Labor in Antiquity

Discussion

Benjamin Suriano:

"That labor came to be valorized as a perfective activity, however, stands in marked contrast with the sociopolitical world of antiquity and its classical philosophical expression. Within the ancient world, whether speaking of the Greek polis or the Roman Empire, sociopolitical reality was determined by those who owned land and expropriated slave labor through private land ownership worked by slave labor. The great masses constituting almost the entirety of the social whole were not slaves, however, but peasants, artisans, shopkeepers and hired laborers who lived mainly at subsistence levels with little or no property and thus scant opportunities for social mobility or political membership. Because the property and wealth of the social whole—especially with the development of the Roman latifundia— was consolidated within the hands of a few through their advantageous exploitation of slave labor, the mass of “free” laborers therefore held no real leverage in determining their sociopolitical reality and were often slavishly subordinated to aristocratic interests, especially through debt bondage.81 The social body was thus marked by a severe and tightly maintained division between a small fraction of a propertied class free from the need to labor and the rest, “free” or unfree, whose lives were consumed by laboring for another.

Because the substantial surplus expropriated by the few allowed them to invest their time into developing a state, military, and cultural apparatus that reproduced their exploitative position of privilege, the collective consciousness ruling this sociopolitical body tended to comprehend its free citizenship abstractly, as if a natural given, with little consciousness of the contribution of the laboring body.83 As the constitutive value of labor to the social totality was concealed and left largely uncomprehended, there was then little incentive to develop and better organize productive forces or relations of production beyond their reproduction of the status quo.84 With this relatively low level of productive development there was a corresponding ideological conception of labor lowly construed as mere toil, bound within the transitory realm of necessity as an involuntary process of reproducing certain nutritive and sensate functions of base animal nature. That is, productive activity was understood in no way to perfect, change, transform or actively contribute to making and knowing the social and natural whole since its socially contingent degradation and diminishment as a lowly biological function was obscured and instead viewed and legitimated as if a natural fact. Labor’s meaning came to be accepted as nothing more than an inevitable and inescapable mortal process within base nature, a symbol of enslavement."

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Bibliographic notes:

• G. E. M. De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the

Arab Conquests (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 169. In other words, even though slaves represented a minority of the total population, the use of slave labor to produce and concentrate wealth only for a few was nevertheless a dominant means of extracting surplus that allowed for the ruling class to gain hegemony in the sociopolitical realm.

• The Greco-Roman world, at least up until the late Roman Empire, contained virtually no middle class

since it was divided almost exclusively by those who owned property and the means of production and those who did not. Yet the ranks of the aristocracy, especially in the Roman Empire, expanded somewhat into intermediate levels of wealth amongst small farm owners and the Decurion who functioned as something like an emerging middle class. Yet this still represented only a tiny fraction of the population, and as Ramsay Macmullen warns, “in a given city, however, the aristocracy nevertheless stood upon the summit of a very steep social pyramid.” Roman Social Relations: 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 89–90.