CLASS IN MARX'S

CONCEPTION OF HISTORY,
ANCIENT AND MODERN
BY GEOFFREY DE STE. CROIX

It is both an honor and a pleasure for me to be speaking

here today. It is an honor to have been asked to give the annual
lecture in memory of Isaac Deutscher, a man who always reso-
lutely pursued his own line of thought with the greatest courage,
and throughout his life tried to tell the truth as he saw it, un-
dismayed 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 some-
times 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 taken on some of the burden of teaching the sylla-
bus, as I, alas, could not. Well, I did my best to find someone
Geoffrey de Ste. Croix is a Fellow of the British Academy and of New
College, Oxford. This is the text of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Lecture
presented at the London School of Economics, November 28, 1983, with
the addition of some few reference notes. It is reprinted with permission
from New Left Review 146 (1984), which includes more extensive refer-
ence notes.
20
CLASS IN MARX'S CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 21

who might be interested in what 1 had to offer; but when 1 went

around, asking people in different departments whether 1 might
think of giving lectures that could conceivably interest their stu-
dents, they prudently rejected my advances. And then, suddenly,
to my great delight, 1 was slotted in, if only in a very small way.
1 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, 1 knew nothing whatever about
the subject of ancient accounting, any more than most other
ancient historians; but 1 duly got it up. 1 had to do a vast
amount of work on it from' original sources, as 1 found that
there was hardly anything in the modern books that was any
good at all. But 1 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. 1 wrote a piece
which is, 1 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.) 1 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 1 could discover, by any
undergraduates of the school itself. And even after 1 had left
London for Oxford, 30 years ago, 1 was invited to come back
and give a lecture at the school each year on ancient and medi-
eval accounting, until the late 1970s.
1 shall not be giving full references today to the various
published works 1 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 1 am contributing to
the forthcoming "Colloque Marx" in Paris, the proceedings of
which will be published in due course.'
22 MONTHLY REVIEW I MARCH 1985

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-s-under the impact of the rise of
Iascism-s-I had just begun to become interested in the Labour
movement. Even then, although I was deeply impressed by the
Marxist interpretation of history, insofar as I had discovered
anything about it (I knew precious little, really), my ideas re-
mained 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 controversy. 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 in-
sist-though here, as I now realize, wrongly-that this neces-
C LAS SIN MAR X 'S CON C E P T ION 0 F HIS TOR y 23

sarily entailed that a class should have a consciousness of corn-

mon 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 char-
acteristics do not exist to a sufficient degree-particularly 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 Marxist analysis of modern society therefore fails.
I hope I have conveyed the fact that the whole argument
I have just been describing rests upon certain presuppositions
(which r now realize 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 conse-
quence 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 out-
lined; but in the 1930s I had not realized 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
24 MONTHLY REVIEW / MARCH 1985

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 15, 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 centered on a few standard
literary texts (treated above all as a taxing series of grammati-
cal 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 significance 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 dis-
appointed. I was extraordinarily fortunate, at University Col-
lege, London, in being taught mainly by Professor A. H. M.
Jones, who from my point of view has made the greatest con-
tribution 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 men-
tioned already.
Now, it is true that a Marxist approach can invest the
study of history with a degree of understanding and a fascina-
tion 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 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 Hellenistic and Roman re-
ligion who migrated from Cambridge, England, to Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and who wrote: "A fact is a holy thing, and
C LAS SIN MAR X'S CON C E P T ION 0 F HIS TOR Y 25

its life should never be laid down on the altar of a generaliza-

tion.'" For ancient history overall there are far fewer facts re-
liably 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.':" 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 rela-
tion 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; 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 con-
sciousness, and political activity in common." To a greater ex-
tent 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 ~laves of very
different nationalities and languages. (Acquiring an ethnically
and linguistically diverse set of slaves is urged upon slaveowners
by a whole series of Greek and Roman writers, whom I have
quoted in my Class Struggle book.) 7 The heterogeneous char-
acter 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 concen-
trated in a few generations in the Late Roman Republic, from
the 130s to the 70s B.c.-and which, incidentally, never in-
26 MONTHLY REVIEW / MARCH 1985

volved 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?
Certainly anyone who supposes, mistakenly, that class con-
sciousness 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 . (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 (pp. 885-86).

