The Roman Empire was Socialist: Squashing the SPQR wet dream in 9 steps

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I write to forget

7 months ago

Appeal to definition fallacies concern themselves with form rather than function. Yes I am well aware that the word “socialism” appeared well after the Roman Empire was reduced to nothing but dust, partisanship and desperately idealistic homo-erotic fantasies. I don’t care. I care about function; and since the term “socialist” carries heavy meaning - especially in those who deludedly idealise the Roman Empire - then the term “socialist” it is… Because the Roman Empire was socialist in everything but name.

Why I insist that the Roman Empire was socialist

You cannot escape a prison you cannot see; you can’t break chains you don’t even know exist. If you idealise the entirety of an idea of the past, you are then unlikely to acknowledge its mistakes, and therefore, you are doomed to repeat them.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m fascinated by the Roman period as much as the next guy. But let us not fool ourselves: the mindset, implied values and governance style of the Roman Empire were more socialist than free. Sure, some slaves were able to move outside of their master’s home, but they were still slaves subject to his every whim.

And let us separate from the imperium the technological, artistic, philosophical and cultural achievements that occurred during the Roman period - they didn’t occur BECAUSE of imperialist despotic rule, but IN SPITE OF it.

Essence over form

The Roman Empire adopted blatant socialist policies. This is merely undeniable fact. Yes, I know, the term “socialism” was coined centuries after the Empire had collapsed… But appeals to definition aside, Rome, like all states, inevitably adopted more and more socialist policies. All states end up socialist in nature because “leaders” need to buy off the support of their people with the people’s own money: said leaders tax the people to then throw the people the scraps from their own stolen wealth. In other words, thieving politicians bribe us with our own money to buy off our support; and we thank them for it on top of it all. This is the psychopathy of socialism.

Right before its fall, the Western Roman Empire (if you want to be specific) displayed all the signature the hallmarks of socialism. What are the hallmarks of socialism? Would Marx’s garbage ideas1 suffice?

Totalitarian authority,
central banking,
wealth redistribution through taxation and welfare,
denial of property rights through property/inheritance tax,
demoralisation and degeneracy,
erosion of ethnic identity (and therefore in-group trust), etc.

Let’s break them down…

Reasons why the Roman Empire was in essence socialist:

1. Forced labour

Nothing says “socialism” like the state deciding your occupation for you, then enforcing it before deciding how much you are to be paid for it - without you having any say or choice. This is slavery. The Roman Empire was reliant upon slavery2 3 and social engineering akin to the USSR’s central planning by which old corrupt atherosclerotic bureaucrats presumed to know better about how each individual should offer value to society, and then force them to do it. Whether Roman Empire slave ships or Soviet gulags, forced labour is a crowning socialist policy.

In today’s mixed economies, we have a some freedom together with a lot of totalitarianism/socialism - one quantifiable metric of the level of socialism in an economy is government participation in GDP. Modern demon-cratic states tax us to the bone, then decide how to spend that wealth, thus creating slavery with extra steps. They fund nonsense at their whim, create jobs nobody asked for, and they create regulations to arbitrarily and inefficiently shape the economy in their image. And all this to satisfy their own constituency and megalomania. This is one step before total socialism USSR-style - and Rome wasn’t far behind.

2. Open borders

The Roman Empire encouraged immigration to the empire by granting citizenship to any and all residents (see the edict of Caracalla4). Not only did the empire’s provinces lose their etnic identity due to their willing subjugation to Rome, but the influx of immigrants from within and outside of the imperium completely altered the demographic character of each province, thus destroying their sense of identity, not to mention tribal trust and solidarity. Without a collective identity to foster unity, there was no purpose to excel or to work for an ideal greater than a single lifespan.

The socialist USSR’s policies of mass migration5 within its territories and spheres of influence had this purpose in mind: to erode ethnic identity so that the only identity left for people to have would be their single fealty to the cult of statism/socialism.

Also, perhaps socialist empires seek to erode the ethnic identities of the provinces under their whip because this way they disempower rebellious tendencies, or maybe even cultivate a super-ethnicity loyal only to the socialist empire.

3. Erosion of ethnic identity

Even though socialism can also manifest in nationalism (such as the case of the German national socialists, AKA nazis), contemporary socialists seek to distance themselves from the bad rep of national socialism - so they miss no opportunity to reject any and all expressions of national sentiment, as long as they get to pretend that it was nationalism, not socialism, that does all the atrocities.

