ACTA ANTIQUA TOMUS 22 (A MTA KLASSZIKA-FILOLÓGIAI KÖZLEMÉNYEI, 1974)
1974 / 1-4. sz. - I. M. DIAKONOFF: Slaves, Helots and Serfs in Early Antiquity
54 I. M. DIAKONOFF Y. A. Jakobson drew the attention of the author of the present paper to the fact that when we speak of extra-economic coercion of the labourers exploited by the ruling class in ancient society, on the one hand, and in medieval society, on the other, we are not thinking of quite the same thing. The exploited worker of the ancient society is compelled to work by the direct force of the ruling class. If such force be not used to him, he might easily pass over into the communal structures which united the free people, and could continue to participate in production as a free person. If not compelled by force to produce material wealth for his master, he could also join the ranks of the royal servants22 who, besides their service to the king (or temple), cultivated their service parcels as freely as if they had belonged to some communal structure outside of the palace and the temjile. The position is different in the case of the exploited person of the medieval society. Usually, he could, at best, go over from one exploiting feudal lord to another (e.g. to a stronger one, or to the church, or to the sovereign), unless there was a possibility to flee to no man's land (from Russia to the Don, to the Terek, to Siberia). A social group of agricultural workers free from exploitation either did not exist at all, or was very weak. As a rule, the peasant in the Middle Ages could not participate in production otherwise than as a feudally dependent person. The reason was that not only the sovereign rights (dominium eminens) but also the property rights over land (in the sense of dominium directum, even if not necessarily dominium utile) either entirely belonged to the feudal state (as it frequently did in Asia), or existed the condition of the proprietor belonging to the feudal class (or estate), or perhaps the land simply belonged, in practice, only (or, at least, in the overwhelming majority of cases) to individual feudal lords. Thus, if in antiquity the exploitation of the labourer was based on the property of the slave-holder in all means of production on a given estate (usually including also the labourers themselves), and while, therefore, here extra-economic (forced) separation of the labourer from property (again in all means of production) was necessary, in the medieval society the exploitation of the labourer, as has been stressed by G. F. Uyin, is based mainly on the property rights of the feudal lord only over one main item of the means of production, viz. over land, and the working man retained a certain economic independence. Here, as in antiquity, there is no show of an exchange of commodities under a contract between the labourer and the master, characteristic of the capitalist society, and therefore, in contrast to Jakobson's opinion, we do encounter e x t r a-economic exploitation also here. However, this extraeconomic exploitation is not always so direct and all-embracing, hut frequently of a more indirect character, since the dilemma — to be a slave or a free person — is no longer facing the agricultural worker. Just because of the less direct 22 In the absence of a well developed economic state sector, he would have become a «lumpen-proletarian» as in Rome.