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The Slave Mode of Production

The genesis of capitalism has been the object of many studies inspired by historical materialism, ever since Marx devoted celebrated chapters of Capital to it. The genesis of feudalism, by contrast, has remained largely unstudied within the same tradition: as a distinctive type of transition to a new mode of production, it has never been integrated into the general corpus of Marxist theory. Yet, as we shall see, its importance for the global pattern of history is perhaps scarcely less than that of the transition to capitalism. Gibbon’s solemn judgment on the fall of Rome and the end of Antiquity emerges, paradoxically, perhaps for the first time in its full truth today: ‘a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the Earth.’¹ By contrast with the ‘cumulative’ character of the advent of capitalism, the genesis of feudalism in Europe derived from a ‘catastrophic’, convergent collapse of two distinct anterior modes of production, the recombination of whose disintegrated elements released the feudal synthesis proper, which therefore always retained a hybrid character. The dual predecessors of the feudal mode of production were, of course, the decomposing slave mode of production on whose foundations the whole enormous edifice of the Roman Empire had once been constructed, and the distended and deformed primitive modes of production of the Germanic invaders which survived in their new homelands, after the barbarian conquests. These two radically distinct worlds had undergone a slow disintegration and creeping interpenetration in the last centuries of Antiquity.

To see how this had come about, it is necessary to look backwards at the original matrix of the whole civilization of the classical world. Graeco-Roman Antiquity had always constituted a universe centred on cities. The splendour and confidence of the early Hellenic polis and the later Roman Republic, which dazzled so many subsequent epochs, represented a meridian of urban polity and culture that was never to be equalled for another millennium. Philosophy, science, poetry, history, architecture, sculpture; law, administration, currency, taxation; suffrage, debate, enlistment – all these emerged or developed to levels of unexampled strength and sophistication. Yet at the same time this frieze of city civilization always had something of the effect of a trompe l’oeil facade, on its posterity. For behind this urban culture and polity lay no urban economy in any way commensurate with it: on the contrary, the material wealth which sustained its intellectual and civic vitality was drawn overwhelmingly from the countryside. The classical world was massively, unalterably rural in its basic quantitative proportions. Agriculture represented throughout its history the absolutely dominant domain of production, invariably furnishing the main fortunes of the cities themselves. The Graeco-Roman towns were never predominantly communities of manufacturers, traders or craftsmen: they were, in origin and principle, urban congeries of landowners. Every municipal order from democratic Athens to oligarchic Sparta or senatorial Rome, was essentially dominated by agrarian proprietors. Their income derived from corn, oil and wine – the three great staples of the Ancient World – produced on estates and farms outside the perimeter of the physical city itself. Within it, manufactures remained few and rudimentary: the range of normal urban commodities never extended much beyond textiles, pottery, furniture and glassware. Technique was simple, demand was limited and transport was exorbitantly expensive. The result was that manufactures in Antiquity characteristically developed not by increasing concentration, as in later epochs, but by decontraction and dispersal, since distance dictated relative costs of production rather than the division of labour. A graphic idea of the comparative weight of the rural and urban economies in the classical world is provided by the respective fiscal revenues yielded by each in the Roman Empire of the 4th century A.D., when city trade was finally subjected to an imperial levy for the first time by Constantine’s collatio lustralis: income from this duty in the towns never amounted to more than 5 per cent of the land-tax.²

Naturally, the statistical distribution of output in the two sectors did not suffice to subtract economic significance from the cities of Antiquity. For in a uniformly agricultural world, the gross profits of urban exchange might be very small: but the net superiority they could yield to any given agrarian economy over any other might still be decisive. The precondition of this distinctive feature of classical civilization was its coastal character.³ Graeco-Roman Antiquity was quintessentially Mediterranean, in its inmost structure. For the inter-local trade which linked it together could only proceed by water: marine transport was the sole viable means of commodity exchange over medium or long distances. The colossal importance of the sea for trade can be judged from the simple fact that it was cheaper in the epoch of Diocletian to ship wheat from Syria to Spain – one end of the Mediterranean to the other – than to cart it 75 miles over land.⁴ It is thus no accident that the Aegean zone – a labyrinth of islands, harbours and promontories – should have been the first home of the city-state; that Athens, its greatest exemplar, should have founded its commercial fortunes on shipping; that when Greek colonization spread to the Near East in the Hellenistic epoch, the port of Alexandria should have become the major city of Egypt, first maritime capital in its history; and that eventually Rome in its turn, upstream on the Tiber, should have become a coastal metropolis. Water was the irreplaceable medium of communication and trade which rendered possible urban growth of a concentration and sophistication far in advance of the rural interior behind it. The sea was the conductor of the improbable radiance of Antiquity. The specific combination of town and country that defined the classical world was in the last resort only operational because of the lake at the centre of it. The Mediterranean is the only large inland sea on the circumference of the earth: it alone offered marine speed of transport with terrestrial shelter from highest wind or wave, for a major geographical zone. The unique position of classical Antiquity within universal history cannot be separated from this physical privilege.

