By Aniket Dixit

There’s no shortage of classical nostalgia in the Western world today. The influence of the Ancient Greeks and Romans has been deeply embedded into modern political culture, often to the point of distorting historical reality. Articles such as “America Is Eerily Retracing Rome’s Steps to a Fall” and “No, Really, Are We Rome?” reveal how Ancient Rome has become a goldmine for armchair historians. This obsession tends to follow a similar trajectory, too: Rome was a great democracy — equal and just — until its excesses gave rise to wealth inequality and dangerous populist tyrants who tore it down. It is this vacuous perception of the Republic as some bastion of democracy that makes such comparisons so unfortunate. The Roman Republic, for all its apparent stability and fairness, was a society built on genocidal settler-colonialism, by slaves, for landed senators from the very beginning. In the end, the Republic’s collapse spoke to its enduring role as the bodyguard for landed classes. The Western attempt to recreate a “lost ideal” of the Roman Republic, requires remaking the very underlying conditions that allowed it to exist in the first place.

The Roman model of imperialism was very specific, one molded by the deeply rooted principles of Roman society. Violence was a tool used with discipline, as was punishment and intimidation. Rome was not resource-rich, of course; colonial powers rarely are. Their rise from an early agrarian city-state in a pocket of Italy to the most powerful empire in the world was a result of near constant warfare and resource plunder. The resource drain from the Roman colonies, particularly in Greece and Egypt, was great enough to tank local economies while enriching the governments of both. Early Roman wars, considered “necessary” defensive actions, were recognized even by many at the time to be the exact opposite. The conquest of Carthage and Hispania in particular have been frequently emulated and praised across the global military-industrial complex. Threats of Carthaginian economic expansion as well as the lure of resource-rich Spain did more to spur the Punic Wars than any notion of “self-defense”. The 146 B.C genocide of Carthage — encouraged by wholly unsupported rumors of brutality and cannibalism — was followed by the equally brutal razing of the Spanish town of Illurgia decades later. It was this strange discipline of violence that American military leaders later latched on to. David Petraeus’ 2006 counterinsurgency manual cites the subjugation of Hispania as a model for modern counterinsurgency. Even the growth of foreign military bases can be traced to Roman imperialism. It was the development of a “military community” abroad that gave Rome the power to keep rebellions in check. Again, the creation of a similar “community” in American foreign policy is necessary to uphold the government we’ve created.

The rampant subjugation of the Mediterranean world was only possible in conjunction with more of the same at home. The inequalities of the early Roman Republic were not an unfortunate side effect of growing corruption, as many contemporary columnists like to imagine. The movement to create the Republic and the eventual overthrow of the tyrant king Tarquinius Superbus were more a result of aristocratic frustration with his growing power than any genuinely popular interest. The comitia centuriata, the precursor to the Curia, was nothing more than an effort to gain popular ground. The same patrician clans (gentes) that had run Tarqiunius out of the city were now the ones in comfortable control. Over the nearly 5 centuries of the Roman Republic, these structures rarely changed. The creation of debt and property laws were geared towards allowing the landed aristocracy as much control over the fates of the farming classes as possible. When upward mobility became a possibility for Romans, forced conscriptions and land seizure took it back out. What’s more, when Tiberius Gracchus, as tribune of the plebs, proposed land reform to limit the property owned by the senatorial elites, they funded a mob to hunt him and his followers down, massacring them outside the Forum.

This was the vision of Rome that sustained its economic development. The relentless plunder from the periphery of the Republic — which ceased to be a true republic long ago — and the permanent fixture of a slave underclass was the heart that kept the Republic running. The collapse into empire and the steady rise of Julius Caesar in the late 1st century was an inevitable manifestation of popular anger and internal weakness. It was a government set up to benefit the few, thus destined to fail. It was this government that our so-called Founding Fathers idolized. As members of their own landed aristocracy, they recognized, much as the gentes of the early Republic did, that slavery and constant expansion were necessary to support their style of government. They were viscerally aware of the contradictions inherent in their moral and economic philosophies, but under early-stage capitalism, a working class of farmers and slaves leads to growth.

Thus, we cannot emulate a system of government without emulating the conditions that allowed it to thrive. The Roman Republic grew out of a slave society, dependent on foreign resources and constant war. The West has modeled many of its governments after this Republic, bringing everything else back with it.

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The New Roman Republic was originally published in The Michigan Specter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Congressional denial of the rights of DC residents has always been built on demagogy and resentment.

Testimony provided by the Democratic Socialists at the DC Police Performance Oversight Hearings provides a detailed roadmap for building real safety in Washington, DC.

What would a future with publicly owned power look like, and how do we get there?

The fight for full democracy for DC will not reach conclusion until DC’s citizens and elected officials unite to bring it about, by any means necessary. 

A new book by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington exposes how the consulting industry profits from (and helps to facilitate) the erosion of the public good.

