Ancient Greek Societies

In order to understand Ste Croix’s contribution, it is essential to point out some major peculiarities of ancient Greek societies. On the one hand, the exploitation of slaves was a fundamental aspect of Greek economies. At the same time, however, slaves constituted a minority in all ancient societies, and most labor was performed by the households of free independent producers (peasants, artisans, traders).

Furthermore, ancient societies exhibit a major difference from medieval and modern societies. In medieval societies, peasants worked for landlords, who derived income from their labor, while in modern societies, most people work as employees for capitalists. Yet in ancient Greek societies, the overwhelming majority of the free population did not work for the elites, but rather for themselves. How should a Marxist analysis combine the significance of slavery with the preponderance of free independent producers?

Finally, as a result of these two peculiarities, ancient Greek societies were characterized by two fundamental conflicts: between masters and slaves, and between the rich and the free poor. While collective conflicts between rich and poor are widely attested for most periods of antiquity, there were no equivalent collective conflicts between masters and slaves. The large-scale slave rebellions in Sicily and the famous revolt of Spartacus all took place within a short period between 130 and 70 BCE. Consequently, for most periods of antiquity, there are no attested collective conflicts between masters and slaves.

The dilemmas created by these facts are evident. How can a Marxist analysis deal with a society in which the free lower classes do not generally work for the elites, and thus are not directly exploited by them? Should Marxist analysis focus on the structural significance of slavery, or the preponderance of free independent producers? Should it prioritize the collective struggles between rich and poor, or the individual conflicts between masters and slaves? And if we should rather combine the master/slave and the rich/poor dialectics, how exactly should we do that?

Defining Class

To answer these dilemmas, Ste Croix argued that the Marxist concept of class must focus exclusively on exploitation. The direct form of exploitation takes place when the members of the class that owns the means of production derive their income from the members of the class who do not control them. But there is also indirect exploitation through the state in the form of taxation, military conscription, and compulsory labor obligations.

According to Ste Croix, exploitation is the fundamental structural feature of all class societies: the Marxist concept of class does not require the emergence of collective class conflict. Exploitation may lead to individual and even collective conflict between social classes, but it does not necessarily result in this outcome.

Instead, the historical impact of exploitation is the fact that it shapes all social relations and directs the historical development of societies. In other words, Ste Croix argues that the Marxist concept of class only requires the existence of “a class in itself,” in the terminology of Karl Marx himself. The emergence of a self-conscious, mobilized “class for itself” is of course a historical potentiality, but by no means a historical necessity.

Perhaps the best example for understanding what Ste Croix is trying to get at is the debate about the fall of the Roman Empire. Marxist historiography attributed the early-modern transition from feudalism to capitalism to bourgeois revolutions against the old ruling class in countries like the Netherlands, England, and France, and predicted that the future transition from capitalism to socialism would come about through workers’ revolutions against the bourgeoisie. Yet in the case of the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, there is no equivalent narrative of a class conflict between two main antagonists that led to a wider social transformation.

This has long been a conundrum for Marxists, but Ste Croix argues that a Marxist analysis does not require that there was such a collective class conflict. In his view, the exploitation of the lower classes is a sufficient explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire. In the course of late antiquity, the direct and indirect exploitation of the lower classes now had to support an immensely expanded army and state bureaucracy, as well as the new institution of the church and its tens of thousands of idle mouths. The system could not cope with this increased level of exploitation, and the collapse of the Roman Empire was the consequence.

Irrespective of whether one agrees with this interpretation of the Roman fall or not, the argument about how exploitation operates as a historical force is undoubtedly stimulating. In my view, by far the most successful part of Ste Croix’s approach is precisely his application of the concept of exploitation to a variety of ancient historical phenomena. An excellent example is the history of early Christianity. Ste Croix documents how Church Fathers took for granted the structures of exploitation in their contemporary society and preached a message that invited the lower classes to accept things as they were.

