Social historians who regard the status-based view of society as at best naive and potentially misleading tend to prefer a different term of analysis: class. This is a problematic term, since it is used in a number of different ways; in everyday usage it is equivalent to ‘‘status group,’’ while in sociology it may be used to describe a system of social stratification based on economic criteria (primary industry, white-collar workers, professionals). The concept is most closely associated with Marxism, where it has a more specific and technical definition, and from which it acquires most of its political overtones; however, although Marx himself used the term extensively and insisted on its importance - ‘‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’’ - he never provided a detailed definition of it. Much effort has therefore been expended in trying to establish exactly how Marx understood the concept; an important question in intellectual history, especially for Marxists who wish to claim the authority of the founder for their particular version, but for the purposes of historical study a ‘‘Marx-influenced’’ definition may be sufficient.1
There are really only two ways of thinking theoretically about class: either as a structural location or as a social relation. The first and more common of these treats class as a form of “stratification”, a layer in a hierarchical structure, differentiated according to “economic” criteria.. .In contrast to this geological model, there is a socio-historical conception of class as a relation between appropriators and producers, determined by the specific form in which, to use Marx’s phrase, ‘‘surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers’’.12
The ‘‘stratification’’ approach falls foul of the same objections raised above about ‘‘status,’’ tending to be descriptive rather than analytical, and is certainly not distinctively Marxist. For that reason, it is suggested, the focus should be on the actual social relationships between different groups, rather than simply comparing their income or occupation.
Class (essentially a relationship) is the collective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social structure. By exploitation I mean the appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others: in a commodity-producing society this is the appropriation of what Marx called ‘‘surplus value’’. A class (a particular class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according to their relationship (primarily in terms of the degree of ownership or control) to the conditions of production (that is to say, the means and labour of production) and to other classes.13
As we might expect, the Marxist approach to ‘‘class’’ is essentially materialist and economic. Classes are defined not by their location in a hierarchy of status but by their place in the system of production; the means by which individuals support themselves and their families, and the way in which their labor contributes to the overall economic system. A clear distinction is drawn between those who own the means of production (self-sufficient peasant smallholders, wealthy property-owners) and those who have to make a living by working the property of others (slaves, tenants, wage laborers). Further distinctions may be based on the nature of the individual’s productive activity, and above all their relation with those in other classes; for example, the tenant farmer hands over part of the produce of his labor to the landlord in a social or economic contract, while the slave’s labor power is wholly owned by his owner; the peasant works his own land whereas the property magnate depends on exploiting the labor of others.
This definition of class, then, has a number of implications for the workings of society. First, there is a strong correlation between an individual’s class and his/her level of education, diet, general state of health, living conditions, and so forth; further, access to the opportunities to improve one’s social and economic position are not equally distributed throughout society, so that in fact most people remain in the class of their parents. Those with greater economic power are able to convert it into political and social power as well, to reinforce their dominant position; the state acts to enforce property rights and deal with unrest amongst the lower orders; education and culture provide ideological support for the status quo. In other words, class divisions permeate the political, social, and cultural spheres as well as the economic. Of course, evidence for the living conditions or the culture of Rome’s lower classes is limited, but it is clear that we cannot simply assume that our elite sources speak for the whole of society.
In all but the simplest of societies, there is a variety of ways of organizing production, and hence there are a number of different classes. At the top, of course, are the great property-owners, who make their living by creaming off the ‘‘surplus value’’ created by those who worked their lands or labored in their workshops, whether free men or slaves. Rome, like most other ancient states, was dominated economically and politically by the interests of rich landowners; the opportunities for making money in trade or industry were much more limited, and even here much of the profits went to the landowners who, directly or indirectly, provided the finance and owned the workshops. Roman society was divided up according to the wealth of individuals, wealth was essential to gain access to political power, and, by the late Republic, political power (to be exact, the provincial governorships exercised by praetors and consuls after their year in office) could bring substantial financial reward. For Cicero, one of the two functions of justice in maintaining society is the defense of private property ( Off. 1.20-1), and he returns to this theme when denouncing proposals for agrarian laws or the cancellation of debts. Praising the constitution of Servius, he argues that ‘‘the man for whom the good fortune of the community was most important carried the greatest weight in voting’’ - that is to say, the rich man (Rep. 2.40). Such attitudes can be seen in the behavior of the Senate, even when the senators disagreed on the best course of action. In the disputes over land reform in the late Republic (see Chapter 27), the majority of senators were always opposed to such proposals, seeing them as attacks on private property in general (if not their own illegally occupied lands in particular); the few who argued for redistribution were arguably motivated by the longer-term but equally self-interested belief that senatorial wealth and security would be better served by making concessions and supporting the peasant class that supplied soldiers to defend the state (and their property).
