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Karl Kautsky
Capitalism in the
Ancient World
(March 1912)

Source: Giuseppe Salvioli, Der Kapitalismus im Altertum.
Studien ber die rmische Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Stuttgart:
J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1922.
Translated from French: Karl Kautsky
Original ed.: Le capitalisme dans le monde antique, tudes sur
lhistoire de lconomie romaine, Paris, Giard, 1906
(<www.archive.org/details/lecapitalismedan00salvuoft>).
Translated into English: Daniel Gaido.
Marked up: Einde OCallaghan for the Marxists Internet Archive.

Among the modern sciences, economic history is one
of those whose field of research has expanded most
rapidly, especially because of the rapidly growing
wealth of primary materials. In spite of that, the
picture we have of the economy of antiquity is still
very vague and quite controversial. The blame for that
should be placed less upon the lack of information
about the past than upon the deficient knowledge of
the present. Only by researching the environment
closest and most accessible to us can we acquire the
knowledge and methods to enable us to find our way
in fields lying beyond it. We couldnt have the faintest
idea about the chemical composition of the stars if we
were to shrink from acquainting ourselves with the
component elements of our terrestrial globe. Only
through a thorough investigation of the earth can we
reach the preconditions for researching the star
world. It would be equally impossible to reconstruct
the physical appearance of extinct species from the
meagre amounts of bone remains discovered if we
were to have misgivings, in order to research their
anatomy and physiology, about studying with the
greatest zeal the contemporary animal species.
That is also true of economic history. It is
impossible to comprehend the economic relations of
the past and understand all their connections clearly
as long as people have scruples about understanding
the present mode of production in all its peculiarities
and ruthlessly laying bare its laws of movement and
development. Those scruples characterize bourgeois
economy in contradistinction from scientific
socialism. They need not be conscious, intentional
considerations. But no matter how unconscious they
might be, their obstructive effects arc no less
powerful.
Those generalizations hold true naturally only for
the practical problems of the present, but that is
enough to make more difficult the research of
problems of the past, far removed from the field of
modern oppositions of interests. Indeed they make it
more difficult, the more remote that past and the
sparser and ambiguous its remnants. Only to those
prejudices can be ascribed the fact that Karl Bchers
conception of economic development, rather than
Marxs, can dominate completely the field of
economic history, although the former is but a bad
reproduction of the latter.
Economic history is for Marx a history of the
development of the modes of production. That
development assumes stable forms, which arc
relatively easy to determine, as far as the production
technique is concerned. However, the situation is
entirely different regarding the forms of production,
insofar as they do not represent the relation of men to
nature, but the relations into which people enter with
one another in order to remain masters of nature
that is to say, the economic relations. These last
relations are of course very strongly determined by
the technique. For instance, they naturally can be
completely different in a place where a large railway
network exists, than in a place where the only means
of locomotion of the people arc their own legs. But the
economic relations are not identical with the
technical. If the latter arc determined and easily
recognizable, the former arc fluid, and all the more
difficult to recognize, the more production develops,
the larger the producing societies, the more diverse
their technique, and the older their history, because
in the course of their development they increasingly
mix up and combine old, antiquated forms with new
ones.
It is not easy to find an Ariadnes thread allowing us
to find our way in that labyrinth. That is most nearly
feasible with the help of the guiding lines provided to
us by Marx.
As the earliest mode of production Marx recognized
primitive communism. People lived together in little
groups, in which everybody worked and owned in
common the land, the most important means of
production, in so far as it is permissible to speak
about clear property relations in such primeval
conditions. Work was carried out according to social
customs, projects and agreements. The products
belonged to society, and were likewise distributed
according to social rules and agreements among its
members; they remained within the society that
produced them, and were consumed by it.
The development of technique leads the separate
societies to produce surpluses above what they need
for their own consumption. Simultaneously develops
also the process of exchange: each group comes into
closer and more frequent contact with other ones,
living in other places, under different conditions, and
producing different products. Thereby the conditions
arise for the exchange of surpluses and the widening
of the sphere of products consumed by each group.
