Roland Boer's Blog, page 58

If you want to be a saint, it pays to be from the ruling class

Another gem from G.E.M. de Ste. Croix. In his discussion of the viability of Marx’s approach to class, he mentions as an aside the chances of becoming an individual saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Of the thousands of saints, only 5 per cent have come from the lower classes which have constituted over 80 per cent of European populations (Class Struggle, p. 27).

Marx’s evening relaxation

It is always a great pleasure to reread Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix’s great but thus far understudied work,The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (winner of the Deutscher Prize in 1982). I am working through the book again in the process of writing ourTime of Troubles.Anyway, Ste. Croix has a fascinating section on Marx as a European classicist, where he traces the rise of interest in Marx’s thought in the 1970s after a very long period of complete neglect.

To indicate Marx’s...

MRB radio interview on the Sacred Economy

Joseph Ryan Kelly has just let me know that an interview, which we did last November on the Sacred economy book, has just gone online at Marginalia, a project by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Book outline: Time of Troubles: Economics and the World of Early Christianity

This is the outline of a book we (Christina Petterson and I) are working on at the moment. It is due with Fortress Press by the beginning of July. In many respects, it is the companion work to the widely acclaimed book,The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel, published in 2015.

Time of Troubles: Economics and the World of Early Christianity

Introduction

Here we situate the book within current studies of economics and the New Testament. We indicate where they fall short, in terms of both economic...

Moses Finlay and the ancient economy: on Thucydides’s guesses

I am rereading Moses Finlay’sThe Ancient Economy for our book calledThe Time of Troubles (outline soon). Despite the flaws of Finlay’s study, it is still a great read. For example:

Or when Thucydides (7.27.5) tells us that more than 20,000slaves escaped from Attica in the final decade of the PeloponnesianWar, just what do we in fact know? Did Thucydides havea network of agents stationed along the border between Attica andBoeotia for ten years counting the fugitives as they sneaked across?This...

Between David Bowie and the DPRK

Two stray thoughts that have no obvious connections.

First, I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone can see David Bowie as in some sense ‘radical’. I do not mean the famous ‘theatrical’ comments about fascism in the 1970s. I mean the supposed radicality of his gender bending. Apart from the fact that this was a pop artist unusually adept at exploiting commercial mediums to be noticed, it is a sad reflection of what radical means in some parts of the world when it primarily refers to...

New website: Culture Matters

A new website has just been launched by the Communist Party of the UK, along with a range of other people, called Culture Matters. I have the first post of what should be a number on the complex issue of Marxism and religion.

Politics of Script (part 2)

In an earlier piece, I commented on the struggle over ‘traditional’ and simplified’ script in China, noting that Taiwan’s decision to keep the traditional script was a deeply anti-communist move. The same could be said of Hong Kong and some older overseas Chinese communities. To add to this, it is worth noting that the DPRK (North Korea) immediately fostered the hangul script (they call itChosŏn’gŭl), which was first designed in the fifteenth century. By contrast, South Korea for a long time...

A Chinese perspective on the Stalin revival in Russia

In the process of writing a second article for the flagship Chinese newspaper, the People’s Daily (first article here), I am working my way through a journal calledMarxist Studies in China. It’s published by the Institute of Marxism in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Some articles leave, shall we say, a little to be desired and some are real gems.

The journal also carries regular pieces by Russia specialists, one of them called ‘Why Is the Stalin Debate Raging Again in Russia?’. This...

Kim Il Sung’s assessment of 1989 in Eastern Europe

As part of my bed-time reading, I continue withAnecdotes of Kim Il Sung’s Life. Towards the end of the second volume is his assessment as to why the communist governments in Eastern Europe were overthrown by coups.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, an abnormal event took place in the world: Socialism collapsed and capitalism was restored in a number of countries.

The renegades of socialism, who had destroyed socialism, tried to justify their despicable betrayal, claiming that the ideals of s...