Insurance lobbyists are using the progressive-sounding language and the elderly to maintain a Medicare privatization scheme.

The Troy City Council will soon be considering adopting a new zoning code, the laws that shape how Troy is developed in the future. The zoning code is the set of rules that developers must abide by, and the zoning code is, arguably, the strongest way the community can influence what their community looks like, feels like, and how it physically works.

The new zoning code, as proposed, is a huge step in the right direction for working people over the current code. It takes large steps to increase the ability of low-income people and people of color by lowering barriers to opening businesses that meet the needs of their communities and adding affordable housing options in wealthier parts of the city, among other things.

However, the zoning falls short of many of the laudable goals and metrics it sets for itself by retaining single-family exclusive districts and low intensity development. We believe that the council should remove single-family exclusive districts and the lowest intensity zone (labeled as Neighborhood I) because this type of development:

• Limits equity and housing affordability: single-family exclusive zoning is historically racist and classist, and was used to keep black families from moving to white neighborhoods. Allowing multi-family units alongside single-family ones can improve opportunity for affordable housing and diversity of both race and income levels in our community .(https://www.planning.org/blog/9228712/grappling-with-the-racist-legacy-of-zoning/)
• Damages environmental sustainability: the proposed code does encourage more environmentally sustainable development in parts of the city (mostly concentrated near the Hudson and South of Lansingburgh), but allowing low intensity and single use development areas still causes environmental harm. Additional vehicle trips and related pollution, energy inefficient buildings, and more inflict harm on all of us, whether we live in these typically more wealthy areas or not. (https://gppreview.com/2019/11/05/green-houses-greenhouse-gases-exclusionary-zoning-climate-catastrophe/) 
• Causes traffic deaths and injuries: the code has a number of provisions to encourage the improvement of the safety of people walking, biking, or rolling. However, it does not strike at the root cause of most traffic violence: the necessity to drive for nearly every trip created by low intensity and exclusively single-family development. The more vehicles on our streets and trips taken, the more traffic deaths and injuries we see. Reducing this type of development will save lives. (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.93.9.1541)
• Creates fiscal imbalance and inequality: more compact development improves the city’s financial resilience by collecting more tax revenues per acre, and allowing us to build and maintain cheaper infrastructure and services per capita. By keeping single-family exclusive and low intensity zones, the more dense, typically lower-income neighborhoods will continue to subsidize the lower-density, typically wealthier areas in the city’s budget, increasing the cost of living for renters and encouraging displacement. (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020)

An additional issue is that while the proposed code encourages more mixed use development in more of the city – which increases the quality of life (convenient to grab something from the corner store) and reduces pollution (no need for a vehicle trip) – the code then undercuts this effort by including a buffer around convenience stores so that two stores can’t be across the street (or even down the block) from each other. This means that if the store closest to you doesn’t have the item you need, you may end up walking quite far, which encourages people to simply drive to the store. It also has the effect of granting those store owners who may not be great neighbors something of a local monopoly – making it impossible for competition to offer an alternative. 

Given the social, environmental, health, and fiscal cost of single-family exclusive and low intensity development, it is incumbent on the council to remove this kind of zoning from Troy’s zoning code. The cost of inaction – and half measures – are real and born by the most vulnerable of us. We, the undersigned, call for the Troy City Council to remove the exclusionary and harmful single-family exclusive use districts and the lowest density zones, as well as the convenience store buffer from the proposed code.

Stephen Maples

Mark Speedy

Renee Rhodes

Chel Miller

Anthony Olivares

Peyton Whitney

Dan Phiffer

Dylan Rees

Dara S.

David Banks

Line Kristine Henriksen

Ethan Warren

Rafael varela

Xan Plymale

Kristoph DiMaria

Caroline Nagy

Jack Letourneau

Rindle Glick

Rhea Drysdale

Daniel Graham

Marie H.

Zachary Guthrie

Tonight, RPM goes global. Strikes and protests have rocked the country of France in response to President Macron’s reform of the social pension system, lifting the country’s retirement age and robbing millions of their retirement. We will hear from Emre, an activist based in Paris with La France Insoumise, about these strikes & protests, and what the Left can do to fight Macron and the far-Right. Plus, we speak to Maia and Erl from NYC-DSA’s Healthcare Working Group on the ongoing organizing to bring universal healthcare to the United States - starting right here in New York. Learn more and RSVP for the April 15 bike ride and rally for the New York Health Act: https://www.mobilize.us/ourrevolution/event/552943/. 

In this interview with Dr. Wideline Seraphin, we discuss the decolonizing power of Haitian spirituality and the unique literacies of a group of Haitian transnational girls, discovering the necessity of including the whole self – mental, emotional, physical, social, & spiritual – in the work for liberation. Dr. Wideline Seraphin is Assistant Professor of Literacy Studies at UTA. Her research centers on the literate lives of Black immigrant girls, critical media literacy, and teacher education.