The Mediterranean, in other words, provided the necessary geographical setting for Ancient civilization. Its historical content and novelty, however, lay in the social foundation of the relationship between town and country within it. The slave mode of production was the decisive invention of the Graeco-Roman world, which provided the ultimate basis both for its accomplishments and its eclipse. The originality of this mode of production must be underlined. Slavery itself had existed in various forms throughout Near Eastern Antiquity (as it was later to do elsewhere in Asia): but it had always been one juridically impure condition – frequently taking the form of debt bondage or penal labour – among other mixed types of servitude, forming merely a very low category in an amorphous continuum of dependence and unfreedom that stretched well up the social scale above it.⁵ Nor was it ever the predominant type of surplus extraction in these pre-Hellenic monarchies: it was a residual phenomenon that existed on the edges of the main rural workforce. The Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian Empires – riverine states built on intensive, irrigated agriculture that contrasted with the light, dry-soil farming of the later Mediterranean world – were not slave economies, and their legal systems lacked any sharply separate conception of chattel property. It was the Greek city-states that first rendered slavery absolute in form and dominant in extent, thereby transforming it from an ancillary facility into a systematic mode of production. The classic Hellenic world never, of course, rested exclusively on the use of slave-labour. Free peasants, dependent tenants, and urban artisans always coexisted with slaves, in varying combinations, in the different city-states of Greece. Their own internal or external development, moreover, could alter the proportions between the two markedly from one century to the next: every concrete social formation is always a specific combination of different modes of production, and those of Antiquity were no exception.⁶ But the dominant mode of production in classical Greece, which governed the complex articulation of each local economy and gave its imprint to the whole civilization of the city-state, was that of slavery. This was to be true of Rome as well. The Ancient World as a whole was never continuously or ubiquitously marked by the predominance of slave-labour. But its great classical epochs, when the civilization of Antiquity flowered – Greece in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. and Rome from the 2nd century B.C. to the 2nd century A.D. – were those in which slavery was massive and general, amidst other labour systems. The solstice of classical urban culture always also witnessed the zenith of slavery; and the decline of one, in Hellenistic Greece or Christian Rome, was likewise invariably marked by the setting of the other.

The overall proportions of the slave population in the original homelands of the slave mode of production, post-archaic Greece, are not possible to calculate exactly, in the absence of any reliable statistics. The most reputable estimates vary greatly, but a recent assessment is that the ratio of slaves to free citizens in Periclean Athens was about 3:2;⁷ the relative number of slaves in Chios, Aegina, or Corinth was at various times probably even larger; while the helot population always greatly outnumbered the citizenry of Sparta. In the 4th century B.C., Aristotle could remark as a matter of course that ‘states are bound to contain slaves in large numbers’, while Xenophon drew up a scheme to restore the fortunes of Athens by which ‘the state would possess public slaves, until there were three for every Athenian citizen’.⁸ In classical Greece, slaves were thus for the first time habitually employed in crafts, industry and agriculture beyond the household scale. At the same time, while the use of slavery became general, its nature correspondingly became absolute: it was no longer one relative form of servitude among many, along a gradual continuum, but a polar condition of complete loss of freedom, juxtaposed against a new and untrammelled liberty. For it was precisely the formation of a limpidly demarcated slave sub-population that conversely lifted the citizenry of the Greek cities to hitherto unknown heights of conscious juridical freedom. Hellenic liberty and slavery were indivisible: each was the structural condition of the other, in a dyadic system which had no precedent or equivalent in the social hierarchies of the Near Eastern Empires, ignorant alike of either the notion of free citizenship or servile property.⁹ This profound juridical change was itself the social and ideological correlate of the economic ‘miracle’ wrought by the advent of the slave mode of production.