The identification of classes in the rest of Roman society has, historically, been somewhat confused by the fact that Marx’s discussions focused primarily on the conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat; historians tended to look for ancient equivalents of these two groups, and to reject the concept of class on the grounds that slaves and peasants would be put into the same class.14 In fact these two classes are specific to modern capitalist society; earlier societies had different classes, reflecting their different ways of organizing production, and generally more than two. This does raise the question of how many different classes should be identified; for example, whether the position of a craftsman working on his own is sufficiently distinct in economic terms from that of a craftsman working alongside his slave that they should be considered as different classes. Opponents of the concept complain that it ignores crucial differences between individuals, while its supporters argue that the basic similarity of individuals’ economic position outweighs superficial differences and provides a better explanation of their place in society. It is, arguably, more useful to understand society in terms of a limited number of large classes, even if these do have internal differences and divisions, than fragmented into lots of tiny classes which differ from one another only marginally.
Neither slaves nor free laborers owned their means of production, but they were exploited in quite different ways - the slave was, in theory at least, a thinking tool, part of the means of production - and so they need not be considered to belong to a single class. Indeed, given the wide range of different ways in which slaves were employed, it is arguable whether they should be considered as a single class. Some slaves were exploited for their labor power, on villa estates, in mines, and in workshops. They may perhaps have been more productive than free workers, at least within the highly organized system of villa cultivation; slave labor was certainly much more profitable than leasing the estate to a tenant, albeit at the cost of increased supervision.15 Some slaves, however, were employed as overseers, vilici, given the responsibility of supervising their fellows; some were employed as agents, conducting business on their owner’s behalf, and were even allowed a sum of money known as the peculium with which to do business on their own account and, one day, purchase their freedom. Some slaves were employed for their mental capacities and education, as tutors and secretaries, while others had no economic role but ministered to personal pleasure and served as status symbols. These different roles determined not only the day-to-day activity of the slaves, and their degree of independence, but their access to privileges such as a partner and family life, and the possibility of manumission.
In Roman ideology, all slaves were utterly dependent and exploitable, lower than any free man; in practice, many of them enjoyed better living conditions, security, and prospects than many of the free. In class terms, the difference between free and slave sometimes seems less significant than the divide between those who had control over some property (even if technically the slave’s peculium remained the property of the owner) and those who had nothing; those whose occupation lay in supervising the work of others or in conducting business, and those who merely labored. The elite tendency to equate manual labor and slavishness had some truth in it; unskilled laborers had more in common with the slaves on the villa chain gang than with prosperous merchants, the slave mineworker had more in common with a poor citizen than with Cicero’s slave secretary.
Unlike status groups, classes are defined in direct opposition to one another. The interests of a group that controls the means of production and relies on the labor of others to exploit them can never be reconciled with the interests of those who have to sell or barter their labor power to gain access to the means of life, let alone those who are compelled to labor for others. Society is therefore understood as an arena of class struggle; not necessarily of open war between self-conscious classes, but certainly of a constant clash of conflicting interests and demands. These conflicts, fought out in the economic, social, political, or cultural spheres, can provide the engine of social and economic change, as property owners seek to maintain the structures of inequality and to increase their profits, and the property-less seek to resist further exploitation. The transformation of Italian society in the late Republic has been interpreted in class terms: military success brought about a shift in the balance of power between landowners and peasants.1 Where previously economic exploitation of the masses had been limited by the elite’s need for soldiers, the influx of wealth and slaves made it possible to break the link; the peasant class was broken, replaced on the land by more profitable slave cultivators, and reduced to a class of landless laborers from which soldiers could be recruited. None of this was planned, or even recognized at the time; it was simply the result of the elite pursuing their own interests at the expense of others. Indeed, they did this even at the expense of society: the expansion of the poor urban masses and the separation of the army from civil society both contributed to the civil wars that brought about the replacement of oligarchy with monarchy, partly, it may be suggested, on the basis that monarchy was better able to maintain peace and protect property rights. It should be noted that this reconstruction is controversial, with fierce disputes over the interpretation of the archaeological evidence for changes in rural settlement patterns, but it offers one powerful interpretation of the events of the late Republic (see Chapters 27 and 28).17
The Roman ‘‘class struggle,’’ according to this account, was driven primarily by elite acquisitiveness, not by the resistance of the exploited. Historically, elites have always been far readier than the masses to recognize their class interests and to act accordingly. Those who occupy a particular position in the system of production have common interests as a result, and would benefit if they acted collectively; but they do not necessarily recognize this, especially as other forces in society are tending to undermine any nascent ‘‘class consciousness’’ in favor of a panoply of social identities. The Roman elite employed a variety of means to divide the exploited class: selective patronage of the ‘‘respectable’’ plebs who might be persuaded to support the interests of property (note Cicero’s praise of the shopkeepers, whose livelihood is said to depend on peace (Cat. 4.17), although other sources suggest that this group was notoriously restive), the redistribution of state wealth to win over sections of the urban masses, the role of military service in binding some of the poor to members of the elite (if not to the state as a whole) and, above all, the ideology of libertas, freedom, that concealed the common interests of the free poor and the lowest slaves in resisting exploitation behind the screen of status difference (see also Chapters 13, 18, and 19).
World History
