Marxism and Ancient Greece

Marxism and Ancient GreeceAuthor(s): Ellen WoodSource: History Workshop, No. 11 (Spring, 1981), pp. 3-22Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4288345 .

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ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

'A Grecian Scene.' Illustration from The Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literature and Art, originally published in 1851

Marxism and ancient Greece' by Ellen Wood

Historical studies reveal as much about their authors' contemporary world, its social conflicts and political controversies, as they do about their purported subject; but histories of the ancient world, of Greece in particular, and especially of democratic Athens, have perhaps served more often than most as ideological vehicles. The modern tradition of classical historiography evolved just as the spectre of mass democracy and revolution were beginning to haunt the ruling classes of Europe. It was only natural that the political history of the society which first articulated the concept of democracy should attract an especially keen interest. Unfortunately, although the idealization of Greek art and literature reached new heights, the most influential historical accounts were imbued with varying degrees of hostility to democracy; and ancient history has to this day not completely freed itself of the myths spawned by that hostility. The consequences have been far-reaching and are of more than simply antiquarian interest. Perhaps the most significant illustration is to be found not in the work of any reactionary historian but rather in Marxist thought, where the factual distortions produced by a counter-revolutionary bias have been absorbed into a theory with a very different perspective. These distortions have affected not only the Marxist understanding of classical antiquity but also the general Marxist theory of 'laws of development' and the origin of classes and the state.



4 History Workshop Journal

THE ANTI-DEMOCRA TIC TRADITION

In the late 18th century and throughout most of the 19th, the ancient world occupied a special place in historiography, and attracted the most influential and passionately political historical scholars. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, two modern preoccupations in particular found their way into classical scholarship: the questions of nationhood and of mass democracy. The former was, not surprisingly, a matter of special and passionate interest to German scholars; and the effect was often to turn their attention away from Greece and towards Rome.2 Mass democracy was a more universal concern; and here the example of classical Greece took centre stage.

For Radicals in early 19th century England, Athenian democracy was a shining ideal, 'the state that had come closest to political perfection', as Richard Jenkyns writes in his recent study, The Victorians and Ancient Greece3. And yet, Jenkyns continues, 'This belief was not shared by contemporary historians'. Thus, if moral judgments against Athenian democracy were challenged by liberal literati such as Byron or J.S. Mill, the historiographical apparatus supporting these judgments remained surprisingly unscathed. The Tory William Mitford, whose influential history was full of explicitly dire warnings about the dangers of democracy exemplified by Athens, could be attacked by Byron for 'his great pleasure in praising tyrants' and yet be lauded as 'perhaps the greatest of all modern historians'.4 Even George Grote, whose great history was the most sympathetic to Athenian democracy and who wrote in direct response to Mitford, continued, like his opponent, rather uncritically to venerate (as did his friend, Mill) the most ardent of Greek anti-democrats, notably Plato. Admiration for Athenian democracy was no guarantee of a questioning attitude toward the historical authority of witnesses whose interpretation of Athenian society was inspired by anti-democratic zeal.

The air of sanctity, the mystique surrounding ancient Greece is not surprising in light of the very special place occupied by the classical heritage in the culture and education of the ruling classes. No one needs reminding of the role assigned to the classics in English public schools or Oxford and Cambridge. At least as early as the 16th century, when the humanist John Cheke introduced young Edward VI to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, the value of the classics as handbooks for gentlemen was perceived by educators.5 It was always clear that the classical education was meant to be the special preserve of gentlemen, setting them apart from the vulgar multitude; and by the late 18th century it played a central role in the self-image of England's governing elite.

The aristocratic ideal was perpetuated in the 19th century, while at the same time the notion of 'gentleman' was extended, via the Public Schools, further down the social scale. The notion of a 'liberal' education, in which classics was the centrepiece, was framed in a similar sense, that is, it was an education designed for men not bound to material necessity by the need to engage in menial labour or vulgar trade, and therefore not requiring the crudely utilitarian occupational training reserved for the multitude. The 'liberal' of 'liberal education' was originally conceived in precisely the same spirit that prompted Plato and Aristotle to contrast the freedom of the noble soul to the spiritual bondage of the 'banausic' - base, menial, and 'mechanical' - classes. The Greek philosophers thus spoke quite clearly and directly to the gentleman of 19th century England. It is not surprising that when ancient history was added to the syllabus of Oxford in 1830 and Cambridge in 1851 (to supplement the earlier largely



Marxism and Ancient Greece 5

literary and linguistic classical education), this innovation occurred under the influence of educational reformers like Thomas Arnold-headmaster of Rugby, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and one of the most influential educators of his time - who at the time of the Reform Bill crisis of 1832 had argued that Greek and Roman history showed the danger of premature concessions to democracy.6

The historians of the early 19th century did not hesitate to state clearly that their object was to teach their contemporaries political lessons about their own world - more often than not, anti-democratic lessons. There was, of course, a spectrum of political views represented among the most eminent historians of the time; but certain dominant themes, reflecting certain common commitments, recur throughout the spectrum. The writers vary from 'liberals' to 'conservatives'; accordingly, they vary in their preferences for certain periods of Athenian history, in relation to the degree of democracy that prevailed at the time. The more liberal tend to accept the Periclean 'Golden Age', in which the 'mob' voluntarily deferred to its 'betters' (this is a popular tendency among 'liberal' classicists, even today7); among these might, for example, be included Fustel de Coulanges, who treated the early democracy - perhaps up to the Periclean Age - as a kind of incipient bourgeois - liberal state dominated by a new 'bourgeois aristocracy', which was unfortunately nipped in the bud by the final triumph of the demos. The more conservative historians prefer the age of the Persian Wars, when Athenians were still honourable, dignified, and patriotic, still infused with the noble values of their aristocratic past, instead of greedy, selfish and materialistic. The most conservative - such as William Mitford or Jacob Burckhardt- condemn the whole of the democracy from beginning to end. Virtually all the most influential historians, with the notable exception of George Grote, agree that the post- Periclean era was a period of profound moral decline and corruption, that is, a period of 'mob-rule', in which the 'masses' were led by men 'of their own stamp'. What these accounts have in common, above all, is contempt for and fear of the 'mob'. Seldom has ostensibly scholarly writing been so punctuated by intemperate and colourfully libellous language as the typical accounts of Athenian democracy and the 'proof' it was supposed to afford of the fundamentally 'greedy, fickle, vicious, indolent, cruel, reckless' character of the demos, the 'twenty-thousand-headed hydra'.