The civilization of classical Antiquity represented, as we have seen, the anomalous supremacy of town over country within an overwhelmingly rural economy: antithesis of the early feudal world which succeeded it. The condition of possibility of this metropolitan grandeur in the absence of municipal industry was the existence of slave-labour in the countryside: for it alone could free a landowning class so radically from its rural background that it could be transmuted into an essentially urban citizenry that yet still drew its fundamental wealth from the soil. Aristotle expressed the resultant social ideology of late classical Greece with his casual prescription: ‘Those who cultivate the land should ideally be slaves, not all recruited from one people nor spirited in temperament (so as to be industrious in work and immune to rebellion), or as a second best barbarian bondsmen of a similar character.’¹⁰ It was characteristic of the fully developed slave mode of production in the Roman countryside that even management functions were delegated to slave supervisors and bailiffs, putting to work slave gangs in the fields.¹¹ The slave estate, unlike the feudal manor, permitted a permanent disjuncture between residence and revenue; the surplus product that provided the fortunes of the possessing class could be extracted without its presence on the land. The nexus binding the immediate rural producer to the urban appropriator of his product was not a customary one, and was not mediated through the locality of the land itself (as in later adscriptive serfdom). It was, on the contrary, typically the universal, commercial act of commodity purchase realized in the towns, where the slave trade had its typical markets. The slave labour of classical Antiquity thus embodied two contradictory attributes in whose unity lay the secret of the paradoxical urban precocity of the Graeco-Roman world. On the one hand, slavery represented the most radical rural degradation of labour imaginable – the conversion of men themselves into inert means of production by their deprivation of every social right and their legal assimilation to beasts of burden: in Roman theory, the agricultural slave was designated an instrumentum vocale, the speaking tool, one grade away from the livestock that constituted an instrumentum semi-vocale, and two from the implement which was an instrumentum mutum. On the other hand, slavery was simultaneously the most drastic urban commercialization of labour conceivable: the reduction of the total person of the labourer to a standard object of sale and purchase, in metropolitan markets of commodity exchange. The destination of the numerical bulk of slaves in classical Antiquity was agrarian labour (this was not so everywhere or always, but was in aggregate the case): their normal assemblage, allocation and dispatch was effected from the marts of the cities, where many of them were also, of course, employed. Slavery was thus the economic hinge that joined town and country together, to the inordinate profit of the polis. It both maintained the captive agriculture that permitted the dramatic differentiation of an urban ruling class from its rural origins, and promoted the inter-city trade that was the complement of this agriculture in the Mediterranean. Slaves, among other advantages, were an eminently movable commodity in a world where transport bottle­necks were central to the structure of the whole economy.¹² They could be shifted without difficulty from one region to another; they could be trained in a number of different skills; in epochs of abundant supply, moreover, they acted to keep down costs where hired labourers or independent craftsmen were at work, because of the alternative labour they provided. The wealth and ease of the propertied urban class of classical Antiquity – above all, that of Athens and Rome at their zenith – rested on the broad surplus yielded by the pervasive presence of this labour system, that left none other untouched.

The price paid for this brutal and lucrative device was, nevertheless, a high one. Slave relations of production determined certain insurmountable limits to ancient forces of production, in the classical epoch. Above all, they ultimately tended to paralyze productivity in both agriculture and industry. There were, of course, certain technical improvements in the economy of classical Antiquity. No mode of production is ever devoid of material progress in its ascendant phase, and the slave mode of production in its prime registered certain important advances in the economic equipment deployed within the framework of its new social division of labour. Among them can be accounted the spread of more profitable wine and oil cultures; the introduction of rotary mills for grain and an amelioration in the quality of bread. Screw-presses were designed, glass-blowing developed and heating-systems refined; combination cropping, botanical knowledge and field drainage probably also advanced.¹³ There was thus no simple, terminal halt to technique in the classical world. But at the same time, no major cluster of inventions ever occurred to propel the Ancient economy forward to qualitatively new forces of production. Nothing is more striking, in any comparative retrospect, than the overall technological stagnation of Antiquity.¹⁴ It is enough to contrast the record of its eight centuries of existence from the rise of Athens to the fall of Rome, with the equivalent span of the feudal mode of production which succeeded it, to perceive the difference between a relatively static and dynamic economy. More dramatic still, of course, was the contrast within the classical world itself between its cultural and superstructural vitality and its infrastructural hebetude: the manual technology of Antiquity was exiguous and primitive not merely by the external standards of a posterior history, but above all by the measure of its own intellectual firmament – which in most critical respects always remained far higher than that of the Middle Ages to come. There is little doubt that it was the structure of the slave economy that was fundamentally responsible for this extraordinary disproportion. Aristotle, to later ages the greatest and most representative thinker of Antiquity, tersely summed up its social principle with his dictum: ‘The best State will not make a manual worker a citizen, for the bulk of manual labour today is slave or foreign.’¹⁵ Such a State represented the ideal norm of the slave mode of production, nowhere realized in any actual social formation in the Ancient World. But its logic was always immanently present in the nature of the classical economies.

