Slavery society

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Slavery society is a term that Karl Marx coined. He uses it to designate the ancient societies on the basis of their mode of production , which produced wealth through the creation and accumulation of surplus value through slave labor . With this term he completes the triad “slave-holding society”, “ feudalism ” and “ capitalism ” as the result of a history of class struggles . The focus of his investigations, however, was the situation in the 18th century.

Classification in the sequence of class struggles

Before the slave society, according to Friedrich Engels the time primitive society or the primitive communism to be set in the "history" has not even begun. After the slave-holding society, the production relations of feudalism , which are characterized by unfree labor ( Fron and others), follow . These are to be distinguished from the " Asian production method ". Engels formulates this as follows: “Slavery is the first form of exploitation peculiar to the ancient world : it is followed by serfdom in the Middle Ages, and wage labor in modern times. These are the three great forms of bondage as they are characteristic of the three great epochs of civilization; open, and recently disguised, slavery always goes wrong. "

To the conceptual history

As early as the 19th century, the expression aroused fierce resistance, on the one hand because antiquity was viewed with a completely different focus and was greatly admired, and on the other hand because , according to theory, the slave-owning society should have been most strikingly ended by a revolution of the slaves, which the transitions the antiquity to the European Middle Ages just did not meet. Here, Arnold J. Toynbee closed a gap by means of the Roman Empire has pointed out, it had in the surrounding barbarian created societies belonging to the same culture "external proletariat", which in the migration period overturned the relations of production of the slave-holding late antiquity. Even in the Marxist debates of the 20th century, the expression was rather embarrassing (with exceptions, e.g. in the form of Charlotte Welskopf's Polis studies). Ancient historians under the rule of the Soviet Union often paid lip service to him and conducted empirical research like their Western colleagues.

Irrespective of this, there is an extensive historical and sociological debate on the role of ancient slave labor , in which Max Weber also participated. His thesis is: With the consolidation of the Roman Empire, the slave supply decreased through the enslavement of defeated peoples. In addition, the birth rate among slaves was low, so that the Roman Empire fell into a gradual structural crisis as early as the 2nd century AD due to the decline of slaves .

The English ancient historian Geoffrey de Ste Croix wrote a detailed review of the ancient Greek slave-holding society using Marxian terms, namely the book The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World . However , this does not conclusively explain the phenomena of slavery in modern times .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Engels: The origin of the family, private property and the state. MEW 21: 170.