Perhaps the most far-reaching effects of the anti-democratic legacy, however, have been more subtle - in the creation of impressions and the conjuring up of images. The very language of an historian can contribute to the making of myths; and the hostility to the 'mob' which has informed so much of ancient history has left a very effective residue of historical impressions. One common myth in particular has confused the historical record and obscured the nature of class and state in Athens. This myth depicts an Athenian citizen-body to a great extent freed from labour - by slaves and, particularly in the case of the poor, by public payments for the civic duties and amusements which allegedly occupied most of the citizen's time. This is the myth which in its original anti-democratic form referred a great deal to the 'idleness' of the citizenry, meaning specifically the poor citizens for whom public payments were a necessary condition for participation in politics. The corollary of this myth was usually a particular view of Athenian democracy as simply a scheme for self-enrichment for the 'idle' and 'greedy' poor, an instrument for plundering the rich - never, of course, as a necessary safeguard against certain forms of exploitation of the poor by the rich. More recent scholarship, to a great extent based on evidence available to and even used by the myth-makers of the 19th century, has proved as conclusively as possible that the




basic premises of these myths are false - above all because the majority of Athenian citizens earned their livelihoods by labour and, more particularly, because there was no clear division of labour between citizens and non-citizens or even between citizens and slaves. The discrepancy between the myth and the reality, as far as it can be responsibly ascertained, is at first puzzling; but a close scrutiny of the most important histories of Greece written in the late 18th century and thereafter reveals the ideological bases of the discrepancy, and sometimes even reveals the truth lurking behind the myth.

An example from William Mitford may serve to illustrate how historians who were not unaware of the part played by free labour in Athenian society might still leave their readers with the impression of an 'idle mob'. On the one hand, Mitford speaks of '. . . citizens without property, without industry, and perhaps without objects for industry' whose perversion of the body politic was made possible by the public payments which maintained them in 'idleness'.8 On the other hand, and apparently without being aware of any contradiction he writes of the 'imperious "crowd of fullers, shoemakers [sic], carpenters, braziers"' (quoting Xenophon) who controlled the democracy, oppressed men of rank and property, and thereby brought Athens to ruin.9 A resolution of this apparent contradiction is, however, suggested in Mitford's general diagnosis of Athens' ills. In sharp contrast to modern England, which possessed a superbly successful mechanism for 'harmonizing ranks' and for creating 'a general private interest in the support of the existing order':

under circumstances then such as those of the Athenian republic, the rich and the poor evidently could not live in harmony... In fact, the balances of Solon's constitution were no sooner overthrown, and sovereign power become absolute in the hands of those without property, or rather in the hands of any demagogue who could, for the moment, lead them, than the interests of all who had property placed them necessarily in the situation of conspirators against the existing government. Indeed, throughout Greece, the noble and wealthy, served by their slaves, not only as domestics, but as husbandmen and manufacturers, had little connection with the poorer Many, but to command them in oligarchical states, and in the democratical, to fear, flatter, solicit, and either deceive, or be commanded by them. No common interest, or scarcely any, united the two descriptions of men; so that, for maintaining civil order and holding the state together, flattery and bribes alone could persuade the multitude, and the only alternative was violence. Hence that impossibility of lasting harmony, and that readiness for extreme discord which the Grecian republics so strikingly exhibit. '0

In other words, the ruination of Athens lay not in the fact that the poorer Many did not labour, but that they did not labour for the 'noble and wealthy'.

Much the same sleight of hand was performed by other scholars. Decades later, the distinguished historian Jacob Burckhardt for example, was still arguing, on the one hand, that Athens was ruined by triumph of the 'banausic' mob of tradesmen, craftsmen and their demagogic spokesmen II, and on the other hand, that

the chief evil was that democracy had been pervaded by the strong anti-banausic attitude, and equality of right was associated with an aversion to work, as a result of which idlers used the right to vote and judicial proceedings as a permanent threat to the propertied.'2




It appears that ...the citizens were obviously unsettled by the many popular assemblies and court sessions. . . because most of them lacked the calming effect of daily work' 13; but, again, on closer scrutiny the real problem seems to be the absence of the 'calming effect' produced by labour 'which the wealthy needed done and the poor could have done for pay.' 14

It would seem, then, that the indignation ostensibly directed against the 'idleness' of the Athenian poor in fact refers to their relative independence: not to the fact that they did not labour but that they often did not serve. The almost universal conviction of the anti-democrats turns out to be that dependence of the poor on the rich, in the form of the one labouring for the other, creates a 'common interest' which alone can ensure civic order and protect the interests of the propertied classes. For these historians, then, the crime of Athens was not really that her citizens were 'idle' and 'greedy', but that her free producing class was too independent and that she therefore lacked, at least in relations among citizens, the 'interdependence' between classes which is the basis of social order and peace.

THEMARXIST TRADITION

Ironically, this ambiguous language - the age-old idiom of the 'civilized' classes com- plaining about the laziness of those whose labour sustains them - has contributed a great deal to the traditional Marxist image of Athenian society as a society which lived on the labour of slaves; whose class structure was unusually transparent because of the clear division, explicitly defined in law, between appropriating citizens and producing slaves, so that the relationship of exploitation stood out in stark relief; where the state unambiguously represented 'an association against a subjected producing class' 5; and where slavery inhibited technological progress, in particular by making labour in general degrading and contemptible.

Engels' account of the Athenian state in the Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State presents this image in its most unambiguous form. He appears to have no doubts that the slave population massively outnumbered the citizen population (at least eighteen slaves to every adult male citizen!); that large manu- factories employing sizeable slave-gangs were typical of Athenian production; and, above all, that slavery 'banned the labour of free citizens', not only by making it uncompetitive, but by degrading labour to the point that a poor citizen would choose to become 'social scrap' rather than debase himself by productive work. In Anti Duihring, Engels elaborates on the effects of the slave mode of production:

Wherever slavery is the main form of production it turns labour into seFvile activity, consequently makes it dishonourable for freemen. Thus the way out of such a mode of production is barred, while on the other hand slavery is an impediment to more developed production, which urgently requires its removal... Greece too perished on account of slavery, Aristotle having already said that inter- course with slaves was demoralizing the citizens, not to mention the fact that slavery makes work impossible for the latter. '6

If Engels' account was modified in later versions to accommodate revised information about the numbers of slaves and the role of free producers in Athens, the essentials of his argument survived. For example, this is how Benjamin Farrington -quoting another socialist historian - summed up his judgement of classical antiquity in The




Civilization of Greece and Rome:

'The more I have studied the life of antiquity' writes Max Beer, 'the clearer it has become to me that the moral and political collapse of the old world was due chiefly to slavery - to unfree labour, to the despising of productive activity, and the result- ing stagnation of the technology of labour'. This is the important element of truth to which antiquity was blind, and to which many seem content to remain blind today. 17

Similar arguments are used by V. Gordon Childe, though in a more complicated form, since he goes further in acknowledging the divisions and conflicts within the citizen body between, on the one hand, wealthy slaveowners and landlords and, on the other, 'vulgar mechanics'. While he sometimes refers to these divisions as class oppositions, he does not extend this acknowledgment to his analysis of technological progress. Like his predecessors, he does not go beyond slavery and the relations between slaveowners and slaves to find an explanation for the lack of technical invention, emphasizing (as does Farrington) the effects of the separation between science and practical life and the contempt for 'banausic' craftmanship. The significant point is that, while he correctly attributes this contempt to the leisured propertied classes and makes no claims about the universality of such attitudes, he does not attempt to refine the analysis by considering the effects on technology produced by the many - indeed, the majority of the population - who were neither wealthy, leisured proprietors nor slaves. 17A