Once manual labour became deeply associated with loss of liberty, there was no free social rationale for invention. The stifling effects of slavery on technique were not a simple function of the low average productivity of slave-labour itself, or even of the volume of its use: they subtly affected all forms of labour. Marx sought to express the type of action which they exerted in a celebrated, if cryptic theoretical formula: ‘In all forms of society it is a determinate production and its relations which assign every other production and its relations their rank and influence. It is a general illumination in which all other colours are plunged and which modifies their specific tonalities. It is a special ether which defines the specific gravity of everything found within it.’¹⁶ Agricultural slaves themselves had notoriously little incentive to perform their economic tasks competently and conscientiously, once surveillance was relaxed; their optimal employment was in compact vineyards or olive-groves. On the other hand, many slave craftsmen and some slave cultivators were often notably skilled, within the limits of prevailing techniques. The structural constraint of slavery on technology thus lay not so much in a direct intra-economic causality, although this was important in its own right, as in the mediate social ideology which enveloped the totality of manual work in the classical world, contaminating hired and even independent labour with the stigma of debasement.¹⁷ Slave-labour was not in general less productive than free, indeed in some fields it was more so; but it set the pace of both, so that no great divergence ever developed between the two, in a common economic space that excluded the application of culture to technique for inventions. The divorce of material work from the sphere of liberty was so rigorous that the Greeks had no word in their language even to express the concept of labour, either as a social function or as personal conduct. Both agricultural and artisanal work were essentially deemed ‘adaptations’ to nature, not transformations of it; they were forms of service. Plato too implicitly barred artisans from the polis altogether: for him ‘labour remains alien to any human value and in certain respects seems even to be the antithesis of what is essential to man’.¹⁸ Technique as premeditated, progressive instrumentation of the natural world by man was incompatible with wholesale assimilation of men to the natural world as its ‘speaking instruments’. Productivity was fixed by the perennial routine of the instrumentum vocale, which devalued all labour by precluding any sustained concern with devices to save it. The typical path of expansion in Antiquity, for any given state, was thus always a ‘lateral’ one – geographical conquest – not economic advance. Classical civilization was in consequence inherently colonial in character: the cellular city-state invariably reproduced itself, in phases of ascent, by settlement and war. Plunder, tribute and slaves were the central objects of aggrandizement, both means and ends to colonial expansion. Military power was more closely locked to economic growth than in perhaps any other mode of production, before or since, because the main single origin of slave-labour was normally captured prisoners of war, while the raising of free urban troops for war depended on the maintenance of production at home by slaves; battle-fields provided the manpower for cornfields, and vice-versa, captive labourers permitted the creation of citizen armies. Three great cycles of imperial expansion can be traced in classical Antiquity, whose successive and variant features structured the total pattern of the Graeco-Roman world: Athenian, Macedonian and Roman. Each represented a certain solution to the political and organizational problems of overseas conquest, which was integrated and surpassed by the next, without the underlying bases of a common urban civilization ever being transgressed.

1. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, 1896 (Bury edition), p. 1. Gibbon repented of this sentence in a manuscript note for a projected revision of his book, restricting its reference to the countries of Europe only, not those of the world. ‘Have Asia and Africa, from Japan to Morocco, any feeling or memory of the Roman Empire?’, he asked (op. cit., p. xxxv). He wrote too soon to see how the rest of the world was indeed to ‘feel’ the impact of Europe, and with it of the ultimate consequences of the ‘revolution’ he recorded; neither remote Japan nor adjacent Morocco were to be immune from the history it inaugurated.

2. A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, Vol. I, p. 465. The tax was paid by negotiatores, or virtually all those engaged in commercial production of any sort in the towns, merchants and craftsmen alike. Despite its minimal returns, it proved intensely oppressive and unpopular to the urban population, so fragile was the city economy proper.

3. Max Weber was the first scholar to give full emphasis to this fundamental fact, in his two great, forgotten studies, ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ and ‘Die Sozialen Gründe des Untergangs der Antiken Kultur’. See Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Tübingen 1924, pp. 4 ff., 292 ff.

4. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, II, pp. 841–2.

