García Mac Gaw - The Ancient Mode of Production, The City-State and Politics

Historical Materialism 28.
1 (2020) 215–249
brill.com/hima
The Ancient Mode of Production, the City-State

and Politics
Carlos García Mac Gaw

Department of History, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina
cgmacgaw@hotmail.com
Abstract
This paper briefly examines the concept of the ancient mode of production as ex-
pressed in Karl Marx’s Formations. It looks at how twentieth-century Marxist histo-
riography picks up this concept in its characterisation of the Greco-Roman city-state.
It explores the feasibility of the use of the concept in relation to the advancement
of knowledge of the city-state, especially through the development of archaeology. It
examines how social classes are structured and relations of exploitation are presented.
And it analyses the need for politics in the organisation of this socio-economic form in
terms of how it is joined up with the social relations of production.
Keywords
pre-capitalist formations – ancient mode of production – city-state – politics
Introduction
In this article I look at the concept of the ancient mode of production as

originally formulated by Karl Marx and at its significance for historiography. I
also suggest the possible incorporation of certain aspects not originally pres-
ent in this discussion. The subject is of central importance in that it explores
the emergence of the state in Greek and Roman Mediterranean societies
of the Archaic and Classical periods. This has a logical bearing on the study of
the forms of exploitation organised there. Unlike the concept of the Asiatic
mode of production, which has been of far greater significance for historiog-
raphy, the ancient mode of production was quickly overtaken by the interest
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216 García Mac Gaw
awakened by the concept of the slave-owning mode of production in rela-

tion to studies on Ancient Greece and Rome. As will be seen later, it was Marx
himself who advanced the idea of an evolution from the ancient to the slave-
owning mode, and Marxist historical approaches have focused mainly on the
latter ever since. It is not possible to engage with these questions here, as their
scope exceeds the bounds of this article, but it should be remembered that
the relationship between the ancient and slave-owning modes of production
is of fundamental importance, as any theoretical reassessment of the ancient
mode of production necessarily entails a relocation of the debate about slave
relations of exploitation in classical antiquity within a different framework. I
shall not, however, be engaging with the matter here.
The formal body of the article is organised in four parts, plus an introduc-
tion and conclusions that summarise the most important points. The first
section sets out the concept of ancient mode of production as propounded
by Marx in the Grundrisse and describes its core elements, as well as the way
the concept has been taken up by certain historians. It broaches the debate
about forms of land appropriation, and the emergence of the state and its evo-
lutionary dynamics. Despite Marx and some of the historians who take up his
ideas applying the concept indiscriminately to the Greek polis and the Roman
civitas, the present analysis focuses on the historical evidence for Greece as
the birthplace of the city-state, later spreading to certain Italic communities
in Magna Graecia.1 The second section reviews current developments in this
field as regards the emergence of the Greek city-state, especially since the
incorporation of archaeological studies, with a brief summary of the topic’s
current status. It also discusses the emergence of social classes. This section
highlights certain major differences in the scope of knowledge between these
advances and the period when Marx was writing. The third section focuses
on the problem of appropriation of surplus, starting with the current histori-
cal evidence and moving on to theoretical aspects, particularly in relation to
the importance appropriation has for the analysis of economic factors in the
definition of mode of production. This section also discusses the possibility of
applying the concept of the tributary mode of production in the period. In the
fourth section I argue the importance of incorporating politics into the defini-
tion of the ancient mode of production as crucial to an understanding of its
functioning. The article closes with some brief conclusions.
1 Marx supports his arguments primarily with Roman examples but does not ignore Greek
ones.
Historical Materialism 28.1 (2020) 215–249

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The Ancient Mode of Production, the City-State and Politics 217
The Formations and the Ancient Mode of Production
Marx’s concept of the ancient mode of production first appears in the Pre-
Capitalist Economic Formations, one of the rough sketches, or Grundrisse, for
his Capital.2 The stated aim of the Formations was to analyse the process that
brought about the historical conditions for capitalist relations of production
to function. As Marx points out therein, these conditions are, on the one hand,
the existence of free labour and its exchange for money, and, on the other, the
separation of free labour from the objective conditions for its realisation: that
is, from the means and material of labour. Once such a separation has taken
place, the circumstances are ripe for the exchange of free labour for money, the
aim of which is the production of surplus-value. In capitalist societies, then,
surplus-value is obtained through a purely economic process insofar as this
is understood as an exchange mechanism. In contrast, while workers in pre-
capitalist societies were not separated from the conditions of production (land
and tools), the manner in which surplus was appropriated had to be organised
differently. If we remember that the basis of the economic order is land own-
ership and agriculture, this appropriation occurs historically in two primary
ways: first, appropriation of the workers themselves – assertion of rights over
the person, which may be either partial (debt bondage or serfdom) or total
(slavery) – involving the separation (alienation) of producers from their com-
munities; and second, appropriation of the product of labour in the form of
rent or taxes. Consequently the confiscation of surplus in pre-capitalist soci-
eties was the result of what is generally described as an extra-economic pro-
cess, to the extent that the relations of exchange in which workers are involved
in selling their labour-power can be understood as strictly economic. Most
scholars in general agreement with Marxist theory would argue that these two
basic forms of appropriation of surplus imposed on direct producers in class
societies mark the theoretical boundary between capitalist and pre-capitalist
societies.3 Later on I critique this conceptual division of economic and extra-
economic appropriation processes, advancing the idea that the appropriation
of surplus is always ‘economic’, and that the economic is expressed differently
2 Marx 1993. For the place and history of the Formations in the general context of Marx’s work,
see Hobsbawm 1964, pp. 9–27.
3 As pointed out in Meiksins Wood 2003, p. 29, ‘Capitalism in these respects differs from pre-
capitalist forms because the latter are characterized by extraeconomic modes of surplus ex-
traction, political, legal, or military coercion, traditional bonds or duties, etc., which demand
the transfer of surplus labor to a private lord or to the state by means of labor services, rent,
tax, and so on’.
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218 García Mac Gaw
depending on the specific nature of the mode of production. But for now I will
start with the first approach by way of introduction.
The study of pre-capitalist formations is not, then, the focus of Marx’s at-
tention. On the contrary, I take it as my central object of analysis, the ideas
developed by Marx being fertile ground for deepening concepts useful for un-
derstanding Mediterranean societies of the archaic and classical periods. Aldo
Schiavone points out that the distinction between the theoretical and the de-
scriptive form of a process is central to any grasp of the Formations’ meaning
and scope.4 According to this author, the end result of historiographical knowl-
edge is always descriptive of a process’s totality: the set of elements that con-
verge in its formation. In this sense Marx’s work in this text does not achieve a
historiographical result in any full sense, falling short of a ‘total description’.5
This is where I intend to make a contribution.
Marx developed the central points of what he called the ‘second’ or ancient
form in Notebook IV of the Grundrisse. The concept of the ancient mode of
production had far less of an impact than the Asiatic mode of production.6
Though authors like B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Robert Padgug or Chris Wickham
reprised the concept, it was generally eclipsed by the growing tendency to
link ancient classical societies with slavery, the latter posited by Marx himself
as a consequence of the evolution of the ancient mode.7 Hindess and Hirst
have made a more systematic analysis of the ideas advanced by Marx. Broadly
speaking, Hindess and Hirst’s view of the ancient mode of production com-
prises: 1) a social division of labour between a class of direct producers and
a class of non-workers; 2) an appropriation of surplus labour by right of citi-
zenship, resulting in the dominance of politics; and 3) a limited development
of the productive forces, independent peasant production being the predomi-
nant form in the work process.8 Wickham introduces an idea not clearly pres-
ent in Marx, namely that the ancient mode was non-exploitative in its early
4 Schiavone 1978, p. 89.

5 Banaji 2010, p. 2, states that ‘By contrast, most Marxist historiography of the precapitalist
period tends to assume we already know the different modes of production from the labels
attached to them, and lacks any sustained attempt to grasp (explore, construct) their complex-
ity’ (original italics).
6 On the Asiatic mode of production, see Sofri 1969; Godelier 1973, pp. 47–68; Chesneaux,
Bartra, Sachs et al. 1975; Krader 1975; Ruiz Rodríguez, Parain, Antoniadis-Bibicou et al. 1978;
Anderson 1974, pp. 462–549; Hindess and Hirst 1979, pp. 183–224.
7 Hindess and Hirst 1979, pp. 83–111; Padgug 1975; Wickham 1984; Marx 1993, pp. 487, 491. For a
critical reading of ancient slavery in Marx, see Nippel 2005, p. 40, who believes that Marx’s
scattered references to this issue relate mostly to his interest in the debate on American
slavery.
8 Hindess and Hirst 1979, pp. 87–8.

