From Athens to the Paris Commune
Neocons, empire building and democracy
By Deirdre Griswold
It seems, according to recent newspaper
accounts (e.g., "A Classicist's Legacy: New Empire Builders,"
New York Times Week in Review, May 4), that the more
ideological among those defining a newly aggressive role for
U.S. imperialism, who today wield the upper hand in Washington,
like to harken back to ancient Athens for their political
inspiration. People like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and
George W. Bush himself often present their mission as one of
imposing "Western values" on a recalcitrant world, and cite
Athenian democracy as the model civilization.
Of course, one could say that all this is merely ideological
window dressing for policies that are so clearly dictated by
the profit greed of the huge oil companies, banks and military
corporations which call the shots in Washington, despite all
the hype about representative democracy.
But what was Athenian democracy? Can the "neocons"--the
neoconservatives who are but a makeover of the old right
wing--lay claim to it? And where should the workers and
oppressed of today be looking for democratic forms to serve
their interests, as opposed to the interests of the war
profiteers and modern-day slave drivers?
Peasant uprisings & the 'Tyrants'
Athenian democracy evolved over a period of about 150 years,
beginning in the sixth century B.C.E. Repeated peasant
uprisings had been challenging the plutocracy, the rule by a
class of wealthy land owners. At the same time, new men of
wealth were emerging as Athens became a center of trade,
commerce and the manufacture of many commodities by skilled
artisans and slaves.
The use of the word "men" here is very deliberate, because,
whether it was a monarchy or a democracy, women were excluded
from political life and, with a few exceptions, from owning
property.
The word "tyrant," which today has such a brutal
connotation, comes from this period. The Tyrants were military
figures, usually swept into power by peasant rebellions against
the monarchs and land-owning nobles whose wealth came from
serfdom. The Tyrant Solon seized power in Athens in 594 B.C.E.
He cancelled the debts of the poor, gave the right to vote to
all male citizens and established a new governing council of
400 people. He was the first ruler to codify a body of laws.
But he refused to carry out land reform.
Pisistratus, who became Tyrant of Athens 34 years later, in
560 B.C.E., redistributed the land and abolished land ownership
as a requirement of citizenship.
Even having land, however, the peasants were not truly free.
The productivity of their land was declining even as wheat and
other foods began to be imported from more fertile areas around
the Mediterranean, and they soon fell into debt slavery. The
class antagonisms had not been eradicated by the reforms of the
Tyrants.
The first democratic assembly, where representatives of all
10 "tribes" of Athens voted directly on major issues, was
formed in 508 B.C.E. when Cleisthenes took power and extended
the reforms, cutting down further the power of the nobility.
This assembly of 500--50 from each tribe--met 40 times a year
and also selected a smaller body that met almost every day.
Members of this standing committee could be recalled at any
time if they didn't carry out the wishes of the assembly.
The century that followed was considered the Golden Age of
Greek democracy and produced many accomplishments in science
and culture. It was also an age of military conquest and the
taking of conquered peoples as slaves. Many of these people
came with highly developed skills from other centers of
civilization around the Mediterranean and northern Africa that
had also amassed impressive scientific, technological and
cultural knowledge. (See, for example, the book "The Ancient
Engineers" by Lyon Sprague de Camp.) They enriched Athens in
many ways.
No rights for slaves, women and
foreign-born
Slaves and the foreign-born in general were never granted
the rights of citizens. By the fourth century B.C.E., Athens
had three slaves for every two free citizens. Most labored in
the homes and workshops of their masters. There were no large
agricultural estates based on slave labor, unlike later in the
Western Hemisphere when slaves captured from Africa were
intensely exploited by European settlers to produce sugar and
cotton for an international capitalist market. The hardest and
most dangerous work done by slaves in ancient Greece was in
mines and on sailing vessels.
Ancient Athens at its height was a city-state of about
140,000 people, of whom some 40,000--free men--had the right to
vote. However, only those citizens who owned property could run
for office.
What is it about this particular center of ancient society
that so enthralls the neoconservatives? Undoubtedly, it is the
high development of the art of politics--that is, the art
whereby a minority, propertied class succeeds in ruling over a
propertyless majority while engaging in the political process a
broader section of society than just themselves. In this,
today's liberals are just as enthusiastic as the
right-wingers.
Socrates, Plato and the state
Many thinkers in the period of Athenian democracy, like
Socrates and Plato, bent their minds around the problem of how
to strengthen the state, which seems to stand above society but
in fact serves the interests of the dominant class. Students
today read Plato's "Republic" and other such political works
but are seldom told that in the course of social evolution the
state is a fairly recent development. For tens of thousands of
years, people lived in communal societies where there was no
division into opposing classes and no state--that is, no
special, organized body of repression. The state arose with the
overthrow of communal societies and the emergence of a class
that claimed for itself the ownership of land and even of other
human beings.
In a society like that of Athens, where slaves outnumbered
free citizens and where the peasants were in a constant
struggle with the nobility over the land, the question of the
state became preeminent.