Production for self-consumption begins to shrink
and production for exchange acquires an ever greater
importance. But thus begins also the displacement of
social production by private production. Private
property in the products of consumption expands
continually, and with it develops also private property
in the means of production, finally reaching also the
most important of them, the land. The free labourer
generally possesses at that stage his own means of
production and disposes of his produce, which he
exchanges for someone elses. Everybody produces an
ever greater quantity of products that he doesnt need
himself, and consumes others that he doesnt
produce, but has to exchange for his own products.
But with private property in the means of production
arises also the possibility of individual workers losing
their means of production and becoming propertyless
proletarians, or even private property themselves, i.e.
slaves in a private undertaking. Finally arises also the
possibility for some individuals to appropriate and
accumulate the means of production of many others
in order to exploit them, either directly, by buying
bound workers, or indirectly, by forcing free
propertyless workers to hand over to them part of
their production, for instance through shared
tenancies.
This accumulation of wealth can become a mass
phenomenon even before the appearance of the
capitalist mode of production; a sort of primitive
accumulation of capital, as Marx called it, through
different forms of violence, especially war. Already at
the beginning of historical times, with the
Babylonians and the Egyptians, we find from time to
time such mass accumulations. The Roman army
offered the most gigantic example of this
phenomenon in antiquity, as Salviolis book clearly
shows.
Each one of these accumulations always ended up,
sooner or later, with the decline of the state in which
they took place. The separation of the mass of the
workers from their means of production finally led to
the paralysis of economic and political life, to the
downfall of the state that plundered its more
barbarous neighbouring peoples, living under more
primitive conditions. That was the end of every higher
culture of antiquity about which some historical
records have been preserved, in the basins of the
Euphrates and the Nile as well as on the shores of the
Mediterranean Sea.
A new clement appeared for the first time in the
economy of northern Europe, as also there an epoch
of primitive accumulation opened up since the
fifteenth century. True, those states that led the way
in that process, Spain and Portugal, finally reached a
condition of paralysis like the states of antiquity. But
the northern states lying on the shores of the Atlantic
Ocean were able, through a favourable combination
of circumstances, to combine the proletarianization of
the majority of their population and the
concentration of great wealth in few hands with the
simultaneous growth of world trade, and in that way
developed a new mode of production. Capitalism
gathered the numerous propertyless workers
available in the service of mass production, for which
the great wealth accumulated, thanks to the
simultaneous development of the natural sciences,
placed at its disposal powerful means of production,
while at the same time the new means of
international commerce provided the necessary
expanded market for the mass products.
What in ancient Rome and even in modern Spain
was a cause of social decadence (the simultaneous
formation of a mass proletariat and the concentration
of huge riches in few hands) became since the
seventeenth century, above all in England, the
starting point for a new, higher mode of production,
capitalism, which enormously strengthened the forces
of state and society, and conquered the world in a
swift triumphant procession. At the same time
however it also developed in its midst a new and
powerful opponent, the proletariat, that from a
parasite [in antiquity] became the ever more powerful
basis of [modern] society. The end, which in the
society of ancient Rome was brought about by the
invasions of the German barbarians, threatens
capitalist society from its own workers. The latter,
however, will not, like the former, destroy society in
order to set up on its ruins a primitive mode of
production and start the entire course of evolution
anew, but, on the contrary, they possess the will and
the capacity to perfect to the highest degree the mode
of production whose pillars they are, by putting an
end to private property on the rapidly growing means
of production and turning them, from means of
exploitation and degradation of the masses, into
means of wealth, culture and leisure for all.
That is Marxs conception of economic
development. It has nowhere been set forth so
expressly and comprehensively. But when one puts
together his scattered remarks and applies the
method he bequeathed us to the known facts of
economic history, one reaches the synthetic view
described above.
Against it Bcher sets forth the following three
stages of economic development:
1. The stage of the closed
household economy (pure
production for self-consumption,
economy without exchange), in
which goods arc consumed in the
same economic unit in which they
were produced.

2. The stage of city economy
(production for customers
[Kundenproduktion] or stage of
direct exchange), in which the
goods flow directly from the
producing economy to the
consuming one, without
intermediaries.

