Geoffrey de Ste.

Croix

Class in Marx’s Conception of History,

Ancient and Modern

It is both an honour and a pleasure for me to be speaking here today.* It is

an honour to have been asked to give the annual lecture in memory of Isaac
Deutscher, a man who always resolutely pursued his own line of thought
with the greatest courage, and throughout his life tried to tell the truth as he
saw it, undismayed by attacks from whatever direction. (I greatly regret that
I never had the good fortune to meet him.) And it is a pleasure to be allowed
to give this lecture at the London School of Economics, where (you may be
surprised to hear) I actually had my first academic post, and taught for three
years in the early 1950s—though perhaps ‘taught’ is something of a
euphemism, because my field of interest as an Assistant Lecturer in Ancient
Economic History was rather far removed from anything prescribed by the
syllabus; and indeed I was sometimes made aware by some of my colleagues
in the Economic History Department (very politely, of course) that I was
really a bit of a nuisance, occupying a post which, but for my presence,
might have been filled by some genuinely useful person, who could have
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taken on some of the burden of teaching the syllabus, as I, alas, could
not. Well, I did my best to find someone who might be interested in
what I had to offer; but when I went around, asking people in different
departments whether I might think of giving lectures that could
conceivably interest their students, they prudently rejected my advances.
And then, suddenly, to my great delight, I was slotted in, if only in a
very small way. I received a letter from the Professor of Accounting,
Will Baxter (one of the leading authorities on his subject in the
English-speaking world), asking me to lecture in his department. ‘We’d
very much like to know’, he said, ‘about accounting by the Greeks and
Romans, and in particular if they had double-entry: things like that’. Of
course, I knew nothing whatever about the subject of ancient account-
ing, any more than most other ancient historians; but I duly got it up.
I had to do a vast amount of work on it from original sources, as I
found that there was hardly anything in the modern books that was any
good at all. But I did find an astonishing amount of first-hand evidence,
not only in the literary sources and the law-books, but also in the
inscriptions and above all the papyri. I wrote a piece which is, I think,
the only general study of the subject that makes use of all the various
kinds of source material.1 (It still seems to be cited as the standard
account.) I also gave some lectures at the School, both on ancient
accounting and on some kindred subjects like the ancient bottomry and
respondentia loan (the precursor of marine insurance):2 these were
attended by the professor and his staff, and some ancient historians from
other colleges, though not, as far as I could discover, by any under-
graduates of the School itself. And even after I had left London for
Oxford, thirty years ago, I was invited to come back and give a lecture
at the School each year on ancient and mediaeval accounting, until the
late 1970s.

I shall not be giving full references today to the various published

works I have occasion to cite; but they can virtually all be identified
easily, either from my recent book, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek
World, sub-titled From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (I shall refer
to it as ‘my Class Struggle book’), or from a paper I am contributing to
the forthcoming ‘Colloque Marx’ in Paris, the proceedings of which
will be published in due course.3

* Isaac Deutscher Memorial Lecture, November 28, 1983. At the editor’s request this lecture is printed
almost exactly as it was delivered, with the addition of some footnotes giving references. In the notes,
the abbreviation CSAGW
my The Clam Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Duckworth, 1981;
corrected paperback reprint, 1983). References to works by Marx and Engels are according to the
standard editions: the English MECW, and the German MEW, MEGA1 and MEGA2, for all of which see
CSAGW, pp. 684–5.
1 ‘Greek and Roman accounting’, in Studies in the History of Accounting, ed. A.C. Littleton and B.S.

Yamey (1956), pp. 14–74.

2 For this important invention (spreading the risks of commerce over the much wealthier non-

commercial classes) see my ‘Ancient Greek and Roman Maritime Loans’, in Debits, Credits, Finance and
Profits [Essays in Honour of W.T. Baxter], ed. Harold Edey and B.S. Yamey (1974), pp. 41–59.
3 For my ‘Class Struggle book’ (CSAGW here) see n.* above. The proceedings of the ‘Colloque Marx’

are to be edited by Bernard Chavance, as Actes du Colloque Marx de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales (Paris, Décember 1983), in Editions de l’EHESS, Paris, 1985, probably with the title Marx en
perspective. My contribution is entitled ‘Karl Marx and the Interpretation of Ancient and Modern
History’.

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The Problem of Class and Class Consciousness

I hope you will forgive me if I now launch right into some personal
reminiscence, which is in fact highly relevant to the subject of this
lecture (namely, the nature of class in Karl Marx’s conception of
history), because it explains an important part of the process of
intellectual development which led me to my present position.

