Labour Monthly
Source: Labour Monthly October 1947, pages 210-219
Note: Wason’s comment on Thomson’s review of “Class Struggles in Ancient Greece” together with Thomson’s rejoinder
Publisher : The Labour Publishing Company Ltd., London.
Transcription/HTML markup: Ted Crawford/D. Walters
Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2013). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. Published here under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license 2013.
Correspondence
To the Editor, Labour Monthly
The review of my book Class Struggles in Ancient Greece in the July issue “Labour Monthly” indicates a great deal of misunderstanding about both the purpose and the subject matter of the book. It was based on a thesis of 452 pages of which as many as 137 pages were notes and 14 of condensed bibliography. I was advised by a Marxist Scholar to shorten it drastically into a popular form as he thought the ideas deserved a wide public. Unfortunately, in doing this the detailed notes, arguments and references had to be dropped and the reader was referred to the original thesis if he wished to consult these.
This has proved to be a serious mistake. At best new ideas always need several years before a final estimate can be made of them, but meanwhile it is essential to have the most detailed arguments and references to back them. For instance, the review complains that the matriarchate, the alphabet and the role of Philip V are not dealt with adequately, but details of these will be found in the original thesis in varying lengths according to whether they are relevant to the subject matter. There is a criticism that no investigation is made of the early tribal society and no mention made of later Greek scientists such as Anaximenes, but I expressly state in my foreword that the book does not attempt to cover the whole period of class struggle in Greece and still less to deal with the whole of Greek civilisation.
His criticism of the part dealing with the Bronze Age is surprising because practically all of it is based on the work of Professor Childe, an authority on that period acknowledged by Marxists. In fact, the particular phrase objected to “The Bronze Age states usually broke up after only about a hundred years,” is actually Professor Childe’s MMH p.264, n.2 B.A.p.18) and due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. The reviewer goes on to make the statement that “The Egyptian kingdom lasted ... for close on three thousand years.” This is such a departure from Marxist method as to make one suspect it to be an unintentional slip. It as if one were to state that the Greek state lasted from ancient times to the present day, which means little or nothing as a historical statement.
The use of the terms “bourgeois” and “feudalism” for ancient times has precedence in other Marxist works, but I was extremely careful in a footnote and elsewhere to explain the limited use of these, so there is absolutely no justification for confusion. In fact, many readers have found them of great value in underŽstanding not only ancient society itself but in appreciating the differences between ancient and modern times. I was more cautious about the use of the word “capital,” but even here I have the authority of Marx himself, who used it of the ancient world and was careful to distinguish the different aspects of it as I have done.
Finally the reviewer complains that the explanation suggested for the failure of slavery to develop in the modern world is not related to the development of the productive forces. If my argument did do this it would be a very serious mistake. But the very opposite is true! It is actually based on the productive development and the whole point of sketching in the Bronze Age and the medieval periods was in order to hammer home the differences in productive development and how these affected social developments and finally made the disappearance of slavery possible. The length of time involved in the decline of the Roman Empire is certainly emphasised, but precisely because it was the result of the great economic changes involved in the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. This theory has been presented only tentatively as a possible starting point for research on the enormous problem of why slavery did not develop in the modern world. It is a problem which can only be solved by the combined research of experts covering prehistory, classical, ancient history and the early and late medieval periods. Any first word on the subject therefore can only hope to indicate a possible line of research, and my theory attempts no more. But I hope other comrades will use the original thesis and carry on from there.
In short, once misunderstandings are cleared away there seems little ground for serious disagreement between the book and the reviewer. It is all the more unfortunate therefore that such confusion should be allowed to arise, for it can only benefit our opponents. I suggest that more co-operation between comrades would help to avoid it in future.
Margaret Wason
Reply From Our Reviewer
I have nothing to retract, and will add only this:
The author’s ideas about tribal society and the status of women in the Bronze Age (p.57) are such that she might never have read The Origin of the Family. It is true that Gordon Childe devotes very little attention these questions, but a Marxist should be the first to appreciate that Childe, with all his merits, has not superseded Engels. And how carefully has she read Childe? The mistakes in her account of the alphabet could easily have been corrected from Man Makes Himself or What Happened in History, and her references to M.M.H. p.264, n.2 and B.A. p.18 are both false. There are no footnotes on p.264 of Man Makes Himself, and the nearest approach toŽ the phrase she claims to have found there is statement to the effect that the ancient “empires” of the Near East were “shortlived.” Not does the phrase appear Žon p.18 of The Bronze Age, but that page does contain the following “ThereŽafter (i.e. after Hammurabi — (G.T.) Babylon remained the capital of a united Babylonia for close on 1,500 years.”
I hope enough has now been said to enable your readers to judge for themselves,
George Thompson