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 contribu-
tion ever made to the analysis of human society above the most
primitive level. I have just spoken of "what Marx primarily
C LAS SIN MAR X'S CON C E P T ION 0 F HIS TOR Y 27

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, 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, per-
haps 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 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 dilem-
ma 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, usu-
ally 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 2, Part 2 of my book) is the col.
28 MONTHLY REVIEW I MARCH 1985

lective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in

which exploitation is embodied in a social structure. (By "ex-
ploitation," of course, I mean the appropriation of part of the
product of the labor of others: in a commodity-producing socie-
ty this is the appropriation of what Marx called "surplus
value.") Class is essentially a relationship-just as capital, an-
other of Marx's basic concepts, is specifically described by him,
in some ten passages I have noted, as "a relation," "a social re-
lation of production," and so forth." 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 de-
gree of control) to the conditions of production (that is to say,
to the means and labor of production) and to other classes. The
individuals constituting a given class mayor may not be wholly
or partly conscious of their own identity and common interests
as a class, and they mayor may not feel antagonism toward
members of other classes as such. Class conflict (class struggle,
Klassenkampf) is essentially the fundamental relationship be-
tween classes, involving exploitation and resistance to it, but not
necessarily either class consciousnessor collective activity in com-
mon, political or otherwise, although these features are likely to
supervene when a class has reached a certain stage of develop-
ment and become what Marx once (using a Hegelian idiom)
called "a class for itself." 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 passages the slave in antiquity is given precisely the
position of the free wage-worker under capitalism and of the
serf in medieval times-as the proletarian is to the capitalist, and
the serf to the feudal lord, so the slave is to the slaveowner. In
each case the relationship is specifically a class relationship, in-
volving class conflict, the essence of which is exploitation, the
appropriation of a surplus from the primary producer: pro-
letarian, 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," by speaking of class
struggle not, as they should have done, between slaves and
C LAS SIN MAR X S CON C EPT ION
0 0 F HIS TOR Y 29

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." For-
tunately, 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 diffi-
culties 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 be-
comes 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 fulfill its objectives without driving
itself out of office at the next election-to keep up the profits
that go primarily to the propertied classesand 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 con-
temporary 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 workforce-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 influen-
tial 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 in-
vestors, members of the propertied classes, with the lowest possi-
ble wages for workers-exploitation in the fullest sense. As part
of what I have called in my book "the class struggle on the
30 MONTHLY REVIEW I MARCH 1985

ideological plane," 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 produce as cheaply as possible, and have no un-
due 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 be-
coming an ancient historian that enabled me to solve the prob-
lems that had long perplexed me. It was specifically the study of
Greek and Roman slavery that enabled me to realize 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 consciousness 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 or she thinks it produces more
fruitful results, to adopt a conception of class that is quite dif-
ferent from the one held by Marx. (My one reservation is that
one must not then try to foist one's own peculiar notions on to
Marx and to pretend that that conception represents that of
Marx.) Probably the treatment of this subject most familiar to
sociologists is the one by Max Weber, 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
CLASS IN MARX'S CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 31

it (and I quote), "the fate of slaves is not determined by the

chance of using goods or servicesfor themselves on the market."
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 expressionof astonishment, in my
Class Struggle book, 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 fundamen-
tally 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 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 peo-
ple miss is that these statements of Marx cannot all be recon-
ciled 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 con-
text-which always turns out to be the cause of the aberra-
tion-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 realized 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
(Continued on page 35)
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C LAS SIN MAR X' S CON C E P T ION 0 F HIS TOR Y 35

