The History of Democracy

A Marxist Interpretation

Brian S. Roper

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781849647144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Democrazia

Democracy under neoliberalism has become tarnished, as governments become disconnected from voters and pursue policies against the interests of the people. And yet the ideal of democracy continues to inspire movements around the world. Brian Roper refreshes our understanding of democracy using a Marxist framework. He traces the history of democracy from ancient Athens to the emergence of liberal representative and socialist participatory democracy in Europe and North America, through to the global spread of democracy during the past century. An an alternative, he offers an engaging Marxist critique of representative democracy, which has the potential to undermine the existing status quo.

1

Origins: democracy in the ancient Greek world

INTRODUCTION

Democracy was introduced into the Athenian city-state with the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508–7BC, reaching its height while Pericles was a leading political figure from around 461 to 429, before being suppressed briefly in the wake of the defeat of Athens by the oligarchic city-state Sparta in the Peloponnesian War in 404. Democracy was soon revived, however, in 403 and persisted in a modified form until 322–1.

There is doubt whether this constituted the first democratic city-state in history, since there is some evidence that democratic institutions, practices, and principles emerged even earlier in Sparta and amongst the Phoenicians (Hornblower, 1992: 1–2). Keane (2009: xi) confidently argues that democracy was certainly ‘not a Greek invention.’ But even if it is the case, as Keane (2009: xi) argues, that the bulk of existing historical scholarship is wrong in claiming that democracy was a Greek invention and in fact popular self-government originated in western Asia, invented by peoples and lands that ‘geographically correspond to contemporary Syria, Iraq and Iran’, there can be no doubt that Athenian democracy was easily the most significant, advanced and influential form of democratic governance to emerge in classical Antiquity. It is of world historic significance, among other things because since its suppression in 322 BC, it has been viewed by intellectuals, political rulers and advocates of participatory democracy as the first fully fledged and sustained system of democracy in history (Ste Croix, 1981: 284; Raaflaub, 2007a: 1–14).

THE HISTORICAL EMERGENCE OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Why did democracy emerge in the Greek city-states of classical Antiquity? Why did Attica, as the Athenian city-state was then known, rise to prominence in the fifth and fourth centuries BC as the most culturally, intellectually and politically advanced and democratic of these city-states? The background to the emergence of democracy in Attica was the prolonged re-emergence of Greek civilization from rudimentary peasant communities from 800 to 500 BC. There is insufficient evidence for us to be certain of the underlying causes of the revival and growth of Greek civilisation during these centuries, but there seem to be several interrelated and mutually reinforcing key factors. First, ‘The eighth century is the period when iron replaces bronze as the main working metal in Greece’ (Osborne, 2004: 24). Because iron can be produced much more cheaply than bronze, it makes possible the large-scale production of weapons and tools. In particular the scratch plough and other iron tools were used to cultivate ‘lighter rain-watered soils’, and this meant that ‘settled agriculture, rain watered and not dependent on artificial irrigation, was boosted, and the peasant farmer grew as an economic and military power’ (Mann, 1986: 185). This led to an expansion of trade and greater interaction with other societies, which might also have helped peasant farmers to discover, or rediscover, more effective agricultural tools and techniques. The absence of extensive irrigation, unreliability of rainfall in the Aegean zone, and existence of a wide range of microclimates due to the geographical location and hilly topography of the classical Greek city-states, meant that crop specialization was rare: a mixture of grains, pulses, olives and vines was typically planted (Millett, 2000: 27).

As Anderson observes, ‘The classical world was massively, unalterably rural in its basic quantitative proportions. Agriculture represented throughout its history the absolutely dominant domain of production, invariably furnishing the main fortunes of the cities themselves’ (1974a: 19). Consequently, increasing agricultural productivity was of crucial importance and a necessary precondition for urbanisation, because ‘The Graeco-Roman towns were never predominantly communities of manufacturers, traders or craftsmen: they were, in origin and principle, urban congeries of landowners’ (1974a: 19).

The second set of material factors that contributed to the revival of Greek civilisation arose from the strategic geographical location of the Greek city-states in general, and Attica in particular. As Mann (1986: 196) observes, ‘What distinguished Greece was its marchland position between Europe and the Near East. The closest of the European ploughed lands to Near Eastern civilization, with its promontory and islands it was most likely to intercept trade and cultural exchange between the two.’ As this suggests, the Greek city-states were predominantly coastal precisely because ‘marine transport was the sole viable means of commodity exchange over medium or long distances’ (Anderson, 1974a: 20). The growth of sea trade from the eighth to the fifth centuries stimulated the development of well-placed coastal cities, some of which came to enjoy periods of progressive growth. Athens had a seaport strategically located at the centre of the Aegean zone. As Raaflaub (2007b: 118) observes, by the mid-fifth century Athens had ‘developed into a large, economically and demographically diverse community that became the economic centre of the Greek world. A vast infrastructure and a whole industry, encompassing many trades, was created to build and maintain three hundred ships and to support the required personnel.’

