Marx's second form of landed property, the ancient (ibid.: 474–6) ‘also assumes the community as its first presupposition’(ibid.: 474). The ancient Greek or Roman community, however, differs from the primitive or Asiatic archetype in several respects. Its basis is urban rather than rural: the cultivated field here appears as a territorium belonging to the town'. We also see here the beginnings of private property: communal property - as state property, ager publicus - [is] here separate from private property. The property of the individual is here not, unlike in the first case, itself directly communal property'. The great problem, in ancient society, is no longer the conquest of nature, but maintenance of the territorium against other communes:
War is therefore the great comprehensive task, the great communal labour which is required either to occupy the objective conditions of being there alive, or to protect and perpetuate the occupation. Hence the commune consisting of families initially organised in a warlike way – as a system of war and army, and this is one of the conditions of its being there as proprietor. (ibid.: 474)
The ancient commune, then, unlike the primitive, consists of individual private peasant proprietors. But at the same time, the condition of their property remains their communal organisation, particularly for war. In this connection Marx offers some interesting parentheses on antiquity's view of agriculture as the sole proper occupation of a free man, the soldier's school', and the consequent exclusion of craftsmen from citizenship (ibid.: 477).
Importantly, however, the emergence here of private property does not obviate the communal character of the ancient form as a whole. Rather, membership in the commune remains the presupposition for the appropriation of land and soil, but, as a member of the commune, the individual is a private proprietor'; 'the commune ... is the presupposition of property in land and soil' still, ‘belonging [is] mediated by [the individual's] being a member of the state, by the being of the state' (ibid.). The individual is in other words only a private proprietor in so far as he remains a member of the commune.
The German Ideology similarly observes that in antiquity, the citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in their community, and on this account alone ... are bound to the form of communal ownership' (1846a: 33). Certainly, the survival of the commune is the reproduction of all its members as self-sustaining peasants'. But equally, their ‘surplus time belongs precisely to the commune, the work of war etc.’. For:
The property in one's own labour is mediated by property in the condition of labour - the hide of land, guaranteed in its turn by the existence of the commune, and that in turn by surplus labour in the form of military service etc. by the commune members. It is not co-operation in wealth-producing labour [unlike in the primitive form] by means of which the commune member reproduces himself, but rather co-operation in labour for the communal interests (imaginary and real), for the upholding of the association outwardly and inwardly. Property is quiritorium [i.e. the property of the Romans or quirites], of the Roman variety; the private proprietor of land as such only as a Roman, but as a Roman he is a private proprietor of land. (1858a: 476, my interpolations)
Property here is therefore integrally bound up with citizenship; it is only as a civis that an individual can be a proprietor. In this instance, then, it is membership specifically of a polis - and participation in its military and other obligations – which Marx sees as presupposed to property and the material labour-processes in which it is realized. That polis is understood, moreover, as a variant of the clan system which also underpinned Marx's first communal form, the primitive. The ancient polis remains, in essence, an association of families grounded in the needs of war, even if the later Roman gens are not strict blood-kin.º Marx approvingly quotes Niebuhr to the effect that there was in the world of antiquity no more general institution than that of kin groups' (ibid.: 478).
Finally to Marx's third form of communal property, the ‘Germanic'. He sees this form as typical of the medieval period in Europe. It is in many ways a transitional form, representing a further development towards modern private property. Settlement here is sparse, and society predominantly rural rather than urban. The commune now exists only as a periodic gathering together of its members to pledge each other's allegiance in war, religion, adjudication etc.'(ibid.: 484). It thus ‘appears as a coming-together, not as a being-together; as a unification of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity. The commune does not therefore in fact exist as a state or political body, as in classical antiquity' (ibid.: 483). Marx still, however, considers that the unity-in-itself of commune members is none the less posited in their ancestry, language, common past and history, etc.' (ibid.); and he continues to insist that the commune ‘is presupposed in-itself prior to the individual proprietors as a communality of language, blood, etc.', even if it only becomes ‘a real assembly for communal purposes' (ibid.: 484-5).
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RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
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