I knew nothing whatever about Marx until the middle 1930s, when I
was in my mid-twenties. After a thoroughly right-wing upbringing, I
had qualified as a solicitor and was working with a Westminster firm,
and—under the impact of the rise of fascism—I had just begun to
become interested in the Labour movement. Even then, although I was
deeply impressed by the Marxist interpretation of history, in so far as I
had discovered anything about it (I knew precious little, really), my
ideas remained confused. In particular, although I was very willing in
principle to accept Marxist ideas about class and class struggle, which
made a powerful appeal to me as soon as I became aware of them, there
were difficulties even in that area which I was unable at that time to
deal with satisfactorily. I had already come to think of myself as a
Marxist (although I suppose ‘come to feel myself a Marxist’ would really
be more accurate); but as yet I was ill-equipped to engage in contro-
versy. For example, I could not as yet produce an effective answer to
the argument that it was dishonest to speak of ‘the working class’ in the
way many people on the Left did then, and still do, as if it were a united
body, carrying on political activity in unison, with a common purpose
and a real ‘class consciousness’. I remember being reproached by a
friend, who was active in the Communist Party, with having no faith in
‘the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat’. I don’t expect I had
the confidence to reply then (as I would now) that the proletariat
certainly has a potential ‘revolutionary consciousness’ which events
could one day make actual; but I do remember feeling, even then, that
to speak of a ‘revolutionary consciousness’ as if it were already actual in
the British working class was self-delusion. Above all, I had no answer
at that time to non-Marxist friends who pointed out to me—rightly—
that in the eyes of Marx, class and class conflict were fundamental, and
who then went on to insist—though here, as I now realise, wrongly—that
this necessarily entailed that a class should have a consciousness of
common identity, a class consciousness, and that it should regularly
participate in common political activity. These people then pointed
triumphantly to the fact (for it is a fact) that in most countries
throughout the world in modern times these two characteristics do not
exist to a sufficient degree—particulary not for the working class, in the
most advanced countries, and above all the one in which capitalism is
most fully developed: the United States, where politics in the main are
not conducted according to class alignments or in class terms. From
this my non-Marxist friends drew the conclusion (as so many people of
course still do today) that the concept of class itself, and in particular
the Marxist theory of the importance of class conflict (class struggle),
has little or no heuristic or explanatory value and does not enable us to
understand the contemporary world, and that the Marxist analysis of
modern society therefore fails.
96
I hope I have conveyed the fact that the whole argument I have just
been describing rests upon certain presuppositions (which I now realise
are false): namely, that we must regard both class consciousness and regular
political activity in unison as necessary features of class and class conflict,
with the consequence that when these features are not present the
Marxist class analysis cannot be applied. Today, if we do not reject,
these false presuppositions, it will be even harder for us to deal with the
arguments I have just outlined, for it is a fact that at the General
Election in June 1983 only a minority of the British working class who
voted at that election voted for Labour while something like a third or
more, depending on one’s definition of working class, voted for the
Conservative Party, led by a woman with deeply reactionary opinions,
thoroughly opposed to their interests. We are now told more insistently
than ever by people of right-wing views (are we not?) that a Marxist
class analysis of society is becoming increasingly inappropriate.
I know now how to deal with the arguments I have outlined; but in the
1930s I had not realised that they depended upon false presuppositions,
and (as I shall explain) it was only when I became an ancient historian
that I discovered why those presuppositions had to be decisively
rejected.
Before I had solved these and certain other problems came the war,
during which I decided to forsake the law when I came out of the RAF,
take a degree, and try to go in for some kind of teaching. I had left
school at fifteen, after spending most of my time there on Greek and
Latin, and although I had forgotten much of what I had learnt of those
languages I hoped that at University I would be able to study Greek
and Roman history, of which I knew little or nothing. As was the wont
in those days, my school study of Classics had centred on a few standard
literary texts (treated above all as a taxing series of grammatical and
stylistic problems), and of course on trying to write Latin and Greek
prose, and even verse, in the style of the same standard authors.
Although I cannot recall ever finding the slightest interest or signifi-
cance in that kind of activity, I had been rather good at it, and I felt
sure that with the historical perceptiveness I had since acquired, I might
be able to find special significance in Greek and Roman history. I was
not disappointed. I was extraordinarily fortunate, at University College,
London, in being taught mainly by Professor A.H.M. Jones, who from
my point of view has made the greatest contribution to ancient history
of anyone writing in English since Gibbon—although he never in his
life, as far as I know, read a word of Marx. I took my first degree when
I was 39, and after a year’s research I came to the LSE in 1950, as I have
mentioned already.
Now, it is true that a Marxist approach can invest the study of history
with a degree of understanding and a fascination which for me is
otherwise unattainable. But the trouble with history is that it is largely
concerned with brute facts, which, insofar as they are discoverable, have
a terrible way of revenging themselves on the practitioner who pretends
that they are not as they really were. I know there are many self-styled
historians who are made uncomfortable by, and even try to repudiate,
the statement that history is concerned with facts—I need not rehearse
97
their arguments, which some of you will have heard all too often. I will
only repeat a splendid remark (which I have quoted in my Class
Struggle book) by Arthur Darby Nock, a leading authority on Hellen-
istic and Roman religion who migrated from Cambridge, England, to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and who wrote: ‘A fact is a holy thing, and
its life should never be laid down on the altar of a generalisation.’4 For
ancient history overall there are far fewer facts reliably available than for
more recent times. And that makes me think of a well-known maxim
formulated in relation to a very different discipline which I often wish
could be well rubbed into ancient historians: ‘Whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent.’5 If this principle were regularly
applied in the field of ancient history, especially early Greek history,
rather a high proportion of the flood of speculative material which
pours out from the printing-presses of Europe and some Transatlantic
and Antipodean countries would soon dry up.
Studying the sources for Greek and Roman history, I soon found that
although a Marxist approach brought new insights, it appeared to come
up against precisely the same difficulties as those I have mentioned
already as having troubled me in relation to the contemporary world,
and indeed in a decidedly more acute form. The reason why the
situation looked worse for antiquity was that Marx and Engels always
regarded slaves as a class;6 and yet of all those groups in history which
seemed to have the right to be regarded as classes in Marx’s sense, it
was precisely Greek and Roman slaves who most conspicuously lacked
the qualities which, as I have explained, I had been led to imagine as
essential ingredients in class: namely, class consciousness, and political
activity in common. To a greater extent than, for example, the negro
slaves of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean, a Greek
or Roman slave household was often quite deliberately drawn from
slaves of very different nationalities and languages. (Acquiring an
ethnically and linguistically diverse set of slaves is urged upon slav-
eowners by a whole series of Greek and Roman writers, whom I have
quoted in my Class Struggle book.)7 The heterogeneous character of a
given set of slaves would make it difficult for them even to communicate
with each other except in their master’s language and would of course
make it much harder for them to revolt or even resist. It is no surprise
to find ethnic and cultural differences playing a major part in promoting
disunity in the few great slave revolts, in Italy and Sicily, which were
concentrated in a few generations in the Late Roman Republic, from
the 130s to the 70s B.C.8—and which, incidentally, never involved more
than a small fraction of the total slave population of the Roman world
of that day. So what on earth did Marx and Engels mean when they
spoke, in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, of class struggles
involving ancient slaves?

4
See CSAGW p. 31.
5
I realise, of course, that my use of this quotation does not convey the meaning intended by
Wittgenstein, and that a more realistic translation of the famous remark at the end of the Tractatus
would be something like ‘We must pass over in silence what we cannot formulate in language’!
6 I deal with this in my contribution to the proceedings of the ‘Colloque Marx’: See n. 3 above.
7 CSAGW p. 146, cf. pp. 65–6.
8 See CSAGW p. 146, with p. 564 n. 15.