"the bourgeoisie had done away with the Klassenkampf for the
moment by abolishing universal suffrage.'?" (A law restricting
the right of suffrage had been passed some seven months ear-
lier.) 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 parlia-
mentary class conflict. In a few other passages Marx even
speaks, in striking contrast with the position he takes up else-
where, as if workers in a capitalist society could not be con-
sidered a class at all until they had "taken political shape" or
"been organized as a class."!' 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. The context happens to re-
quire 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, 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."
Those who deny that the slaves of antiquity could consti-
tute a class commonly quote two passages in Marx, referring
specifically to Klassenkamp], one of which from Volume I of
Capital) 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," (p. 135) and the
other, from The Eighteenth Brumaire, that "in ancient Rome
the class struggle took place within a privileged minority, be-
tween 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." (pp. 359-60) 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 be-
fore "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
recognize Roman slaves as a class, engaged in continuous class
struggle on the economic plane.
36 MONTHLY REVIEW / MARCH 1985

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 3, Part 2 of my Class
Struggle book, with a brief but sufficient refutation; 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, 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 under-
graduates in the improved English version of the book, which
has the title Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece.
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 characterize the position of Marx. Their argu-
ments (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
His book, mainly about precapitalist economic formations, was
strangely unaware of the great mass of evidence against him. 14

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 : it is L' anatomia della scimmia,"
Some years ago at Oxford I had a Greats pupil who was look-
ing 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 labeled "Archi-
tecture." I am tempted to wonder where, in such a bookshop,
C LAS SIN MAR X'S CON C E P T ION 0 F HIS TOR Y 37

one might expect to find this work of Carandini's: his "Monkey

book," as I tend to call it-without, let me hasten to say, in-
tending 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 per-
haps, 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 prohlem 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 also 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 interest than if I were just speaking about Greco-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.t' " A large literature on peasants
has grown up in the past few decades, much of it written by
sociologists and anthropologists 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 diffi-
cult source material, the ancient evidence, as few can.
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. An-
cient slaves and serfs and debt bondsmen suffered exploitation
in perfectly obvious ways, and so did a certain number of
peasants, including leaseholders who were rackrented 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
38 MONTHLY REVIEW I MARCH 1985

living from their farms, handed down from generation to gen-

eration? 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 in-
dividual," the other "indirect and collective." The first (direct
and individual) is of wage-laborers, slaves, serfs, and debt
bondsmen, and also of tenants and ordinary debtors, by par-
ticular employers, masters, landowners, or moneylenders; and
it presents no difficulties. Exploitation may be said to be "in-
direct and collective" when a state (including, for example, the
Roman imperial government or that of a Greek or Roman
city), which 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 labor or personal services. I will take each of these three
in tum, 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 peasan-
try: 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." The incidence of military conscription varied
greatly in antiquity: sometimes the poorest classes got off very
lightly; but in the third and second centuries B.C. (as all his-
torians 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 anga-
reuein. The Greek angareia and Latin anagria descend from a
word long used in the Persian empire for transport services,
which was taken over by the Hellenistic kingdoms and came to
C LAS SIN MAR X 'S CON C E P T ION 0 F HIS TOR Y 39

be applied to similar and allied impositions for the benefit of

the state or the municipalities in the Roman period. 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. (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 con-
tributed to forming the passive political attitude of S10Paul, 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.") It is perhaps worth mentioning that
the philosopher Epictetus (an ex-slave, incidentally) was a good
deal less enthusiastic than Jesus about cooperation 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.
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 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 capi-
talist class exploits the peasant class through the State taxes:"?"

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 2, Part 2
40 MONTHLY REVIEW / MARCH 1985

of my book, (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 demon-
strably false: the greater part of production, especially in agri-
culture (by far the most important sector of the ancient econ-
omy), was done by peasants who were at least nominally free,
even if, from the early fourth century of the Christian era
onward, more and more of them were brought into forms of
serfdom; 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 pro-
ducers. 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 labor which was unfree. (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 accounted for
perhaps something between 2 or 3 and 10 or 15 percent of the
free population in Greek and Roman antiquity, according to
place and period. The lower figure must generally have been
CLASS IN MARX'S CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 41

nearer the reality, I think, especially in the Roman period.)