3. The stage of political economy
[Volkswirtschaft] (commodity
production, stage of circulation of
goods), in which the goods as a rule
must pass through a series of
economic agents before reaching
the point of consumption. [1]
The order of succession of this tripartite division
corresponds approximately to the guiding lines which
economic development assumes according to Marx:
social production, simple commodity production,
capitalist production [i.e. commodity production
based on wage labour ed.]. But Bcher not only
differed from Marx by the fact that his stages
represent much more rigid and fixed forms than the
fluid Marxist phases of development. The spheres
that each one took into consideration were also
different. Marxs domain was the entire field of
economic history. His conception enabled him to
follow the previous economic development from its
earliest beginnings in its full complexity and diversity,
and to discover in it the embryo of the future.
Bchers classification also claims to comprehend the
entire economic development, but in fact it gives at
each stage only an isolated phenomenon, a part for
the whole.
Thus, for instance, Bcher places as the first stage,
instead of social production, the closed household
economy, one among the many forms of each
production, and moreover one which appears at the
period of dissolution of primitive communism and is
to be observed alongside simple commodity
production throughout its whole history, until the rise
of the capitalist mode of production.
In the same manner the production for customers
constitutes only one of the forms of simple
commodity production. Even if we want to limit it to
city economy (although commodity exchange appears
long before the formation of cities, at the stadium of
nomadic economy), urban commodity production is
impossible without simultaneous commodity
production in the countryside. However, the peasant
bringing cattle, corn, wool, flax and similar products
for exchange to the city, often does not exchange
them directly with the consumers. He exchanges his
cattle with the butcher, who then sells the meat to the
consumer, his corn with the baker, or perhaps first
with the miller, from whom the baker buys the flour,
with which he then produces bread for the
consumers. And it is surely not those who wish to
wear a coat that buy the wool, but the wool-traders or
cloth-makers. In the city itself there are numerous
manual labourers who also produce for the traders or
for other producers, and not directly for the
consumers.
But if we find already under simple commodity
production a whole series of wares, which must pass
through a series of economic factors, before reaching
consumption, then it is plainly erroneous to make
this property the distinguishing feature of the next
stage, the political economy, which Bcher himself
once called capitalist economy. But indeed which
other distinguishing feature can one devise in order to
distinguish it from simple commodity production if,
like Bcher, one refers for the characterization of the
different modes of production, not to the totality of
the process of production, but only to a small aspect
of it, namely the circulation of the finished products?
The social role of the worker in the production
process, his social claim to the means of production
and products, appear unimportant in Bchers
characterization of the different modes of production.
He is only interested in this question: how do the
finished products reach the hands of the consumers?
It is characteristic that the contemporary bourgeois
theory of economic development, like the bourgeois
theory of value, the marginal utility theory
[Grenznutzentheorie], avoids dealing with the
process of production and by economy understands
only the circulation of finished goods.
In his detailed investigation about the formation of
political economy Biicher mentions wage labour only
in two short sentences. First on page 161:
There appears mass production based on
the division of labour in manufactures
and factories, and with it the class of
wage labourers.
Bcher does not expand on this subject. Then on page
167 he adds:
Where outside labour [fremde Arbeit] is
required, it consists during the first stage
of permanent bound labourers (slaves,
bondsmen), in the second stage of
producers reduced to a state of long
servitude, and in the third stage of
workers entering into short contract
relations.
That is all we learn from the social conditions of the
workers. One can sec that the subject is handled as a
purely subsidiary, totally indifferent question, and
moreover incorrectly. This is because slavery is by no
means a peculiarity of production for self-
consumption. Slaves and bondmen have long and
often enough worked in commodity .production. But
it is downright absurd to sec in the shortness of the
contract relation the economic peculiarity of wage
labour in the capitalist mode of production. That,
according to Bcher, is what distinguishes capitalism
from all other modes of production. Apart from the
fact that the difference in the duration of the work
contract between manufacture and large-scale
industry is not a pervading and fundamental one, the
real outstanding peculiarity of modern wage labour is
not only not emphasized, but directly disavowed in
the above-quoted sentence from Bucher:
Where outside labour is required, it
consists ... in the third stage of workers
entering into short contract relations.