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days. He also points out that it was characterised by a citizen body of private
owners settled in the city who controlled the surrounding land.9 Taking the
example of Rome, he highlights its subsequent expansion and progressive sub-
stitution of the peasantry through the slave-owning mode. Rome’s conquest of
Italy and the Mediterranean may have led to a shift towards the exploitative
in the ancient mode. Haldon criticises this perspective because he thinks it
is impossible ‘to talk of the “ancient mode in its class form”’, seeing it as noth-
ing but an urban variant on the theme of primitive communal exploitation.10
However, he shares the former view because he believes the expansion gave
rise to the exploitation of dominated groups and some of the same citizens by
an enriched class, a process that transformed the relations of production and
in particular the form of appropriation of surplus. Therefore, in its class form
the ancient mode of production was rather a specific social formation in which
the slave-owning and tributary modes of production came together, the tribu-
tary mode ultimately dominating the slave-owning mode. We will come back
to this later. Lastly, focusing on the Greek world, Padgug also starts from the
premise of the commune as a pre-classist society where the development of
classes was the result of conflict between groups associated with two different
types of land occupation: communal and private.11 The progressive imposition
of the principle of private ownership led to the creation of class divisions and
the replacement of the commune by the state. This conflict lay at the heart of
later Greek history and reappeared in different forms.
Significantly, none of these three authors makes a clear-cut association
between the city-state and the ancient mode of production, which is central
for Marx and clearly defines the relationship with the development of social
classes.12 I discuss some of these elements below, especially the interpretation
of the ancient mode of production as pre-classist. My stance attempts to ad-
vance a theoretical formulation consistent with developments in studies of the
classical Mediterranean world and in particular with the dynamic thrust that
archaeological studies have given to this question. After a brief presentation of
Marx’s basic guidelines, I will look at the problem in increasing depth.
The central aspects of the ancient mode, a ‘product of more active, histor-
ic life, of the fates and modifications of the original clans’, were for Marx as
follows:
9 Wickham 1984, p. 6.
10 Haldon 1993, pp. 89–90.
11 Padgug 1975, p. 87.
12 Hindess and Hirst refer indirectly to this when they point to the existence of an appro-
priation by right of citizenship.

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220 García Mac Gaw
1. The second form … it presupposes as base not the countryside, but the
town as an already created seat (centre) of the rural population (owners
of land).
2. … The cultivated field here appears as a territorium belonging to the town.
3. … War is therefore the great comprehensive task.
4. … The clan system in itself leads to higher and lower ancestral lineages, a
distinction which is still further developed through intermixture with
subjugated clans etc.
5. … Communal property – as state property, ager publicus – here separated
from private property.
6. … The commune – as state – is, on one side, the relation of these free and
equal private proprietors to one another, their bond against the outside,
and is at the same time their safeguard.
7. … Membership in the commune remains the presupposition for the appro-
priation of land and soil, but, as a member of the commune, the indi-
vidual is a private proprietor.
8. … The presupposition of the survival of the community is the preservation
of equality among its free self-sustaining peasants, and their own labour
as the condition of the survival of their property.
9. … The individual is placed in such conditions of earning his living as to
make not the acquiring of wealth his object, but self-sustenance … 13
Some of these ideas are repeated in the scant pages that deal with the subject,
while others are analysed in greater detail. I believe we should insist on three
specific defining features of this mode: 1) the form of ownership; 2) the city as
state; and 3) the internal dynamics.
It is particularly in the Formations that Marx observes the way relations of
land appropriation are organised, land being the main means of production
in societies where the economic base is agricultural production. The develop-
ment of private property presupposes a community more permeable to social
change through the process of land concentration, unlike oriental societies,
which are less prone to change. Membership of the community and individual
land ownership organise a dual conditional relationship, the community en-
tity being composed of members who are agricultural owners of the land they
work. Indeed, private property coexists with public property and is separate
from it.14 I will come back to this later.
13 Marx 1993, pp. 474–6.

14 Krader 1975, p. 105, posits a dialectical sequence from the primitive communal form to
the forms of oriental, ancient and Germanic ownership. I disagree with this reading. At
no point did Marx posit a shift from the oriental to ancient form, nor even imagine the

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The second of the three features I mentioned is the city as state. For Marx
the city’s status in the ancient community is central: ‘ … the town as centre of
rural life, residence of the agricultural workers, likewise the centre of warfare,
the commune as such would have a merely outward existence, distinct from
that of the individual’.15 Consequently, the economic existence of the commu-
nity as a whole is distinct from the mere plurality of independent houses.
While Marx does not deal with the historical processes forming the polis/
civitas, he still draws attention to certain specific aspects of this question. The
first is that the city should be seen as the economic centre (of rural life) and
the political centre of the community, while also being the home of the peas-
ant farmers who live in it. Moreover, because the polis/civitas is organised as
a state, it has an objective existence beyond its component individuals mani-
fested in the urban space and its magistrates. These elements are central when
it comes to thinking about distinctive qualities of the ancient community. Yet
there is still controversy over the conception of the ancient commune as state.
Hobsbawm understands that Marx considers the basic variants of primitive
communalism, including the Asiatic mode, as pre-classist societies.16 In this
respect Godelier has advanced the idea that the Asiatic mode of production
is a form of classless societies in their transition to class societies.17 This could
be explained by the combination of primitive communities organised around
kinship relations and a state power controlling key economic resources and
appropriating part of the labour. This is, however, inconsistent: the existence of
tax alters the original conditions of the community organised around kinship
relationships and subsumes these relationships under the logic of exploita-
tion. Therefore, although the two mechanisms coexist, the imposition of the
logic of exploitation limits the reach of the redistributive mechanisms based
on kinship relationships. This is not a transition; rather, the logic of exploita-
tion has now prevailed over the redistributive logic.18 In my view, whatever
Hobsbawm says, there is no doubt about Marx’s classist view of the Asiatic
mode in the Formations.19 He states there that a ‘comprehensive unity’ appears
existence of Mycenaean palaces. Also he was at pains to underline the contrast between
static (oriental) and dynamic (ancient and Germanic) forms. We start from the premise
that the development of productive forces should not be thought of as a necessity but as
a condition of possibility.
15 Marx 1993, p. 479, who promptly stresses that ‘The history of classical antiquity is the his-
tory of cities, but of cities founded on landed property and on agriculture.’
16 Hobsbawm 1964, p. 51.
17 Godelier 1971, p. 149.
18 Campagno 1998, p. 33.
19 In the same vein, see Krader 1975, pp. 123–4.

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222 García Mac Gaw
in Asiatic forms over and above the small community entities as the superior
or sole proprietor of collective ownership, as a consequence of which, ‘The
surplus product – which is, incidentally, determined by law in consequence of
the real appropriation through labour – thereby automatically belongs to this
highest unity.’20 This is a clear reference to the transfer of surplus from com-
munities to this ‘comprehensive unity’, which I shall identify with the first state
and which puts us in a class society where there is appropriation of surplus.21
The question of the appropriation of surplus, however, is less clear when it
comes to the second form, such as it appears in the Formations. Marx does not
explicitly highlight this question; the arguments for understanding the com-
mune as a class society rather arise out of his insistence on ‘the commune as
state’ and his reference to the formation of ‘higher and lower ancestral lin-
eages, a distinction which is still further developed through intermixture with
subjugated clans’ as a result of expansion.22 This differentiation is first marked
at the internal level – higher and lower lineages – and then highlights a deep-
ening through external domination in relation to the development of slavery.
Nor does Marx elaborate on concrete mechanisms for the emergence of the
state either generally or specifically.23 In the case of the ancient mode he lim-
its himself to stating that the community exists as a state in the city, but does
not explain why this developed from the primitive commune.24 Referring to
Marx’s notes, Engels took an interest in these theoretical aspects in The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State, highlighting slavery as the main
cause of the division of society into classes. Here he claimed that the conquest
of foreign territories by clans – forms of organisation incapable of providing
domination – may have led to the emergence of the state through leader-
ship. For Engels, society based on ‘gentile constitution’ was torn apart by the
clash of newly-formed social classes and organised itself into a state: its lower
20 Marx 1993, pp. 472–3.

