NOTES
SLAVE
MODE OF
PRODUCTION
BY PERRY ANDERSON
Perry Anderson’s analysis of the Slave Mode of Production (SMP)
in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism offers a materialist
interpretation of classical antiquity, arguing that slavery was not
just a feature of ancient economies but the dominant and de ning
structure of surplus extraction. Anderson begins by contrasting the
developmental paths of feudalism and capitalism, observing that
while capitalism emerged gradually through accumulation and
transformation of older systems, feudalism arose through a
catastrophic collapse of the Roman slave economy and the
intermingling of its remnants with Germanic tribal modes of
production. Central to Anderson’s argument is the idea that
Graeco-Roman antiquity was shaped by the systematic use of
chattel slavery, which was historically unique in both form and
scale. While older civilizations such as Sumer, Egypt, and Assyria
employed various forms of unfree labor, these were juridically
impure and socially marginal. It was in classical Greece, and later
Rome, that slavery was transformed into a distinct, legal category
—absolute and expansive—marking a complete separation
between the slave and the free citizen.
The classical world, Anderson asserts, was centered on cities, but
these cities were not industrial or artisanal hubs; rather, they were
political and cultural centers that thrived economically through the
exploitation of slave labor in the countryside. Urban elites drew
their wealth not from manufacturing or trade, but from agricultural
estates worked by slaves. In this way, the material foundation of
the vibrant urban culture of Athens and Rome—celebrated for its
art, philosophy, and politics—was a rural system dominated by
coercion and exploitation. Slaves were treated as property,
classi ed in Roman law as instrumentum vocale or “speaking
tools,” legally positioned below animals and above implements.
They were employed widely across agriculture, mining, crafts, and
household labor. Their mobility as commodi ed persons made
them ideal for the coastal, trade-driven structure of the
Mediterranean world, where sea transport allowed the movement
of labor, resources, and tribute across regions. The widespread
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availability of slaves made them a convenient and exible labor
force, and urban slave markets emerged as vital economic
institutions linking town and country.
Slavery was not only an economic system but a social structure
that made liberty possible for the citizen class. Anderson
emphasizes that the freedom and political agency of citizens in
Athens, for instance, were predicated on the exclusion and
degradation of the slave population. This binary between liberty
and servitude was not a contradiction but a foundational dualism—
each side reinforcing the other. Political theorists such as Aristotle
explicitly stated that slaves should till the land to enable citizens to
devote themselves to governance and philosophy. In this way,
slavery enabled a uniquely intensive development of political
forms and civic life, even as it devalued and silenced the labor that
sustained them. The consequence of this system, however, was a
structural limit placed on economic and technological progress.
Since labor was cheap, plentiful, and socially disdained, there was
little incentive to develop labor-saving technologies or re ne
production methods. Anderson notes that despite isolated
innovations such as rotary mills and screw presses, classical
antiquity experienced no systematic or revolutionary technological
advancement comparable to what later occurred under feudalism or
capitalism.
This stagnation was not due to ignorance or lack of intellectual
capacity—indeed, the ancient world produced some of the most
sophisticated cultural and philosophical achievements in human
history—but to the social contempt for manual labor itself. The
Greeks had no precise term for "labor" in the modern productive
sense. Plato and Aristotle both associated work with servility and
viewed artisans and cultivators as outside the political community.
As a result, intellectual life and material production were radically
divorced. There was no culture of invention because invention
would require the transformation of labor, and in the classical
world, labor was seen as degrading. The slave mode of production
thus paralyzed long-term economic development even as it enabled
short-term urban magni cence. It promoted a society that relied on
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conquest to replenish its labor force, leading to cycles of imperial
expansion that were economically and demographically
unsustainable. Slaves were often acquired through warfare, and
empires like Athens, Macedon, and Rome built their might on this
endless demand for human chattel. Eventually, this dependence on
conquest, combined with stagnating productivity and growing
internal contradictions, led to the breakdown of the slave economy
in the West.
As the Roman Empire weakened, slavery was slowly replaced by
other forms of labor exploitation, such as the colonate, which tied
peasants to the land and foreshadowed feudal serfdom. In
Anderson’s view, the collapse of the slave mode of production and
its inability to evolve marked the end of antiquity and the
beginning of a new social order. His interpretation is distinctly
Marxist, insisting that the structure of surplus extraction
determines the shape of society’s legal, cultural, and political
superstructure. Slavery, in this framework, is not merely a moral
outrage but a historically speci c system with its own logic,
strengths, and fatal contradictions. The slave mode of production
made possible the owering of classical civilization, but it also set
hard limits on what that civilization could become. In this sense,
Anderson rehabilitates the economic base as the decisive factor in
understanding the rise and fall of one of history’s greatest eras.
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