The outside labourers appear thus as occasionally
necessary. But what characterizes the third stage, the
capitalist mode of production, is precisely the fact
that in it outside labour is not something incidental,
which can often be dispensed with without any injury
to the production process, but something necessarily
determined by the character of the mode of
production. At the third stage, outside labour is the
general form of labour, and its existence constitutes
the precondition for the entire production process.
We can see that Bchers three stages, to the extent
that they differ from Marxs description of the
development of the different modes of production,
represent anything but a progress. Far from making
the characterization of the separate modes of
production sharper and more precise, his categories
blur the differences between them, leaving their
distinguishing traits completely out of the picture.
Not in spite of that, but precisely because of that,
Bchers conception has come to prevail among
bourgeois economists. For them the classical school
was anathema, as it became unmistakably evident,
especially under the influence of Marxs Capital, that
the laws of capitalist commodity production arc not
eternal natural laws, but only characteristic of a
passing historical stage. Therewith the perishableness
of capitalism was demonstrated a quite serious
matter, considering the growing proletarian militancy
that threatened to apply in practice the results of
theoretical knowledge.
Then came Bchers very convenient discovery. He
recognized that capitalist economy was a purely
transitory historical phenomenon. But what was its
distinguishing trait according to Bcher? The fact that
goods must, as a rule, pass through a series of
economic agents before they reach the consumers
hands. Not a word about the private property on the
means of production, about the propertyless
character of the wage workers. If these arc the
distinguishing traits of the capitalist mode of
production, then they will and must disappear with it
as soon as the proletariat is strong enough to abolish
it. How much more harmless the further development
of contemporary political economy appears when its
distinguishing trait becomes the passage of goods
through different economic agents, and wage labour
represents just a subsidiary accompanying
phenomenon!
Thanks to this misinterpretation of the modern
mode of production Bchers conception has become
dominant in bourgeois economic history.
However it also obscures the most important points
of view for the understanding of the economy of
antiquity. No wonder that the historians and classical
scholars declare that Bchers conception is
incompatible with the facts discovered by them.
But not being trained in economics, the historians
are not always sufficiently able to recognize the
differences between the economic phenomena of
antiquity and those of our time. They tend to make
them too much alike. As a consequence they are
bound to limit themselves to the discovery of isolated
economic phenomena, a highly important and
laudable task, whose further progress however clearly
requires a theoretical reworking and elaboration of
the numerous new materials.
Salviolis book constitutes in my opinion a
remarkable beginning in that direction. Its author has
a thorough knowledge of the economic relations, not
only of antiquity, but also of the Middle Ages. Since
1884 he has worked as a professor at Italian
universities. At first he belonged to the University of
Palermo; since 1903 he has taught history and
philosophy of right at Naples.
But his interest in research into the past did not
lead him to an indifference towards the present. He
applied himself to the study of the problems of our
time with zeal. and. choosing a completely different
path from that of the great majority of his colleagues,
did not take the side of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, he
despises adopting the apparently magnificent but in
fact despicable pose of possessing an objectivity that
is above the parties, that evades any clear-cut
position, and answers the most pressing problems of
the time with a question mark. Salvioli belongs to that
tiny but select circle of professors who resolutely
admit being on the side of the proletariat, professors
that constitute a glorious peculiarity of Italian
university life. He is a member of the Socialist Party,
contributes to the party press, gives lectures on its
behalf, and in 1894 was a candidate for Camera,
though without success.
Much more momentous than for practical politics is
however his socialist interest in science. He seriously
applied himself to the study of Marxism, became
familiar with historical materialism and the train of
thought of Capital and applied them very
appreciatively and intelligently to his studies on
economic history.
One cannot call him an orthodox Marxist. For
instance, he does not follow completely the Marxist
terminology, sometimes using the term capital in a
context where Marx would have used the words
money or means of production or stock of
products [Produktenvorrat]. He also understands
historical materialism in a different way from that of
the orthodox Marxists, when he assumes that this
materialism traces back every social fact to economic
motives, whereas we attribute every social peculiarity
to specific economic conditions.
