Valerius Poplicola, above, became one of the Republic's first two consuls. 

Roman Historian Foresaw an Eternal
Conflict Between  
Patricians and Plebs

Karl Marx, shown in a 1875 photograph, is getting name-checked by a lot of Republicans these days, but by few democratic socialists.  
Bernie Sanders and other democratic socialists of today speak in terms of improving the lot of the 99% vs. the 1%, rather than of overturning the system. Few make any explicit association to Karl Marx or his theories. 
It's been left to Republicans to connect today's democratic socialists to their revolutionary predecessors, with U.S. President Donald J. Trump even claiming Black Lives Matter is a "Marxist" movement
Occupy Wall Street exposed the growing disparities in income and wealth in the U.S., and helped move the issue to the center of American political discussion.
​​     Livy wrote a monumental, 142-volume history, From the Founding of the City, which begins even before Rome’s 753 BCE founding and offers a year-by-year account of the rise of the ancient world’s most powerful civilization, right up to his own day.


     Thirty-five books of the history survive, including the earliest ones, and it is in these that Livy introduces his intertwined main themes: Rome’s external military conquests and its internal social battles. The latter have come to be known as the Struggle of the Orders, patricians versus plebeians.

     The patricians were a hereditary aristocracy, descendants of the city’s earliest senators, who at the city’s founding held a near monopoly on political, religious and economic power. Needless to say, they wanted to hang on to that monopoly.

     “Plebeians” is somewhat of a catch-all term for the those who didn’t share in that power and who, naturally, wanted to change that state of affairs.

     The issue was on of economic inequality, “the gulf between the privileged and the underprivileged,” writes historian Robert Ogilvie. “The prime need was protection against oppression.”[4]

      And two millennia before the Industrial Revolution and the Organized Labor movement, Rome’s exploited workers knew how to respond: They went on strike.

     Termed secessio plebis, or secession of the people, the commons would leave the city in a mass, set up camp and on a nearby hill and refuse to return until their demands were met.

     “In Rome,” writes Livy, “everything came to a standstill.”[5] This meant business stopped, food went unpicked, goods went undelivered and money was lost.

     The plebeians hit the patricians in their pocketbooks – labor’s eternal strategy, as effective in an agrarian economy as in an industrial.

     To be sure, Rome never became anything like a true democracy, much less a socialist paradise. But the 99% made great strides with their secessions.

     The Struggle of the Orders first came to a head in 494 BCE, following what Livy terms “ever-increasing bitterness between the ruling classes and the masses.”[6] The main issues were, and would continue to be, debt relief and political/legal representation.

     Specifically, men drafted into military service had been compelled to abandon their land – and livelihood – while in the field, forcing many into debt and ruin. So, even as Rome’s enemies were gathering, men were refusing to serve.

     To symbolize their plight, an old soldier was brought before a public assembly, with “soiled and threadbare clothes, his dreadful pallor and emaciated body, he was a pitiable sight.” The veteran explained how, because he had served his patriotic duty, he had lost his family land and all his possessions, then was “finally seized by my creditor and reduced to slavery.”[7]

     Debt relief was out of the question to many patricians, since they were the ones doing the lending, and Livy writes that “money-lenders … used all their influence and employed every device” to avoid concessions.[8]

     This was when the people walked, taking “themselves off in a body to the Sacred Mount, three miles from the city across the Anio.”[9] They set themselves up there and remained for days, abandoning the city as enemies loomed.

     “In Rome there was something like panic,” Livy writes, with violence feared on both sides. “The only hope lay in finding a solution for the conflicting interests of the two classes in the state,” wrote Livy,[10] and an accommodation was found.
​Titus Livius was born in Patavium (now Padua, in northern Italy), likely in 59 BCE, the fateful year that Julius Caesar served as consul and started the chain of events that would result in the crack-up of the republic. Livy's early years were filled with civil war -- he was 10 when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and about to turn 30 when Octavian finally defeated Mark Antony.

​Livy is thought to have started writing his history in the 30s, completing most of it during the glorious early years of the Principate, dying a few years before Augustus. He appears to have written on a full-time basis, never serving as a senator or, seemingly, in the military.
"In Rome, everything came to standstill," Livy wrote of the secessio plebis. Here, an 18th century engraving of Rome's Ponte Nomentano by Giuseppe Vasi; the Sacred Mount is in the distance, to the left of the bridge tower.
The Roman Republic was far from an equitable place, and the existence of debt bondage meant people who could not pay off their obligations would be sold into slavery. Here, a 19th century vision of a Roman slave market.
The first secessio plebis resulted in the creation of Tribunes of the People, an office held by plebeians for the protection of the plebeian class. It was a major concession by the patricians, one which much later would contribute to the breakup of the Republic, when tribunes like Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, shown here, sought more power than the ruling class was willing to give up. A senatorial mob killed Tiberius in 133 BCE; Gaius took his own life 12 years later as the mob trying to get him. 
For plebeians and proletariat alike, the strike is a prime weapon. Here, a scene from Britain's General Strike of 1926.
The Roman army of 494 BCE wouldn't have looked much like these reenactors, who are equipped as a legion of the early empire. Instead, it would have been a rag-tag group that retired to the Sacred Mount, with mis-matched weaponry and little or no armor, still fighting Greek phalanx-style. The Roman legion would develop over centuries into the world-conquering force that these guys are pretending to be.
A rendering of the first secessio plebis (from Hutchinson's History of the Nations, published 1915) shows plebeian leader Lucius Sicinius Vellutus addressing the people, many of them soldiers who had been forced into debt when their service prevented them from farming their lands. 
​​​     Debt bondage was not eliminated; that would have to wait until 326 BCE and another popular uprising. But what the people did get was representation, in the form of Tribunes of the People, officials who were plebeians themselves and whose function was to “protect the commons against the consuls.”[11]

     This was a momentous step, and the success of the first people’s strike ensured there would be more.