98
Certainly anyone who supposes, mistakenly, that class consciousness
and/or common political activity are indeed necessary hallmarks of class
(as many people still do) is going to get into an impossible position if
he accepts slaves as a class. I think it is perhaps for that very reason that
almost all the contemporary Continental ancient historians I have read,
including soi-disant Marxists, becoming aware that there is a dilemma
here, have chosen the wrong way of escape from it and have decided
that slaves cannot be treated as a class.9 (I use the expression ‘soi-disant’
or ‘self-styled’ Marxists because it seems to me that anyone who refuses
to regard slaves as a class is, for reasons I shall give presently, denying
a basic principle of Marx’s thought.) I was always made uneasy by the
kind of writing I have just been describing; but it is only in the last few
years that I have become able to understand why it is wrong. I would
like to think that from a fairly early stage I suspected that if a man of
such tremendous intellectual power as Marx wrote of slaves from the
first as a class, in spite of the serious difficulties that seemed to create,
he may have had a different notion of class from his modern commentators.
But what was that notion? As we all know, Marx never provided a
definition of class. At the very end of Volume III of Das Kapital, where
the work breaks off, he was about to do . . . . not precisely that: not to
define class as a general concept, but to give a definition of ‘the three
great social classes’, the individual classes of his own day.10
The Primacy of Exploitation
I must not delay any longer to explain exactly what I think Marx
primarily meant by ‘class’: a concept which for me is absolutely
fundamental in his thinking, and which I myself fully share. I regard
the whole complex of thought of which class is the very kernel as the
most useful and effective contribution ever made to the analysis of
human society above the most primitive level. I have just spoken of
‘what Marx primarily meant by “class”’—because it can be shown that
he occasionally uses the expression in a very different sense (a narrower
sense) from the one I am treating as fundamental. I would like to think
that the most important contribution I have made in the theoretical
portion of my Class Struggle book is to elucidate this basic sense of
class in Marx,11 and to distinguish it from some of his other uses of the
term, where he has allowed his context to dictate a narrower significance
to the word than it properly bears. As far as I know, no one has ever
sufficiently insisted that out of a number of different usages there is just
one that is primary: class is (to put it as succinctly as possible, perhaps
rather more crudely than in my book) a relationship of exploitation; and
the other senses in which Marx uses the word are all secondary and
must be treated as aberrations, unless they are given the specific
narrower sense which Marx intended on each occasion, as indeed the
context often unmistakably reveals. As far as I know, my book is the
first in any language both to work out this theory in full and to apply it
in detail to a very long period of history—some thirteen or fourteen
hundred years, from the Archaic period of Greek history down to the
9
See my contribution to the proceedings of the ‘Colloque Marx’.
10
Marx, Capital III, pp. 885–6
MEW XXV, pp. 862–3.
11 See CSAGW II, ii–iii, esp. the definitions on pp. 43–4.

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Arab conquests of much of the Eastern part (the ‘Greek’ part) of the
Roman empire: that is to say, from the eighth century B.C. to the 640s
of the Christian era. Where an apparent dilemma is caused by Marx’s
inconsistent use of the terminology of class (especially in relation to
class conflict, class struggle, Klassenkampf), many modern self-styled
Marxists have ended, as I said a moment ago, by taking a wrong road
and rejecting a fundamental part of Marx’s theory. My position never
obliges me to do that. Of course we must never follow Marx blindly;
and we must never hesitate to correct him when he makes a wrong or
inadequate judgment, as he does now and then, usually through
insufficient knowledge of the historical evidence, which was sometimes
not available in his day. But the Neo-Marxism or Pseudo-Marxism that
has so many adherents in the contemporary world is often due to simple
misunderstanding of what Marx actually said, as I hope I am showing
today in relation to the meaning of ‘class’.
To give more substance to my very brief definition—class (as I
maintained in Chapter II Part ii of my book)12 is the collective social
expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is
embodied in a social structure. (By ‘exploitation’, of course, I mean the
appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others: in a
commodity-producing society this is the appropriation of what Marx
called ‘surplus value’.) Class is essentially a relationship—just as capital,
another of Marx’s basic concepts, is specifically described by him, in
some ten passages I have noted, as ‘a relation’, ‘a social relation of
production’, and so forth.13 And a class (a particular class) is a group of
persons in a community identified by their position in the whole system
of social production, defined above all according to their relationship
(primarily in terms of the degree of control) to the conditions of
production (that is to say, to the means and labour of production) and
to other classes. The individuals constituting a given class may or may
not be wholly or partly conscious of their own identity and common
interests as a class, and they may or may not feel antagonism towards
members of other classes as such. Class conflict (class struggle, Klassen-
kampf) is essentially the fundamental relationship between classes,
involving exploitation and resistance to it, but not necessarily either class
consciousness or collective activity in common, political or otherwise,
although these features are likely to supervene when a class has reached
a certain stage of development and become what Marx once (using a
Hegelian idiom) called ‘a class for itself’.14 The slaves of antiquity (and
of later times) fit perfectly into this scheme. Not only do Marx and
Engels refer repeatedly to ancient slaves as a class; in a whole series of
passages15 the slave in antiquity is given precisely the position of the
free wage-worker under capitalism and of the serf in mediaeval times—
as the proletarian is to the capitalist, and the serf to the feudal lord, so
12 CSAGW p. 43.
13 Marx, Capital
III, p. 814 (
MEW XXV, pp. 822–3), with I, p. 534, cited in CSAGW p. 547 n. 1; and
many other passages, e.g. Cap. I, p. 766 & n. 3; MECW IX, p. 212; Grundrisse, in the edition which is
now standard, MEGA2 II, i, 1 (1976) pp. 228, 229
Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy, Eng. trans. by Martin Nicolaus (Pelican Marx Library, 1973) pp. 309, 310. Of course, capital
for Marx was also a process and ‘not a simple relation’ : MEGA2 II, i, 1, p. 180
Eng. trans. p. 258.
14 See CSAGW p. 60, with references to MECW VI, p. 211 and the French original in MEGA1.
15 These are cited in my contribution to the proceedings of the ‘Colloque Marx’ (n. 3 above).