The essential problem in the traditional Marxist view of ancient Greece - and of classical antiquity generally - is not so much that it attaches excessive importance to slavery but that it fails to take sufficient account of free labour and its role in shaping society. The concept of a 'slave mode of production' is itself a blunt instrument which can do justice neither to free labour, nor to slavery, nor to the complex interaction between the two. Furthermore, it tends to distort the analysis of class relations, to the extent that it implies a clear social division of labour between citizens (or free men generally) and slaves, and glosses over class oppositions within the citizen body.'8 Finally, all this acts as an obstacle to the interpretation of the cultural and ideological products of Athenian society. For example, Marxists have consistently treated Greek anti-democrats like Plato and Aristotle as spokesmen for the citizen community as a whole or as reflections of the slave mode of production, instead of stressing their role in expressing antagonisms within that community between the leisured few and the labouring many. Thus, the aristocratic contempt expressed by these philosophers for 'banausic' citizens and for the excessively high status accorded to free labourers by the democracy is taken to represent nothing more than the general degradation of labour by slave production. In all these respects, the legacy of the anti-democratic historians, who for reasons of their own obscured the position of free labour in Athenian society, has left its mark. More recent Marxist scholarship has had to come to terms in various ways with the historical evidence concerning the role of free producers; but there has often been a great reluctance to abandon the basic framework of the original analysis and its fundamental premise that the essential class division was between citizens and slaves.

Short of reconsidering this class-analysis altogether, there are essentially two ways of dealing with free labour while preserving the basic outline of the original Marxist view: the first is to acknowledge the major role of free labour in Athenian production and even the importance of social divisions within the citizen body, but nevertheless to




retain the basic structure of Marx's class-analysis by the simple device of placing most free producers outside the system of class altogether, so that the citizen/slave antithesis is replaced by the opposition slaveowner/slave and a large proportion of the citizenry is excluded from any class-analysis. 9 The other possibility is to recognize the role of free labour but to play down its significance and still maintain the citizen/slave antithesis almost intact. This requires an emphasis on ideological factors and what might be called the hegemonic effects of the 'slave mode of production', so that the consequence of free labour and of class divisions within the citizen body can be submerged in the bathing light of slavery. The latter view, which suggests that the influence of slavery impregnated the whole fabric of Athenian society so thoroughly that it reduced to insignificance the effects of free labour and its place in the class structure, is the one which, as we shall see, emerges from Perry Anderson's analysis of the ancient world.

Before considering this very recent Marxist account, let us critically re-examine each of the fundamental assumptions in the traditional analysis: that there was a dominant 'slave mode of production'; that this implied a social division of labour between slaves and free men sufficiently clear-cut to be the basis of a class-division; that this was the only class division of major consequence; that the association of labour with slavery degraded all labour and produced a widespread contempt for it; and that this social and ideological devaluation of labour acted as a hindrance to technical inventiveness and the development of productive forces.

THE 'SLA VE MODE OF PRODUCTION'

In the original Marxist notion of production in Greece, as exemplified by Engels, not only is the extent of slave-labour grossly overestimated but its nature is misrepre- sented.20 Above all, there was in Athens no clear social division of labour between citizens and slaves in the 5th-and 4th centuries B.C., the period at issue. The majority of citizens laboured for a livelihood, most at productive tasks (as many as 90 per cent or more), many of these in the handicrafts (possibly from about one-third in the 5th century B.C. to almost half in the 4th century). At the same time, slaves engaged in virtually every occupation, from mineworker to domestic servant, from craftsman to business manager or banker, civil servant or policeman. Production for the market remained undeveloped, and individual craft-production remained the rule, among slaves as well as free workers. Even in the few 'workshops' where many slaves owned by a single master worked under one roof the division and integration of labour appears to have been minimal. In agriculture, where slave-labour was less important - possibly even negligible - the rule also was small production. Properties were small; even wealthy landowners usually owned several separated small-holdings, and there were no slave-gangs of the type that worked the later Roman latifundia. Most land was apparently worked by independent peasant-proprietors, tenant farmers, and to some extent hired - usually casual - labourers. The typical productive unit - agricultural and 'industrial' - was the individual who produced and sold his wares. Thus, if slaves and citizens were not clearly opposed as a class of non-producing appropriators and a class of direct producers, neither did they compete as two clearly distinct forms of labour with different degrees of productivity.

Furthermore, not only did slaves perform a wide range of economic roles, productive and non-productive, they also occupied a wide range of defacto positions along the continuum from bondage to freedom of choice and movement, from the




profoundly oppressed mineworker to the skilled craftsman living and working on his own and paying a kind of rent to his master, or the slave-banker, the civil servant, and the policeman who was authorized to arrest free citizens. Citizens - often working side-by-side with slaves - ranged from the most menial of casual hired labourers to the wealthy rentier slaveowner; paradoxically, the citizens' independence often took the form of rejecting 'non-productive' managerial positions in favour of manual labour on the grounds that the former, as long-term salaried employment, constituted a dependent condition.

The relation between citizens and slaves, then, is difficult to characterize as a simple class relation based on a social division of labour. The citizen-body itself was from the beginning internally divided in ways which cannot be dismissed as merely a division between rich and poor. It can be argued that the Athenian state, the polis, developed in response to an internal class opposition between two agrarian classes - an aristocracy of noble landholders and a producing class of peasant proprietors; and while the internal class struggle was transformed by both the development of slavery and the growth of free urban producing classes, it never ceased to play a central role in the social life of the Athenianpolis. Indeed, the class conflict among citizens is in many respects the essential fact of Athenian political history. Even though it was the surplus labour of slaves more than that of poor but free producers that was appropriated by wealthy citizens, the opposition between rich and poor took a particularly definite form in Athenian eyes as the opposition between citizens who were compelled to labour for a livelihood and citizens who, by virtue of their property, were able to live on the labour of others. This opposition figured prominently in philosophical speculations, playing an essential role in the theories of Plato and Aristotle. Above all, the division between two kinds of citizens expressed itself in political conflicts. These political struggles cannot be dismissed as merely political, as oppositions peripheral to the basic relations of production within a fundamentally united ruling class. In pre- capitalist societies which still rely on 'extra-economic' modes of surplus-extraction - by means of direct legal, political, or military coercion - the political struggles of the poor, even poor proprietors, may represent resistance to economic exploitation. In this sense, the conflicts between democrats and oligarchs in Athens cannot be fully understood without reference to class oppositions within the citizen body.

In all these respects, the concept of the 'slave mode of production' and the transparent social relations it implies is put in question by the facts of Athenian social history. If one further considers the differences between Greece and Rome, the notion of the slave mode of production becomes even more problematic. It should be noted, in the first place, that this 'mode of production' is usually so conceived that it covers a time-span of more than a millenium. This is a considerable slice of historical time, whose magnitude may be judged by comparing it to a period which in modern Europe encompassed all the historical transformations from early feudalism to industrial capitalism. The rate of epochal change in classical antiquity may not have been quite so dramatic, but this period does cover the rather significant transformations which separate the early Greek polis from the later Roman Empire, and the peasant economy of Attica from the 'senatorial' economy of the late Roman Republic or the latifundial production of the Western Empire.

If one essential form of production binds together these very different 'social formations', it is arguably peasant production rather than slavery. While it can be said more or less categorically that in both Athens and Rome large-scale enterprises, urban and rural, were dominated by slave-labour, it must also be said that especially in




Athens there were few such enterprises.2' In particular, the 'fully-developed' slave mode of production, based on large estates worked by slave-gangs, was never characteristic of Greece at any time, and existed - let alone predominated - in Rome for only part of the period concerned and even then in only part of the Empire, in the West and particularly in Italy and Sicily. Even then, at the height of latifundial slave production, the majority of the population were peasants, who were arguably still the productive backbone of the Empire. Indeed, it is only by keeping this fact in mind that the continuities in the transition from antiquity to feudalism can be understood.22

The concept of 'slave mode of production' is questionable even if its essential characteristics are reduced to the existence of a 'juridically pure' condition of chattel slavery (in contrast to the 'mixed types of servitude ... in an amorphous continuum of dependence and unfreedom' which characterized slavery elsewhere in the ancient world23) and the systematic use of this juridical category as the dominant type of surplus extraction. The seeming precision of this criterion dissolves when one considers the widely divergent forms of slave-utilization, the profoundly different labour-processes [that is, literally, modes of production] into which this juridical category was inserted, and the different locations of slaves in the economies of Greece and Rome. It is also questionable whether one can speak of slavery as a single type of 'surplus extraction' or, for that matter, as a 'pure', 'absolute' condition, if one considers the 'continuum of unfreedom' which separates slaves in the Attic silver mines or the plartai;ions of imperial Rome from the slave-craftsmen of Athens, living and working independently and paying a kind of rent to their owners, or slaves in managerial or civil service functions including the police force of Athens.

Above all, the role of free labour, its relation to slavery and its position in the class structure, cannot simply be excluded from an analysis of the dominant mode of production and relegated to the periphery as a secondary characteristic of an 'impure' 'social formation'.24 It is not so easy to determine whether it is the position of slavery or that of free labour which acts as the 'general illumination which bathes all the other colours' of the social formation.

The presumption in favour of slavery as the 'dominant mode of production' probably has less to do with the actual preponderance of slaves over free labourers, either in numbers or in their relative importance to the economy, than with the fact that especially from the vantage point of the modern world and the predominance of juridically free labour, it is slavery alone which seems extraordinary. It is true that Graeco-Roman civilization employed, systematically and on a large scale, slaves who were clearly defined in law as chattels; and it would be absurd to deny the significance of this fact. On the other hand, it can be argued that at least as remarkable and extraordinary as slavery in the ancient world was the position of free labour, peasants and craftsmen, especially in Athens. Their juridical, civic and political status was unique; and in social formations where 'extra-economic' forms of surplus extraction predominated, this was a matter of no small consequence.

It is necessary not only to acknowledge the central role of free labour in the productive systems of Greece and Rome, but to consider the ways in which the particular nature of free labour in each of these cases 'bathed all the colours' of these social formations. For example, one might speculate on the effects of internal class struggles on the development of slavery: not only the possibility that in both Athens and Rome the early struggles between two agrarian classes which reduced the availability of poor citizens as dependent labour may have acted as an incentive to the subjection of aliens25, but also the fact that the different outcomes of class conflicts in Athens and




Rome resulted in different forms of slave-production. In neither case was internal class conflict resolved in the formation of a united citizen ruling class. In Athens, however, the victory of the dominant landed class was thwarted to the extent of obstructing mass expropriation and the concentration of property. In Rome, on the other hand, where the victory of large landed proprietors was more complete, much of the small peasantry was expropriated and land concentrated, giving rise to the 'senatorial' economy and an aristocratic - eventually imperial - state quite different from the Athenian polis. Only in the Roman case did the conditions exist for the 'fully developed slave mode of production' exemplified by the slave latifundia.

THE GREEK A TTITUDE TO WARD LABOUR

If the 'slave mode of production' has a somewhat shaky identity as a mode of production - dominant or otherwise - can its integrity be salvaged by stressing the pervasive cultural and ideological effects of slavery? In particular, can it be said that, if slavery did not preclude other forms of production or reduce them to insignificance, it nevertheless cast its shadow over them by degrading all labour? There has been a long tradition of socialist historiography which has accepted almost as an article of dogma the conviction that Greeks and Romans generally held labour in contempt. And yet, that tradition relies on some rather ambiguous evidence - which is particularly questionable in the case of Athens and which perhaps owes too much to those thinkers - like Plato, Aristotle, or Xenophon - whose attacks on the democracy were directed against the political status it conferred on the 'Banausic' classes who were morally and intellectually degraded by a life of drudgery and bondage to the world of material necessity.

The issue of attitudes toward labour is undoubtedly a complex and ambiguous one. In the first place, it is not always clear what is meant by 'contempt' for labour, since a variety of conflicting attitudes are often lumped together under this rubric. It is, for example, possible to praise labour and its products in the abstract, while denigrating the labourer, or to glorify a life of labour precisely in order to keep the labourer in his place, quietly subordinate. It is also worth noting that the high ideological status apparently accorded to labour at certain stages in the history of modern Europe has had less to do with labour than with the 'productivity' of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie asserting itself against the values of an 'unproductive' rentier aristocracy. On the other hand, labourers themselves are likely to be unromantically frank about the nastiness of drudgery while showing a healthy respect for labour and the worker's right to self-determination. The ideological structure of ancient Greece was no less ambiguous and no less in need of critical scrutiny - which it seldom gets.

There are several attitudes toward labour revealed in Greek sources which might be labelled as 'contemptuous' or 'disdainful'. First, there is the rejection of the dependence associated with certain kinds of labour. Often, critics of Greek democracy speak of a contempt for labour as such when they have in mind this unwillingness to be bound to a master. The confusion is, of course, a convenient one, and quite natural, given the conviction that labour should always be dependent and servile. Second, there is the theme of the misery of toil and the failure positively to glorify a life of labour, as certain more modern doctrines have done. Third, there is the actual condemnation of labour as corrupting to the soul and to the moral worth of the labourer, and hence to his political capacity. The first of these attitudes may have been universal enough to be regarded as a cultural norm; and the second was undoubtedly widespread. These atti




tudes are, however, rather different from the kind of contempt that an anti- democratic historian like Burckhardt wants to ascribe to the Greeks, or that Engels, for example, suggests in his account of the Athenian state. Indeed, the first attitude seems even to have had the effect of sometimes compelling a citizen to choose manual labour. Free men apparently preferred to be not only independent producers but even casual wage-earners, rather than accept steady salaried -and hence 'dependent' - employment as managers or civil servants, often leaving such non-productive labour, including police-functions, to slaves.

The third attitude, a genuine contempt for labour and labourers, is typical of critics of the democracy, whose complaint against democracy is precisely that 'banausics' had too much influence, and that their ethos, the mentality of labourers, had put its stamp on the polis. This attitude can be regarded as a cultural norm only, if at all, in the case of non-democratic states where citizens were often (as in the case of Sparta) forbidden to engage in productive occupations; at least, in these states this attitude was dominant as the ideology of the ruling class. The case of Athenian democracy was quite different. The attitudes of writers like Plato and Aristotle, far from representing an ideal expression of the Athenian democratic ethos and proving a prevalent contempt for labour among Athenian citizens, if anything prove the opposite. These critics of democracy are expressing an aristocratic attitude in the face of democratic ideals, and they are motivated to do so precisely because their views are no longer dominant. They are not expressing but attacking the dominant world-view.26

Certainly the ideology of the old ruling class survived to some extent even among democrats: for example, a certain respect for the rentier-class appears even in Demosthenes. Ruling ideologies are always tenacious; and Burckhardt is probably right to the extent that he attributes such contempt for labour to a cultural legacy derived from an earlier ruling class, rather than simply to the institution of slavery. The point, however, is precisely that a contrary ideology had emerged out of the new social realities of the democracy, an ideology more specific to those realities and more uniquely their own. Instead of a world-view surviving from an earlier social formation, or an ideology articulated by a class in revolt against new social conditions that no longer favoured its dominance, there is a new ideology more specific to the Athenian mode of production under democracy. This was a mode of production in which slavery was not the only essential fact, in which the position of free labour was equally formative in its effects on the nature of society and its ideological expressions.

The anti-banausic ideology of the aristocracy was, of course, most dramatically opposed in practice in the political rights exercised by the peasants and craftsmen who constituted the majority of the Athenian citizen-body. If the 'banausic' majority understandably left no systematic ideological testimony to match that of its aristocratic adversaries, the ideological expressions of their unique social status can nevertheless be found in various forms - not least in the negative evidence of the critics themselves but also in the ethic of craftsmanship symbolized, for example, by the fact that the Greeks were the first to dispel the anonymity of craftsmen, in sharp contrast to the advanced civilizations of the Near East, no longer regarding them as appendages of the patron they served27; or in the law prohibiting insulting references to a person's trade; or in the philosophical arguments attributed by Plato to Protagoras, who in the dialogue bearing his name defends the democracy against Socrates' attacks by arguing that political virtue is necessarily a universal quality, belonging not to a select few but to 'shoemakers and smiths', that is, to 'banausics' as well; or in the eulogies to the practical arts in Protagoras' speech, Aeschylus' Prometheus, and Sophocles'




Antigone. Even the disdain for dependent labour, which was undoubtedly widespread among Athenians, may in this historical context - no matter how 'petty bourgeois' it may seem in the context of modern class relations - represent an advance in the ideological status of labour. It is in effect an assertion against the aristocratic view that all labour for a livelihood is by its very nature base and servile. This attitude towards dependent labour was the expression of a struggle for freedom from exploitation, and of a political revolution of considerable significance, at least as much as it was the ideal of a slave-owning society. In other words, it was an attitude based more on a desire for the freedom of labour than freedom from labour.

In sum, the Athenians with their democratic ideal and their ethic of craftsmanship were expressing the principle that labour, if not pleasant is also not degrading, that it can be an object of pride, and that it need not be servile, need not imply subjection to a master, whether that master be a private lord or an appropriating state. It is simply perverse for Marxists to overlook this aspect of the Greek legacy - although it is easy to see why anti-democratic historians have done their best to obscure the picture by exploiting the myth of Athenian 'indolence' and 'contempt' for labour.

TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS

What, then, can be said about the argument so often associated with the conviction that Greeks and Romans held labour in contempt: that the devaluation of labour by its association with slavery helps to account for the relatively low level of technological development in. classical antiquity?

The first and most obvious objection to such arguments is that, if our model of technological progress is the revolutionizing of productive forces that has marked the evolution of capitalism, then it is an absence that is apparent in most societies throughout most of human history. It is the radical and rapid technological innovation which the West has experienced since the feudal period that needs to be explained, not the relative 'lack' of such innovation virtually everywhere else. Even if, however, one chooses to regard the state of technology in Greece as something that requires explanation, and even if one chooses to treat rapid technological change as somehow so natural that its relative absence compels one to look for obstacles, any explanation which rests on the alleged ideological effects of slavery must be regarded as unsatisfactory for many reasons. First, there is again the evidence which contradicts the view that Greeks, and particularly Athenians, held labour in contempt. More fundamentally, one might well ask whether technological innovation on a grand scale has normally been a result of pride in workmanship, or whether, in fact, the reverse has been true; whether technological progress in the West has really been the result of a rise in the status of labour, or rather the consequence of a new mode of exploiting labour made possible - and, in a sense, necessary - by the gradual expropriation and prolet- arianization of free labour and the concentration of property. It is this process of expropriation that has been at the heart of the division, specialization, and integration of labour in the capitalist mode of production. Pride in workmanship may itself be an obstacle to technological innovation. Certainly individual craft-production is inimical to the kind of technological progress characteristic of the West. There is, too, historical evidence that an abundance of skilled labour has worked against the introduction of technical innovations.

It should perhaps be added that there are some curiously bourgeois assumptions secreted in such analyses. The implication almost seems to be that human wants are



Marxism andAncient Greece 15

infinite (in the particular sense intended by conventional economic textbooks), that therefore under 'normal' circumstances there is an acquisitiveness, a drive to improve productivity - more particularly, by technological innovation - and that the absence of a drive for ever-expanding surplus is somehow unnatural and needs to be explained by some obstruction in the constitution of the society. Alternatively, the assumption may be that the 'natural' form of production is commodity production, production of exchange value, even the capitalist mode of production, which is in principle unlimited in its need for surplus production. It would seem that there is something abnormal about production that is limited in its objectives, its need for surplus, or its compulsion to increase productivity by technological means. Such bourgeois and ahistorical views accord rather badly with the basic principles of Marxist historiography, and yet the arguments so often associated with the 'slave mode of production' seem to compel us to accept these assumptions.

A more reasonable explanation of technological progress, or the lack of it, would acknowledge that (whatever positive consequences technological progress may have from a Marxist point of view) the drive for technological innovation has had something to do with the forms of surplus appropriation and the kinds of exploitation inherent in a particular mode of production. Whatever else can be said about technological progress, expanding surplus-production has generally been associated with the pressures of surplus-extraction and the needs of the extractor.28

In the light of these considerations, it becomes necessary to examine not only the effects of slavery on technological development but also those of free labour. For example, one might consider the consequences of a free producing class able to resist - with at least partial success - exploitation and the compulsion to produce wealth for others, to obstruct concentration of property, to endanger the stability of aristocratic property by means of democratic political institutions, to uphold craft traditions. In fact, it would be useful to consider the effects of an ideology which expressed not contempt for labour but its opposite -an ideology which seems to have included, if not respect for or glorification of labour, the rather subversive view that labour need not by definition be servile or dependent.

7X,~

Cup decoration by the Carpenter Painter. Athens, 6th Century.




PERR Y ANDERSON ON ANCIENT GREECE

In Perry Anderson's hands, the Marxist analysis of classical antiquity is modified to incorporate historical evidence unavailable - for one reason or another - to Marx and Engels; and the traditional view undergoes a number of insightful elaborations and refinements. Nevertheless, his argument shares the essential premises of earlier Marxist analyses about the existence and dominance of a 'slave mode of production', the fundamental class opposition this implies, the devaluation of labour, and the consequent obstruction of technological progress. His adherence to these premises in the face of compromising historical evidence, which he scrupulously includes in his account, produces some significant contradictions in his argument.

Anderson begins his Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism with a general introduction to what he calls 'the original matrix of the whole civilization of the classical world'29, in particular, the 'slave mode of production'. Here, at first, it appears that Greece and Rome are to be classed together as essentially a single social type, characterized by two fundamental qualities: the slave mode of production and a particular relation between town and country, an 'anomalous supremacy of town over country, in an overwhelmingly rural economy'30. The condition of this urban dominance, according to Anderson, was the existence of slavery in the countryside, liberating the landowning class from its rural background and creating an urban citizenry with wealth still based on the land. This argument is further supported by the contention that 'the numerical bulk of slave-labour in classical antiquity was agrarian labour' (although this proposition is qualified with the observation that this was true only 'in aggregate' and was 'not so everywhere or always')31. The nature of that agrarian slave-labour is described in terms of 'slave estates'-which in the 'fully developed' slave mode of production took the form of latifundia worked by slave- gangs - supporting a class of wealthy absentee landowners.

The purity of this picture, this unified image of the slave mode of production - which seems so unequivocally to support the conception of a social formation based on a clear class opposition between citizens and slaves - is, however, compromised by a host of qualifications, asides, and parenthetical exceptions. These on consideration prove to be rather significant. For example, one of the exceptions to the proposition that 'in aggregate' most slave-labour was agrarian turns out to be Athens itself. Furthermore, Anderson not only consistently uses Rome as evidence for the slave mode of production generally, but is equally likely to skip among the centuries, citing the example of later imperial Rome to make a point about this mode of production as a whole. In fact, it can be argued that Anderson's general characterization of the slave mode of production does not, and is probably not meant to, describe Greece -and more particularly, Athens - at all, and may even be only slightly related to Rome during much of its history.

That the general character of the slave mode of production is not general at all is confirmed by the subsequent specific discussions of Greece and Rome separately. Here, Anderson reveals an impressive grasp of historical fact, but does not permit historical specifics to shake his general formula even when the two are patently in contradiction. In the chapter on classical Greece, he makes it very clear that he under- stands the important differences between Greece and Rome, but he fails to point out how they compromise his general picture. For example, he acknowledges the differences in political development between Greece and Rome, the 'deeply aristocratic' character of the Roman constitution as compared not only to Greek democracies but




even to the polis in general32, and he shows how the unique political developments in Athens assured 'the staunch survival of small and medium farmers'. This development he suggests, was probably common throughout Greece, though only documented in Athens; and its 'inverse non-occurance was later to define the contrasting social history of Rome'33. The survival of small property and the obstacles to the development of a large-landowning class in Athens implied a form of slave production quite different from that which was to evolve in Rome. As Anderson points out, it was Rome which invented slave-plantations, the large estates of latifundia worked by slave-gangs (and that only relatively late, after Roman expansion); and the slave-estate was never the basis of Athenian agricultural production.

Anderson's historical analysis thus implicitly puts in question the existence of the 'slave mode of production'. Similarly, his account of historical specifics raises questions about his own proposition that a slave mode of production - of any kind - was dominant in classical antiquity. This is how Anderson formulates that proposition:

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, morever, 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. 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.34

It should, however, be noted that these 'classical epochs' were nonetheless periods in which 'other labour systems' at least equalled slavery in extent and arguably even in their importance to the economy. For example, the 'Golden Age' of Periclean democracy was a period in which the free population outnumbered slaves and the majority of citizens were engaged in productive labour, urban and rural.

In fact, while Anderson does not acknowledge historical studies which suggest that any form of slave labour was negligible in Attic agriculture, he does point out -if somewhat in passing - that slaves 'were probably outnumbered by free labour in agriculture and perhaps in the crafts'35. He appears to regard this as insignificant, given the number of slaves in the population as a whole;36 but since he says little more about the location of free producers in the economy, their relation to slaves or to non-producing appropriators, it is never quite clear in what sense slavery was more 'dominant' than any other 'mode of production', even during the 'classical epochs'.

Anderson's class-analysis necessarily suffers from this failure to locate free producers in the economy or the social relations of production. He appears unwilling




to consider the importance of class divisions within the citizen body, for fear of compromising the purity of the 'slave mode of production', which seems to demand the subordination of all social antagonisms in which slaves are not the primary partici- pants. And yet, in a sense Anderson defies the logic of his own historical argument by refusing to give adequate weight to internal class divisions, because, at least implicitly, they figure prominently in his explanation of the evolution of the slave mode of production. In his account of the evolution of Athenian political institutions there is some suggestion that the motivating force was a struggle between exploiters and exploited within the community, particularly in the form of resistance to debt- bondage. He points out that the release of citizen-labour from such outright dependence encouraged the growth of slave-labour. But the implications are not pursued and nothing is permitted to affect the general characterization of the slave mode of production or the general principle that the only class opposition of essential significance to the nature of the polis is that which involves slaves as the exploited class. Anderson does occasionally allude to class differences within the citizen community, but only to dismiss their importance, quickly and without argument:

The community of the classical polis, no matter how internally class-divided, was erected above an enslaved work-force which underlay its whole shape and substance37

This social structure, with its acknowledged stratification but absence of dramatic crevasses within the citizen body, provided the foundation of Athenian political democracy.38

It is not easy to see on what basis this judgment about the 'absence of dramatic crevasses' is made. First, it cannot refer to the absence of conflicts among groups of citizens, even serious conflicts over the disposition of surplus product. Anderson's analysis of Athenian history, in fact, proceeds without an account of the internal conflicts which were the source of the most dramatic events in the history of the democracy - for example, the oligarchic coups and the regime of the Thirty Tyrants, not to mention the ongoing political strife between oligarchs and democrats.39 It is not even clear that Anderson's class-analysis has to do with relations of production at all. When he refers to the 'structure of the Athenian social formation', he has less to say about relations of production than about largely quantitative categories including the income groups into which the Athenian citizenry was divided for certain political, military, and administrative purposes.40 The 'dramatic crevasses' which are 'absent' appear, on the whole, to be simply large disparities of income. If, therefore, neither social conflicts nor relations of production - but rather spatial locations in a structure of hierarchy or a spectrum of inequality - are the core of Anderson's analysis, what seems to be at issue is not class, but 'stratification' in the mode of bourgeois sociology. All this is particularly remarkable since an account of these class relations is demanded by Anderson's description of the differences between Athens and Rome, and particularly his explanation of what turn out to be their different modes of slave production. These differences appear to be based precisely on the divergent ways in which internal class struggles evolved.

Having seriously compromised his own conception of the slave mode of production, Anderson rescues its integrity and dominance by stressing the ideological effects of slavery on 'the whole shape and substance' of Athenian society. In




particular, he invokes this ideology to explain the limited productivity and technological development which he regards as a central fact of classical history. The argument is essentially that 'once manual labour became deeply associated with loss of liberty, there was no free social rationale for invention'; and so the 'social principle' of slavery.. . subtly affected all forms of labour.'4' He makes it very clear that he is here placing the ideological influences of slavery above its concrete economic effects:

The structural constraint of slavery on technology thus lay not so much in a direct intra-economic causality, though 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.42

It is this ideology, too, on which he ultimately relies to explain the 'disproportion' between the 'cultural and superstructural vitality' of classical antiquity and its 'infrastructural hebetude.4

Anderson's loyalty to the slave mode of production thus apparently forces him implicitly to accept what he would certainly explicitly reject: those familiar capitalist assumptions about the 'naturalness' of ever-expanding surplus achieved by permanent technological revolution; and it compels him to look for more or less psychological obstacles to this natural drive. Like many before him, he is thus forced to rely on some rather dubious evidence about contempt for labour in the classical world.

This is not to denigrate Anderson's emphasis on 'superstructural' factors. His generally brilliant analyses of the ways in which the superstructural legacy of one mode of production enter into the constitution of subsequent modes - for example, the ways in which the 'municipal' tradition of antiquity and Roman law affected the nature of Western feudalism - are among the most exciting aspects of his work. In the case of classical antiquity, however, the ideological superstructure is seen through a distorting lens; and the picture could have been clarified by a more precise account of the under- lying relations of production.

We have seen that questions must be raised about the wisdom of generalizing from the views of anti-democrats like Plato, Aristotle, or Xenophon, whose object in expressing their contempt for 'banausic' labour was to oppose the prevailing democratic values and the extension of political rights to producers. Anderson generalizes in precisely this way when he argues that 'the slave mode of production which underlay Athenian civilization found its most pristine ideological expression in the privileged social stratum of the city, whose intellectual heights its surplus labour in the silent depths below the polis made possible." This is his rather too subtle justifi- cation for appealing to writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon -all notable for their aristocratic distaste for the democracy - as expressions of the prevailing culture, when their object is precisely to condemn that culture, to oppose rather than reflect prevailing attitudes. In a sense, their views on labour were not so much a comment on slavery as on the position of free labour, attacking a democracy in which labour - or an important segment of it - was too free. Their view of labour and labourers is an ideology that is certainly not uniquely characteristic of the 'slave mode of production', but has been common to aristocracies everywhere at various times, and has always been most eloquently articulated precisely when the interests and the power of the aristocracy have been challenged by classes engaged in the despised activities. It is precisely in the attitude toward labour expressed by these anti-democratic philoso-




phers that the class-antagonisms dividing the Athenian citizenry are most clearly crystallized; and it is, again, Anderson's unwillingness to deal with the implications of internal class divisions that makes possible his unsatisfactory formula concerning the 'ideological expression' of Athenian productive relations and its effects on technology. The consequence is that Anderson makes little of the most fundamental economic, social and political conditions in Greece that may actually have hindered (if that is the right word) technological progress. Threats to the stability of property inherent in the political situation, the particular nature of slave-property which made it unsuitable for the kind of exploitation that promoted technological innovation in modern Europe, the configuration of class power which in Athens inhibited the expropriation of small producers and the concentration of property - all these, for example, are factors that might have been carefully explored to account for the technological 'stagnation' of classical antiquity. Indeed, it would be worthwhile to pursue the implications of Anderson's own suggestion that 'the major single advance in the agrarian technology of classical Antiquity', the discovery of the rotary mill for grind- ing corn, seems to have occurred not in spite but because of slavery - or at least that it issued from the slave latifundia of Imperial Rome, 'the slave mode of production fully unleashed on the land, without constriction or impediment.45

The problem of epochal transitions - from antiquity to feudalism, from feudalism to capitalism, and beyond -is at the heart of Marxist historiography, as is the 'specificity' of European experience in the development of capitalism. Few people have done more to advance these questions than has Perry Anderson. A reconsideration of certain assumptions that have acquired the status of conventional wisdom among Marxists would not have subverted but enhanced his important contribution to Marxist historiography. To identify and criticize the 'misjudgments' and 'myths' in the writings of his Marxist predecessors, as Anderson himself has said, '. . . is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it'46 - the more so when those myths and misjudgments have their source in an anti-democratic tradition completely alien to Marxism.

1 This essay is based on a book-length manuscript, now (I hope) in the final stages of completion, which deals with both the modern anti-democratic and the Marxist traditions of historiography on ancient Greece.

2 Theodore Mommsen is the most notable example of this trend. 3 Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Oxford, 1980, p. 14. 4 Jenkyns, p.14. 5 For a detailed study of this educational tradition, see M.L.Clarke, Classical Education

in Britain, Cambridge, 1959. 6 Jenkyns, p.6Z 7 This spectrum ranges from the violently anti-democratic arguments of 19th century

conservatives like Jacob Burckhardt or the Tory William Mitford to the more 'bourgeois-liberal' positions of Fustel de Coulanges or even Max Weber and contemporary writers like Maurice Bowra and Victor Ehrenberg.

8 William Mitford, The History of Greece, London, 1818, Vol. V, p. 16. 9 Mitford, Vol. V, pp.38-9

10 Mitford, Vol. V, pp.34-5. 11 Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte ed. Rudolf Marx, Leipzig, 1929, Vol.

III, pp.91, 206. 12 Burckhardt, Vol. I, p.258-9. 13 Burckhardt, Vol. I, p.221. 14 Burckhardt, Vol. I, pp.254-5. 15 This is, for example, how Marx and Engels refer to the ancient state in the German

Ideology




16 Engels, Anti-Duhring, London, 1969, pp.413-4. 17 Benjamin Farrington, The Civilization of Greece and Rome, London, (The New

People's Library), 1938, p.91. 17A See, for example, V.Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, Harmondsworth,

1969, especially pp.213-39. 18 There is a fairly common tendency to confuse the issue by using 'slaveowner', 'citizen',

or 'free man' more or less interchangeably, as Engels sometimes does in the Origins.. . 19 See, for example, G.E.M.de Ste.Croix, 'Karl Marx and the History of Classical

Antiquity', Arethusa, 8, 1975, pp.7-41. This argument is considered in the above-mentioned manuscript.

