ABSTRACT
K. Marx characterises the conditions of Classical Antiquity as distinct from these economic characteristics of despotism. In the former, private property appears as the foundation; the loss of landed property through the development of usury is not only possible, but a widespread phenomenon. Marx’s and Engels’s basic understanding of the progressive character of economic – and with it, general social – development is maintained in the four-stage process of antagonistic relations of production. Marx comments that not only slavery – as a relation of private property - but also serfdom, i.e. the definitive form of servitude under feudalism, can modify the ‘Asiatic forms’ least of all. The concepts of ‘feudalism’, vassalage, bondage, and serfdom arose in world history, not on the foundation of despotism, which stagnated and hindered the development of oppositions, but on the basis of the destroyed slave-owning society of Classical Antiquity at the edges of its territory.
