Byzantine economy run along socialist lines?

[spartan]

I was reading the second volume of John Julius Norwich's Byzantium trilogy of books and in it he said that the Byzantine economy was run along strictly socialist lines!

He said that any capitalism in the economy was heavily regulated by the civil bureaucracy which ran the state, and that any private sectors of the economy were liable to state intervention, which was apparently frequent.

I would say that there are certain similarities to Byzantium and Stalin's autocratic USSR (one man, bureaucracy and an all powerful state) but there were still private sectors in the Byzantine economy (unlike the USSR).

Surely then this isn't socialism but an example of a mixed economy where the state has reserved the right to intervene if it suited it's needs?

What do you think?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_economy

[More Fire for the People]

The Byzantine economy was at the same, if not higher, level of productive forces. If the definition of ownership of land by the state then feudal England was socialist because the Lords, who are part of the civil society / state, owned the land. Obvious the writer is some kind of Orientalist.

[Kwisatz Haderach]

It is absurdly anachronistic to talk about "socialism" or "capitalism" in feudal, pre-industrial economies. It's like talking about the Byzantine Empire's strategies for tank warfare.

The state, as we know it, simply did not exist in the Middle Ages. The level of local autonomy, even in the most autocratic empires, was extreme by modern standards. There was no police, borders were often vague and undefined, and most "states" (which is to say, most royal families) were in constant competition with all sorts of other political entities and institutions (churches, guilds, local nobles) with overlapping authority over the same geographical area. Written laws were few and far between, and the exercise of "state" authority was arbitrary, uneven, and inconsistent. Western Europe was pretty much like Somalia today in terms of state authority, and the Byzantine Empire was probably something more akin to Iraq.

Also, there was essentially no difference between state power and land ownership - if you owned a piece of land, that gave you the right to determine the laws there (literally "the law of the land"). So it's difficult to say whether a medieval aristocrat should be called a state agent or a private landowner.

[Schrödinger's Cat]

if you owned a piece of land, that gave you the right to determine the laws there (literally "the law of the land")Hilariously, an-caps want to return to feudalism under a different name. :confused:

Socialism is based in the rejection of wealth acquisition from private property and supports public ownership over resources (at least initially - there is a discrepancy between the "collectivists" and "individualists"), whether you look at mutualism, Marxism, or any branch of ideology. I would really like to see how much of the public was involved in the decision-making processes of the day. And I can guarantee you people were benefiting from land ownership.

[Yehuda Stern]

This is exactly what happens when people decide that nationalization equals socialism.

[PigmerikanMao]

The state retained the monopoly of issuing coinage, and had the power to intervene in other important sectors of the economy. It exercised formal control over interest rates, and set the parameters for the activity of the guilds and corporations in Constantinople, in which the state has a special interest (e.g the sale of silk) or whose members exercised a profession that was of importance for trade. The emperor and his officials intervened at times of crisis to ensure the provisioning of the capital and to keep down the price of cereals. For this reason, the empire strictly controlled both the internal circulation of commodities, and the international trade (certainly in intent; to a considerable degree also in practice). Additionally, the state often collected part of the surplus in the form of tax, and put it back into circulation, through redistribution in the form of salaries to state officials of the army, or in the form of investment in public works, buildings, or works of art.

That sounds like a pretty basic economy in which the government only intervenes for the interests of preserving capital (regulating monopolies, etc). Although I can see how this could be considered socialist by the standards of the time, these are simply basic controls by today's standards.

~PMao :laugh: