![]() One of the reconstructions of the Comitia Centuriata features 18 centuriae of cavalry, and 170 centuriae of infantry divided into five classes by wealth, plus 5 centuriae of support personnel called adsidui, one of which represented the proletarii. This assembly, which usually met on the Campus Martius to discuss public policy, designated the military duties of Roman citizens. Late Roman historians such as Livy vaguely described the Comitia Centuriata as a popular assembly of early Rome composed of centuriae, voting units representing classes of citizens according to wealth. Officially, propertyless citizens were called capite censi because they were "persons registered not as to their property.but simply as to their existence as living individuals, primarily as heads ( caput) of a family." Secessio plebis, a form of protest in ancient Rome where the plebeians would leave the city, causing the economy to collapseĪlthough included in the Comitia Centuriata ( Centuriate Assembly), proletarii were the lowest class, largely deprived of voting rights. ![]() ![]() Roman citizen-soldiers paid for their own horses and arms, and fought without payment for the commonwealth, but the only military contribution of a proletarius was his children, the future Roman citizens who could colonize conquered territories. Those who owned 11,000 assēs (coins) or fewer fell below the lowest category for military service, and their children- prōlēs (offspring)-were listed instead of property hence the name proletarius (producer of offspring). The name presumably originated with the census, which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a register of citizens and their property, which determined their military duties and voting privileges. The proletarii constituted a social class of Roman citizens who owned little or no property. O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.Further information: Constitution of the Roman Republic Get The Stewardship of Wealth: Successful Private Wealth Management for Investors and Their Advisors, + Website now with the O’Reilly learning platform. Smaller enterprises were generally permitted to remain in private hands. Instead, Europe found a “middle way.” Socialist governments dominated the landscape for many years after World War II and those governments tended to nationalize not the entire economy but only the most important industry sectors-especially banks, infrastructure (transportation, communications, and energy) and large employers. In Western Europe, pure communism in the Marxist sense was never adopted. Unfortunately, once the USSR's simple industrial society found it necessary to evolve into a vastly more complex postindustrial society (to compete with the United States), top-down command strategies proved to be no match for bottom-up free market strategies, and the USSR went the way of the dodo bird. And for a while, this worked magnificently, as Russia evolved from a backward, peasant society into the second most powerful country in the world in less than 30 years (1917–1945). Such a revolution actually did occur in Russia, and the state did in fact ban private property. When this happened, the workers would seize control of the government, ban private ownership, and all profits would thereafter accrue to the state, which would redistribute the wealth far more broadly. Marx famously believed that conflicts between the middle-class owners of productive enterprises (the “bourgeoisie”) and the workers in those enterprises (the “proletariat”) would result in the collapse of capitalism.
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