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the slave is to the slaveowner, In each case the relationship is specifically
a class relationship, involving class conflict, the essence of which is
exploitation, the appropriation of a surplus from the primary producer:
proletarian, serf or slave. That is the essence of class. Actually, in three
of their early works, written during the 1840s, Marx and Engels commit
what I have called in my book ‘a minor methodological and conceptual
error’,16 by speaking of class struggle not, as they should have done,
between slaves and slaveowners, but between slaves and free men, or
citizens. That is clearly a mistake, because the great majority of free
men, and even citizens, owned no slaves; and of course the distinction
between slave and free man or citizen, however important, is a
distinction not of class but merely of status, or ‘order’. Fortunately,
Marx and Engels did not repeat this error after 1848, as far as I know—
if anyone is aware of a later example, I shall be glad to have the
reference.
This theoretical position, which I arrived at in the 1970s, solves all the
problems I mentioned earlier. It removes all difficulties in regarding
slaves as a class. And it is strikingly helpful in the modern world. Its
application to Thatcherite Britain is only too obvious. The fact that the
British working class is very far from being uniformly self-conscious or
a political unity becomes irrelevant. What is significant is that the
government is overwhelmingly on the side of the propertied classes,
and is eager—in so far as it can fulfil its objectives without driving itself
out of office at the next election—to keep up the profits that go
primarily to the propertied classes and to keep down the wages that go
to the workers, who are constantly told that if they show ‘greediness’
(through their trade unions above all), they will price ‘us’ out of the
market.
And above all, the theoretical position I have described helps us to
understand a sinister major phenomenon of the contemporary world:
capitalist exploitation on a world scale, which has taken on vast new
dimensions in the past few decades, with the increasing export of capital
from advanced countries to less developed areas, in particular to those
which in the absence of democracy can be subjected to a high degree of
control and coercion over their work-force—the oppressive American-
backed dictatorships in Central and South America, for example, and of
course that archetype of twentieth-century oligarchy, South Africa,
which plays a great part in the minds of many influential people in this
country, as a bastion of what they are pleased to call ‘the free world’.
As we all know, the objective of this global movement is to produce
the highest possible profit for investors, members of the propertied
classes, with the lowest possible wages for workers—exploitation in the
fullest sense. As part of what I have called in my book ‘the class
struggle on the ideological plane’,17 this whole process is given a bogus
air of respectability and indeed inevitability by being referred to as the
beneficial operation of ‘enterprise’ through ‘the free market’, which of
course can be relied upon, as a consequence of its very nature, to
distribute its benefits, in the form of profits, to those above all who
16
See CSAGW p. 66, referring to MECW V, pp. 33, 432; VI, p. 482.
17
See CSAGW pp. 409–52 (Chapter VII).

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produce as cheaply as possible, and have no undue tenderness about
their workers’ wages.
Political Activity and Consciousness
The theoretical position I have been describing has the very great
advantage of enabling us to employ the concept of class consistently,
with the same meaning, over the whole range of class society, from
prehistoric times to the present day. I hope I have now brought out the
fact that it was really becoming an ancient historian that enabled me to
solve the problems that had long perplexed me. It was specifically the
study of Greek and Roman slavery that enabled me to realise the nature
of class in Marx’s fundamental thought. As I said earlier, he always
thought of slaves as a class. But this is the most extreme case: if ancient
slaves are indeed to be regarded as a class, then neither class conscious-
ness nor political activity in common (both of which were far beyond
the capacity of ancient slaves) can possibly have the right to be
considered necessary elements in class, in Marx’s scheme of things; and
this also provides a solution of the difficulties about class in modern
society that had worried me since the 1930s.
Let me turn aside for a moment to say that many different concepts of
class have been developed, and that of course it is perfectly open to
anyone, if he thinks it produces more fruitful results, to adopt a
conception of class that is quite different from the one held by Marx.
(My one reservation is that he must not then try to foist his own
peculiar notions on to Marx and to pretend that his conception
represents that of Marx.) Probably the treatment of this subject most
familiar to sociologists is the one by Max Weber,18 whose definition of
class was very far from anything that can be attributed to Marx. For
example, Weber would not allow slaves to be a class at all ‘in the
technical sense of the term’ (that is to say, according to Weber’s own
peculiar definition of class), because, as he put it (and I quote), ‘the fate
of slaves is not determined by the chance of using goods or services for
themselves on the market’.19 For Weber, ‘“class situation” is ultimately
“market situation”’; and of course slaves do not operate on the market:
they are therefore, for Weber, not a class but a Stand, a status group. I
should like to repeat today my expression of astonishment, in my Class
Struggle book,20 at not being able to find anywhere in Weber’s work—
all the relevant parts of which I think I have gone through—any serious
consideration of Marx’s fundamentally different concept of class. (If I
have missed something, I hope someone will enlighten me.) But I
suggest that there may have been a simple reason for this: Weber, like
so many other people, was perhaps never quite able to make up his
mind precisely what Marx’s concept was!
There is a little more that I feel it is necessary to say about the concept
of class in Marx. A major difference between my own attitude and that
of many others who have written on this subject, as I have already

