Slave-owning mode of production or slavery. Mode of production based on the physical ownership of most of the labor force by the exploiting class within the framework of an economy which is only very partially commodified.
General characteristics of the slave-owning mode of production
The slave-owning mode of production spread throughout the ancient world from Hindustan to the Atlantic, sweeping away or transforming the civilizations based on the Asiatic mode of production. In Europe it lasted until the fall of the Roman Empire and the development of feudalization, in the Middle East until the spread of Islam and in much of Africa until the 19th century. Under this mode of production the state develops, and there appear the great empires of the West (from Persia to Africa), the first great trade networks, complex legal systems and the great ideological apparatuses of Antiquity.
Its main defining elements are:
- Most of the labor force -and of the population- is the property of the families of the exploiting class and, to a lesser extent, of the state. Exploitation is personal and direct, and the worker, individually, is regarded as an object, like any other means of production. The slave is not, however, a commodity; he is not produced to be sold (as would happen under US slave-owning capitalism), and his transferability or emancipation will depend on his position in the productive apparatus and on the situation of his owner.
- The buying and selling of the main means of production, the agricultural and mining estates with the slaves attached to them, is relatively rare and is highly regulated and ritualized. It is normally restricted to the ruling class, or at the very least to non-foreign "free men".
- A commodity economy develops, with large trade circuits strictly in the hands of the ruling class and the state. These trade circuits will also be limited in their growth, since most of the population -the slaves- cannot even go to the market except on behalf of their masters.
- War and territorial expansion fulfill a double economic function: on the one hand, to capture slaves in order to offset their high cost of reproduction; on the other, to increase the land under production, easing the tensions between the ruling class and the other free classes.
- The state develops complex institutions and mechanisms -legal, political, ideological and welfare- to cushion the conflict between free classes and to repress both the rare slave uprisings -a true obsessive panic of the ruling classes- and the cyclical revolts of subjugated peoples and tribes which, with productive systems mostly based on communal ownership of land, will refuse to pay levies.
Class structure of the slave-owning mode of production
The nobility of the slave-owning mode of production is usually a remnant of a conquering people or tribe, or of a fusion of several. It monopolizes the ownership of land and the leadership of the state and of its ideological and bureaucratic apparatuses. It is internally hierarchical and stratified in various degrees. Alongside it there will appear in most cases a heterogeneous plebeian class that will press for access to the ownership of land and to gain weight in the state.
The slaves will form the bulk of the exploited class, the majority in society. Their origin in the conquered tribes and peoples is evident in Sparta. There it is the city -that is, the political structure of the free families- that is the collective owner of the helots, on whom it declares war every year so that they lose their human status and can be killed without this constituting a crime against property. Thanks to Thucydides we can deduce that they kept certain forms of communal exploitation of the land and marriage rights.
The state of permanent class war, and the fact that Thebans and Athenians regarded the helots as a subjugated people and not as mere slaves, nevertheless reveals that Sparta never fully established the slave-owning mode of production, which would not fully develop until the Roman conquest. Yet precisely for that reason it reveals the permanent tension that, more or less symbolized, the slave-owning state would sustain against the exploited class throughout its historical course.
Class struggle under the slave-owning mode of production and the emergence of feudalism
It could not be, however, the rare, though always threatening, slave revolts that would put the slave-owning mode of production in check, but rather the confrontation between nobility and plebeians over access to the ownership of new lands and of hands to exploit.
The relatively low productivity of the land and the high cost of reproduction of slaves forced recourse to wage labor at different times, for example in the mining operations of the Roman Republic in Baetica and Cisalpine Gaul. However, the limited commodification of the means of production, the demographic scarcity of subjugated "free peoples" and the absence of a developed commercial bourgeoisie -long-distance trade was in the hands of the nobility and the state bureaucracy- made the emergence of circuits of capital accumulation impossible.
Nevertheless, still in the rising period of the slave-owning mode of production, and in different forms depending on the civilization, the figure of the colonate will appear: hordes of assimilated nomadic peoples and freed slaves who are attached to a piece of land that they cultivate -generally under a communal regime and as subsistence agriculture- in exchange for rent.
The extension of this system during the decadence of the slave-owning mode of production -in Rome it was regulated from the 3rd century onwards- came in response to an underlying tendency towards depopulation and a lack of new slaves, materialized first of all as a fiscal crisis... and therefore as a crisis of the city. That is why it would interest, first of all, a part of the nobility and the peripheral bureaucracy.
The colonate serves them to overcome the conflict with the landowners of the interior -plebeians turned landowners- and to recover tax revenue at a time of political weakness and fragmentation. Not only because it serves to put new areas into production, but because taxes will be collected directly from the colonists, not from the landowners, and it is always easier to collect taxes from a fragmented and geographically isolated exploited class than from a propertied class that organizes social labor in a region where the coercive forces of the state have little presence.
The plebeians who had benefited from the distribution of plots and land for military services, or as a relief valve for the class tensions of the capital, will thus become landowners and will exploit a labor force that is legally free but attached to an agrarian estate it cannot leave.
The colonate actually prefigures feudalism within slave-owning society during its decadence. The arrival of the barbarian invasions would align the interests of this new class of agricultural landowners with those of the new invading nobility against the state apparatus of the cities, bringing about the definitive change of mode of production.