Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124033 in Books
• Published on: 1997-12-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 732 pages

Customer Reviews

Marxist history at it's very best.
The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is a massive book, more than 700 pages long, and covers a vast sweep of history. It explores the social and political structures of the eastern Mediterranean from 700 BC onwards, concluding with the Arab conquests over 1,300 years later. It is more a collection of closely related essays than an integrated narrative, full of digressions and pungent asides. Yet the book has a unifying theme. It is, quite simply, exploitation. In what is in my view the best single discussion of the Marxist theory of class, Ste Croix argues that 'class is the way in which exploitation is reflected in a social structure'. Classes are defined by people's positions in the relations of production, and in particular by their control or lack of control of the means of production. Thus understood, class is an objective relationship. It does not depend on individuals being aware of their class position or on classes self consciously organising themselves politically.

Yet wherever society is based on exploitation, the class struggle goes on, usually silently as the propertied classes seek to squeeze as much as possible from 'the voiceless toilers'. Ste Croix relentlessly marshals and minutely analyses the evidence to support such a view of classical antiquity. He demonstrates that the Greek and Roman ruling classes were ruthlessly efficient exploiters, as is shown, for example, by the fact that--most unusually in pre-industrial times--ordinary country dwellers suffered worse in times of famine than the towns where the rich landowners were based.

He also argues that ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies, not in the sense that most people were slaves (in fact they were peasants), but because slave labour provided the surplus product off which the ruling class lived. Therefore, as the use of slaves became more costly in the later Roman Empire, the society went into crisis. Yet, as the empire declined, the senatorial aristocracy continued to amass yet more wealth. In a characteristic final paragraph Ste Croix compares them to vampire bats.

Using this approach, de Ste. Croix explains such events as the rise and fall of Greek democracy, the fall of the Roman Republic and later the Empire, elements in the rise of Christianity and Islam.

This is one of the finest books ever written.