Capitalism in the Ancient World

8/12/2019 Capitalism in the Ancient World

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MIA > Archive > Kautsky

Karl Kautsky

Capitalism in the

Ancient World

(March 1912)

Source:Giuseppe Salvioli, Der Kapitalismus im Altertum.

Studien ber die rmische Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Stuttgart:

J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1922.

Translated from French:Karl KautskyOriginal ed.:Le capitalisme dans le monde antique, tudes sur

lhistoire de lconomie romaine, Paris, Giard, 1906

().

Translated into English:Daniel Gaido.Marked up:Einde OCallaghanfor the Marxists Internet Archive.

Among the modern sciences, economic history is one

of those whose field of research has expanded most

rapidly, especially because of the rapidly growing

wealth of primary materials. In spite of that, the

picture we have of the economy of antiquity is still

very vague and quite controversial. The blame for that

should be placed less upon the lack of informationabout the past than upon the deficient knowledge of

the present. Only by researching the environment

closest and most accessible to us can we acquire the

knowledge and methods to enable us to find our way

in fields lying beyond it. We couldnt have the faintest
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idea about the chemical composition of the stars if we

were to shrink from acquainting ourselves with the

component elements of our terrestrial globe. Only

through a thorough investigation of the earth can we

reach the preconditions for researching the starworld. It would be equally impossible to reconstruct

the physical appearance of extinct species from the

meagre amounts of bone remains discovered if we

were to have misgivings, in order to research their

anatomy and physiology, about studying with the

greatest zeal the contemporary animal species.

That is also true of economic history. It is

impossible to comprehend the economic relations of

the past and understand all their connections clearly

as long as people have scruples about understanding

the present mode of production in all its peculiarities

and ruthlessly laying bare its laws of movement and

development. Those scruples characterize bourgeois

economy in contradistinction from scientific

socialism. They need not be conscious, intentional

considerations. But no matter how unconscious theymight be, their obstructive effects arc no less

powerful.

Those generalizations hold true naturally only for

the practical problems of the present, but that is

enough to make more difficult the research of

problems of the past, far removed from the field of

modern oppositions of interests. Indeed they make it

more difficult, the more remote that past and thesparser and ambiguous its remnants. Only to those

prejudices can be ascribed the fact that Karl Bchers

conception of economic development, rather than

Marxs, can dominate completely the field of


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economic history, although the former is but a bad

reproduction of the latter.

Economic history is for Marx a history of the

development of the modes of production. Thatdevelopment assumes stable forms, which arc

relatively easy to determine, as far as the production

technique is concerned. However, the situation is

entirely different regarding the forms of production,

insofar as they do not represent the relation of men to

nature, but the relations into which people enter with

one another in order to remain masters of nature

that is to say, the economic relations. These last

relations are of course very strongly determined by

the technique. For instance, they naturally can be

completely different in a place where a large railway

network exists, than in a place where the only means

of locomotion of the people arc their own legs. But the

economic relations are not identical with the

technical. If the latter arc determined and easily

recognizable, the former arc fluid, and all the more

difficult to recognize, the more production develops,the larger the producing societies, the more diverse

their technique, and the older their history, because

in the course of their development they increasingly

mix up and combine old, antiquated forms with new

ones.

It is not easy to find an Ariadnes thread allowing us

to find our way in that labyrinth. That is most nearly

feasible with the help of the guiding lines provided tous by Marx.

As the earliest mode of production Marx recognized

primitive communism. People lived together in little

groups, in which everybody worked and owned in


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common the land, the most important means of

production, in so far as it is permissible to speak

about clear property relations in such primeval

conditions. Work was carried out according to social

customs, projects and agreements. The productsbelonged to society, and were likewise distributed

according to social rules and agreements among its

members; they remained within the society that

produced them, and were consumed by it.

The development of technique leads the separate

societies to produce surpluses above what they need

for their own consumption. Simultaneously develops

also the process of exchange: each group comes into

closer and more frequent contact with other ones,

living in other places, under different conditions, and

producing different products. Thereby the conditions

arise for the exchange of surpluses and the widening

of the sphere of products consumed by each group.

Production for self-consumption begins to shrink

and production for exchange acquires an ever greaterimportance. But thus begins also the displacement of

social production by private production. Private

property in the products of consumption expands

continually, and with it develops also private property

in the means of production, finally reaching also the

most important of them, the land. The free labourer

generally possesses at that stage his own means of

production and disposes of his produce, which he

exchanges for someone elses. Everybody produces anever greater quantity of products that he doesnt need

himself, and consumes others that he doesnt

produce, but has to exchange for his own products.

But with private property in the means of production

arises also the possibility of individual workers losing


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their means of production and becoming propertyless

proletarians, or even private property themselves, i.e.

slaves in a private undertaking. Finally arises also the

possibility for some individuals to appropriate and

accumulate the means of production of many othersin order to exploit them, either directly, by buying

bound workers, or indirectly, by forcing free

propertyless workers to hand over to them part of

their production, for instance through shared

tenancies.

This accumulation of wealth can become a mass

phenomenon even before the appearance of the

capitalist mode of production; a sort of primitive

accumulation of capital, as Marx called it, through

different forms of violence, especially war. Already at

the beginning of historical times, with the

Babylonians and the Egyptians, we find from time to

time such mass accumulations. The Roman army

offered the most gigantic example of this

phenomenon in antiquity, as Salviolis book clearly

shows.

Each one of these accumulations always ended up,

sooner or later, with the decline of the state in which

they took place. The separation of the mass of the

workers from their means of production finally led to

the paralysis of economic and political life, to the

downfall of the state that plundered its more

barbarous neighbouring peoples, living under more

primitive conditions. That was the end of every higherculture of antiquity about which some historical

records have been preserved, in the basins of the

Euphrates and the Nile as well as on the shores of the

Mediterranean Sea.


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A new clement appeared for the first time in the

economy of northern Europe, as also there an epoch

of primitive accumulation opened up since the

fifteenth century. True, those states that led the way

in that process, Spain and Portugal, finally reached acondition of paralysis like the states of antiquity. But

the northern states lying on the shores of the Atlantic

Ocean were able, through a favourable combination

of circumstances, to combine the proletarianization of

the majority of their population and the

concentration of great wealth in few hands with the

simultaneous growth of world trade, and in that way

developed a new mode of production. Capitalism

gathered the numerous propertyless workers

available in the service of mass production, for which

the great wealth accumulated, thanks to the

simultaneous development of the natural sciences,

placed at its disposal powerful means of production,

while at the same time the new means of

international commerce provided the necessary

expanded market for the mass products.

What in ancient Rome and even in modern Spain

was a cause of social decadence (the simultaneous

formation of a mass proletariat and the concentration

of huge riches in few hands) became since the

seventeenth century, above all in England, the

starting point for a new, higher mode of production,

capitalism, which enormously strengthened the forces

of state and society, and conquered the world in a

swift triumphant procession. At the same time

however it also developed in its midst a new and

powerful opponent, the proletariat, that from a

parasite [in antiquity] became the ever more powerful

basis of [modern] society. The end, which in the

society of ancient Rome was brought about by the


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invasions of the German barbarians, threatens

capitalist society from its own workers. The latter,

however, will not, like the former, destroy society in

order to set up on its ruins a primitive mode of

production and start the entire course of evolutionanew, but, on the contrary, they possess the will and

the capacity to perfect to the highest degree the mode

of production whose pillars they are, by putting an

end to private property on the rapidly growing means

of production and turning them, from means of

exploitation and degradation of the masses, into

means of wealth, culture and leisure for all.

That is Marxs conception of economic

development. It has nowhere been set forth so

expressly and comprehensively. But when one puts

together his scattered remarks and applies the

method he bequeathed us to the known facts of

economic history, one reaches the synthetic view

described above.

Against it Bcher sets forth the following threestages of economic development:

1. The stage of the closedhousehold economy (pureproduction for self-consumption,economy without exchange), in

which goods arc consumed in thesame economic unit in which they

were produced.

2. The stage of city economy(production for customers[Kundenproduktion] or stage ofdirect exchange), in which thegoods flow directly from the


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producing economy to theconsuming one, withoutintermediaries.

3.

The stage of political economy[Volkswirtschaft] (commodityproduction, stage of circulation ofgoods), in which the goods as a rulemust pass through a series ofeconomic agents before reachingthe point of consumption.[1]

The order of succession of this tripartite division

corresponds approximately to the guiding lines whicheconomic development assumes according to Marx:

social production, simple commodity production,

capitalist production [i.e. commodity production

based on wage labour ed.]. But Bcher not only

differed from Marx by the fact that his stages

represent much more rigid and fixed forms than the

fluid Marxist phases of development. The spheres

that each one took into consideration were also

different. Marxs domain was the entire field ofeconomic history. His conception enabled him to

follow the previous economic development from its

earliest beginnings in its full complexity and diversity,

and to discover in it the embryo of the future.

Bchers classification also claims to comprehend the

entire economic development, but in fact it gives at

each stage only an isolated phenomenon, a part for

the whole.

Thus, for instance, Bcher places as the first stage,

instead of social production, the closed household

economy, one among the many forms of each

production, and moreover one which appears at the

period of dissolution of primitive communism and is
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to be observed alongside simple commodity

production throughout its whole history, until the rise

of the capitalist mode of production.