18
See CSAGW pp. 80–91, with 696–7 for the bibliographical references.
19 CSAGW
p. 89.
20 CSAGW
p. 90.

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indicated, is that I have not given equal weight to all the various passages
(there are hundreds of them) in which Marx says something that may be
taken as an indication of his conception of class. The point that many
people miss is that these statements of Marx cannot all be reconciled as they
stand. Instead of trying to assimilate them all, and picking out on each
separate occasion a particular statement that happens to suit a specific
argument, I have singled out a basic sense of the term ‘class’ which suits
all but a very few of its occurrences in Marx; and I insist that the
passages which are in conflict with that fundamental meaning must be
treated as aberrant, and carefully examined, to discover how their
context—which always turns out to be the cause of the aberration—has
given the passage a peculiar meaning. In relation to the ancient world
in particular, the aberrations can immediately be understood in several
cases if it is realised that when Marx refers to ‘class’ or ‘class conflict’ he
is, on those occasions, thinking primarily if not entirely of political
struggles.
An example from the nineteenth century that no one can possibly
gainsay is the statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in
relation to the very end of 1850, that ‘the bourgeoisie had done away
with the Klassenkampf for the moment by abolishing universal suf-
frage’.21 (A law restricting the right of suffrage had been passed some
seven months earlier.) Taken literally, the statement is simply ridiculous
as it stands, but it can be turned into perfectly good sense if we make it
say, as indeed the context demands, that the abolition of general suffrage
had for the time being banished French parliamentary class conflict. In a
few other passages Marx even speaks, in striking contrast with the
position he takes up elsewhere, as if workers in a capitalist society could
not be considered a class at all until they had ‘taken political shape’ or
‘been organised as a class’.22 In a much-quoted passage in The Eighteenth
Brumaire Marx says of the French smallholding peasants that in certain
respects they do form a class and in certain other respects they do not.23
The context happens to require the second statement to receive all the
emphasis, and I have known that second statement to be quoted by
itself and the first simply ignored,24 although it is absolutely clear from
many other passages in The Eighteenth Brumaire and other works of Marx
that he did consider peasant smallholders to be a class.25
Those who deny that the slaves of antiquity could constitute a class
commonly quote two passages in Marx, referring specifically to Klassen-
kampf, one of which says (not very accurately, on any interpretation)
that ‘the class struggles of the ancient world took the form chiefly of a
contest between debtors and creditors’,26 and the other that ‘In ancient
21 MECW XI. p. 153
MEW VIII, p. 165.
22 E.g. MECW VI pp. 167 & 211, 318 & 332,
498 & 493.
23
See CSAGW pp. 60–1.
24 As by P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘Les esclaves grecs étaient-ils une classe?’ in Raison présente 6 (1968) 103–12,

at 103; twice reprinted, on the second occasion with the inclusion of the first half of Marx’s statement,
thus destroying the argument founded on its omission. See my contribution to the ‘Colloque Marx’, n.
3 above.
25 Peasants are very well analysed in an article by Engels, ‘The Peasant Question in France and

Germany’, mentioned in CSAGW p. 211. For excellent discussions of mediaeval peasants, see the works
of Rodney Hilton cited in CSAGW p. 680.
26
Marx, Capital I, p. 135
MEW XXIII, pp. 149–50.

103
Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority,
between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive
mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal
for these combatants.’27 The solution is that Marx is thinking entirely in
both cases of political struggles; and the mere insertion of the word
‘political’ in each case before ‘class struggle’ brings both statements
into line with his basic thought, and allows us to accept his other
statements in their natural sense. We then have no reason at all to refuse
to recognise Roman slaves as a class, engaged in continuous class
struggle on the economic plane.
I suppose it is only fair that I should give some references to those
historians, Marxist and non-Marxist, who argue or (more often) assume
that slaves must not be considered a class. I shall confine myself to the
few who are best known. (You will find some references in Chapter III
Part ii of my Class Struggle book, with a brief but sufficient refutation;28
the whole question is dealt with more thoroughly in my paper for the
Paris ‘Colloque Marx’.) There is an article by a leading French ancient
historian, Professor Pierre Vidal-Naquet, which is often quoted and has
received enthusiastic endorsement from Sir Moses Finley,29 and a joint
source-book in both French and English by Dr Michel Austin (of the
University of St. Andrews) and Vidal-Naquet, containing a long
Introduction by Austin. I am told that this is much read by British
undergraduates in the improved English version of the book, which
has the title Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece.30 Although
none of the three scholars I have just mentioned is in any sense a
Marxist, or regards himself as such, they are mainly purporting to
characterise the position of Marx. Their arguments (if I can call them
that) seem to me entirely without substance against those I myself have
just been sketching; but if you are interested, you will be able to read
them and make up your own minds.
Nor do the Italians do any better. I have time to mention only Professor
Andrea Carandini, one of the best of Italian archaeologists, who is a
Marxist and shows more acquaintance with the works of Marx than the
others I have mentioned, although I must say that on this particular
subject he seems strangely unaware of the great mass of evidence against
him.31 His book, mainly about pre-capitalist economic formations, was
not available to me when I was writing my Class Struggle book, so I
must mention the cryptic title, the significance of which is likely to be
understood at once (I am afraid) only by those who know their
Grundrisse:32 it is L’anatomia della scimmia. Some years ago at Oxford I
had a Greats pupil who was looking in a bookshop (I forget which) for
Rice Holmes’s work on the Emperor Augustus, called The Architect of
the Roman Empire: he told me he found it in the section labelled
‘Architecture’. I am tempted to wonder where, in such a bookshop, one
27
Marx, Preface to the second (1869) edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, in MEW VIII, 560
XVI, pp.
359–60.
28
CSAGW pp. 63–6.
29
See n. 24 above, with M.I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (1973) pp. 49 & 186 n. 32; and Ancient Slavery
and Modern Ideology (1980; Pelican 1983) pp. 77 & 165 n. 29.
30
See CSAGW pp. 64–5.
31
I deal with this in my contribution to the proceedings of the ‘Colloque Marx’ (see n. 3 above).
32
See the relevant passage in MEGA2 II, i, 1, p. 40
Grundrisse, Eng. trans. p. 105 (cf-n. 13 above).

104
might expect to find this work of Carandini’s: his ‘Monkey book’, as I
tend to call it—without, let me hasten to say, intending the least
disrespect to such an outstandingly able scholar. I suppose the fairly
obvious ‘anatomia’ would be likely to consign it to the Medical section,
under ‘Anatomy’. But perhaps, if the bookseller knew what ‘scimmia’
meant, he might be more likely to put it under ‘Zoology’.

