The Commune in the Ancient East as Treated in the Works of Soviet Researchers

Abstract

Slave labor is not the sole distinguishing characteristic of the epoch of slavery. As we know, slave labor was widely employed in feudal and capitalist societies as well. What is characteristic of the slave system is the combination and the counterposition of free labor and involuntary labor in production itself. Often, in our attempts to find mass slavery in a particular ancient society (efforts which are sometimes in vain), we have not given thought either to the question of whether slave labor would have been economically advantageous under the particular conditions we are studying, or to whether the particular society possessed sufficient means of compulsion to make the mass employment of slave labor possible. For example, in the early Sumerian city-states, where the standing means of compulsion consisted merely of the small group of the ruler's henchmen, armed with copper axes and having no armor, it was impossible to employ slaves in the field tasks requiring large numbers of hands. This was so not because the society had not matured to the point of the creation of surplus products by slave labor, but because the mass of former soldiers, now slaves with copper hoes in their hands, could not physically be compelled to work in the fields, and it was dangerous to attempt to compel them. Therefore, for a long period, it was preferred to kill male prisoners and to employ the labor of slave women and their children in the home, under supervision and in crafts, thereby freeing the labor of free persons for field work. (2) Slave labor in agricultural production should not necessarily be considered characteristic of the first type of class system, (3) which we call the slave-owning system of production. With the exception of certain special cases, the use of slaves for agriculture becomes possible only when the slave system is well advanced. On the other hand, in places where the goal of production was not the mass-scale output of commodities (and this was the case in the majority of ancient societies) slave production, requiring not only that the resistance of the enslaved be overcome but that capital — not immediately recoverable — be invested for the acquisition of slaves whose productivity was lower than that of free workers, did not always prove to be economically more advantageous. Therefore, no ancient society ever attained, or could attain, the complete replacement of free labor by slave labor. Alongside slave production, there always existed small-scale subsistence production by independent free producers. Here we disregard the work of hired laborers and that of individuals who are personally, but not hereditarily, unfree, although this kind of labor also existed in ancient times. However, in the present essay we do not attempt to provide a general survey of the economy of ancient societies and are therefore compelled to disregard a number of important economic factors, these included Hired labor and the work of personally-unfree people might or might not be present in various specific ancient societies, (4) depending upon circumstances. However, free subsistence production, primarily agricultural production, always existed in the ancient world.