Rome. More than one-and-a-half millennia since the Empire collapsed under its own weight, its decrepit stone architecture still claws menacingly against the Mediterranean sky. Even in its slumber it retains a haunting power, the spectre of eternal imperial supremacy, a recurring fantasy now invoked by resurgent neo-fascist forces today.
Preceded by the Babylonian, Persian and Greek Empires before it, Rome reigned for more than a millennium, a monumental achievement as far as Empires go. Expanding from a small republic on what is now the Italian peninsula, it quickly devoured the entirety of the Mediterranean basin, its hungry tentacles reaching into West Asia, Northern Africa, and eventually Western Europe. It was an economic powerhouse, boasting a sophisticated financial system, built through the enslavement of every nation it conquered.
In the name of the Pax Romana or “the Peace of Rome”, the Roman Legion would rape and pillage through every city it encountered, securing its Peace through imperial terror. Building new cities on the smouldering wreckage of its conquered towns, Rome would then co-opt the existing power structures of its vassals to ensure an acceptable transfer of power and influence over its subjects.
With this came the formation of a class of tenured farmers, forced to work their own land for a wealthy landowner through the use of debt and land transfers. Enslaving the rest of the survivors, the engine of the empire ran on steady supply of indentured labour in the fields, in the mines, on ships, and in the palaces of the slave-owning class. The social order was enforced through open terror, with crucifixion used as the preferred method for punishing slave uprisings. In this way, the parasitic leech built up a colonial regime, fed by gold, silver and 400,000 tons of wheat annually, ensuring peace in the capitol through a writhing network of suffering and humiliation through the rest of the Empire.
Unveiling this satanic monstrosity in the aftermath of Jerusalem’s destruction, John of Patmos writes:
And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads; and on its horns were ten diadems, and on its heads were blasphemous names. And the beast that i saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And the dragon gave it his power and his throne and great authority. One of its heads seemed to have received a death-blow, but its mortal wound had been healed. In amazement the whole world followed the beast. They worshipped the dragon for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?“
The beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words … and was given authority over every tribe and people and language and nation, and all the inhabitants of the earth will worship it
(Revelation 13).
This beast of John’s apocalypse, is it really so estranged from our world today? The beast – a patchwork of Persian, Babylonian, and Greek imperial imagery, taking its most advanced form in the person of Caesar – is this Beast not the imperial archetype? From the ascension of the British empire, rising out of the sea with its mighty navy, to the worldwide bloodbath unleashed upon the world by 20th century fascism, to the blasphemous proclamations of the global American Empire, perhaps the animal unveiled in John’s Apocalypse is not so alien to us as we think.
Marxism and Empire
“I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.” Matthew 13:35
Through the tradition of Marxism we can see that as civilization develops throughout history, an economic basis takes shape. This base – the economic foundation of society – is formed out of the systems of production and exchange, regulated through a ruling class, built by the labour of an exploited class. In Rome, it was the slave and colonial regime which formed the skeleton of production. The slave, under pain of death, was compelled through force to produce the crops, to mine the silver from underground networks, and to haul it from the four corners of the earth via ports and city centres, where slaves and artisans would turn raw materials into goods. These slaves, given nothing but enough gruel to continue their labour each day, were regarded as nothing more than tools for their masters, a primitive form of private property under the law of Dominium, a concept which was later extended to commodities they produced, and then to the land that they worked. It was an economy that consumed “human souls” as the author of Revelation would put it, and in this way the Roman colonial regime formed upon an exploited underclass numbering millions, whose labour allowed the class of free-men to live in luxury and take part in a rich cultural and political life. The Imperial Beast grew fat on a diet of blood and gold.
But beasts are not immortal, and the overfed Beast of Rome was not immune to its own contradictions. By the mid 1st Century, the Roman Empire was stretched thin. Its reserve of slave labour, decimated by plague, or in open rebellion in conjunction with Germanic barbarian assaults upon the Empire, caused huge labour shortages – disrupting agricultural outputs, the manufacturing of goods, trade and commerce. Growing aware of the mortality of the Beast, the exploited masses of slaves rose up in greater and greater numbers, fielding armies who frequently clashed with legionaries, taking revenge upon the slave masters. The Empire, paralyzed by a subsequent power struggle among its ruling class, fell into both a civil war in its core and defensive war at its borders. Unable to secure new slaves in wars of aggression, the Pax Romana collapsed under the weight of its own impossible demands.
Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great! It has become a dwelling place of Demons, a haunt of every foul spirit, a haunt of every fallen bird, a haunt of every foul and hateful beast
(Revelation 18:2)
Out of the ruins of the Ancient Mode of Production, a new one began to take shape. This transformation of the political economy of Europe did not happen overnight, and indeed took centuries to coalesce, but over time feudalism came to be the dominant mode of production. Trade had all but collapsed, entire cities had been decimated. Many former slaves took to the wilderness to work the land for themselves, while roving bandits swept through villages, taking anything they wanted through force. As production was forced to become localized and with less indentured labour, more efficient means of production were required, sparking technological advances. Landowners, desperate for indentured labourers to work their vacant lands, and slaves facing hunger and displacement, were in this way forced back together in a new feudalist class society. The serfs were given minimal rights in exchange for being shackled to the land, and the lords were paid in rents by taking a large portion of the goods produced on the land. While no longer technically slavery, feudalism operated on a new mode of production and a new mode of class domination.
With feudalism came fresh contradictions. As the ruling classes (the lords and the clergy) amassed more and more wealth through the exploitation of the peasantry, the upkeep of their opulent way of life; the cost of waging war to secure more land and the expenditures required to maintain political alliances between feudal kingdoms (all non-productive expenses), reached a point where they overtook the limited productive forces of the feudal economy. Economic crisis led to wars of desperation, deepening the feedback loop of debt and increased taxation, which in turn sparked peasant insurrections and further economic disruption. When the bubonic plague swept through in the 14th century, 50 million were killed, sparking a massive labour shortage and throwing the entire feudal order into its final death-spiral.
The labour crisis gave the serfs much more leverage in negotiating higher wages for labour and lower rents, in turn spurring technological advances in production and a more militant serfdom, who often clashed violently with the lords in massive peasant rebellions. This militancy resulted in brutal repression, beginning with crusades against heretical groups, and expanding to witch hunts and the Catholic Church’s Inquisition, a reign of terror spearheaded by the clergy -the largest landowning class in Europe. Simultaneously, colonial crusades expanded out of Europe in an effort to secure new wealth through slaughter in western Asia. The Leviathan, long-emaciated by its own greed, was forced to evolve, hungry for new blood.
Out of these contradictions, a new economic trend emerged. Capital – profit extracted through exploitation, came into the forefront, as land ownership itself became less valuable due to the labour crisis and the underdevelopment of agricultural production. Merchants emerged as a class who could facilitate the exchange of goods after the near-total collapse of trade (a result of war and plague), becoming highly sought after and highly paid. As this new class accumulated capital for itself, as city states coalesced into nations, and as the ideas of the old world were displaced by scientific ones, a new, revolutionary class emerged – the bourgeoisie. In a way that John’s Revelation could never envision, the Beast re-emerged from the sea, dripping with blood and mud.
As the dust of Feudalism’s collapse had settled, the boundaries of class society were again redrawn along sharper battle lines: The Bourgeoisie – the industrialists, the colonial overlords, the finance capitalists on one side, and the proletariat – the colonized and immiserated working class, on the other. So it has been for half a millennium – the labouring masses, herded like cattle into mine-shafts, brothels, factories, concentration camps – left with two choices: sell your labour or be exterminated. In seizing ownership of every square inch of the earth that it could, and privatizing the means of production (and the wealth it produces), human labour itself was fully transformed into a commodity, humanity into mere objects meant to sustain a ruling class of vampires intent only on securing for itself new and more profitable investment opportunities.
This is the Beast which confronts us today; a monstrosity which appears truly omnipresent, which for five-hundred years has constricted the entire globe in its tentacles. This monstrosity – with its hydra heads of colonialism, imperialism, and fascism – garbed in the blood-soaked stars and stripes of American nihilism, will not be negotiated with. This abomination would sooner devour the entire world in a cascade of nuclear fire than relinquish one iota of its supremacy.
And yet this animal is in pain. There is blood in the water, and even the most outsloken evangelist of globalization cannot deny that capitalism today is in approaching an ultimate crisis. It’s rate of profit is caught in a terminal death spiral towards zero – an inescapable decline caused by the contradiction between automation and capitalism’s vampiric need to extract surplus labour. This is the key contradiction which generates crisis after compounding crisis: unprecedented wealth inequality, environmental degradation and the looming threat of nuclear conflict between imperialist powers and a growing axis of resistance. Like a shambling corpse, a Beast who’s visage is marred by a mortal wound, capitalism today with all its moribund symptoms appears to actually mimic life through its own process of decay: global stock markets cannibalizing each economic disruption, billionaires rising and falling over the course of days, investors sparing no opportunity to let a catastrophe go to waste.
It is the task of the international working class to overcome this Beast and institute a system which would put to death the epoch of Empire – replacing it with socialism. To paraphrase a certain Galilean carpenter – “the harvest is ripe but the workers are few”. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.
transfigurations 