     Another four secessio plebis followed, in 449, 445, 342, and 287, and these along with other labor actions slowly chipped away at patrician dominance.

     In addition to the abolishment of debt slavery, plebeians would eventually force the creation and publication of the Twelve Tables, laws that spelled out their exact rights, while earning the liberty to marry patricians, join the senate and be elected consul, the highest constitutional office, opening the way for “new men” like Cicero.

     None of these political gains did much to weaken the economic control of the patrician class, of course. Rome never produced its own Marx, someone who saw a permanent way out of the Struggle of the Orders.

     And Livy was no left-wing radical, a designation that would have been meaningless in Rome anyway. He was very much part of the establishment, friendly with the emperor Augustus and tutor to the young future emperor Claudius, his History a best-seller in his lifetime. Livy wasn’t calling for revolution.

     But Livy did recognize that the fundamental tension in society was between patrician and plebeian, “oppressor and oppressed,” who “stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight.”[12]

     Though those last words are Marx’s, they could easily have been Livy’s.

     The class struggle was a very real thing to the Romans, who knew it for the driving force that it is in society.

     Livy celebrates moments of positive social change with the same enthusiasm he cheers Rome’s unprecedented military conquests. Of the abolition of debt-bondage, he wrote, “the liberty of the Roman people had as it were a second birth.”[13]

    For Livy, it was these combined achievements – domestic harmony and military dominance – that made Rome “the greatest nation in the world.”[14]

     Though he had an almost modern view of social change, understanding that it was a process, a battle for concessions, Livy could not envision anything beyond the Roman political model. There just were no alternatives, except despotism, the rejection of which was central to Rome’s creation myth.

     (What Livy thought of the principate, which replaced most of the Republic’s political institutions with single-man rule, isn’t known since those books that covered Augustus’ reign are lost.)

     To Livy, the class struggle was like a perpetual skirmish that occasionally flared into open combat, which had to be effectively managed but which was as eternal as Rome itself.

     It would only be much later, more than two thousand years after the Roman people first went on strike, that Marx conceived a way out of this war without end.

     “Abolition of private property”[15] – it is a truly revolutionary idea, one that likely  would have horrified Livy, but one that offers an end to the exploitation of one class by another, an end to the class struggle.

     Today’s democratic socialists seem to hold a view closer to Livy’s than Marx’s. They seek incremental change – universal health care, free college, a higher minimum wage – not a fundamental shift in the capitalist system of exploitation.

     In this approach, the class struggle is something to be managed, just as Rome’s city fathers did so many centuries ago, but not to be upset. The class struggle once again becomes eternal. Livy would approve; Marx would not.
 
_____
  
Kenneth G. Pringle is a financial journalist, internet-news pioneer, writer and historian. He is currently heading up Barron’s Centennial Project, a year-long retrospective of the magazine's first 100 years.  https://kennethgpringle.com/
People examine the Twelve Tables, a result of the second secessio plebis (449 BCE). The tables spelled out the rights and duties of a citizen and would serve as the basis for all later Roman law.
IL fatto di Virginia, or the killing of Verginia, helped spark the second secessio plebis in 449 BCE.
Livy was on good terms with the emperor Augustus, left, and advised the young emperor-to-be Claudius on his studies.
A German first edition of the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 
Rome's empire would reach its maximum size about 100 years after Livy's death, turning the Mediterranean into its private pond.
For Romans, there were basically two types of government, their republic or barbarian despotism. Even after Augustus began one-man rule, they kept the trappings of the republic, such as the senate. Here, ​a 19th century fresco in Palazzo Madama, Rome, features Cicero speaking during the Catiline Conspiracy.
"The theory of the Communists may be summed up in one sentence: Abolition of private property," Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, offreing a way out of the forever class struggle. Rome never developed its own political revolutionaries, and a world without classes couldn't be envisioned even by forward-thinkers like Livy. 
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have brought democratic socialism back to the mainstream, but they've done it with almost no reference to Marx and the revolutionary socialists who came before them and made their movement possible. A search for "Marx" on AOC's official website came up empty. (Sanders' doesn't have a search function.) 
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Footnotes: 

[1] Andy Biggs, “Democrats open door to Marxist totalitarian rule through attacks on police, history and institutions,” The Washington Times, June 23, 2020: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/23/democrats-open-door-to-marxist-totalitarian-rule-t/
  
[2] Steven Nelson, “Trump Slams Black Lives Matter Organization as “Marxist Group,” New York Post, Aug. 5, 2020: https://nypost.com/2020/08/05/trump-slams-black-lives-matter-organization-as-marxist-group/
  
[3] Karl Marx, Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” (New York: Harper Row, & Row, 1972), 241.
​
[4] Robert Ogilvie, “Introduction,” to Livy: The Early History of Rome: Books I-V of The History of Rome From Its Foundation, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt (New York: Penguin, 1971), 26.

[5] Livy, History, 2.32.

[6] Livy, History, 2.23.

[7] Livy, History, 2.23.

[8] Livy, History, 2.31.

[9] Livy, History, 2.32.

[10] Livy, History, 2.32.

[11] Livy, History, 2.32.

[12] Marx, Manifesto, 241.

[13] Livy, History, 27.4.

[14] Livy, History, 1.1.

[15] Marx, Manifesto, 255.