Based on this approach to class, Ste Croix is able to offer an answer to the question about the role of slavery in ancient societies. The crucial parameter is how ancient elites derived their income: since slavery, and other forms of unfree labor, constituted the main source of elite income, it follows that ancient societies were slave societies. This point holds true irrespective of the fact that free independent producers constituted the majority and produced most goods.

It is accordingly the form that exploitation takes that offers the key for identifying the fundamental structures of a particular society. Again, whether or not Ste Croix is empirically correct in his contention that ancient elites derived their income overwhelmingly from unfree labor, the logic of his argument is clearly valuable.

Three Axes

However, Ste Croix’s approach also has important limitations, which future Marxist work on ancient history will need to deal with. As I mentioned above, social conflicts between rich and poor constituted one of the most remarkable aspects of Greek history. Ste Croix’s discussion of Aristotle’s sociology, in which the class conflict between rich and poor plays a fundamental role, is truly brilliant.

But as we have seen, free independent producers in Greek societies did not work for Greek elites, and therefore were not directly exploited, while forms of indirect exploitation, like taxation and compulsory labor, were either nonexistent or minimal. In light of these facts, what can we say these conflicts were really about?

We know that Greek revolutionary slogans did not concern rents, labor dues, or wages, but called for the redistribution of land and the cancellation of debts. Greek social conflicts were not about work exploitation, but rather wealth inequality: the possession of significant wealth by the rich made life difficult for the poor. We need therefore to distinguish between exploitation and inequality; exploitation is the major cause of inequality, but in many societies, there are also important additional causes of inequality, like partible inheritance, dowries, and wars.

Furthermore, Ste Croix pays very little attention to work as a fundamental aspect of class. Work provided a major framework in which class was experienced. It is essential therefore to incorporate work within a Marxist approach to class. Class is not a unitary thing with a trans-historical essence, but a historical process constituted by three interrelated axes: work, exploitation, and inequality.

The axis of work refers to the various forms of human effort to produce things and provide services, the modes of living organized around the various forms of work and the division of labor. Exploitation consists of the various ways in which certain people extract goods, services, and money from the work of other people without returning equivalent value. Finally, inequality concerns the differential distribution of wealth among individuals and groups.

Class is constituted by the entanglement between these three axes, but the precise way in which they are articulated varies significantly between different societies and periods. Each axis generated its own bones of contention. While all these issues and conflicts were interrelated, they mattered in very diverse ways for different groups of people.

New Approaches

While Ste Croix’s concept of class has the great merit of warning historians not to take the emergence of collective social conflicts for granted, it does not offer us any framework for studying this issue systematically. Nevertheless, the concept of exploitation opens a first pathway, by illustrating how it can inflect conflicts and crises even in the absence of collective class struggle.

The Roman civil wars of the late republic were unquestionably conflicts between different sections of the Roman elite. But inequality had created a mass of landless peasants, who formed the necessary recruiting material for the large armies that each side needed to field. Furthermore, these armies had to be compensated with land by the winners, and accordingly each elite faction had to take into account the interests of a substantial lower-class mass when devising its policy. Even if the Roman civil wars were not direct, immediate conflicts between rich and poor, the emergence and development of those wars were deeply shaped by how class operated in the Roman world.

Finally, the divisions between masters and slaves and rich and poor undoubtedly constituted two distinct types of social conflict in ancient societies. Nevertheless, they were often entangled. Slaves and the free poor often worked in the same occupations next to each other, lived in the same neighborhoods, socialized together in taverns and baths, and participated in mixed communities based on occupation, cult, and ethnicity. It was these shared experiences and communities that on various occasions brought them together in diverse forms of conflict with ancient elites.

Marxist approaches to class in antiquity can learn a lot from the tradition of history from below and its rich output in medieval and early modern history. The new radical approaches to the study of ancient history that have emerged in recent years raise the possibility of a new history of antiquity. In this direction, Ste Croix’s work will unquestionably remain an essential port of call, both for its evident strengths, as well as for inviting us to think seriously about how to deal with its weaknesses.