20 Estimates vary, but the mainstream of opinion certainly puts the number of slaves far lower than Engels' impossibly high figure. One highly respected historian, A.H.M. Jones, suggests a ratio as low as roughly one slave to one citizen household; several estimates suggest that during the Periclean era slaves constituted about one-quarter to one-third of the total population, so that they would still be out-numbered by members of the citizen class and con- siderably outnumbered by the free population including metics, although slaves would out- number adult male citizens by between two or three to one - still a figure very far from Engels' eighteen to one. As M.I.Finley has pointed out, however, numbers are not necessarily the essential question in determining the role of slavery in any economy (Finley, The Ancient Economy, Berkeley, 1973, pp.71-2. Even if we assume that the ratio of slaves to the total population was approximately the same in democratic Athens as it was in the American south, for example, the role of slavery was very different. One of the essential points is that in Athens, slaves, like citizens, were found in every kind of work, from the most unskilled to the highly skilled, including various administrative and managerial functions - a situation very unlike that which prevailed in America. For discussions of the Athenian economy and social structure, see also Finley's recent Ancient Slavery andModern Ideology, London, 1980; Finley, ed., Slavery in ClassicalAntiquity, Cambridge, 1968; A.H.M.Jones, Athenian Democracy, Oxford, 1969; and for the late 5th and 4th centuries B.C. in particular, Victor Ehrenberg, The People of Aristophanes: A Sociology of Old Attic Comedy, 2nd ed., New York, 1962. Useful general accounts of Athenian history and society are provided by Antony Andrewes, Greek Society, Harmondsworth, 1967 and, more briefly W.G.Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, New York, 1966. For the early period, see also Chester Starr, The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece: 800-500 B.C., New York, 1977. The political life of Athenian democracy is illuminated by W.Robert Connor, The New Politicians of Fifth-century Athens, Princeton, 1971 and Finley, 'Athenian Demagogues' in Studies in Ancient Society, ed. Finley, London, 1974. On other particular problems in Athenian history, see Alison Burford, Craftsmen in Greek and Roman Society, London, 1972; Sarah B.Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, London, 1975; K.J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality, Oxford, 1974; W.K.Pritchett, The Greek State at War, Berkeley, 1974, 2 Vols.

21 Finley emphasizes the role of slaves in large enterprises in Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, p.82. His designation of Greece and Rome as slave societies, incidentally, has certain advantages over the 'slave mode of production' since it acknowledges the importance of slavery without suggesting that the systematic use of chattel slaves necessarily implies a particular system of production, or even appropriation.

22 Cf., for example, Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge, 1978; and Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, London, 1973, p.10:

. . . there seems little doubt that peasantries were the basis of the ancient civilizations out of which most European feudal societies grew; and that the class of slaves, though economically and culturally of great significance at certain times and in certain sectors of the ancient world, was numerically inferior and of less permanent importance than the peasant producers. In fact, viewed from the standpoint of this most numerous class of rural society, the difference between late Rome and early medieval civilization may not have been all that easy to discern. 23 Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, London, 1974, p.21. Finley

also stresses the uniqueness of chattel slavery as a form of dependence. See, for example, Ancient Slavery, pp.71-7, where he discusses the unique characteristics of slavery: 'the slave's property status, the totality of power over him, his kinlessness' (p.77); and their consequences. It is clear from Finley's account, however, that while the distinct juridical status of slaves had profound consequences for their social condition and for their usefulness to their owners, it did not imply a




particular form of labour, a particular location in the division of labour, or even a particular form of surplus-extraction.

24 See, for example, Anderson, Passages, p.22. 25 See, for example, Finley's Ancient Slavery, pp.67-92, for an argument supporting the

view that the unique juridical and political status achieved by free producers was the impulse for the development of 'slave societies' in Antiquity. While the existence of slavery has been widespread, he argues, its systematic use on a large scale has been rare and requires a very particular explanation which, in the Graeco-Roman case, he finds in the prior 'creation' of a new type of free man. This view is apparently about to be challenged in a forthcoming book by G.E.M.de Ste.Croix; but whatever the explanation for the origin of Greek and Roman 'slave- societies', the particular nature of slavery in each of these cases is inextricably bound up with the particular nature of free men and the internal class struggles which produced and sustained them.

26 For a full discussion of Plato and Aristotle and their relation to the prevailing democratic ideology, see Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Social Context, Oxford, 1978.

27 See Burford, Craftsmen in Greek and Roman Society, pp. 20, 212. 28 Cf. Robert Brenner, 'The Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of Neo-

Smithian Marxism', New Left Review, 104, pp.25-92. 29 Perry Anderson, Passages, p. 19. 30 Anderson, p.23. 31 Anderson, p.25. 32 Anderson, p.58. 33 Anderson, p.32. 34 Anderson, pp.21-2. 35 Anderson, p.38. 36 Anderson's apparent dismissal of the significance of free labour (despite the admission

that they 'probably outnumbered' slaves in production) on the grounds that slaves 'constituted a much larger group than the total citizenry' is itself misleading. Numbers are, again, not necessarily decisive in determining the role of slavery, and estimates are, in any case, notoriously variable. Nevertheless, even if we grant Anderson's premise and accept his figures as correct - for their period - their contribution to his argument is doubtful. The 80-100,000 figure refers to all slaves, not simply to adult males, while the 30-40,000 citizens refers to adult males only, not to all members of the citizen 'class', let alone other free members of the population. The citizen class alone, even without free resident aliens, outnumbered slaves. See note 20 above.

37 Anderson, p.37. 38 Anderson, p.38. 39 It is perhaps possible to conclude that these conflicts did not reflect class struggles; but

no class analysis can be considered adequate which does not somehow account for the major social conflicts that divide a community and give it historical movement. A detailed argument in favour of regarding the conflicts within the citizen body as class conflicts is contained in the manuscript on which this essay is based and -to some extent and with many second thought since publication - in Wood and Wood, Class Ideology, Ch. 2.

40 See, for example, Anderson, p.38. 41 Anderson, p.27. 42 Anderson, pp.26-7. 43 Anderson, p.26. Questions might, in any case, be raised about the very idea of a

'disproportion' between the level of intellectual activity and the degree of technological progress. This seems to imply that there is some kind of natural and quantifiable fit between the two, that the quality of, say, Plato's Republic is measurable against the sophistication of the Attic oil press, and that if the latter fails to match the former, something is amiss.

44 Anderson, p.20. 45 Anderson, p.63. 46 Anderson, p.9.



Marxism and Ancient Greece

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