Re: Chris "Tory concept of voluntary elections"

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Jose G. Perez" wrote:

>  Democracy,
> like everything else, is a class question. Democracy in ancient Greece was
> democracy FOR THE SLAVEOWNERS. For the slaves, it was the dictatorship of
> the slaveowners. Modern bourgeois democracy is democracy for the
> bourgeoisie, and the dictatorship of capital for the masses.

Thanks for your fine post as a whole --  but in respect to the question
of ancient Athens you might find it worthwhile to read Ellen Wood,
*Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy*.
A fairly large amount of recent scholarship has established that the
relationship between slavery and democracy in ancient Athens was a
bit more convoluted than had been held traditionally by both marxist
and bourgeois scholars. Only incidentally  was slavery used for
commodity production, and the vast majority of athenian citizens
were not slave owners. The democracy was dependent on slavery,
but in more complex ways than being a democracy for slave owners.
Imagine a daily life with no finished products for sale, with no
technology to speak of for domestic activities. What would be the
use of being rich without servants? And yet the democratic revolution
in Athens deprived the rich of compulsory domestic service from
the peasantry. Slaves replaced the freed peasantry as domestics,
making democracy just barely tolerable for the rich. To see how
*barely* tolerable it was, consider Plato.

Wood argues convincingly that, once we get the image of slave-
owning peasants out of our heads, we (marxists) have much we
can learn from athenian democracy.

Carrol

P.S. I didn't keep up with this thread. Who is the "Chris" you
are responding to?