21 See also Marx 1993, p. 473: ‘A part of their surplus labour belongs to the higher commu-
nity, which exists ultimately as a person, and this surplus labour takes the form of tribute
etc., as well as of common labour for the exaltation of the unity, partly of the real despot,
partly of the imagined clan-being, the god.’
22 Marx 1993, pp. 475, 474, 483.
23 Marx 1993, p. 472, posits the transition from the family to the tribe and from nomadism
to sedentary agriculture. After settlement, changes in the original community ‘depend on
various external, climatic, geographic, physical etc. conditions as well as on their particu-
lar natural predisposition – their clan character.’ On the other hand, the all-encompassing
unit ‘appears’ simply as a superior proprietor, the ‘highest unity’, which I have identified
with the first state.
24 Marx 1993, p. 483: ‘The [Germanic] commune therefore does not in fact exist as a state or
political body, as in classical antiquity, because it does not exist as a city’ (original italics).

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tiers become territorial and non-gentile, the family regime was subjected to
relations of property, class contradictions and class struggle developed free-
ly, a public force was also established and taxes were collected.25 Lenin ad-
vanced similar criteria when he defined the state in a lecture given at Sverdlov
University in July 1919. In that summary, it was the product of society’s division
into classes and into rulers and ruled, the former using the state to underwrite
the exploiting classes’ power of coercion. The same ideas had already been
developed more comprehensively in The State and Revolution, especially the
first three points of Chapter I.26 For her part, Meiksins Wood takes up Morton
Fried’s definition, stressing the role of institutions: ‘For the purposes of this
discussion, the state will be defined in very broad terms as “the complex of
institutions by means of which the power of the society is organized on a basis
superior to kinship” – an organisation of power which means to claim “to para-
mountcy in the application of naked force to social problems” and consists of
“formal, specialized instruments of coercion”.’ I shall take these broad defini-
tions as a starting point.27
The Emergence of the City-state: Historiography and Archaeology
Let us now briefly summarise current advances in historiography on the ques-

tion of the appearance of the city-state, based especially on archaeological
25 Engels 2010, pp. 207ff. In Chapters IV and V, the author develops the problem of the Greek
gens in the framework of Morgan’s general theory as a prelude to an analysis of the emer-
gence of the Athenian state and later, in Chapter VI, the Roman state. Cf. Claessen and
Skalník 1978, who provide an overview of the different theories around the emergence of
the state, particularly those they term ‘early states’, and highlight the range of the different
causalities cited over the last century and a half, especially in pp. 586–93.
26 Lenin 1917 and 1919.
27 Meiksins Wood 2003, p. 32. See Claessen 1978, pp. 586–8, who describes seven defining
characteristics of the early state: (1) a sufficient number of people to make possible social
categorisation, stratification and specialisation. (2) Citizenship is determined by resi-
dence or birth in the territory. (3) The government is centralised, and has the necessary
sovereign power for the maintenance of law and order, through the use of both authority
and force, or the threat of force. (4) It is independent, at least de facto, and the government
possesses sufficient power to prevent separatism (fission), and the capacity to defend its
integrity against external threats. (5) The productivity (level of development of the pro-
ductive forces) is developed to such a degree that there is a regular surplus which is used
for the maintenance of the state organisation. (6) The population shows a sufficient de-
gree of social stratification that emergent social classes (i.e., rulers and ruled) can be dis-
tinguished. (7) A common ideology exists, on which the legitimacy of the ruling stratum
(the rulers) is based.

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224 García Mac Gaw
information, and the emergence of social classes. Gordon Childe and Robert
Redfield insisted on the relationship between the emergence of the city and
the state, particularly in the case of the polis, while Claessen and Skalník argue
that the extent to which the appearance of cities may have been an essential
factor concomitant with the state’s formation and subsequent development is
yet to be researched.28 Yet its emergence in Greece and Rome was inextricably
linked to the city, and this is central to an understanding of its specific nature.29
Archaeology confirms the fact that the classical world was focused on urban
life. Based on his own and other archaeologists’ findings, John Bintliff points
out that between 75 and 80 per cent of the population lived in cities during
Greece’s Classical era, with the remainder living in small farms and villages in
the territories controlled by them.30 During the Archaic period the existence
of cities presupposed the earlier development of urban centres whose roots
in some cases could be traced back to the Mycenaean period.31 Marx had no
knowledge of the palatine structures of that period and made no reference
to them in the Formations.32 We now know that the conditions for the emer-
gence of the polis were the result of a long process. The first stage of the Greek
world’s development takes in the Bronze Age, the most notable expressions of
which were found in Crete with the palace of Knossos as a political centre in
around 2000 BCE. Around 1600 BCE the balance of power shifted to the Greek
mainland, where several monarchical independent political units developed
around their respective palaces: the period is known as ‘Mycenaean’. During
the twelfth century BCE a series of events affecting the whole Mediterranean
plunged the Mycenaean kingdoms into crisis and led to their subsequent
28 Gordon Childe 1950; Redfield 1953; Claessen and Skalník 1978, p. 12.
29 See Hansen (ed.) 1993, pp. 13–16. Van der Vliet 2008, pp. 201–4, has sought to apply the
concept of ‘early state’ to the Greek world, though the author admits that ‘the conclusion
had to be, that much of what Early States elsewhere had in common, was absent or could
not be demonstrated in early Greece.’ This concept is similar to Marx’s proposed develop-
ment for the Asiatic commune, so it is difficult to apply as a stage in the movement from
the oikos to the polis.
30 Bintliff 2006, p. 22.
31 Hall 2013, pp. 9–10. Against the dominant view concerning the emergence of the polis see
Foxhall 1995, p. 249, and in favour of it see Morris 1987, p. 6, with whom I stand.
32 As Hobsbawm 1964, p. 21, points out, Heinrich Schliemann began his excavations at Troy
in 1870 and the first volume of Theodor Mommsen’s CIL (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum)
appeared in 1863. The archaeological breakthroughs that revolutionised knowledge of the
Greek world therefore occurred late in his life. See Morris 1997, pp. 535–9, who provides
a brief overview of the relationship between the Homeric poems and archaeology based
on Schliemann’s discoveries.

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disappearance.33 This in turn brought about the dispersion of coalescing

peasant communes and gave way to reorganisation in forms quite different
to previous ones.34 The disappearance of writing in the twelfth century BCE
and its subsequent reappearance during the eighth century BCE explain why
the period has come to be known as a ‘dark age’. The transition involved a shift
from state forms to forms that, as we will see below, can be identified as chief-
doms or, failing that, were organised around a ‘big man’. In other words, there
was a regression in the development of productive forces, with consequences
that bear a telling resemblance to what happened after the fall of the Western
Roman Empire in the fifth century CE.35
The existence of an egalitarian commune as a starting point for the study
of the emergence of the city-state, as posited by Marx in the Formations,
might belong in the dark period, when the villages dispersed after the fall of
the Mycenaean palaces underwent an initial phase in which they remained
isolated, with low levels of social differentiation.36 The nature of these peas-
ant communes is controversial because, while archaeologists have empha-
sised egalitarian social conditions, historians, focusing mainly on Homer,
point to a pronounced stratification.37 In historiography a model dependent
on Snodgrass’s theories has prevailed to interpret this process, starting with
a highly civilised period controlled by the palaces and moving on to a period
of demographic shrinkage marked by even the abandonment of agriculture
33 Around this time iron tools began to appear. It is therefore considered the end of the
Bronze Age, although such tools also coexisted in the dark age.
34 Finley 1970; Chadwick 1976; Marazzi (ed.) 1982; Killen 1985, pp. 241–42; Foxhall 1995, p.
243; Halstead 1992. Halstead 1992 studies the economic relations of Mycenaean palaces
and provides evidence of a far more complex system than the one posited by Marx for
the Asiatic form, in which the Mycenaean structures could be framed. Parain 1978 sug-
gested this equivalence for the Creto-Mycenaean world, especially pp. 50–7. For the pe-
riod following the fall of the palaces see the chronology in Dickinson 2006, pp. 10–23,
summarised in the table on p. 23.
35 Wickham 2005, p. 241, introduced the idea of a geographical pattern rather like a leopard
skin as a result of the dissolution of the Empire, ‘with areas of dark (the feudal mode, let
us say) interspersed with areas of light (the peasant mode)’. On the peasant economy see
Redfield 1956, Shanin 1971 and 1976, Powell 1974, Harrison 1977, Worsley 1984, and Cortés
and Cuéllar 1986. For a thoroughgoing critique of the concept, see Vilar 1980. Sahlins 1972
and Meillassoux 1985 elaborate on the concept to account for the primitive agricultur-
al societies we find from the Neolithic period on. See the critique by Meillassoux 1985,
pp. 13–14, of the way the issue is presented in the Formations.
36 To establish the criterion of ‘community’ in light of the archaeological remains found at
various sites, see Morris 1991, pp. 29–31. For an exhaustive examination of the ‘invention’
of the dark age after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, see Morris 2000, pp. 77–108.
37 Snodgrass 1993a, pp. 35–6.

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226 García Mac Gaw
and the advancement of pastoralism, and a subsequent return to a civilised

time characterised by the dominance of agriculture within the framework of
the polis from the early eighth century.38 The idea currently prevailing is one
of demographic decline, albeit with local nuances. The account involving a
shift to pastoralism and the abandonment of agriculture has been criticised
and replaced with one involving the prevalence of a mixed economy similar
to the one in both the previous period and classical Greece.39 The process ap-
pears not to have been identical across the different regions, for all that the
Homeric poems create the idea of a homogeneous society, a picture archaeol-
ogy has questioned.40 Lin Foxhall, for example, points out that the way sites,
villages or regions evolved after the break-up of Mycenaean administration
seemed to depend especially on their earlier relationship with the nearest pal-
ace.41 She pays particular attention to the role of the new elites, who were in
a position to adopt a degree of continuity with the ancient elites.42 Thus, the
regions exhibiting more radical change would have been those under the pal-
ace’s direct supervision, that is, the closest areas, where archaeological remains
show no signs of continuity. In contrast, secondary administrative centres like
Nichoria, with local elites previously subjected to the palace, were freed politi-
cally and economically, retaining their prestigious positions on a local scale.43
Finally, areas completely marginal to the palaces, like Methana and Lefkandi,
grew after the fall, due probably to their status as refuges in periods of turbu-
lence, and to immigration and the absence of disruption brought on by their
independence from such centres.44 Whitley, on the other hand, establishes a
distinction between stable and unstable sites.45 In his view, stable sites were
usually important Mycenaean centres and often later became poleis, while un-
stable sites were occupied for relatively short periods – between fifty and three
hundred years. Both approaches reinforce the dominant idea of difference
38 Snodgrass 1980, and Snodgrass 1993a, pp. 30–2. For a description of this historiographical
evolution, see Palmer 2001, pp. 43–53. On the polis and the modern forms to translate his
concept, see Hansen (ed.) 1993.
39 See the demographic estimates in Morris 1991, pp. 31–4, for some sites. On the mixed econ-
omy, see Palmer 2001, pp. 50–3, 66–77; Dickinson 2006, pp. 93–104.
40 Whitley 1991, pp. 341–3; Morris 1998, pp. 29–31, 42–3; Raaflaub 2005, p. 28; Dickinson 2006,
pp. 76–7.
41 Foxhall 1995, pp. 247–8.
42 See Thomas and Conant 1999, pp. 26–31, for the case of Mycenae in the period immedi-
ately following the fall of the palace until its second destruction.
43 Foxhall 1995, pp. 244–5; Thomas and Conant 1999, pp. 32–59.
44 See Dickinson 2006, p. 63, for references to other regions with similar conditions, such as
Tiryns, Asine and perhaps Argos.
45 Whitley 1991, pp. 346–7.

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over uniformity. The advances of archaeological prospecting suggest that the

post-Mycenaean collapse may not have been as catastrophic as first imagined,
although the period is characterised by insecurity and uncertainty primarily
on the evidence of the population’s mobility and declining numbers.46
Having started from the premise that the Greco-Roman state arises out of
the emergent city-state and, as I have argued, that the appearance of the state
is bound up with the emergent class system, I would like to examine the redefi-
nition of social relations linked to the exploitative practices formerly imple-
mented by the palaces in dark-age communities. On this subject Dickinson
claims that the surviving settlements’ new ruling classes would have had to
establish new limits of control regardless of whether they included members
of the ancient elites or presented themselves as their successors: their power
was most likely not as steady as it was for the ruling classes of the palatine nu-
clei, a situation presupposing new balances of power.47 Settlements with low
populations (100 inhabitants or fewer) probably afforded their members open
access to arable land, pasture and other natural resources.48 These communi-
ties would not have had fixed social hierarchies but a ‘big man’ as leader, who
reached and upheld his position through his ability to attract followers with
gifts and revelry.49 This idea fits with the concept deriving from the basileia
in Homer and Hesiod, and not with a true monarchy, and is strengthened by
a lack of associated elements in the archaeological record.50 Looking at the
case of Nichoria, the degree of social differentiation that can be inferred from
buildings revealed by excavation rules out the existence of social classes, and
the head of the household of the main building (Unit IV) would have to be
46 Dickinson 2006, pp. 69–70. See Bintliff 1994, pp. 213–15, for the case of Boeotia.
47 Dickinson 2006, p. 61. On pp. 189–90 he highlights the relative simplicity and lack of
ostentation in funeral uses if we look at the most ancient Iron Age burials (c.1050–700
BCE), the only clear-cut exception to the rule of moderate ostentation in tombs being the
Lefkandi heroon.
48 Palmer 2001, p. 67. In the case of Athens, Morris 1991, pp. 27, 42, puts this process back to
1050 BCE, but Thomas and Conant 1999, pp. 66–84, hold a more nuanced view. See also
Valdés Guía 2001, p. 134, and Valdés Guía 2011, p. 161, n. 22.
49 We adopt the concept of ‘big man’ as presented by Sahlins 1963, p. 289: ‘But the indicative
quality of big-man authority is everywhere the same: it is personal power. Big-men do
not come to office; they do not succeed to, nor are they installed in, existing positions of
leadership over political groups. The attainment of big-man status is rather the outcome
of a series of acts which elevate a person above the common herd and attract about him
a coterie of loyal, lesser men.’
50 Dickinson 2006, pp. 249–50; Bennet 1997, pp. 521–2. See Van der Vliet 1986, p. 125, on
the possibility of characterising these societies as ‘chiefdoms’. On this last concept see
Claessen and Skalník 1978, p. 22. See Campagno 2002, pp. 73–4, where both types of pa-
rental societies are compared.

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228 García Mac Gaw
qualified as a ‘big man’.51 The archaeological remains at Lefkandi are in some

ways close to those at Nichoria and Athens.52 Thomas and Conant ask why
Lefkandi and Nichoria – once prosperous sites – did not become permanent
poleis in the way Athens did.53 The authors venture the hypothesis that the
power groups reflected in the funerary furnishings at Lefkandi would have
clashed with each other, resulting in a fracturing of the community and some
groups’ expulsion. This would have led to weakening and exposure to neigh-
bouring centres, strengthened at the time by political aggregation mecha-
nisms. Both Nichoria and Lefkandi would thus have been caught in the midst
of military processes that put an end to them: for Nichoria, Sparta’s expansion
into Messenia; for Lefkandi, the conflict between Chalcis and Eretria. On this
basis, the particular case of Lefkandi could signify the elite’s ineffectualness
in establishing permanent dominion over other social sectors that were ca-
pable of preventing their subjection. The necessary corollary of this hypothesis
should be the possibility of an alternative access to the means of production,
either in the region of Euboea again or further afield.
The City as State
The second section looked at the concept of ‘state’ and linked it to the emer-
gence of social classes. We can now ask to what extent these aristocracies in
the period after the fall of the Mycenaean kingdoms were able to become a
kind of state with a capacity for the appropriation of surplus over peasant
production sectors. Thinking around this process, I would like to stress here
the idea of rupture as against evolution. In this respect it is worth mentioning
Pierre Clastres’s idea of the state as a dividing threshold between ‘primitive’
societies – any negative connotations in this label should be put aside – and
non-primitive societies.54 In particular, my argument asserts the peculiar na-
ture of the city-state as a statal form that loosely meets some of the conditions
51 Thomas and Conant 1999, pp. 46–7, 52. See Donlan 1994, pp. 348–53, where the adven-
tures of Odysseus are interpreted along the same lines.
52 Thomas and Conant 1999, pp. 85–114.
53 Thomas and Conant 1999, pp. 107–8.
54 Clastres 2010, p. 67: ‘Primitive societies are thus undivided societies (and for this rea-
son, each considers itself a single totality): classless societies – no rich exploiters of the
poor; societies not divided into the dominating and the dominated – no separate organ
of power.’ For Clastres the question concerning the origin of the state should therefore
be phrased more precisely: under what conditions does a society cease to be primitive?
(p. 70), or, as he asks elsewhere, ‘what made it so that the state ceased to be impossible?’
(Clastres 1989, p. 205).