Peasants and Exploitation

I want now to deal with a problem of Marxist class theory which gave
me a great deal of trouble at one time, and the solution of which took
me longer to work out, perhaps, than anything else. It concerns those
who were actually a majority of the population of the Greek and Roman
world for many centuries, but about whom (because of the nature of
our sources) we know infinitely less than about the upper classes: I refer
to the free independent producers, the vast majority of whom were of
course peasants. And that makes what I am about to say of greater
general interest than if I were just speaking about Graeco-Roman
antiquity, because, as Teodor Shanin has well said, ‘It is worth
remembering that—as in the past, so in the present—peasants are the
majority of mankind.’33 A large literature on peasants has grown up in
the past few decades, much of it written by sociologists and anthropol-
ogists who may be able to deal most effectively with the contemporary
world but are helpless in the face of antiquity unless they can cope with
the often very difficult source material, the ancient evidence, as few
can.34

My own particular problem here, as an ancient historian, began to dawn

upon me in my undergraduate days in the late 1940s, but I could not
produce a satisfactory solution until the 1970s. The problem, in a
nutshell, can be put as follows. Ancient slaves and serfs and debt
bondsmen suffered exploitation in perfectly obvious ways, and so did a
certain number of peasants, including leaseholders who were rack-
rented and fell into arrears with their rents, and even freeholders who,
when their crops failed, had to borrow at mortgage on usurious terms:
both these groups might be ejected from their holdings, or subjected to
debt bondage. But what about the great majority of small freehold
peasants, who at least managed to scrape a living from their farms,
handed down from generation to generation? In what ways were they
exploited?

I have answered this in my book by distinguishing between two

different kinds of exploitation: one I call ‘direct and individual’, the
other ‘indirect and collective’.35 The first (‘direct and individual’) is of
wage-labourers, slaves, serfs and debt bondsmen, and also of tenants
and ordinary debtors, by particular employers, masters, landowners or
moneylenders; and it presents no difficulties. Exploitation may be said
to be ‘indirect and collective’ when a State (including, for example, the
Roman imperial government or that of a Greek or Roman city), which
33
Peasants and Peasant Societies, ed. T. Shanin, 1971, p. 17.
34
See CSAGW pp. 208–6 (
IV, ii) on ancient peasants.
35 CSAGW
pp. 205–8 (
IV, i).

105
represents primarily the interests of a superior class or classes, imposes
burdens disproportionately upon a particular subject class or classes.
These burdens divide up conveniently under three headings: taxation,
military conscription, and forced labour or personal services. I will take
each of these three in turn, very briefly. Taxation, often astonishingly
light in the Classical Greek city-states and the Roman Republic,
increased enormously under the Roman Empire, and in the Later
Empire absorbed a high proportion of the total product of the
peasantry: see in particular the last chapter of my Class Struggle book
and of course A.H.M. Jones’s magnum opus on the Later Roman
Empire.36 The incidence of military conscription varied greatly in anti-
quity: sometimes the poorest classes got off very lightly; but in the third
and second centuries B.C. (as all historians of the Roman Republic will
know) conscription was a fearful burden on the peasantry of Roman
Italy, and many poor farmers lost their land as a result. The last of my
three categories, compulsory services, has had far less attention paid to it
than the other two, so I will give one or two examples of it which will
be familiar to everyone, from the New Testament. We all know about
Simon of Cyrene, who was compelled by the Romans to carry the cross
of Jesus to the place of execution; but even Classical scholars are often
unaware that in relation to this incident both Mark and Matthew use
the correct Greek technical term for such impositions: a form of the
verb angareuein.37 The Greek angareia and Latin angaria descend from a
word long used in the Persian empire for transport services, which was
taken over by the Hellenistic kingdoms and came to be applied to
similar and allied impositions for the benefit of the State or the
municipalities in the Roman period.38 Only an understanding of the
angareia-system makes sense of one of the sayings of Jesus in the
‘Sermon on the Mount’: ‘Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go
with him twain’; here again the Greek word is a form of the verb
angareuein.39 (I suggest that this passage deserves more attention than it
usually receives in discussions of the attitude of Jesus to the political
authorities of his day. I think it may have been one of the texts which
contributed to forming the passive political attitude of St. Paul, as
expressed in a disastrous group of texts which can be summed up in the
words of the Epistle to the Romans: ‘The powers that be are ordained of
God.’)40 It is perhaps worth mentioning that the philosopher Epictetus
(an ex-slave, incidentally) was a good deal less enthusiastic than Jesus
about co-operation with officials exacting angareia: he says pragmatically
that it is good sense to comply with a soldier’s requisition of one’s
donkey. If one objects, he says, the result is likely to be a beating, and
the animal will be taken just the same.41
I must add that after working out the theory of the forms of exploitation
I have just been describing, I was encouraged to find that Marx himself
had partly formulated it, in one of his series of articles for the Neue
36 CSAGW
VIII, ii–iii, esp pp. 473–503; and A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284–602 (1964), esp.
II. pp. 767–823 (Chapter XX).
37
See CSAGW p. 15, on Mk XV, 21; Mt. XXVII, 32.
38 See CSAGW pp. 14–16.
39 See CSAGW p. 15, on Mt. V, 41.
40 See CSAGW p. 398, citing Rom. XIII, 1–7 and other passages.
41 See CSAGW p. 15, citing Epict., Diss. IV, i, 79.

