Helotage

In a previous post  I wrote a bit about the Spartan Helots: the population enslaved by the Spartans to provide the agricultural labor for the Laconian state.  My conclusion was that they can be viewed as no different than slaves for the purpose of analyzing the structure of Spartan society.  This is broadly true, but upon further reading and consideration, I would like to be a bit more precise on the nature of Helotage.

Archaic leftovers

When studying classical antiquity, despite the intelligent voices of its literature and the very human faces staring at us from its lively statues and frescoes, one is encountering an alien world.  There is a comfortable familiarity that we tend to feel for the ancients, a familiarity that we do not share with, say, the strange humans of the middle ages, but this is due largely to the survival of many aspects of its art, literature, and philosophy within the framework of modern capitalist society.  These survivals are undoubtedly beautiful, showing a level of intelligence and culture not reached again for a thousand years or more, but they are fossils in a museum; if one were to meet an ancient Athenian or Alexandrian in their really-existing world, they would stand before an alien.  Those who proclaim (not infrequently with a moral tone or a sense of somber resignation) that human nature will never change are not men or women who are familiar with man's history.  Man has changed many times due to changing material circumstances, which bring him into differing relationships with both nature and his fellow man.  To paraphrase Marx: one can differentiate man from animal by whichever measure one likes - although it has become somewhat fashionable to not differentiate them at all (Stephen Jay Gould) - but ultimately, man has differentiated himself by the practice of changing and producing his own means of subsistence, changing the world around him.  The relations of production upon which the social relations of antiquity rested had no similarity with ours.  

Even before the Classical period ( roughly 500-300 BC), free labor as we know it was of marginal importance at best.  Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had words for labor, production, capital, or even economy, in the way that we use and think of them.  Many engaged in seasonal labor for a daily wage, helping farmers during the harvest usually, working as porters at the docks, etc, but there were no workers - wage laborers - as we know them.  Wage labor required two conceptual leaps: abstraction of man's labor from both his person and the product of his work, and a way to measure the labor that one has purchased for payment (Finley, 1973).  The latter requires a second abstraction of labor-time, as well as a regular method of measuring time generally.  All of this was beyond the ancient mind.  This was not due to any intellectual defect or cultural value, just the real activity of economics;  social and technological conditions were not developed to a point in which the need for the development of a capitalist model of labor was felt over the historical period.  Without a material base for the possibility of a development, there can be no idea expressing it.  

Greek society, despite being the world's first true urban culture, remained overwhelmingly agrarian; even in the most advanced cities, with the most developed division of labor, the majority of the population was connected with agriculture in some way.  This was especially true of the citizens, as the ability to own any land at all was generally restricted to full citizens.  The citizen ideal was to own land, trade and industry was largely left to resident foreigners.  At the height of antiquity, agricultural labor would become synonymous with chattel slavery on the giant Roman estates; even in the 5th century BC, a small landowner in Attica or Boeotia likely had at least one slave unless he were very impoverished.  Helotage, though, harks back to a more ancient time.  Slavery existed in the Greek world back to Mycenaean times, but it was of little economic importance.  Slaves in that period were mostly of the household variety, doing little productive labor; it was only in the 6th century BC that slavery effectively replaced other forms of productive labor. 

The the Greek states (as much as one could call them such) of the archaic period (roughly 800-500 BC) were ruled by hereditary aristocracies who owned much of the land.  Clientage, debt-bondage, and the like were the prevalent forms of labor; most productive labor was done by those tied to the land through one means or another, but they were not slaves.  Rather, they were similar to feudal serfs or late Roman coloni.  This older feudal period is the key to understanding the Helots.  

Sparta is most famous, but Helotage existed in many other places in the classical Greek world: Crete, Thessaly, Sicily, and in many of the Greek Colonies in the Danube basin and along the Hellespont and Black Sea.  M.I. Finley noted that Helots made up a rather large proportion or all Greek labor.  The Sicilian and Black Sea/ Hellespontine use of Helot labor was largely due to the settler populations coming across large native populations which made the large-scale importation of slaves unnecessary; the Black Sea Greeks were actually one of the main exporters of slaves to the mainland.  Aristotle's characterization of the Greeks as frogs around a pond was very appropriate, as the Greek world largely represented a frontier civilization.  They did not view the peoples they found in and around their colonies as potential citizens but as either potential labor or useful trading partners - although the two were not mutually exclusive.  The ideal of a "good life" to an ancient Hellene meant freedom from toil, and the settlers made use of the resources available, human and natural. 

For Sparta and the Thessalian states, many interesting parallels exist.  The geographies of Laconia and Thessaly are unique in having an abundance of arable land and being exceptions to most of Greece.  They also share the social distinction of never having ejected their aristocracies in favor of the rule of private property.  The battering ram of the latter was due to the growth of sea trade in geographically suited cities, which created conditions favorable for the growth of a class of wealthy non-nobles.  The use of money, due to the demands of sea trade, was also a social agitator since peasants had to borrow from nobles or wealthy merchants to gain access to it.  These flammable conditions, which led to class struggle and the reigns of Bonapartist tyrants in states like Athens, did not exist in Laconia or Thessaly until much later.  That does not mean that class struggle did not occur at all in these states, just that the social conditions of impasse - necessary for armed arbiters, the tyrants - did not develop.  Hellenistic Sparta would see its first tyrant, Nabis in 207 BC, as a consequence of acute class struggle.

 Land transportation, through the end of the Roman empire, remained prohibitively expensive and difficult, so it was the growth of sea trade, in the cities positioned to best engage in it, that allowed for the growth of large populations and wealthy ruling classes of slave owners.  But, Laconia and Thessaly were not compelled to reach to the sea like Athens; their land was rich enough to sustain large populations with little trouble.  It was only late in the 5th century that Sparta even developed a navy of any real size or skill.  

There is no mechanical "normal" development of the classical states, but Thessaly and Sparta are conspicuous in their deviance.  Both retained strong ruling aristocracies and their production rested upon older modes of bondage.  The Helot had access to every basic social institution, had their own culture and families.  This existence was in sharp contrast to the slave of other Greek states, who was an outsider shipped in.  Though the form was an ancient artifact in the age of slave agriculture and industry, the world had changed around these old hold-outs of aristocracy and feudalism.  Slave society only developed once in Greece, and once it did, it changed the world despite the Spartan warrior aristocrats' wishes.  They developed the tastes and general political aims of the Greek slave owning class.  In the same way that the Russian Czar and aristocracy of the old empire became investors in and owners of capitalist industry when faced with the realities of competition and power in a capitalist world, so the Spartan ruling class developed the interests of the chattel slave-owners as a means of maintaining themselves and their power in the world.  The famous 5th century admiral Lysander was the most prominent representative of a tendency within the Spartan ruling class who wished to break out of the insular economy and into the modern world of imperialism, trade, and property acquisition.  Xenophon, in his work Hellenika,  reported a conspiracy among non-Spartiate free men to overthrow the restrictive system of citizenship.  The same social forces eventually developed within closed Spartan society as had developed in other Greek states at earlier points in time.

Helotage is, in the last analysis, a transitional form of compulsory labor between serfdom/debt-bondage and chattel slavery.  Slavery developed due to the realities of class struggle and the incompatibility of forms of serfdom and debt-bondage with the social-material demands of the ancient economy.  The development of advanced and powerful slave states like Athens, with all the changes in culture and politics that came with them, changed the entirety of the Greek world through bringing a more advanced mode of production into being; all other states would now operate within its framework or at least against its background.  Helotage was a transitional, and not uncommon, mode of unfree labor; slavery with elements of serfdom top varying degrees.