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for states, notably the monopoly of coercion, which has been the subject of
debate among historians of antiquity.55
In an article analysing the emergence of the Archaic Greek state from a dif-
ferent theoretical perspective than the one I propose here, Runciman posits
four necessary conjoined conditions: specialisation in roles of government;
the centralisation of executive authority; the permanence of the structure;
and emancipation from the bonds of real or fictitious kinship as the basis for
relations between the occupants of governmental roles and the governed.56 He
believes that this critical transition relies on the conditions of a cumulative
growth in power among the holders of potential government roles. This power
exists in three forms: economic, social (in the sense of social status), and po-
litical. In other words, the rulers’ powers are derived from a combination of: 1)
possession or control over the sources and distribution of wealth; 2) attribu-
tion by the subjects and/or fellow citizens of a higher honour or prestige deriv-
ing from either a sacred or secular institutional or personal charisma; and 3)
command of the technical and organisational means of physical coercion that
allow them to impose obedience by force.57 The author believes that, chrono-
logical specifics aside, there is clear evidence for an accumulation of power of
these three mutually reinforcing types in the Greek world around the eighth
century BCE.58
Two aspects of Runciman’s definition are central to an understanding of
this process: the first is the shift from the dominance of kinship relationships
to political ones (the latter is specific to the Mediterranean world); the second
signals the ruling class’s control over the means of production and distribution,
which implies the existence and conflict of social classes, the nub of the prob-
lem surrounding the emergence of the state.59 The two aspects are inextricably
linked. In order for there to be a social class capable of controlling the means
of production above and beyond the constraints imposed by the communi-
ty, the reproduction of the social relations underwriting conditions of non-
exploitation among the members of this community must be broken. In other
55 Berent 1998, 2004 and 2006; Morris 1991, p. 44; see especially Paiaro 2011, pp. 224–32,
against Berent.
56 Runciman 1982, p. 351.
57 Runciman 1982, p. 361. Cf. Finley 2000, pp. 8–9, for, in my view, a less effective definition of
state.
58 Runciman 1982, p. 367. Snodgrass 1993a, p. 34, claims that the changes made during the
eighth century could only have occurred in the context of transition to the state.
59 Haldon 1993, p. 280, n. 37, with bibliography: ‘The formulation begs the question, of
course, whether states do always develop in the context of class antagonisms. The answer
is empirically testable and unequivocally in the affirmative.’

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230 García Mac Gaw
words, regulatory kinship links must be breakable and replaceable by political

links. These theoretical aspects have been studied by Marcelo Campagno, who
points out that in extra-kinship spaces between various kinship networks –
which the author terms interstitial – the conditions may arise for practices
contrary to those regulating the institutions of kinship, that is to say, that break
with the criteria of reciprocity and redistribution.60 These proposed spaces
include: 1) wars, resulting in the victors’ permanent control over the van-
quished; 2) urban contexts arising from processes of diverse population con-
centration; 3) sacred leadership forms in which a leader can present himself as
someone socially separated from the community. These three scenarios entail
the possibility of advancing outside the principles governing the kinship sys-
tem. The first two, both individually and in combination, are recurrent in the
case of the polis/civitas. The third does not present itself as stated; nevertheless
the religious question is central in the transition to the city-state.61
Some historians have understood concrete historical development in the
case of Archaic Greece from perspectives suited to these theoretical criteria
with slight variations. Ian Morris claims that the twelfth-century collapse did
not destroy the hierarchies in Greece and that state-level institutions appeared
in a gradual process of centralisation with limited penetration by the state into
civil society right up to the Hellenistic period.62 He posits a close relationship
between the population levels reached and the need to establish an organ-
isational level. Yet while he points out the tendency to fragmentation of the
expanding groups, he does not explain the reason for some of them reaching a
threshold of 500 members or more, where constituted offices begin to emerge,
access to which was frequently restricted by birth. Such agrarian communi-
ties take on the characteristic features of peasant societies, including strati-
fied groups.63 The next step he locates in the eighth century, when evidence
appears of greater centralisation, with monumental architecture, writing and
more serious warfare, and believes that the transition to the state therefore oc-
curs by around 700 BCE, while highlighting this as a small step from a complex
60 Campagno 2011, pp. 45–6. The author bases himself on Renfrew 1986, pp. 6–7, who sug-
gests that the change comes from peer polity interaction. See Campagno 1998, p. 106, and
Campagno 2011, p. 45.
61 The aristocracy’s investment of resources in sanctuaries during the eighth century is a
prime example: see de Polignac 1995, pp. 11–21, and Anderson 2005, p. 12; as is its willing-
ness to establish a connection with the heroic tradition: see Morris 1996, pp. 31–3, and
especially Antonaccio 1994; and de Polignac 1995, pp. 128–38.
62 Morris 1991, pp. 41–4.
63 The author uses this as a model for the largest Dark Age communities but says nothing
about ones that do not reach his threshold.

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stratified society to a state that developed weakly for centuries. Morris sup-
ports the idea of a confrontation between kakoi and agathoi.64 The kakoi would
have been subjected to agathoi, who would seize control of the occupied lands
during the process of demographic expansion.65 Donlan studies the step be-
tween pre-state communities and the first states in Greece from a perspective
of power relations, claiming that the leaders of the dark age had considerable
authority but little power, whereas in the Archaic period – during the seventh
and sixth centuries – they possessed an effective power that translated into an
ability to implement sanctions.66 Power here is the ability to force conformity
according to the will of the leader, whereas authority is an elusive concept,
defined as an ability to recruit consent. The former is typical of societies with
a state, where the ruling group controls access to the sources and distribution
of the means of wealth, while the latter hegemonises the ability to exercise
coercion. For Donlan what differentiates leadership societies from state soci-
eties is their charismatic leaders’ inability to accumulate power in the face of
opposition from the masses, and equates the basileus with this kind of warlord,
wherein the relations established were founded on criteria of reciprocity.67
Around 700 BCE power relations would be significantly altered in regions
where city-states emerged. There the ruling elites formed a land-owning class
that increased its control over the land as the population burgeoned, many
families thus coming to depend on them for their livelihoods. Miriam Valdés
Guía describes a similar process for Attica through internal colonisation by the
aristoi, and the same is true of Spartan synoecism and the expansion towards
Laconia and Messenia analysed by César Fornis.68 This process is followed
in more detail by Julián Gallego based on his reading of Hesiod’s Works and
Days.69 The author convincingly suggests that the poet’s confrontation with
his brother Perses might be read as a consequence of the search by the impov-
erished peasant sectors in the village of Askra for support from the aristocratic
64 In other words the wicked or wretched, and the good or noble.
65 Morris 1987, pp. 175–6.
66 Donlan 2005, p. 40.
67 Donlan 2005, pp. 41–4. For a brief description of a community organised around the struc-
ture of the oikos, where parental bonds overlap with villagers and clientelistic relations of
subordination to the leaders, see Donlan 1989, and Donlan 1994, which the author bases
primarily on information provided by the Homeric poems. See also Finley 2002; Hall 2013,
pp. 12–13; and the pioneering work of Calhoun 1934. Geddes 1984 is an outright critic of
the historical use of poetry. For a wider-ranging, more abstract look at the domestic com-
munity outside the framework of the ancient Greek world, see Meillassoux 1985. See also
Runciman 1982, pp. 357–8, on the evolution of the basileus.
68 Valdés Guía 2011, pp. 163–4; Fornis 2003, pp. 30–3.
69 Gallego 2013, pp. 117–21.