106
Rheinische Zeitung during 1850, which in their collective form are referred
to as The Class Struggles in France. Marx says there of the condition of
the French peasants of his day: ‘Their exploitation differs only in form
from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat . . . . The exploiter is
the same: capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual
peasants through mortgages and usury; the capitalist class exploits the
peasant class through the State taxes.’42
Slave Societies?
There is one other aspect of Marxist class theory which I want to deal
with, as it may give rise to perplexity if it is not cleared up. It is a
problem which may arise in relation to any class society but is
particularly acute in regard to ancient slavery. What it needs essentially
for its solution is simply a recognition of what Marx himself says in a
series of passages in all three volumes of Capital which I have discussed
in Chapter II Part ii of my book.43 (It may be that someone has dealt
thoroughly with this subject in general terms recently, but I do not
happen to know of any satisfactory treatment.) In modern times some
Marxists, knowing that Marx and Engels consistently regarded the
Greek and Roman world as a ‘slave society’, have thought it necessary
to maintain that in that world most of the actual production was done by
slaves. But this opinion is demonstrably false: the greater part of
production, especially in agriculture (by far the most important sector
of the ancient economy), was done by peasants who were at least
nominally free, even if, from the early fourth century of the Christian
era onwards, more and more of them were brought into forms of
serfdom;44 and much manufacture also was always done by free workers.
The adoption of the position I have attacked has brought much
criticism upon those who have held it, and rightly; but unfortunately
many people have also supposed that the view in question is an
inevitable consequence of accepting a Marxist analysis of ancient society,
as it is not. I would not deny that Marx himself may possibly have
believed that in much of Italy and Sicily during the Late Roman
Republic (say, roughly the last century and a half B.C.) slaves did do
most of the work. (That position, although mistaken, would be far from
absurd.) But according to the principles Marx himself laid down in the
passages in Capital which I have alluded to, the nature of a given mode
of production is decided, not according to who does most of the work of
production, but according to the method of surplus-appropriation, the way in
which the dominant classes extract their surplus from the primary
producers. In at least the most developed parts of the Greek and Roman
world, while (as I have said) it was free peasants and craftsmen who
were responsible for the bulk of production, the propertied classes
obtained the great bulk of their regular surplus from labour which was
unfree.45 (The propertied classes, in my terminology, are those who can,
if they wish, live without actually working for their daily livelihood:
they may work or not, but they do not have to. They may have

42
See CSAGW p. 206, citing MECW X, p. 22.
43 CSAGW pp.
50–2.
44 See CSAGW
IV, iii, esp. pp. 249–59.
45 See CSAGW pp. 52–4. 133–4, 140 ff.; cf. III, vi, esp. pp. 179–82, etc.

107
accounted for perhaps something between two or three and ten or fifteen
per cent of the free population in Greek and Roman antiquity, according
to place and period. The lower figure must generally have been nearer
the reality, I think, especially in the Roman period.)

Now, unfree labour was not entirely that of slaves: first, forms of
serfdom (the Spartan Helots, for example) existed here and there in the
Greek world as rare exceptions;46 and secondly, debt bondage existed in
most places throughout the Greek and Roman world (democratic
Athens is the one great exception) on a far larger scale than the vast
majority of ancient historians have recognised. (I have shown this by
producing a large quantity of evidence in Chapter III Part iv of my
Class Struggle book.)47 Thirdly, after about A.D.300 it seems to me
likely that the propertied classes derived their surplus (always primarily
agricultural in character) more from peasant serfs than from actual
slaves, although slavery continued to be important. However, this is a
fearsomely difficult question, which I have tried to discuss in detail in
Chapter IV Part iii of my book,48 and I must not go on about it now.
I will only say that in my opinion the most useful single statement by
Marx on this subject is one in the Grundrisse, to the effect that the
ancient world was characterised by ‘direkte Zwangsarbeit’, direct
compulsory labour.49 The Greek and Roman world—at any rate down
to the seventh century of the Christian era, which is as far as my own
knowledge of the source material allows me to go—was indeed a society
dependent upon unfree labour, in the sense that its propertied classes always
derived the bulk of their regular surplus from unfree labour.

The Versatility of Marx’s Concepts

My time is nearly at an end, but you will perhaps expect me, before I
finish, to say a few words about rival theories of historical interpretation,
to set beside Marx’s historical materialism. There are just two I will
briefly mention: Structuralism, and the essentially Weberian type of
approach associated with Sir Moses Finley and his followers.

Structuralism, as represented above all in the work of Claude Lévi-

Strauss and his school, is thought by many people to have made a
contribution of the greatest importance to anthropology; but its
application to history seems to me to have brought as much darkness as
light, although some of its practitioners, notably the French Byzantinist
Evelyne Patlagean, are much admired in some circles. I will only
recommend what seems to me a very good Marxist analysis of
Structuralism as a historical method by John Haldon, of the Birming-
ham University Centre for Byzantine Studies, in English, in the Czech

46
See CSAGW pp. 135–6, 147–58.
47 CSAGW pp. 136–7, 162–70; cf. p. 282.
48 CSAGW
IV, iii, esp. pp. 255–9.
49 See CSAGW p. 54; cf. pp. 52, 133.

108
periodical Byzantinoslavica for 1981.50 While paying tribute to Patlagean’s
work, Dr. Haldon brings out the weakness of Structuralism as a
historical method both in its inability to handle successfully diachronic
phenomena (as the historian must always be doing) and in its character-
istic failure to go beyond mere description and provide explanations.
A well-known ancient social and economic historian who for some
thirty years has been working in this country, and who has made some
distinguished contributions to his subject, Sir Moses Finley, put a gulf
between himself and Marx in his best-known book, The Ancient Economy
(1973), by totally rejecting, as tools of historical analysis, both class and
exploitation. In that book Sir Moses specifically dismisses in the most
cavalier way, in a few lines, Marx’s concept of class, of which he shows
no comprehension. In place of it he chooses a highly subjective
category, that of status—in the Weberian sense, although I think he
never says that explicitly.51 (I call status a ‘subjective category’ because
it depends primarily upon the esteem accorded by others—what
Aristotle called time, in fact: a term which, by the way, he banished
almost entirely from his great work on Politics, reserving it mainly for
his ethical writings.)52 Sir Moses, in his Ancient Economy, is also
disinclined to make serious use of the concept of exploitation, apparently
on the ground that, like imperialism, it is ‘in the end, too broad as a
category of analysis’.53 In two later works, published in 1981 and 1982,
Sir Moses has had recourse to a particular piece of status-terminology,
namely ‘élites’, in his attempt to define (as he had not done in his
Ancient Economy) what he means by describing ancient Greek and
Roman society as ‘a slave economy’: he now says that slaves ‘provided
the bulk of the immediate income from property . . . of the élites,
economic, social and political’.54 Now, ‘élites’ is one of the most
imprecise of sociological obfuscations, which may sometimes have its
50
John F. Haldon, ‘On the structuralist approach to the social history of Byzantium’, in Byzantinoslavica
42 (1981) pp. 203–11: a review-article on two books by Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté
sociale à Byzance, 4–7 siècles (Paris, 1977), and Structure sociale, famille, chrétienté à Byzance, IV–XI siècle
(London, 1981). Perhaps I should add that Structuralism, at least in the strict Lévi-Straussian sense,
now seems to be in general retreat; and according to a review by Rodney Needham, in 4228 Times Lit.
Suppl. (13th April 1984) p. 393, Lévi-Strauss himself writes of it in his most recent book, Le Regard
éloigné, as ‘having passed out of fashion’. Through its influence on Louis Althusser and his followers,
Structuralism seems to me to have done serious damage to the study of Marxism in France. I am not
acquainted with the works that are sometimes broadly described as ‘post-structuralist’, for which see,
briefly, Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (The Wellek Library Lectures, delivered
at the University of California at Irvine), Verso/NLB, London 1983, and published in London, 1983)
pp. 39–57.
51 See CSAGW pp. 58–9, 91–4.
52 See CSAGW p. 80, with p. 551 n. 30. In view of M.I. Finley’s light-hearted remark, in his Politics in the