As mentioned above, the Roman Empire eroded the national identities of its provinces through mass import of foreigners by granting them full citizenship, and all the perks that came with it at the expense of others.

Other policies, such as employing foreign mercenaries6 at the taxpayers’ expense, further encouraged ethnic mixing and the loss of ethnic identity and solidarity. Socialism in general seeks to destroy the affiliations of the past if it is to foster religious belief in itself.

4. Taxation and welfare

Wealth redistribution is the essence of socialism. In his pamphlet ‘the communist manifesto,’ Marx delivers repeated references on how wealth should be redistributed according to arbitrary criteria that he deems “just,” even though he had never worked a day in his life. The core socialist delusion is that a single class of experts - or communist party members, or aristocrats - have the know-how and authority to presume to know how to best redistribute other people’s hard-earned earnings by force.

Welfare is virtue-signalling forced charity with other people’s money, and it stems from the socialist obsession of equity - or “equality of outcome” - instead of equality of opportunity with fair inequality of outcome. Wealth redistribution this is to appease the begrudging lower classes by fostering hate and division between the haves ands the have-mores. Welfare also keeps people fed and reliant enough upon the state so that they rest docile and inert in socialist dystopia, without ever bothering to revolt.

The Roman Empire welfare state7 8 functioned exactly as any other socialist state would. Politicians appeased the masses with free arbitrary handouts, rendering them weak, pathetic and reliant upon the state.

The naive masses rarely realise that the handouts are just scraps from the feasts taken from them by force. The masses naively assume that taxes are taken from the rich, yet all taxes, even taxes from the rich, get transferred down to the lower classes in the form of higher prices, low wages, unemployment, and wealth opportunities missed from tax-induced economic suppression.

Give them bread and circuses, and they will never revolt.

5. Centrally planned economy

Authoritarianism is socialist by nature. All governments are to a degree socialist. Even Mussolini, the guy who coined ‘fascism’ asserted: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Germany’s National Socialists were by admission “socialists,” even though the deceptive abbreviation “nazi” tries to conceal the socialist part. The only non-socialist society is a stateless society. Huge government spending and the megalomaniac assumption that a totalitarian leader “knows best” how to spend the people’s money - supposedly for their own good - is where socialism and authoritarianism merge in essence.

The Roman Empire’s socialist policy of central economic planning9 ignored the precious back-and-forth feedback of free-market pressures, which serve to self-correct and balance the economy in the most optimal way possible - through incentives and not through threats. There is a reason supply and demand are a law of the system of the economy, and not just a theory. Supply and demand is an undeniable law inherent in the system of free human interactions, and its outcome is the best possible win-win resolution, if left uninterrupted by state socialist interventionism (Economics 101).

The socialist Roman Empire’s policies of attempting to plan and orchestrate the economy created unrealistic and economically unsupported supply and demand, ultimately stealing away from the Roman economy’s true wealth potential. And clueless historians of today still pretend to wonder how their Roman Empire false god could ever collapse under the weight of its own hubris.

Remember that centralisation is a core concept in Marx’s pamphlet ‘the communist manifesto.’ The socialist state (just like modern Keynesian economies) cannot survive unless it spends vast chunks of cash in arbitrary works and military campaigns that no one asked for - certainly not the ones doing the working and the paying.

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

- Benito Mussolini (national socialist dictator)

6. Property tax and inheritance tax

As part of socialist wealth redistribution, property tax10 and inheritance tax11 in the Roman Empire deserve their own mention. This is not just another socialist policy that denies property rights; it is a policy that disincentivizes cross-generational investment, which in turn erodes family bonds and values.

Why would you work hard building something for your offspring if the state will take a huge chunk from it? What if you can’t pay the tax at the time of inheritance, and the state will then inherit it all? What’s the point in buying property if you don’t really own i? Paying rent to the state and calling it “property tax” doesn’t really make a difference in essence.

7. Central banking and monetary policy

Although it was difficult with the means of that period to enforce a money-supply monopoly, the Roman state did coerce its own state currency by demanding taxes in it. Taxation is the only way to establish a state-manipulated currency that is sure to be debased by the state - since it’s a monopoly of money. Taxation forces merchants to charge their wares using the state’s manipulated currency.