In the same manner the production for customersconstitutes only one of the forms of simple

commodity production. Even if we want to limit it to

city economy (although commodity exchange appears

long before the formation of cities, at the stadium of

nomadic economy), urban commodity production is

impossible without simultaneous commodity

production in the countryside. However, the peasant

bringing cattle, corn, wool, flax and similar products

for exchange to the city, often does not exchange

them directly with the consumers. He exchanges his

cattle with the butcher, who then sells the meat to the

consumer, his corn with the baker, or perhaps first

with the miller, from whom the baker buys the flour,

with which he then produces bread for the

consumers. And it is surely not those who wish to

wear a coat that buy the wool, but the wool-traders or

cloth-makers. In the city itself there are numerousmanual labourers who also produce for the traders or

for other producers, and not directly for the

consumers.

But if we find already under simple commodity

production a whole series of wares, which must pass

through a series of economic factors, before reaching

consumption, then it is plainly erroneous to make

this property the distinguishing feature of the nextstage, the political economy, which Bcher himself

once called capitalist economy. But indeed which

other distinguishing feature can one devise in order to

distinguish it from simple commodity production if,

like Bcher, one refers for the characterization of the


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different modes of production, not to the totality of

the process of production, but only to a small aspect

of it, namely the circulation of the finished products?

The social role of the worker in the production

process, his social claim to the means of productionand products, appear unimportant in Bchers

characterization of the different modes of production.

He is only interested in this question: how do the

finished products reach the hands of the consumers?

It is characteristic that the contemporary bourgeois

theory of economic development, like the bourgeois

theory of value, the marginal utility theory

[Grenznutzentheorie], avoids dealing with the

process of production and by economy understands

only the circulation of finished goods.

In his detailed investigation about the formation of

political economy Biicher mentions wage labour only

in two short sentences. First on page 161:

There appears mass production based on

the division of labour in manufactures

and factories, and with it the class ofwage labourers.

Bcher does not expand on this subject. Then on page

167 he adds:

Where outside labour [fremde Arbeit] is

required, it consists during the first stage

of permanent bound labourers (slaves,

bondsmen), in the second stage of

producers reduced to a state of long

servitude, and in the third stage of

workers entering into short contract

relations.

That is all we learn from the social conditions of the

workers. One can sec that the subject is handled as a

purely subsidiary, totally indifferent question, and


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blur the differences between them, leaving their

distinguishing traits completely out of the picture.

Not in spite of that, but precisely because of that,

Bchers conception has come to prevail amongbourgeois economists. For them the classical school

was anathema, as it became unmistakably evident,

especially under the influence of MarxsCapital, that

the laws of capitalist commodity production arc not

eternal natural laws, but only characteristic of a

passing historical stage. Therewith the perishableness

of capitalism was demonstrated a quite serious

matter, considering the growing proletarian militancy

that threatened to apply in practice the results of

theoretical knowledge.

Then came Bchers very convenient discovery. He

recognized that capitalist economy was a purely

transitory historical phenomenon. But what was its

distinguishing trait according to Bcher? The fact that

goods must, as a rule, pass through a series of

economic agents before they reach the consumershands. Not a word about the private property on the

means of production, about the propertyless

character of the wage workers. If these arc the

distinguishing traits of the capitalist mode of

production, then they will and must disappear with it

as soon as the proletariat is strong enough to abolish

it. How much more harmless the further development

of contemporary political economy appears when its

distinguishing trait becomes the passage of goodsthrough different economic agents, and wage labour

represents just a subsidiary accompanying

phenomenon!


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Thanks to this misinterpretation of the modern

mode of production Bchers conception has become

dominant in bourgeois economic history.

However it also obscures the most important pointsof view for the understanding of the economy of

antiquity. No wonder that the historians and classical

scholars declare that Bchers conception is

incompatible with the facts discovered by them.

But not being trained in economics, the historians

are not always sufficiently able to recognize the

differences between the economic phenomena of

antiquity and those of our time. They tend to makethem too much alike. As a consequence they are

bound to limit themselves to the discovery of isolated

economic phenomena, a highly important and

laudable task, whose further progress however clearly

requires a theoretical reworking and elaboration of

the numerous new materials.

Salviolis book constitutes in my opinion a

remarkable beginning in that direction. Its author has

a thorough knowledge of the economic relations, not

only of antiquity, but also of the Middle Ages. Since

1884 he has worked as a professor at Italian

universities. At first he belonged to the University of

Palermo; since 1903 he has taught history and

philosophy of right at Naples.

But his interest in research into the past did notlead him to an indifference towards the present. He

applied himself to the study of the problems of our

time with zeal. and. choosing a completely different

path from that of the great majority of his colleagues,

did not take the side of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, he

despises adopting the apparently magnificent but in


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fact despicable pose of possessing an objectivity that

is above the parties, that evades any clear-cut

position, and answers the most pressing problems of

the time with a question mark. Salvioli belongs to that

tiny but select circle of professors who resolutelyadmit being on the side of the proletariat, professors

that constitute a glorious peculiarity of Italian

university life. He is a member of the Socialist Party,

contributes to the party press, gives lectures on its

behalf, and in 1894 was a candidate for Camera,

though without success.