The obsession of Athenian intellectuals with politics stands
in stark contrast to other areas of the ancient world, where
wealthy people who had leisure time in which to think and
experiment were much more interested in solving the problems of
mechanics, astronomy and navigation, metallurgy and other
scientific challenges posed by the expansion of trade.
Science & materialist philosophy
In Miletus, a city in Asia Minor (today Turkey) not
dependent on slavery but on wage labor for its extensive role
in commerce, remarkable progress was made not only in these
sciences but in developing a comprehensive view of the
universe. This enthusiasm for understanding the material world,
rather than for ruling over people, fostered the early
development of materialist philosophy.
The view that everything in the universe was made up of tiny
particles called "atoms"--which was advanced 2,300 years before
the tools existed to prove or disprove this theory--originated
with Leucippus of Miletus. His greatest disciple was Democritus
of Adbera in Thrace, who traveled to Persia, Egypt and Babylon
(today's Iraq) in search of knowledge, and may also have been
to Ethiopia and India. (The book "Greek Science" by the British
Marxist scholar Benjamin Farrington skillfully explains the
social conditions that led to the development of opposing
philosophies--materialism vs. idealism--at the same time in
different parts of the ancient world.)
It is a twist of historical fate that today's neocons hold
up Plato and Aristotle as their great inspirers. They would be
more honest to honor Leucippus and Demo critus, for it was the
awesome detonation of two atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 that
encouraged the intellectual servants of the U.S. capitalist
class to entertain the idea that it was their manifest destiny
to rule over the entire world and turn the 20th into the
"American" century.
Capitalism has revolutionized the means of production by
incorporating the intellectual achievements of all previous
societies whenever they could be useful in turning a profit. In
this respect, it cares not at all whether the ideas came from
Greece or Mesopotamia or China.
But when it comes to political ideas, the present-day rulers
are very choosy. Their eyes mist over and their hearts beat
faster when they encounter a political philosophy that glosses
over terrible social inequities as long as the form of class
rule is democratic.
Slaves and women shut out
The United States political system owes a great deal to
Athenian democracy. This, too, is a country where slavery was
considered normal for hundreds of years, and slaves had no
political rights, even though their masters were able to claim
added seats in the House of Representatives by counting each
slave as two-thirds of a person.
A bitter Civil War ended in the abolition of slavery, but
the Northern capitalists soon betrayed their promises of Recon
struction and the descendants of slaves were effectively
disenfranchised until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And even in
2000, George W. Bush became president only after the systematic
exclusion of Black voters allowed him to claim victory in the
key state of Florida.
Athenian women never got the right to vote. It took nearly a
century and a half for women here to win suffrage.
And even after these victories for the right to vote, the
elections in the U.S. still result in the domination of the
billionaire ruling class over the political process. That is
why, when the people registered their opposition to attacking
Iraq in the clearest way, demonstrating again and again in
numbers not seen since the Vietnam War, the Congress completely
ignored the will of the people. Without even a mock debate, it
allowed the executive branch to proceed with its criminal war
of aggression.
The word democracy supposedly means rule by the people. In a
modern capitalist society, the majority of the people are wage
earners and their families--not the owners and CEOs of
Halliburton and ExxonMobil and Fox News, all of whom are so
cosy with the Athenian democracy-loving Bush
administration.
The democracy of the Paris Commune
Can the majority really rule, and not just be used to rubber
stamp the agenda of the moneyed class?
That question was answered, if only for a short time, by the
workers of Paris in 1871. While the central government was
preoccupied by a war with Germany, they took over and set up
the Paris Commune. Some of the measures they instituted, like
the right of the people to recall their elected representatives
at any time, echoed steps first taken in Athens. But the
Commune's democracy went much further.
The Commune dissolved the standing army and police and
replaced them with a people's militia. It reduced the salaries
of public officials to what an ordinary worker earned. It
opened up all schools and universities to the people, free of
charge.
It ended the state's support of and use of the church by
disestablishing all religion. Priests who had been paid by the
state would have to depend on their parishioners for
support.
The Commune conferred full political rights on those from
other countries who sided with the revolution. At a time of war
between France and Germany, it elected a German-born worker as
Minister of Labor.
The Commune was not advanced enough to offer full equality
to women, even though women had started the uprising. But by
establishing a pension for all widows and children of "citizens
killed defending the rights of the people," it struck a blow
for women's emancipation, recognizing the rights of children
born "out of wedlock." Many Parisian workers lived in "free
unions" not previously recognized by either church or
state.
The Commune was crushed by the combined weight of French and
German armies before it had a chance to go further. Karl Marx
analyzed its strengths and weaknesses in "The Civil War in
France." It was not a blueprint for today. It had no political
party or other experienced leadership at its helm, and that
left the field free for adventurers and opportunists of all
kinds. But it showed emphatically that the working class could
become an independent force in history and could create new
political forms to strike directly at the entrenched privileges
of the old rulers.
For these reasons, and because it promoted the international
solidarity of the workers and opposed national chauvinism, the
democracy of the Commune is despised by today's empire-building
neoconservatives in Washington.
Reprinted from the May 15, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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