ABSTRACT
269The ancient class process is another name for productive self-employment, where the adjective productive refers to the production and self-appropriation of a surplus (in kind or in value form). Self-employment has held an almost mythic status in the history of the US and many other parts of the world. However, discussions of productive self-employment are largely absent from the neoclassical orthodoxy, various Keynesian and institutionalist insurgencies and Marxism, although it is in the Marxian literature where we find the largest body of theoretical work on ancients and self-exploitation (Gabriel 1989; 1990). Many in the Marxian world, however, frown at the use of Marx’s adjective “ancient,” as in “the ancient mode of production” and prefer other, “less provocative” terms, such as independent commodity production or peasant mode of production.