Much more momentous than for practical politics is

however his socialist interest in science. He seriously

applied himself to the study of Marxism, became

familiar with historical materialism and the train of

thought of Capitaland applied them very

appreciatively and intelligently to his studies on

economic history.

One cannot call him an orthodox Marxist. For

instance, he does not follow completely the Marxistterminology, sometimes using the term capital in a

context where Marx would have used the words

money or means of production or stock of

products [Produktenvorrat]. He also understands

historical materialism in a different way from that of

the orthodox Marxists, when he assumes that this

materialism traces back every social fact to economic

motives, whereas we attribute every social peculiarity

to specific economic conditions.

But these deviations are no reason tor us to fail to

recognize that Marx richly fructified Salviolis thought

and researches. Especially the historical parts in the

third volume of Capital offered him numerous new


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insights and provided him plenty of stimuli, which his

command of the ancient sources turned to good

account. His work on capitalism in the ancient world,

which first appeared in 1906 in French, is the result of

a decade of work. It fascinated me so much, that Iinduced my son Karl to render it into German, and

advised my friend Dietz [owner of the SPD publishing

house Dietz Verlag] to publish the translation, a

project to which Salvioli gave his consent in writing.

True, it is a scholarly work, but it was written in a

style so clear and easy to understand, that one needs

to have no factual knowledge at all in order to

comprehend it.

For this edition all foreign quotations and

expressions have been translated, so that the work is

fully understandable even for readers unacquainted

with ancient languages and unfamiliar with the

history of antiquity. But of course even a superficial

knowledge of Roman history will facilitate its

comprehension. A good introduction to the subject is

the booklet of Leo Bloch Social Struggles inAncient Rome.[2]If, after having read Salviolis

book, one wishes to continue the study of ancient

economic history, I would recommend Ciccottis

book The Decline of Slavery in the Ancient

World, which constitutes an excellent supplement to

the present work, especially for the Greek

period.[3]Naturally that doesnt mean that I agree

with every single statement in those books. For

instance my conception of the Patriciate or Caesarism

are very different from Blochs. But in the history of

ancient society so much is still unclear and debatable,

that there cannot be two authors whose opinions

coincide completely.
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Someone might wonder whether it is appropriate to

ask the workers to sacrifice a fraction of the little

spare time they dispose of by occupying themselves

with antiquity, instead of concentrating their entire

interest in the present. To which should be repliedthat the present surely requires their entire interest,

but that a full understanding of the present

presupposes knowledge of the past. If, as we said at

the beginning, spatially and temporally remote

phenomena cannot be understood as long as we arc

not able to find our way in the present, one can also

conversely say that a deep understanding of the

phenomena nearest to us requires an acquaintance

with distant events.

The only way to know things or phenomena is

through their differences, What we call properties of a

thing are in truth the characteristics that distinguish

it from other things. Indeed a thing in itself can never

be known: we can only know each thing or

phenomenon by comparing it with other phenomena.

So, in order to understand the capitalist mode ofproduction we must also compare it with other modes

of production. That comparison was already done at

its dawn, through the contradiction into which it ran

with declining feudalism. But we will understand

capitalism, its problems and tendencies the better,

the greater the number of modes of production we

compare it with. Hence the great interest prevalent in

our party for prehistory.

Needless to say that is also true of classical

antiquity, and especially of the end of that period,

which is precisely the main subject of Salviolis book.

The end of the ancient world is of special significance

for us, because its problems came into much closer


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contact with those of our times than those of any

other pre-capitalist era.

The most significant product of that period has

remained down to the present a powerful factor ofpractical politics: Christianity. True, a factor of a

purely conservative nature since the rise of modern

capitalism, but one that capitalism cannot dispense

with. The products of ancient capitalism can only be

fully overcome by the products of modern, industrial

capitalism -through socialism.

The subject of Salviolis book is therefore connected

by many threads with the struggles of our times.

Berlin, March 1912

Notes

1.Karl Bcher, 1904, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft:

Vortrge und Aufstze, 4th ed., Tubingen: H. LauppscheBuchhandlung, p. 108. English edition: 1912,Industrial

Evolution, New York: H. Holt and Company.

( ).

2.Leo Bloch, Soziale Kmpfe im alten Rom, 3rd ed., Leipzig:

B.G. Teubner, 1913. (Die stndischen und sozialen Kmpfe

in der rmischen Republik, 1900)

().

3.Ettore Ciccotti, Le dclin de lesclavage antique. French ed.

revised and augmented with a preface by the author, Paris: M.

Rivire et cie, 1910

( ).

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Capitalism in the Ancient World

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