>When they say "history is a history of class struggles" it is clear
>from what follows that they are treating the European territory as a
>unit for the history they refer to.
It begs the question of when "the European territory" became a "unit" for the history of class struggles.
>Ancient Greece is not identical with capitalist Europe, but it has a
>historical relationship to capitalist Europe that is like a kernel
>to a flower.
You are much more Hegelian than I am. A kernel does not necessarily flower, a fetus may become spontaneously aborted even without an intervention by an abortionist.
Why should you assume that ancient Athens has a closer historical relationship with our contemporary Sweden than Egypt? Why should you believe that Thucydides has a more intimate historical relationship with Oliver Cromwell or Max Weber than Frederick Douglass or Saddam Hussein?
>Rome and Middle Ages are intermediate phases. Marx and Engels do
>recognize a connection between the class struggles of ancient Greece
>and the class struggles of capitalism, as all part of a history with
>some unity ( relative to other areas with their own histories of
>class struggles).
A connection, yes, but of what kind? Not an unfolding of Reason, surely?
>"Class struggles" is not synonmous with contingent process. Marx and
>Engels intend to elucidate laws of historical development by this,
>with "laws" referring to determined, not chance, elements of history.
Whether or not laws (e.g., M-C-M') emerge is a matter of chance; once emergent, laws exert their powers. I refer you to Alan Carling or Jim Farmelant. As Stephen Jay Gould notes, the emergence of the species to which both of us belong was contingent. Unless you believe in Providence, it is self-evident that the birth of human beings was not a matter of necessity.
>They want to indicate that there _was_ some tendency in the long
>term to modern European capitalism from the class struggles of
>ancient Greece.
If Marx & Engels do, they are following an irrationally teleological husk of Hegelian philosophy of history. In the main, however, the _rational kernel_ of Marx & Engels does not locate a tendency to develop into "modern European capitalism" in the class struggles of ancient Greece. It was not determined during the class struggles of ancient Athens that denizens from the area which has come to be called Africa were destined to become chattel slaves toiling on the cotton plantations in the American South in order to fuel the development of industrial capitalism.
>When they say that history is a history of class struggles, they do
>not mean that history is series of accidental and unconnected
>events, but something of the opposite
History is neither a series of accidental & unconnected events nor its opposite.
Yoshie