Ancient World (1983) p. 10 n. 1, that in my Class Struggle book I have ‘turned Aristotle into a Marxist’,
perhaps I should point out here that what I have done is essentially to demonstrate in detail the
important ways in which Aristotle’s method of analysis of Greek politics closely resembles the
approach adopted by Marx: see CSAGW pp. 69–80 (
II, iv).
53 See CSAGW p. 91. And in Finley’s later book, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (see n. 29 above) I

think that ‘exploitation’ hardly appears, apart from p. 78, except in the expression ‘unit of exploitation’
(e.g. pp.133, 135, 136, 137).
54
Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology p. 82, repeated in Finley’s ‘Problems of Slave Society: Some
Reflections on the Debate’, in the first fascicule of the new Italian periodical, Opus I (1982) i. pp. 201–
10, at p. 206. I cannot accept Finley’s claim, which follows in the latter work, ‘That definition can
easily be translated into Marxist language’: such a ‘translation’ would involve major conceptual
changes.

109
uses but surely ought to be strictly avoided in a definition. And quite
apart from the unnecessary imprecision inevitably introduced by the
word ‘élites’ (made worse, if anything, by calling them ‘economic, social
and political’ élites), that term is not at all a good choice in this
particular case, for slave-owning certainly extended well below the
lowest level at which ‘élites’ could be thought an appropriate descrip-
tion. Many well-to-do peasants whom it would be absurd to number
among an ‘élite’ owned slaves to do their farm-work, and so did some
quite humble people engaged in manufacture and trade. My own
formula, you will remember from a few moments ago, is that the
propertied classes (people who were able to live without themselves
working for their livelihood) derived the bulk of their regular surplus
from slave labour and other unfree labour.55

Now, I have no difficulty in understanding why so many people become

uncomfortable and unhappy when they are seriously confronted with
Marx. As I like to think I have shown in my Class Struggle book,
Marx’s analysis of society, although devised in the course of an effort to
understand the mid-nineteenth-century capitalist world, resulted in the
construction of a set of concepts which work remarkably well when
applied even to the Greek and Roman world and can be used to explain
many of its features and developments—the total destruction of Greek
democracy over some five or six centuries,56 for example, and even the
age-old problem of ‘the decline and fall of the Roman empire’, or let us
say rather, ‘the disintegration of quite a large portion of the Roman
empire between the fourth and eighth centuries.57 It is this very
versatility and general applicability of Marxist historical method and
concepts, I suggest, that makes so many members of late-twentieth-
century capitalist society so reluctant to have anything to do with
Marxism. I was particularly pleased, by the way, when a prominent
Roman historian, who is not a Marxist, reviewing my book in a learned
journal,58 ended by asking whether it was possible to find my ‘categories
of analysis convincing without drawing disturbing inferences for
contemporary society’, as I have done.

And now to conclude. As early as 1845, in the eleventh of his Theses on

Feuerbach, Marx wrote, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point however is to change it.’59 Of course
before the world can be changed, it must first be thoroughly understood;
55 In his latest book, Politics in the Ancient World (1983), which I saw only after this lecture had been

delivered, Finley seems to have abandoned his attachment to status concepts (though without, I think,
admitting the fact) and to have begun to think in terms of class: see many passages (from pp. 2–3
onwards) in that book, the Index of which contains some 20 entries under ‘class’ (p. 147) but none
under ‘status’ (or ‘order’). Unfortunately, he refuses to be precise about what he means by ‘class’ and
merely says he has ‘used the term “class” loosely, as we customarily do in ordinary discourse’ (p. 10).
This reminds one of a reason he gave in 1973 for choosing status in preference to class as his prime
tool of analysis: that it is ‘an admirably vague word’ (cf. my comment in CSAGW p. 92). We may hope
that he will similarly discover the limited utility of employing yet another imprecise concept, and feel
the need to define it properly.
56 I have never been able to discover an adequate modern account of this process, and I therefore felt

obliged to describe it in detail in CSAGW pp. 295–326, 518–37.

57 See
CSAGW VIII, esp. pp. 474–503.
58 T.D. Barnes, in Phoenix 36 (1982) pp. 363–6, at p. 366.
59 MECW
V, pp. 5 & 8 (with 9)
MEW III, pp. 7 & 535; and see MECW V, p. 585 n. 1.

110
and we must begin this process by providing ourselves with a set of
concepts that will enable us to understand and explain it—and thus to
participate in the work to which Marx’s own life was single-mindedly
devoted: changing the world indeed, by putting an end to class society,
and thus (as Marx himself put it, in a splendidly optimistic phrase in the
1859 Preface) ‘bringing the prehistory of human society to a close’.60
60 The standard German edition of the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

is now MEGA2 II, ii (1980) pp. 99–103.

111