5. M. I. Finley, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, VI, 1963–4, pp. 237–8.

6. Throughout this text, the term ‘social formation’ will generally be preferred to that of ‘society’. In Marxist usage, the purport of the concept of social formation is precisely to underline the plurality and heterogeneity of possible modes of production within any given historical and social totality. Uncritical repetition of the term ‘society’, conversely, all too often conveys the assumption of an inherent unity of economy, polity or culture within a historical ensemble, when in fact this simple unity and identity does not exist. Social formations, unless specified otherwise, are thus here always concrete combinations of different modes of production, organized under the dominance of one of them. For this distinction, see Nicos Poulantzas, Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociales, Paris 1968, pp. 10–11. Having made this clear, it would be pedantry to avoid the familiar term ‘society’ altogether, and no attempt will be made to do so here.

7. A. Andrewes, Greek Society, London 1967, p. 155, who reckons that the total slave labour-force was in the region of 80–100,000 in the 5th century, when the citizenry numbered perhaps some 45,000. This order of magnitude probably commands a wider consensus than lower or higher estimates. But all modern histories of Antiquity are hampered by basic lack of reliable information as to the size of populations and social classes. Jones could compute the proportion of slaves to citizens in the 4th century, when the population of Athens had fallen, at 1:1 on the basis of the city’s corn imports: Athenian Democracy, Oxford 1957, pp. 76–9. Finley, on the other hand, has argued that it may have been as high as 3 or 4:1 in peak periods of both the 5th and 4th centuries: ‘Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?’, Historia, VIII, 1959, pp. 58–9. The most comprehensive, if defective, modern monograph on the subject of ancient slavery, W. L. Westermann’s The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Philadelphia 1955, p. 9, arrives at something like the same gross figure as that accepted by Andrewes and Finley, of some 60–80,000 slaves at the outset of the Peloponnesian War.

8. Aristotle, Politics, VII, iv, 4; Xenophon, Ways and Means, IV, 17.

9. Westerman, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, pp. 42–3; Finley, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom’, pp. 236–9.

10. Politics, VII, ix, 9.

11. The very ubiquity of slave-labour at the height of the Roman Republic and Principate had the paradoxical effect of promoting certain categories of slaves to responsible administrative or professional position; which in turn facilitated manumission and subsequent integration of the sons of skilled freedmen into the citizen class. This process was not so much a humanitarian palliation of classical slavery, as another index of the radical abstention of the Roman ruling class from any form of productive labour whatever, even of an executive type.

12. Weber, ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, pp. 5–6.

13. See especially F. Kiechle, Sklavenarbeit und Technischer Fortschritt im römischen Reich, Wiesbaden 1969, pp. 12–114; L. A. Moritz, Grain-Mills and Flour in Classical Antiquity, Oxford 1958; K. D. White, Roman Farming, London 1970, pp. 123–4, 147–72, 188–91, 260–1, 452.

14. The general problem is forcibly put, as usual, by Finley, ‘Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World’, Economic History Review, XVIII, No. 1, 1955, pp. 29–45. For the specific record of the Roman Empire, see F. W. Walbank, The Awful Revolution, Liverpool 1969, pp. 40–1, 46–7, 108–10.

15. Politics, III, iv, 2.

16. Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomle, Berlin 1953, p. 27.

17. Finley points out that the Greek term penia, customarily opposed to ploutos as ‘poverty’ to ‘wealth’, in fact had the wider pejorative meaning of ‘drudgery’ or ‘compulsion to toil’, and could cover even prosperous small-holders, whose labour fell under the same cultural shadow: M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, London 1973, p. 41.

18. J. P. Vernant, Myth et Pensée chez les Grecs, Paris 1965, pp. 191, 197–9, 217. Vernant’s two essays, ‘Prométhée et la Fonction Technique’ and ‘Travail et Nature dans la Grèce Ancienne’ provide a subtle analysis of the distinctions between poiesis and praxis, and the relations of the cultivator, craftsman and money-lender to the polis. Alexandre Koyré once tried to argue that the technical stagnation of Greek civilization was not due to the presence of slavery or the devaluation of labour, but to the absence of physics, rendered impossible by its inability to apply mathematical measurement to the terrestrial world: ‘Du Monde de l’À Peu Près à l’Univers de la Précision’, Critique, September 1948, pp. 806–8. By doing so, he explicitly hoped to avoid a sociological explanation of the phenomenon. But as he himself implicitly admitted elsewhere, the Middle Ages equally knew no physics, yet produced a dynamic technology: it was not the itinerary of science, but the course of the relations of production, which printed out the fate of technique.