But these deviations are no reason tor us to fail to
recognize that Marx richly fructified Salviolis thought
and researches. Especially the historical parts in the
third volume of Capital offered him numerous new
insights and provided him plenty of stimuli, which his
command of the ancient sources turned to good
account. His work on capitalism in the ancient world,
which first appeared in 1906 in French, is the result of
a decade of work. It fascinated me so much, that I
induced my son Karl to render it into German, and
advised my friend Dietz [owner of the SPD publishing
house Dietz Verlag] to publish the translation, a
project to which Salvioli gave his consent in writing.
True, it is a scholarly work, but it was written in a
style so clear and easy to understand, that one needs
to have no factual knowledge at all in order to
comprehend it.
For this edition all foreign quotations and
expressions have been translated, so that the work is
fully understandable even for readers unacquainted
with ancient languages and unfamiliar with the
history of antiquity. But of course even a superficial
knowledge of Roman history will facilitate its
comprehension. A good introduction to the subject is
the booklet of Leo Bloch Social Struggles in
Ancient Rome. [2] If, after having read Salviolis
book, one wishes to continue the study of ancient
economic history, I would recommend Ciccottis
book The Decline of Slavery in the Ancient
World, which constitutes an excellent supplement to
the present work, especially for the Greek
period. [3] Naturally that doesnt mean that I agree
with every single statement in those books. For
instance my conception of the Patriciate or Caesarism
are very different from Blochs. But in the history of
ancient society so much is still unclear and debatable,
that there cannot be two authors whose opinions
coincide completely.
Someone might wonder whether it is appropriate to
ask the workers to sacrifice a fraction of the little
spare time they dispose of by occupying themselves
with antiquity, instead of concentrating their entire
interest in the present. To which should be replied
that the present surely requires their entire interest,
but that a full understanding of the present
presupposes knowledge of the past. If, as we said at
the beginning, spatially and temporally remote
phenomena cannot be understood as long as we arc
not able to find our way in the present, one can also
conversely say that a deep understanding of the
phenomena nearest to us requires an acquaintance
with distant events.
The only way to know things or phenomena is
through their differences, What we call properties of a
thing are in truth the characteristics that distinguish
it from other things. Indeed a thing in itself can never
be known: we can only know each thing or
phenomenon by comparing it with other phenomena.
So, in order to understand the capitalist mode of
production we must also compare it with other modes
of production. That comparison was already done at
its dawn, through the contradiction into which it ran
with declining feudalism. But we will understand
capitalism, its problems and tendencies the better,
the greater the number of modes of production we
compare it with. Hence the great interest prevalent in
our party for prehistory.
Needless to say that is also true of classical
antiquity, and especially of the end of that period,
which is precisely the main subject of Salviolis book.
The end of the ancient world is of special significance
for us, because its problems came into much closer
contact with those of our times than those of any
other pre-capitalist era.
The most significant product of that period has
remained down to the present a powerful factor of
practical politics: Christianity. True, a factor of a
purely conservative nature since the rise of modern
capitalism, but one that capitalism cannot dispense
with. The products of ancient capitalism can only be
fully overcome by the products of modern, industrial
capitalism -through socialism.
The subject of Salviolis book is therefore connected
by many threads with the struggles of our times.
Berlin, March 1912

Notes
1. Karl Bcher, 1904, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft:
Vortrge und Aufstze, 4th ed., Tubingen: H. Lauppsche
Buchhandlung, p. 108. English edition: 1912,Industrial
Evolution, New York: H. Holt and Company.
(<www.archive.org/details/industrialevolut00bcuoft>).
2. Leo Bloch, Soziale Kmpfe im alten Rom, 3rd ed., Leipzig:
B.G. Teubner, 1913. (Die stndischen und sozialen Kmpfe
in der rmischen Republik, 1900)
(<www.archive.org/details/diestndiscsozia00bloc>).
3. Ettore Ciccotti, Le dclin de lesclavage antique. French ed.
revised and augmented with a preface by the author, Paris: M.
Rivire et cie, 1910
(<www.archive.org/details/ledclindelescla00platgoog>).

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Last updated on 13.11.2011