Although one of the least developed Marxist concepts, slave mode
or organization of productive relations has spawned rich
intellectual debate. There are four major lines of inquiry. Must
the number of productive workers be the dominant form of labor?
What is the significance of surplus extraction (profit through
exploitation) in the organization of production, and how does it
define a social formation? Is there one mode of production or
several competing social formations at any one time? What was
the historical evolution of the slave mode of production?
Although Karl Marx’s primary concern was with the historical
evolution of capitalism, not pre-capitalist social formations,
he occasionally referred to the slave mode of production. The
German Ideology identified the first historical form of property
as communal, containing within it familial and slave relations
(1978, p. 151). The Communist Manifesto recognized three forms
of class society: capitalist and proletarian during the
bourgeois epoch, lord and ser