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232 García Mac Gaw
groups of the city of Thespiae, implemented through the arbitrations of the

basileis and thus weakening normal philia relations in the village framework.
For these elements to be valid as arguments to support my idea, there must
be the possibility of an exploitation that in certain cases may even be loose,
where peasants were subject to the payment of levies and the provision of ser-
vices, tantamount to servile forms of subordination.70 Athenian hektemoroi
and Spartan helots fit comfortably into this classification.71
Unlike his ideas about the Asiatic Commune, in the Formations Marx did
not address the specific mechanisms whereby exploitation was practised in
the case of the ancient commune. However, it is safe to say that rent and tax
come together here, varying in importance from one specific historical case
to another. Ste. Croix has summarised the collection of surplus in the ancient
world in three ways: 1) wage labour; 2) unfree labour, including chattel-slaves,
serfs and debt bondsmen; and 3) through the letting of land and house prop-
erty to leasehold tenants in return for rent.72 In addition there is state appro-
priation through taxation, spoils of war and forced labour. All these types of
exploitation generally coexist, some outweighing others depending on time
and place, and I believe that none of them specifically singles out the ancient
mode of production that characterises the city-state, underlining a basic dif-
ference with the more widespread proposition focused on the exploitation of
slave labour.
We can now turn our attention to the specific forms of appropriation of
surplus labour in the ancient mode of production. Broadly geared to pre-
capitalist societies, this problem has fuelled a very lively debate in Marxist
historiography. John Haldon has insisted on the concept of a tributary mode
of production, especially as based on the idea of extra-economic appropria-
tion of surplus in the interchangeable form of rent or tax, to characterise most
pre-capitalist formations.73 Accordingly he posits the equivalence of rent
70 Ste. Croix 1981, pp. 135–6, 147–62.

71 On these forms of dependency, see Valdés Guía 2014; Scheid-Tissinier 2002; Rihll 1991;
Hodkinson 2003; Fornis 2003, pp. 261–7; Luraghi 2002 and 2003; Ducat 1990; all provide
bibliography on the subject.
72 Ste. Croix 1981, p. 53. It would be more consistent not to restrict the type of slavery and to
speak of slaves in general. Ste. Croix 1981, p. 139, also includes Spartan Helots, Klarotai and
Mnoïtai of Crete, the Thessalian Penestai, the Mariandynoi of Heraclea Pontica, Kyllirioi
of Syracuse, Woikiatai of East Locris and (perhaps) Bithynians of Byzantium in the cat-
egory of serfs, a classification which is worthy of consideration. See the critique of the
concept of ‘unfree’ labour in Banaji 2010, pp. 14–15.
73 Haldon 1993 is based on Amin 1976. A major off-shoot of this debate in Spanish may be
found in the dossiers published by Haldon in 1998, and Haldon and García Mac Gaw in
2003.

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appropriated by the state class, identified with tax, and rent appropriated pri-
vately by an aristocratic class, the only forms assumed by the appropriation of
surplus in pre-capitalist social formations of classes not dominated by slavery
and bearing no traces of lineage modes of production. Haldon believes both
tax and rent are expressions of political-juridical forms taken by the appro-
priation of surplus rather than a modal difference.74 Haldon bases his argu-
ments, which emphasise relations of exploitation, on an oft-cited passage from
Chapter 47 of Kapital.75
We should view the two forms of the appropriation of surplus – rent and
tax – as entailing a different intervention by one or several social classes on
the direct producers either via state or private mechanisms. This can lead to
tensions between different groups, which may or may not constitute differ-
ent social classes, competing for control of the surplus produced and resulting
in political conflicts of varying scales: the advance of an ascendant military
aristocratic group, for example, that rivals a state bureaucracy and eventually
competes for control of the state apparatus. The process of production in a
strict sense may not be modified – though this is generally not the case – but
the conflict occurs basically at the level of distribution of the surplus appro-
priated from direct producers.76 Furthermore, by equating the two forms of
74 Haldon 1993, pp. 77–9.

75 Haldon 1993, p. 93. Marx 1991, p. 927, says in Chapter 47: ‘The specific economic form in
which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the rela-
tionship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and
reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the
economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its
specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the condi-
tions of production to the immediate producers – a relationship whose particular form
naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner
of labour, and hence to its social productive power – in which we find the innermost se-
cret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the
relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of state in each
case.’ Callinicos 2004, p. 42, believes that Marx: 1) asserts that exploitation explains the
particular form taken by political domination; 2) this exploitation is based on relations of
production; and 3) relations of production correspond to a certain level of development
of productive forces. Callinicos says that it is tempting to look at these three points as
representing the type of hierarchical structure assigned by Cohen to the mode of produc-
tion, in which a political-ideological superstructure overlies the economic structure it is
based on and the development of productive forces eventually contributes the historical
dynamic. I am against any spatial reconstruction of social structure, and later on pursue
this critique.
76 Likewise acknowledged by Haldon 1993, p. 85, who nevertheless underestimates the
differences between different social groups competing over the appropriation of sur-
plus produced by peasants. This has been criticised by Callinicos 2004, pp. 50–2, after

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234 García Mac Gaw
appropriation of surplus – tax and rent – based on the existence of a peasant

producer class that occupies and exploits its possessions, Haldon disregards
potential differences within that class. Be they dependent tenants or free own-
ers grouped in village communities, or a mixture of the two, it is not impor-
tant for Haldon in the context of the extra-economic mode of appropriation
described above.77 This levelling of the different types of productive peasant
groups ignores specific factors that are central in Marx to the definition of pre-
capitalist formations: namely the relationship between producers organised
in communities and the means of production, essentially the land itself.78 If,
for example, tenants and small owners coexist in a given social formation,
as did the Roman coloni and assidui, this will lead to different capacities for
resistance in both peasant groups in relation to landowners and/or the state
class, since, insofar as they do not legally possess the means of production, the
coloni are in a weaker position and more easily exploited.79 Haldon’s restricted
reading minimises the field of action of economic factors. It is worth asking if
relations of distribution should be considered economic factors at all. If the
answer is ‘yes’, why not incorporate relations of distribution into the descrip-
tion of the mode of production? Is the appropriation of surplus not itself a
form of distribution?80
Although the city-state fits snugly into Haldon’s theory, there is a problem
arising from its lack of specificity: the tributary mode equates widely differ-
ing societies like Pharaonic Egypt, Mesopotamian cities, Byzantium, Islamic
states and so on. To counter this perspective, I think it apt to return to Perry
Anderson, who argues that the superstructures of kinship, religion, law or
the state necessarily enter into the constitutive structure of the mode of pro-
duction in pre-capitalist social formations, because they intervene directly in
the ‘internal’ nexus of surplus-extraction. According to Anderson, ‘In conse-
quence, pre-capitalist modes of production cannot be defined except via their
Wickham 1984, p. 6, and Wickham 1985, p. 170, an author who held these views but even-
tually went back on them and ended up sharing Haldon’s.
77 Haldon 1993, p. 77.
78 Marx 1993, pp. 472–3.
79 Cf. Callinicos 2004, p. 52.
80 In this respect, in the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx 1993, pp. 81–100, analyses
the relations between the different instances or moments of the production process: pro-
duction in the strict sense, distribution, circulation and consumption. See in particular
the role of distribution, which, superficially according to the author, is far-removed from
production and virtually independent of it. But rather than distribution of products it is:
1) distribution of the instruments of production; and 2) distribution of the members of
society across the different branches of production, which is in practice the subsumption
of individuals in certain relations of production: Marx 1993, pp. 94–8.

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political, legal and ideological superstructures, since these are what determine
the type of extra-economic coercion that specifies them.’81
In pre-capitalist formations, where appropriation of surplus takes place
through the imposition of a rent or tax by the non-producer upon the direct
producer, such appropriation generally occurs at the time of distribution and/
or exchange, in other words, outside the time of production in the strict sense,
although effectively within the framework of the mode of production. This is
because producers control the means of production. The different forms and
variations of the instrumentation of this appropriation of surplus would char-
acterise the different pre-capitalist social formations. However, I do not think
Anderson properly formulates the idea he is trying to convey: he appeals to
the figure of ‘superstructure’, in the manner of Godelier, who suggests that
superstructural elements like kinship ‘function as’ social relations of produc-
tion.82 The endless problems caused by the spatial images of infrastructure
and superstructure when it comes to explaining economic performance, espe-
cially among Marxists themselves, have generally been overcome through the
use of the periphrasis ‘function as’. To return to the opening of this article, it
emerges that theory generally sanctions an initial difference separating capi-
talist from pre-capitalist social formations by setting apart the capitalist form
of exploitation – the ‘purely economic’ – from the other systems, where ex-
ploitation is ‘extra-economic’. This throws up a theoretical contradiction: on
the one hand, it is argued that historical materialism studies social formations
on the basis of their material elements, namely their modes of production,
or in other words, their economic base; on the other, it is claimed that what
81 Anderson 1974, pp. 403–4 (original italics). Despite maintaining the image of ‘base’ and
‘superstructure’ as Anderson does, Meiksins Wood 2003, p. 28, states that ‘There are, then,
at least two senses in which the juridical-political “sphere” is implicated in the productive
“base”. First, a system of production always exists in the shape of specific social determi-
nations, the particular modes of organization and domination and the forms of prop-
erty in which relations of production are embodied – what might be called the “basic”
as distinct from “superstructural” juridical-political attributes of the productive system.
Second, from a historical point of view even political institutions like village and state
enter directly into the constitution of production relations and are in a sense prior to
them (even where these institutions are not the direct instruments of surplus appropria-
tion), because relations of production are historically constituted by the configuration of
power that determines the outcome of class conflict.’ The second meaning highlighted by
Meiksins Wood cannot in fact be distinguished from the first: the concept of mode of pro-
duction is always the result of a historical ‘point of view’ and therefore village and state
‘enter directly into the constitution of production relations’, as stated in the quotation. Cf.
Astarita 2003; García Mac Gaw 2003.
82 Godelier 1971, pp. 155–7. Haldon 1993, pp. 44, 97, also says that completely non-economic
‘superstructural’ dimensions perform the function of relations of production.

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236 García Mac Gaw
characterises pre-capitalist modes of production is their particular form of

surplus extraction, which is extra-economic. This is to say that what charac-
terises pre-capitalist societies’ economy is its organisation of extra-economic
mechanisms. To summarise, it is argued that the economic is in this case extra-
economic – a way of expressing the non-economic – a claim that involves an
aporia. This complex problem relates to the fact that the same ‘economic’ con-
cept is used for two different things: on the one hand it is the way the mode
of production – the production and reproduction of material life – is organ-
ised; on the other it is the capitalist system’s particular exchange mechanism
of labour-power for money. The last version of the concept disqualifies its use
in the case of societies where the appropriation of surplus is organised dif-
ferently. Perhaps it would be more consistent to argue that the forms of ap-
propriation of surplus in pre-capitalist societies are expressed in a different
economic way from capitalist formations, but that in both cases they are par-
ticular forms of historical emergence of the economy and not extra-economic
vis-à-vis economic forms. The concept of the economic does not correlate with
the assumption of its form of existence in a particular (capitalist) mode of pro-
duction, but with the way this concept is constructed for each mode of produc-
tion. This does not necessarily entail the repetition of a place for the economic
within the workings of the socio-economic structure for the different modes
of production but a different articulation with the other elements of the struc-
ture that redefines this place according to the periodisation organised by his-
torical materialism.83
Returning to strictly historical analysis, it is no secret that political-juridical
relations are central to the Greco-Roman world. Most Greek cities saw the
expansion of the citizen body and an increase in popular participation in
decision-making. The social conflict expressed in the struggle for the appro-
priation of surplus and domination was thus manifested in the framework of
the state through politics as action in the public sphere of the polis.84 Politics
is therefore a cornerstone of the concept of ‘ancient mode of production’ be-
cause it shapes its specific social relations of production, and the centrality
of the category of citizenship that organises the legal-political space should
be singled out for particular attention. The centrality of politics then calls for
analysis in terms of the productive process and, more specifically, the rela-
tions of distribution and exchange in that process. Or, to put it another way, we
should be studying the specific determinations of distribution and exchange
through the political elements occurring in ancient social formations.
83 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 178.

84 Meiksins Wood 2008, p. 30.

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Politics and Class Struggle
Politics could be said to dominate in these social formations as the system

whereby certain social classes (or factions of them) bid for the redistribution
of parts of the surplus obtained through various mechanisms, and this pri-
marily includes certain community mechanisms – like war (and some of its
consequences, like the appropriation of new land, men and the collection of
taxes) – and other private mechanisms like euergetism, though these are not
ultimately decisive.85
Politics was established as a distributive space to the extent that the city-
state was organised as such on the basis of certain distinctive features. Finley
clearly summarises this when he says that all city-states shared the incorpora-
tion into the political community of peasants, artisans and shop-keepers as
members, that is, citizens – even those not obliged to bear arms.86 This incor-
poration implies a process that begins with the birth of the state and whose
results are different in each city-state, but the presence of these social groups
as a constituent part of the citizen community is key to an understanding of
the specific characteristics of the polis/civitas. By around the second half of
the seventh century the state apparatus in most of the poleis were following
a similar pattern.87 This consisted essentially of a tri-partite division of politi-
cal activities: a body of elected magistrates in distinct hierarchies who held
their posts for fixed, usually brief, terms; a council, the composition of which
might vary from small numbers to anything between twenty and 500 members;
and an assembly that could represent the interests of the community in the
widest sense. Van der Vliet says that, broadly speaking, the process of political
decision-making in the city falls into a routine of proposition by individual cit-
izens or by a section presided over by the council, a decision from the council,
and acceptance or rejection by popular assembly.88 This is like the ripples of a
stone in a pond, not a pyramid with a top and a base. There is no centralised
hierarchy with an administrative head; instead there are boards of equivalent
85 Finley 2000, p. 2, says that ‘The language of ancient politics thus confirms Aristotle’s “im-
portant truth”, that … the state is an arena for conflicting interests, conflicting classes’. On
the concept of ‘euergetism’, taken as the rich ‘performing a good deed for the community’,
see Veyne 1976, pp. 20–2, and, specifically for the Greek case, pp. 181–94. See an important
critique in Schmitt, Schnapp and Andreau 1978. Gyqax 2006, p. 11, traces the phenomenon
of euergetism back to the Archaic period.
86 Finley 2000, p. 15.
87 Anderson 2005, pp. 177–8.
88 Van der Vliet 2008, p. 203.

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238 García Mac Gaw
magistrates operating in a manner similar to a heterarchical system.89 This

helps us see why it is hard to apply the Weberian concept of monopoly on vio-
lence to the case of the city-state. It is worth noting that Marx does not tackle
the structure of decision-making for this second form as he does the first. In
the Asiatic commune he highlights the existence of the despot in his different
avatars, but in the case of the ancient commune his only reference is to ‘the
city as state’.90
The early polis was oligarchical and politics essentially the domain of the
elites; the expansion of the citizen body, however, led to tensions and conflicts.
For Greg Anderson, if it is safe to assert the emergence of an intermediate class
of hoplite farmers towards the end of the seventh century, it is unclear whether
it played a significant role in the control of any Greek states before the end of
the sixth, although there are authors who claim earlier involvement in politi-
cal deliberations by groups outside the elites from the eighth century on, with
domination by the upper echelons right up to the former period.91 This percep-
tion of the polis as a segmentary state, a result of the aggregation of villages, is
thought to be the keystone of its egalitarian traits.92 Although bureaucratisa-
tion is generally presented as an ‘integral’ part of statehood, it can be feasibly
claimed that in this specific type of state, according to the characteristics of
the segmentary distribution of power, bureaucracy does not exist or is highly
undeveloped. To the extent that the city-state’s institutions become bureaucra-
tised, as happened progressively in Hellenistic kingdoms and Rome after the
Principate, it tends to become a tributary state where power is concentrated:
89 It is interesting to contrast this image with the kind of hierarchical decision-making that
Van der Vliet considers characteristic of early states. However, this system is already the
result of an evolution, and it is highly unlikely that it worked like this in the initial period
of the emergence of the polis. This type of mechanism is now the result of an intense
political conflict, which in cases like Athens can be followed, albeit with difficulty.
90 Godelier 1971, p. 151, argues that the notion of oriental despotism belongs not to politi-
cal science but to ideology, a view with which I concur. Nonetheless, Marx clearly used
this image to convey the idea of the concentration of decision-making in autocratic sys-
tems. See Banaji 2010, pp. 17ff., for a critique of the supposed non-existence of other social
classes competing with the sovereign (pp. 20–3) and the absence of private property in
the Asiatic mode of production (pp. 17–20). See also Anderson’s critique (Anderson 1974,
pp. 462–4).
91 Anderson 2005, pp. 177–8. Foxhall 2005 confirms these ideas of Anderson’s. However,
Raaflaub 1993, Raaflaub 1996, pp. 150–3, Raaflaub 2005, Donlan 2005, and Morris 1987,
1996, 1997 and 2000 assert earlier participation. Morris 1996, p. 20, states that something
similar to the ‘principle of equal consideration of interests’ emerged in the eighth century
and that a ‘strong principle of equality’ later arose in the sixth century, and that both were
expressed in a conception of the state as a community of ‘middle’ citizens.
92 Gallego 2005, pp. 22–34; Morris 1994.

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one that asserts autocracy at the expense of segmentary horizontality. The

egalitarian elements that characterise the ancient mode are formed and re-
inforced by jointly occurring processes like colonial expansion and hoplite
military organisation.93 The need for these new centres to develop a legal
framework to bolster government resulted in the strengthening of political
factors through the development of the criterion of citizenship for the com-
munity’s members.94
The principles of equality were reinforced by the practice of territorial dis-
tribution at the rate of one lot per individual in the new foundations. This prob-
ably had significant repercussions in terms of the demands for access to land
in Central Greece.95 Hindess and Hirst have called attention to the existence
of the land-owning state in the ancient mode of production, one of the basic
factors posited for the ancient commune by Marx in the Formations: namely,
the relationship between private and communal property.96 The legal rights of
citizens, especially their sharing in the distribution of state appropriations –
particularly when it came to land – and the level of protection to be exploited
as labour-power, define the field of social conflict for this mode of production.
In this respect, Gallego suggests that the polis, as against individual owners,
acted politically as the main owner of all landed property within its borders,
regulating its members’ access to plots by more or less egalitarian means linked
to a participatory political framework.97 In other words politics was a domi-
nant factor insofar as the distribution mechanisms of the means of production
and rent were built upon it. This control of resources also extended to con-
trol over forms of domination among certain social groups through juridical-
political mechanisms like immunities on citizen sectors and various types of
procedural actions. The aristocratic classes’ capability of exacting surplus from
the poorest peasants or landless groups depended on the latter’s capacity for
political action.98 The different political regimes within the framework of the
city-state were directly bound up with the activity of the social sectors whose
93 For a discussion of the current knowledge about the Hoplite Revolution see Echeverría
Rey 2008, which features an extensive bibliography. See Snodgrass 1993b, Detienne 1968,
Hanson 1991 and 1996, Bowden 1993, van Wees 1994, Ducrey 1999, and Raaflaub 2005. On
the first colonies, see Ridgway 1984.
94 Domínguez Monedero 1993, pp. 100, 162–4.
95 Graham 1964, p. 59, deals in particular with the criterion of equality in the distribution
of lots through the study of foundational decrees for colonies. See Asheri 1966, pp. 13–16;
Boyd and Jameson 1981, pp. 327, 336; Domínguez Monedero 1993, pp. 150–3; Gallego 2005,
pp. 135–6.
96 Hindess and Hirst 1979, pp. 86–7.
97 Gallego 2005, p. 135.
98 Finley 1998, pp. 135–60; Meiksins Wood 1988; Plácido 1989; Valdés Guía 1999 and 2006.

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240 García Mac Gaw
inclusion in the political community defined the specific nature of these socio-
economic formations: peasants, artisans and shop-keepers. These groups’ ab-
sence from decision-making and the consequent shift to autocratic systems
negatively defined the transition to tributary systems based on the city-state
but divested of its political dynamics.
This leads us to the question of the partially analysed internal dynamic.
According to Marx, for the community to go on existing in the same way its
members need to reproduce in the same objective conditions.99 When these
conditions are disturbed, the communitarian entity disintegrates along with
its relations of property.100 According to Marx, the end of this process entails
the disappearance of the city as centre.101 But this is not the only periodisation
that can be devised; both the Greek and the Roman city, with some capac-
ity for autonomy, were subsumed in more strictly hierarchical tributary socio-
political structures and decision-making mechanisms.
Conclusions
As my analysis shows, the concept of the ancient mode of production has an

explanatory potential far beyond the oblivion it has been consigned to. This
concept, among others analysed in the Formations, is included as one of the
socio-historical forms integrated into the process leading up to the appear-
ance of the right conditions for the development of capitalist relations of pro-
duction: the separation of the worker from the means of production and the
material of labour on the one hand, and the existence of free labour and its
exchange for money on the other. I have prioritised three specific aspects in
Marx’s text that characterise this mode of production: the form of ownership,
the city as state, and the internal dynamic. Likewise, to revive this concept
99 Marx 1993, p. 486.

100 The factors highlighted by Marx 1993, pp. 486–7, are production itself and the population’s
progress, which, he clarifies, also belongs to the sphere of production. They gradually sup-
press and destroy those conditions, and he adds other elements, like the development of
slavery, the concentration of land ownership, exchange, the monetary system, conquest
and so on.
101 According to Marx 1993, p. 506, ‘the mere presence of monetary wealth, and even the
achievement of a kind of supremacy on its part, is in no way sufficient for this dissolution
into capital to happen. Or else ancient Rome, Byzantium etc. would have ended their his-
tory with free labour and capital, or rather begun a new history. There, too, the dissolution
of the old property relations was bound up with development of monetary wealth – of
trade etc. But instead of leading to industry, this dissolution led in fact to the supremacy
of the countryside over the city’ (original italics).

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I have deemed it necessary to update the basic ideas advanced by Marx in

the Formations in light of modern historiographical research. To this end,
I have provided an overview of recent breakthroughs in the appearance of the
city-state, based especially on archaeological information. I have particularly
focused on the study of the formation of social classes as the foundation for
the emergence of the city-state through relatively egalitarian communes that
can be located in the dark ages. I have looked at the particular form acquired
by the mechanism of appropriation of surplus, as against other perspectives
that consider such formations pre-classist. The ruling elites were formed as a
land-owning class that successfully imposed on the peasants the payment of
levies and the provision of services: in other words, this was an articulation
of the perceptions of rent and taxation that varied from one historical case to
another. I have emphasised that the appropriation of surplus in pre-capitalist
formations occurs at times of distribution and/or exchange: outside the time
of production in the strict sense, that is, although effectively within the mode
of production. That is why I view this appropriation not as extra-economic
but as the economic relationship defining the mode of production. In most
city-states there was a process of expansion of the citizen body through the
incorporation of peasants, artisans and shopkeepers, and a resultant increase
in popular participation in the decision-making process, which led to serious
tensions. In this way, the social conflict expressed by the struggle for the ap-
propriation of surplus and domination was manifested through politics in the
framework of the state. Given its articulation with the social relations of pro-
duction, politics thus came to be established as the dominant factor defining
the specificity of the ancient mode of production. I have also looked briefly at
the institutional structure of city-states assimilated to a heterarchical system
with low levels of bureaucratisation. The shift to autocratic political forms, the
increase in bureaucracy and the concentration of land property created the
conditions for the transition to tributary economic and social formations.
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Historical Materialism 28.

The Ancient Mode of Production, the City-State

Carlos García Mac Gaw

pre-capitalist formations – ancient mode of production – city-state – politics

In this article I look at the concept of the ancient mode of production as

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-00001392

awakened by the concept of the slave-owning mode of production in rela-

Historical Materialism 28.1 (2020) 215–249

The Formations and the Ancient Mode of Production

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4 Schiavone 1978, p. 89.

Historical Materialism 28.1 (2020) 215–249

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13 Marx 1993, pp. 474–6.

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20 Marx 1993, pp. 472–3.

Historical Materialism 28.1 (2020) 215–249

The Emergence of the City-state: Historiography and Archaeology

Let us now briefly summarise current advances in historiography on the ques-

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disappearance.33 This in turn brought about the dispersion of coalescing

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and the advancement of pastoralism, and a subsequent return to a civilised

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over uniformity. The advances of archaeological prospecting suggest that the

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qualified as a ‘big man’.51 The archaeological remains at Lefkandi are in some

The City as State

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words, regulatory kinship links must be breakable and replaceable by political

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groups of the city of Thespiae, implemented through the arbitrations of the

70 Ste. Croix 1981, pp. 135–6, 147–62.

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74 Haldon 1993, pp. 77–9.

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appropriation of surplus – tax and rent – based on the existence of a peasant

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characterises pre-capitalist modes of production is their particular form of

83 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 178.

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Politics and Class Struggle

Politics could be said to dominate in these social formations as the system

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magistrates operating in a manner similar to a heterarchical system.89 This

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one that asserts autocracy at the expense of segmentary horizontality. The

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As my analysis shows, the concept of the ancient mode of production has an

99 Marx 1993, p. 486.

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I have deemed it necessary to update the basic ideas advanced by Marx in

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Campagno, Marcelo 2002, De los jefes-parientes a los reyes-dioses. Surgimiento y consoli-

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Echeverría Rey, Fernando 2008, Ciudadanos campesinos y soldados. El nacimiento de la

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4 Schiavone 1978, p. 89.

13 Marx 1993, pp. 474–6.

20 Marx 1993, pp. 472–3.

70 Ste. Croix 1981, pp. 135–6, 147–62.

74 Haldon 1993, pp. 77–9.

83 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 178.

99 Marx 1993, p. 486.