Slave Society

Also known as “slave-owning society”. The first class society in human history in which man was exploited by man, i.e., a social formation based chiefly on the slave-owners’ appropriation of the means of production and the appropriation and exploitation of the producers—the slaves.

The emergence of slave society was a result of the development of the productive forces of society. In the last period of primitive society, with the development of productive forces, the tribes engaged in primitive cattle-raising were differentiated from the rest of the barbarian herd. This social division of labor has increased the productivity of labor, promoted the development of private property and exchange, and the polarization between the rich and the poor within the tribe. The gentile aristocracy and wealthy families first turned the prisoners of and then poor members of the tribe into slaves, which led to the collapse of the gentile organization and the gradual emergence of a slave society. Engels said: “With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and the exploited.”

Under the mode of production of slave ownership, the relations of production were chiefly slave ownership. Slave-owners owned all the means of production and owned the slaves themselves. Slave-owners were the ruling class of society including big landowners, big workshop owners, religious priests, big merchants and usurers. Slaves were the ruled, oppressed and exploited class and the talking tools among the private property of slave-owners. Slaves generally performed collective work under the whip of their masters, who could punish, trade and even slaughter them at will. All products belonged to the slave-owner, and the slaves could only get a minimum amount of the means of life to maintain their life. Slave-owners appropriated all the surplus-labor of slaves and also part of their necessary labor. Slaves often died of hunger and overwork.

In slave society, there were also a considerable number of peasant-proprietors and petty craftsmen. In some places, they were in the majority and constituted an important economic base of society. They owned their small-holdings and other means of production, and they belonged to the freemen of society like the slave-owners, but they had no political privileges, known as plebs. They were oppressed by the nobility politically and exploited by slave-owners, wealthy merchants, and usurers economically, leading to unstable lives and poverty, bankruptcy, and becoming slaves and lumpenproletariat.

The State has emerged in the slave society. The gentile organization held together by ties of disintegrated, and the rulers divided the inhabitants under their control according to territory; in order to maintain their rule and suppress the resistance of slaves, slave-owners set up standing army, police, courts, prisons, and other organs of force, which was the birth of the state of the dictatorship of slave-owners. Many small states or city-states established larger states through wars of plunder. There were two chief forms of the slave-owning state: the despotic and the democratic state. Despotic states were dictated by a monarch, and only slaves but also freemen were deprived of their political rights, as was the case in many ancient Oriental countries and the Roman Empire. In democratic states, the power was in the hands of an assembly of the people composed of the nobility or all persons who enjoyed full citizenship rights, such as the city-states of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic. In democratic states, the slaves did not have any political rights, and the immigrants and women had no voice. Regardless of their form, slave-owning states were dictatorships of the class of slave-owners.

The level of the productive forces in slave society was still very low, but there had been significant development compared to primitive society. Metallic tools were widely used, and ironware could be found in many places. Ploughing replaced hoeing in agricultural cultivation on a wide range, and large-scale water conservancy and irrigation projects were built. The types of crops have expanded. Many countries have planted a greater variety of crops such as wheat, millet, sorghum, rice, flax, olives, grapes, melons, fruits, vegetables, etc., and raised most of the livestock that can be seen today. Handicrafts now have a detailed division of labor, with widespread workshops in mining, metallurgy, boat-building, leatherworking, brewing, and weaving. Large construction teams are now able to build huge and luxurious buildings, such as Egyptian pyramids and many grand palaces. In the slave society, the natural economy dominated, but there was some development in the commodity-money economy. In the late slave society, the power of commercial capital and usury capital was already significant, and prosperous overseas trade emerged in some places.

In slave society, the social division of labor was further developed. Many cities that were formed became political and economic centers, gathering places for large slave-owners, nobles, big merchants and usurers. They ruled and exploited the slaves and freemen in the countryside, creating an antithesis between town and country. At the same time, a division and antithesis between mental and physical labor emerged.

The class of slave-owners, not engaged in productive labor, monopolized intellectual activity. They fooled and ruled the working people with their religious and cultural knowledge. The slave-owning mode of production caused an increase in the productive forces of society compared with the primitive communal system. Given the low level of science, this division of labor naturally played a progressive part. It was in this way that the slave society invented writing, producing calendars, geometry, physics, medicine, as well as technologies such as architecture, water conservancy, metallurgy, textiles, pottery, brewing, etc., and philosophy, law, and art all developed to a higher level.

Slave-owners and slaves were the fundamental classes of society. The contradiction between them was the principal contradiction of society. Slave-owners regarded slaves as cattle or horses, and gave them the most clumsy and indestructible tools to use, and the slaves showed no concern for production and rebelled against their masters by engaging in sabotage, destroying tools, and escaping. Under slavery, there was a strong social climate that despised labor, and labor was considered shameful by freemen. The early death and escape of slaves and the bankruptcy of small free producers devastated the productive forces of society. The struggle of slaves against their masters developed into armed uprisings, shaking the rule of the slave-owning class. The fall of the slave ownership varied from place to place. In Byzantium, slavery disappeared at a much slower rate than in Western Europe. In the late Roman Empire, the sources of slaves dried up, and the tremendous estates of slave-owners (“latifundia”) could no longer be maintained, consequently the land were divided into small plots and rented to the peasants for cultivation, which became the predecessor of the later feudal society. Historians have different views on the replacement of the slave society by the feudal society in China. Some people hold that in ancient China, there was no stage of feudal seigniory, and that the new landlord class gradually gained power by acquiring private property in the land and established the political power of the feudal landlord class and directly replaced the rule of slave-owners. Some hold that the slavery in China was first transformed into feudal seigniory and then entered feudal landownership.