Class of Slave-Owners

The class characterized by oppression and exploitation of slaves, the first exploiting class in the history of human society, the ruling class of slave society.

For the first time in human history, slave society divided man into two major fundamentally opposing classes: the class of slave-owners and the class of slaves. In slave society, slave-owners, who constituted a tiny minority of the population, not only owned all means of production, but also owned the slaves entirely, exploited and oppressed them in a most cruel way, and were able to punish, buy and sell and even massacre them at will. Lenin pointed out that the division into slave-owners and slaves was the first important class division. The former group not only owned all the means of production—the land and the implements, however poor and primitive they may have been in those times—but also owned people. This group was known as slave-owners, while those who labored and supplied labor for others were known as slaves.

The appearance of the class of slave-owners was an inevitable phenomenon of the development of the history of society to a certain stage. At the end of the primitive society, due to the development of productive forces, a surplus-produce began to emerge, resulting in the polarization between the rich and the poor and private property, which made it possible for the emergence of classes. At that time, the chiefs of the gentes, the priests, the chiefs of the tribe, etc. who held offices in the clan seized more and more public property such as property and land by taking advantage of their posts, took advantage of foreign wars and conflicts to make their fortunes and turned social servants into social masters, and in this way, a group of slave masters appeared. On the other hand, they turned prisoners of war into slaves, and members of the impoverished and bankrupt clans into their own slaves. There was also a differentiation of some agricultural families due to the natural division of labor. Those wealthy families absorbed a small number of laborers and turned them into slaves, and the masters became slave-owners. Human society thus split for the first time into slave-owners and slaves, forming two basic antagonistic classes in the slave society. Slave-owners not only possessed land and other means of production, but also owned the slaves themselves, and the number of slaves they owned became an indication of the wealth of slave-owners. They forced slaves to perform heavy labor, deprived them of personal freedom, and cruelly exploited and oppressed them. They could punish, trade or even slaughter slaves at will. Slave-owners were the ruling class of slave society, they held the state power, they have established various organs of coercion, used the state power and organs of coercion to hold down the resistance of the slaves, and maintain their exploitation and dominance over the slaves.

In slave society, with the development of productive forces, some people have been divorced from physical labor and engaged in production management, state affairs and cultural and scientific activity, which has resulted in the division of mental and physical labor in society. With the accumulation of experience in social production and life, the slave society created a splendid culture. However, due to exploitation and oppression of the slaves by the slave-owners, the working people created a material civilization but could not own it. The division of labor between physical and mental labor enabled the slave-owners to own the material means of production, hold the state machinery, and at the same time monopolize cultural knowledge and school education. Slaves were merely talking tools, engaged in heavy physical labor, were excluded from schools, and had a personal dependence on the slave-owners. Therefore, the development of slave society and culture was limited and insufficient.

In order to meet the needs of the slave-owners’ ownership, the first state of the dictatorship of an exploiting class in human history, i.e., the slave-owning state, has arisen. The cruel exploitation and oppression intensified the class contradictions, and as class contradictions became more and more intense, the struggle of slaves against the struggle of slaves against the class of slave-owners broke out continuously, shaking the rule of the class of slave-owners. With the fall of the slave society, the class of slave-owners also perished.