Now, unfree labor 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; 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 recognized. (I have shown this by producing a
large quantity of evidence in Chapter 3, Part 4 of my Class
Struggle book.) Thirdly, after about 300 A.D. 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 im-
portant. However, this is a fearsomely difficult question, which
I have tried to discuss in detail in Chapter 4, Part 3 of my
book, 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 characterized by "direkte Ztoangsarbeit," direct com-
pulsory labor. 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 labor, in the sense that
its propertied classes always derived the bulk of their regular
surplus from unfree labor.

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 material-:
ism. 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 Levi-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 prac-
titioners, notably the French Byzantinist Evelyne Patlagean, are
42 MONTHLY REVIEW I MARCH 1985

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 Birmingham Uni-
versity Centre for Byzantine Studies, in English, in the Czech
periodical Byzantinoslavica for 1981. 19 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 characteristic failure to go
beyond mere description and provide explanations.
A well-known ancient social and economic historian who
for some 30 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, 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. (I call status a "subjective cate-
gory" 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.) 20 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."?' In two later works, published in 1981 and 1982,
Sir Moses has had recourse to a particular piece of status-
terminology, namely "elites," 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 econ-
omy": he now says that slaves "provided the bulk of the im-
mediate income from property ... of the elites, economic, social
and political."?" Now, "elites" is one of the most imprecise of
sociological obfuscations, which may sometimes have its uses but
surely ought to be strictly avoided in a definition. And quite
apart from the unnecessary imprecision ine.vitably introduced
C LASS IN MAR X05 CON C E P T ION 0 F HIS TOR Y 43

by the word "elites" (made worse, if anything, by calling them

'economic, social and political' elites), 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 "elites" could be
thought an appropriate description. Many well-to-do peasants
whom it would be absurd to number among an "elite" 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 proper-
tied classes (people who were able to live without themselves
working for their livelihood) derived the bulk of their regular
surplus from slave labor and other unfree labor."
Now, I have no difficulty in understanding why so many
people become uncomfortable and unhappy when they are seri-
ously 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-nine-
teenth-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, 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." It is this very versatility and general appli-
cability 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, 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."26 Of course before the world can be changed, it
must first be thoroughly understood; and we must begin this
 MONTHLY REVIEW / MARCH 1985

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 de-
voted: changing the world indeed, by putting an end to class
society, and thus (as Marx himself put it, in a splendidly optim-
istic phrase in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy) "bringing the prehistory of
human society to a close."

NOTES
I. "Greek and Roman Accounting," in A. C. Littleton and B. S. Yarney,
eds., Studies in the History of Accounting (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 Harold Edey and B. S. Yamey, eds.,
Debits, Credits, Finance and Profits [Essays in Honor of W. T. Bax-
ter] (1974), pp. 41-59.
3. 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, December 1983), in Editions de l'an ssa,
1985, probably with the title Marx en perspective. My contribution is
entitled "Karl Marx and the Interpretation of Ancient and Modern
History."
4. See Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek
World (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 31.
5. I realize, of course, that my use of this quotation does not convey the
meaning intended by Wittgenstein, and that a more realistic transla-
tion of the famous remark at the end of the T'ractatus would be some-
thing like "We must pass over in silence what we cannot formulate in
language!"
6. I deal with Marx and Engels treatment of slaves in my contribution to
the proceedings of the "Colloque Marx."
7. Ste, Croix, Class Struggle, p. 146, cf., pp. 65-66.
8. Of course, capital for Marx was also a process and "not a simple
relation."
9. For bibliographic references, see Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, pp. 696-
97.
10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. XI, p. 153.
11. Ibid., Vol. VI, pp. 167, 211, 318, 332, 493, 498.
12. Peasants are very well analyzed in an article by Engels, "The Peas-
ant Question in France and Germany." For excellent discussions of
medieval peasants, see the works of Rodney Hilton cited Class
Struggle, p. 680.
13. See Vidal-N aguet, "Les esclaves grecs etaient-Ils une classe?" Raison
presente 6 (1968). M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973), pp. 49, 186 n. 32, and An-
cient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking, 1980), pp.
77, 165 n. 29.
CLASS IN MARX'S CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 45