The Roman state, with such monopolistic power in its hands, understood that it could literally create money out of thin air, or at least, create money with higher value than what it cost to create. So, the state inevitably diluted the money supply with coins made of impure precious metals, which led to debasement. Steady debasement12 led to inflation and the inevitable economic collapse that took the mighty Empire with it. This is what you get with central banking, a concept central to Marxism13.

8. Moral degeneracy, perversion and political corruption

Demoralisation, as described by USSR defector Yuri Besmenov14, appears to be a consistent socialist policy. Together with socialism’s anti-religious stance, socialist demoralisation propaganda aims at ideological subversion and confusion so that people under socialist rule have nowhere to turn to for moral guidance other than the socialist state itself - the same state that took away their moral framework in the first place.

The Roman Empire’s undeniable moral decay15 is yet another manifestation of the socialist corruption of ideals. And this is no accident. As people rely more and more on the socialist state for micromanagement of their lives, they lose their sense of identity and self-ownership. They thus feel unaccountable, since their lives are being puppeteered by others. If people are thus conditioned to be unaccountable, then why wouldn’t they indulge in all kinds of degeneracy? It’s not like upholding moral principles is worth the hassle when people have no sense of self. It’s not like they’ll feel guilty for an meaningless existence they have little control over…

9. Violence

The Roman Empire invented cruel inhumane ways to torture people and instil order through terrorism, like crucifixion, the garrote and the monstrous spectacles of arena. This is no accident. Socialism, which in essence is total totalitarianism, cannot be sustainable without the fear of the threat of extreme violence, just like every socialist authoritarian regime in history16.

So “good”where the Roman ideals that they could not emerge without violence. Yet the repressed homosexuals who fantasise about the Roman Empire as their surrogate daddy seem to miss this small fact.

The Roman Empire of Socialist Republics

Romans didn’t call themselves “socialist” but they were socialist in everything but name - even the red-yellow symbolism and branding. The Eastern Roman Empire never called itself Byzantine, yet we call it that today. Semantics don’t matter - essence only does. Self-identification doesn’t change what the Romans objectively were: socialists.

It might be hard for certain Empire-worshipping snowflakes to accept, but their false idol, the Roman Empire - on which they rested their whole fragile value system - was in fact yet another dirty degenerate collectivist institution of corruption, war, slavery and communist-level economic inefficiency.

If you can’t accept this world-shattering reality, feel free to stab me in the back. You wouldn’t face me directly, eh, Brute?

Why is it important to recognise the Roman Empire as socialist?

It seems that a number of individuals rest their entire value system on a glorified caricature-version of “The Roman Empire.” Their insecure conviction in their purpose, masculinity and meaning appears to desperately need this imagined “Roman ideal” as a guide. But this sets them up for even more meaninglessness, since they are bound to be disappointed when they figure out that the Roman Empire’s ideals were not held by the Roman Empire itself. They also set themselves up for manipulation, since demagogues will use Roman symbolism and evoke supposed “Roman ideals” to sway public opinion - see Mussolini, Hitler, and even Trump (yet another degenerate posing as an idealist). And yes, Trump-administration policies were also extremely socialist in function (increased money supply, increased spending, curfews, mandatory public “health” policies, speech laws, etc.)

It is crucial to stop idolising the Roman Empire - and to recognise it for its fundamental flaw of being a socialist state with a bloated government17 - because we need to learn from history. If we are distracted with form over substance, we will always be gaslighted, manipulated and doomed to live under socialism again and again just because we get lost arguing semantics.

Forget the textbook definition of the term “socialism”. Instead, focus on the meaning of central planning, property taxes, totalitarian authoritarianism, wealth redistribution, collectivism, demoralisation - statism.

“But if the Roman Empire was socialist, then every state is socialist…”

Precisely - you’re catching on quick! Socialism is an inalienable characteristic of all states: totalitarian central planning with audacious economic interventionism and subversion of the populace. All states are socialist; it’s just a matter of intensity. Monarchies, dictatorships, demon-cracies, and modern technocracies where the self-advertised “experts” get to dictate public policy are all socialist in everything but name.

The only society that is not socialist is the one that self-governs without any form of state central authority. It’s time for the human race to grow out of its state-needing infancy, and finally achieve true civilisation through stateless self-governance.

Idolising the abusive daddy figure of the Roman state is nothing more than pathetic infantilism, if not full-blown repressed homo-eroticism.

Troll someone you know with this article, and watch him screech:

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