Re:Geoffrey de Sainte Croix dies.

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2000 10:50:15 -0600
> From: Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Geoffrey De Ste. Croix, 89, Marxist Historian of Ancient World  
> Dies(NY
>Times Obit)
>
> One proposal Geoffrey De Ste. Croix made in his work on class
> struggle is of some interest. He argued that in ancient Athens, the
> women of the ruling class did *not* belong to that class but formed
> a separate exploited class. I believe the argument has not been
> very widely accepted, but it does serve to underline the extreme
> male supremacy of Athenian democracy. His argument that slave
> labor produced the surplus in Athens has been challenged by
> a number of scholars (convincingly, it seems to me), but his
> argument on the position of women in Athens would not be
> incompatible with such accounts of Athens as those provided
> by Wood and the scholars she draws from.

Well, for what I can remember of the book (much, and in fact I grieve a
lot for the death of GEM de Sainte Croix, who made me want to read again
the classics when I was deeply depressed with the poor intellectual fare
of a MSc. in Economics) and its phrasing, Sainte Croix considered the
entire female sex, of all times, an exploited class by itself, concerned
with the reproduction of labour-power in all societies. In this he was
terribly naive, almost un-marxist; labour-power is always social, not
biological, becuse it does not exist irrespective of a mode for its
appropiation, attribution of value, etc. But, in a field of
historiograph highly politicized as Ancient History, renowned mostly for
the deep and deliberate anti-marxist stance taken by most of its
practicionere (suffice to compare GEM de Sainte Croix with the
Foucauldian Paul Veyne, who has turned Ancient History into a pomo
playground, and who has published his *opus magnum*, *Bread and
Circuses*, some 6 years before Sainte Croix published "Class Struggle
in...."), Sainte Croix's enquires, and his thesis of the progressive
erosion of democratic rights for poor freemen in Antiquity, allowing for
the extension of forms of non-voluntary labour pressed by the
"propertied" class onto the rest of society, are a superb accreation for
the small tradition of Marxist historiograph on Ancient History,
alongside with M.I. Finley's (Marxist, perhaps, only *latu sensu* of
course- Finley was a Frankfurtian) work.

Carlos Rebello
>
> Right or wrong,  *Class Struggles in the Ancient Greek World*
> is a beautiful and impassioned  history of the ancient world. It is
> also a history of Rome because it follows the Greek part of the
> Roman Empire to its end, and thus he needed to deal with Rome in
> general. The frontispiece, incidentally, is a reproduction of a
> striking Van Gogh painting, The Potato Eaters -- a peasant
> family at supper.
>
> Carrol