Frederick Engels'
                SOCIALISM:
               UTOPIAN and
                      SCIENTIFIC
 
 So long as the total social labor only
yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary
for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or
almost all the time of the great majority of the members of
society -- so long, of necessity, this society is divided into
classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond
slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive
labor, which looks after the general affairs of society: the
direction of labor, State business, law, science, art, etc. It is,
therefore, the law of division of labor that lies at the basis of the
division into classes. But this does not prevent this division into
classes from being carried out by means of violence 

The slavery of classical times had outlived itself.  Whether employed
on the land in large-scale agriculture or in manufacture in the towns,
it no longer yielded any satisfactory return -- the market for its
products was no longer there.  But the small-scale agriculture and the
small handicraft production to which the enormous production of the
empire in its prosperous days was now shrunk had no room for numbers of
slaves.  Only for the domestic and luxury slaves of the wealthy was
there still a place in society.  But though it was dying out, slavery
was still common enough to make all productive labor appear to be work
 for slaves, unworthy of free Romans -- and everybody was a free Roman
now.  Hence, on the one side, increasing manumissions of the
superfluous slaves who were now a burden; on the other hand, a growth
in some parts in the numbers of the coloni, and in other parts of the
declassed freemen (like the "poor whites" in the ex-slave states of
America).  Christianity is completely innocent of the gradual dying out
of ancient slavery; it was itself actively involved in the system for
centuries under the Roman Empire, and never interfered later with
slave-trading by Christians: not with the Germans in the north, or with
the Venetians in the Mediterranean, or with the later trade in Negroes.
[2] Slavery no longer paid; it was for that reason it died out.  But in
dying it left behind its poisoned sting-the stigma attaching to the
productive labor of freemen.  This was the blind alley from which the
Roman world had no way out: slavery was economically impossible, the
labor of freemen was morally ostracized.  The one could be the basic
form of social production no longer; the other, not yet.  Nothing could
help here except a complete revolution.

[MC5 comments:
The above is interesting to us in that like Rome, the mother
country of the empire today becomes taken over by the unproductive sector
of "labor."]