The growth of agricultural output in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean and an associated growth of sea trade underpinned the emergence of the urban pattern of classical civilization from 800 to 500 BC (Anderson, 1974a: 29). By the mid-sixth century ‘there were some 1,500 Greek cities in the Hellenic homelands and abroad – virtually none of them more than 25 miles inland from the coastline’ (1974a: 29). Essentially these cities were:

residential nodes of concentration for farmers and landowners: in the typical small town of this epoch, the cultivators lived within the walls of the city and went out to work in the fields every day, returning at night – although the territory of the cities always included an agrarian circumference with a wholly rural population settled in it.

(Anderson, 1974a: 29-30)

These cities not only acted as service centres for their rural hinterland, they were also nodal points for trade because Greek ships did not directly traverse the Mediterranean, but rather ‘preferred to keep in sight of land for navigational and supply reasons, creeping around coasts and islands, calling in at a series of ports and staging posts’ (Mann, 1986: 205).

The rise of Attica as the pre-eminent city-state or polis was also due to the mines in Laureion (south-east Attica), which worked the largest deposits of silver-bearing ore in the ancient Greek world. As Osborne (1985: 111) observes, ‘silver was certainly “the most important Athenian resource, exported in substantial quantities” and it is possible that it was the only significant Athenian export’. These mines were worked by the heaviest concentration of chattel slaves in Attica, 10–20,000 out of an estimated total slave population of 80–100,000 (Millett, 2000: 36; Osborne, 1985: 111; cf. Anderson, 1974a: 40; Wood, 1988: 43). Silver mining not only provided raw material for a coin currency, the profits also flowed into the public treasury (the precise mechanisms are unclear) and enabled the construction of a powerful navy early in the fifth century (Millett, 2000: 37). A substantial proportion of the aristocratic propertied class derived at least some of their wealth from owning and/or leasing silver mines (Osborne, 1985: 112–26). According to Millett: ‘mining operations were largely the preserve of the wealthiest members of the population …. Details of approximately 180 leases survive in inscriptions from the fourth century, and the lessees include a high proportion of Athenians (about one third) known to be wealthy and prominent in other fields, including politics’(Millett 2000, 36–7).

Attica’s strategic location, these highly profitable silver mines and the comparatively productive system of agriculture go some way towards explaining its growing prominence, but do not explain why it was in this city-state that democracy first emerged. Of the other growing city-states in the region, Crete and Sparta, for example, were oligarchic and Macedonia had a monarchy. To find an explanation we need to focus on the unique internal social, economic and political developments in Athenian society that helped to give it a different historical trajectory.

Little is known about the largely peasant communities that survived the mysterious collapse of the Mycenaean kingdom around the twelfth century BC and the ‘Dark Age’ that persisted until the eighth century. But as Wood (1988: 90) observes, ‘When Greek society re-emerges from the obscurity of the Dark Age, one feature is especially striking: the presence of a clearly defined ruling class, a privileged nobility based on individual property.’ This class accumulated its wealth through the exploitation of peasants by means of a range of tributary relations including tenancy, serfdom, debt bondage and chattel slavery (a process about which we shall have more to say shortly). Ste Croix (1981: 112) observes that ‘The ownership of land and the power to exact unfree labour, largely united in the hands of the same class, together constitute, therefore, the main keys to the class structure of the ancient Greek communities.’ As this suggests, wealthy landowners exerted ongoing political as well as economic dominance over the city-states that emerged from the eighth to the fifth centuries, and as far as we know, reproduced themselves as hereditary aristocracies.

By the late sixth century this hereditary landowning aristocracy was being besieged, both by upwardly mobile and wealthy members of the dominant propertied class who did not belong to the nobility, and by an increasingly disgruntled and militant demos consisting of middling and poor peasants, as well as free labourers and artisans. In sum, during this period society became increasingly divided between ‘the hereditary ruling aristocrats, who were by and large the principal landowners and who entirely monopolised political power’ and, at least initially, ‘all other social classes sometimes together called the demos’ (Ste Croix, 1981: 280).

The struggle within the ruling class, as the newly wealthy increasingly challenged the political dominance of the aristocratic ruling families, as well as the struggles between these affluent groups and the peasant farmers, intensified between the mid-seventh and late sixth centuries (Ste Croix, 1981: 280). Surplus extraction in Athens during this period seems to have increasingly taken the form of debt bondage (1981: 136–7, 162–70). A growing portion of the peasant farmers were becoming impoverished because, as tenants, they were forced to pay one-sixth of their produce to the landowner. Thorley observes that:

The system almost certainly originated from the transfer of the land of owner farmers under some kind of mortgage to rich creditors as a result of debt. The hektemorioi [tenant farmers] then agreed to pay as rent one-sixth of their produce to the landowner, and markers were fixed in the ground to indicate that the land was held in this fashion. In the latter part of the seventh century many hektemorioi had found themselves unable to pay the sixth part to the landowner, and been forced to sell themselves and their families as slaves to the landowner. By about 600 the situation was one of seething unrest.

(Thorley, 1996: 10)

A bitterly internally divided ruling class was in no position to respond effectively to this dramatic rise in struggle from below. Furthermore, it could not rely on a strong centralised state with a large standing army to suppress the masses. ‘Athens in the seventh century … was firmly governed by the aristocracy through the archons backed by the Council of the Areopagos’ (Thorley, 1996: 10). Archons were the principal administrative rulers with responsibility for directing civil, military and religious affairs. By the mid-seventh century, there were nine archons and they held these positions for a maximum term of ten years. Representatives of the most prominent aristocratic families gathered in the Council of the Areopagos, which was the central governing body because it had ‘oversight of the laws, the magistrates, the politically active citizens, and the general conduct of all Athenians, and it could pronounce judgement, [including] the death sentence, in political trials’ (Hansen, 1991: 37). Nonetheless, despite its political dominance of the Athenian city-state, the aristocracy lacked the kind of extensive repressive apparatus required to decisively crush an increasingly rebellious peasantry. Since the bulk of the Athenian army was composed of peasants, this meant that the peasants possessed arms and military experience. For this reason, if members of the aristocracy wanted to suppress internal rebellion, they had to enlist an outside military force, such as the Spartan army. Such a course of action risked further fanning the flames of revolt and so was generally avoided.

In this context, the more politically astute members of the ruling class were prepared to accept a substantial degree of reform in order to ensure the continued viability of Athenian society, and hence of their own privileged position. Solon, who was part of the aristocracy but a merchant rather than a landowner, which distanced him from the feuding noble families, was appointed an archon in 594. Either then, or more probably during the years following his appointment, he introduced a comprehensive set of economic and constitutional reforms.

There is no doubt at all about Solon’s perfectly serious conception of his own role, as a would-be impartial arbitrator in a situation of severe class strife, who was pressed by the demos to make himself tyrant, but refused. Although Solon also refused to make a general redistribution of the land, as demanded by the impoverished lower classes, he did take the extraordinary step of cancelling all debts, and he forbade for the future not merely the enslavement for debt but also any kind of debt bondage, by the simple expedient of prohibiting the giving of the body as security.

(Ste Croix, 1981: 281–2)

The central economic reform, cancelling the debts of tenant farmers, was captured in the phrase ‘shaking off the burdens’. The hated markers on the land of the hektemorioi were removed, there could no longer be enslavement for debt, no foodstuffs could be exported except for olive oil, and other measures aimed at stimulating economic growth were introduced.

Debt bondage involved more than a purely financial arrangement between wealthy landowners and poor peasants because the peasants agreed to fulfil a set of rent or tribute obligations. As Wood (1988: 94) emphasises, ‘in Solon’s day Athens could hardly be considered a money economy’. Consequently, ‘the “debts” which Solon cancelled were the obligations of rent or tribute owed by a dependent peasant to a lord. The practice of enslavement for debt [was thus] part of a more general system of dependence.’ For this reason Wood (1988: 95) considers that Solon’s reform ‘constitutes a more substantial structural change than the cancellation of debt in the narrow sense would suggest, abolishing the last remaining forms of dependence and tribute to which Athenian peasants were subject’.

While Solon’s economic reforms involved major concessions to the peasantry to stave off revolutionary tumult, his constitutional reforms also addressed the tension between factions in the propertied classes:

In reforming the constitution Solon saw it as essential to break the hold of the aristocratic families on the government of the state. So far the power of the archons, who were always chosen from members of the noble families and backed by the Areopagas, had been in effect absolute. Solon was intent on broadening the power structure of government, to include especially those who had substantial wealth and property … but who were not from the noble families.

(Thorley, 1996: 13)

He began by codifying four classes of Athenians: the pentakosiomedimnoi, who owned estates which produced annually at least 500 medimnoi (both a dry and a liquid measure of produce); the hippeis, ‘horsemen, knights’, who produced 300–500 medimnoi; the zeugitai, who produced 200–300 medimnoi and who were wealthy enough to pay for their own armour, and constituted the hoplitai, or fully armed infantrymen; and the thetes, who produced less than 200 medimnoi per year. As Thorley (1996: 14) observes, the word thetes ‘originally meant a serf, a man bound to his master and to his land, but later the word referred to any hired labourer. … this class must have included at least half, and in Solon’s time probably considerably more, of the total citizen population’.

Chief among the reforms was the establishment of a new Council of Four Hundred, consisting of 100 members from each of the four tribes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Origins: democracy in the ancient Greek world
• 2 Democracy suppressed: the Roman republic and empire
• 3 The early Middle Ages and the transition from feudalism to capitalism
• 4 The English Revolution and parliamentary democracy
• 5 The American Revolution and constitutional redefinition of democracy
• 6 The revolutionary revival of democracy in France
• 7 The revolutions of 1848–49
• 8 Capitalist expansion, globalisation and democratisation
• 9 The Marxist critique of capitalism and representative democracy
• 10 Precursors of socialist participatory democracy: the Paris Commune 1871 and Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917
• Bibliography
• Index