14. I deal with this in my contribution to the proceedings of the "Col-

loque Marx."
15. See the relevant passage in Grundrisse, Eng. trans. by Martin
Nicolaus (Pelican Marx Library, 1973), p. 105. .
16. Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies (New York and
London: Penguin, 1971), p. 17.
17. A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284-602 (1964), esp.
pp. 767-823.
18. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. X, p. 22.
19. John F. Haldon, "On the Structuralist Approach to the Social His-
tory of Byzantium," Byzantimoslavica 42 (1981) pp, 203':11: a re-
view-article on two books by Evelyne Patlagean, Pauurete economi-
quet et pauvrete sociale Ii Byzance, 4-7 siecles (Paris, 1977), and
Structure sociale , [amille, chretiente Ii Byzance, IV-XI siecle (Lon-
don, 1981). Perhaps I should add that structuralism, at least in the
strict Levi-Straussian sense, now seems to be in general retreat; and
according to a review by Rodney Needham, in the Times Literary
Supplement (April 13, 1984), p. 393, Levi-Strauss himself writes of
it in his most recent book, Le Regard eloigne, as "having passed out
of fashion." Through its influence on Louis Althusser and his follow-
ers, 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 Ma-
terialism (The Wellek Library Lectures, delivered at the University
of California at Irvine), published in London, by New Left Books,
in 1983.
20. In view of M. I. Finley's light-hearted remark, in his Politics in the
Ancient World, 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 im-
portant ways in which Aristotle's method of analysis of Greek politics
closely resembles the approach adopted by Marx: see Class Struggle,
pp. 69-80.
21. And in Finley's later book, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology,
I think that "exploitation" hardly appears, apart from p. 78, except
in the expression "unit of exploitation."
22. 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),
p. 206. I cannot accept Finley's claim, which follows in the latter
work, "that definition can easily be translated into Marxist lan-
guage": such a "translation" would involve major conceptual changes.
23. 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 in that book, the Index of which contains
some 20 entries under "class" 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
 46 MONTHLY REVIEW I MARCH 1985

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."
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.
24. See Class Struggle, pp. 295-326, 518-37, 474-503.
25. T. D. Barnes, in Phoenix 36 (1982): 366.
26. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. V, pp. 5, 8-9.

GLASGOW UNIVERSITY
CENTRE FOR
SOCIALIST THEORIES & MOVEMENTS

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

HAS SOCIALISM A FUTURE?

8 -12 APRIL 1985
GLASGOW UNIVERSITY: ADAM SMITH BUILDING

Conference Theme: European Social Democratic attempts to regulate market

economy within the world division of labour to the advantage of the working-class
seem to have exhausted their promise and potential. Do the 1983 election results of
Britain and Germany represent popular recognition of this? The USSR is widely
regarded, domestically and abroad, as representing no 'model' of socialism. Third
World countries calling themselves 'socialist' can arguably be said to represent
merely efforts by national elites to secure a more favourable bargaining position for
their countries within the world division of labour. If this is all true does it vindicate the
Mises-Hayek thesis that socialism is impossible? Or on the other hand, does it
vindicate the thesis of Marx that between the market and the society of freely
associated producers there is no third way?

There will be 10 panels including the following:

Socialist Political Strategy Nature of Socialist Society Philosophy of Socialism

LEO PANITCH MICHAEL BARRATT BROWN CHRIS ARTHUR
IMMANUAL WALLERSTEIN MICHAEL l1JWY ANDREW GAMBLE
BERTELL OLLMAN G.A.E. SMITH TED NINNIS
NIGEL HARRIS SCOTT MEIKLE

liansition from Market Socialist Society and Crisis of Social Democracy

10 Socialist Society the Market
ISTVAN MESZAROS RICHARD B. DAY SIMON CLARKE
ERNEST MANDEL ALEX CALLINICOS A. GUNDER FRANK
HILLEL TICKTIN SIMON MOHUN GEOFF PILLING
MILTON FISK DIANE ELSON JAMES PETRAS

For further details and registration form please write 10: Conference Organiser, Centre for Socialist
Theory & Movements,clo Philosophy Dept., Glasgow University, Glasgow G12 600, UK.