[Marxism] Athenian democracy?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1764240,00.html
A radical, short-lived and violent experiment: the origins of democracy

The glorious myth of ancient Athens is a poor model for re-creating the 
virtues of government in the 21st century

Mary Beard
Saturday April 29, 2006
The Guardian

In 427BCE the people of Athens voted, democratically, to put to death the 
entire adult male population of the town of Mytilene and to throw into 
slavery the women and children - thousands in all. As a punishment for 
changing sides in the great war between Athens and Sparta, this was brutal 
even by the permissive rules of ancient warfare. The next day the voters 
got cold feet.

Meeting again, they reversed the decision, and sent a second message to 
their commander in the field, cancelling their earlier orders. With good 
luck, incentive payments and favourable winds, this arrived just in the 
nick of time, before the mass slaughter had been carried out. Under the new 
ruling, the number of executions barely reached four figures - a selective 
cull of the leading insurgents.

Most ancient writers used this kind of incident not, as we might, as an 
indictment of Athens's ruthlessness, but of the incapacity and fickleness 
of its democratic decision-making process. And they had plenty of other 
examples to choose from - whether the disastrous invasion of Sicily, which 
effectively lost Athens the war with Sparta, or the execution of the 
dissident Socrates. Needless to say, all these writers were the equivalent 
of the ancient rightwing. They were acerbic, sometimes nasty critics of the 
power of the people, and at the same time victims - from Plato down - of 
the odd delusion that an intelligent autocrat or an elite cabal was less 
likely to make military or political blunders than a democracy.

All the same there is a stark contrast here with our own modern political 
fetish, from both left and right of the spectrum, for Athenian democracy. 
The more that "democracy" becomes an empty slogan - all too often the 
west's convenient alibi for intervention in non-western politics (a bubble 
pricked only when our new democratic converts vote in some regime we don't 
much like) - the more we hark back to its ancient pedigree. Think, for 
example, of the self-congratulatory celebrations a decade or so ago of the 
2,500th anniversary of world democracy, which fixed on some murky and 
probably self-serving reforms in 508BCE as the originary moment.

It was for this occasion that Bush Sr penned, or presumably had penned for 
him, a gushing introduction to a US exhibition catalogue celebrating The 
Greek Miracle (www.nga.gov/past/data/exh659.shtm ). But the Athenian 
democratic allure extends beyond the Bush-Blair axis. As far away as the 
Pacific island of Tonga there is a university parading its intellectual 
credentials with the title "Atenisi" and with a mission to embrace the 
"democratic ideals" of ancient Greece (www.atenisi.edu.to).

This fetish casts ancient democratic Athens as the foundation of modern 
political virtues: one man one vote, freedom of expression, communal 
decision-making, the sovereignty of the law and equality before it, and so 
on. At the same time, it deftly airbrushes out the less appealing aspects 
of Athenian democratic culture. The well-known exclusion of women and 
slaves from any form of political action is one factor, but not the only 
one. And to be honest, even if Athens operated a more thoroughgoing 
repression of its female population than any other Greek state we know, no 
ancient culture would score highly here.

The Athenian democracy which we so admire was, in reality, a short-lived 
and violent political experiment; it lasted 50 or so years in its most 
radical form, a half-century that saw the assassination of one of the most 
influential democratic reformers and numerous attempts by the enemy within 
to betray the city to the undemocratic Persians or Spartans. During its 
almost equally short-lived empire in the fifth century BCE, it imposed 
democratic government on its satellites with as much ruthlessness (and 
probably as little understanding) as George Bush and his allies. It was 
also a tiny community, with perhaps some 30,000 full male citizens, making 
its political nucleus roughly the same size as the student population of 
the modern University of Manchester, or, to put it another way, half the 
size of Kidderminster. And their citizen rights were fiercely guarded. With 
a strategy that would endear it to the BNP, it made sure that only those 
born of both Athenian mothers and Athenian fathers would qualify to be part 
of the exclusive club of citizens. No political integration of migrants or 
asylum seekers here.

It goes without saying, of course, that there were, and are, many 
attractive and important features in Athenian democratic politics. For a 
poor, free, male and ambitious citizen, over a short period in the fifth 
century, it was surely the best Greek city in which to live: with a chance 
of playing a full political role (thanks to the selection of most political 
office-holders by lottery) and of being adequately compensated financially 
for time taken up with political duties. Pay for taking on public 
responsibility was anathema to the noblesse oblige attitudes of the 
rightwing, but a central plank in the sharing of power. Equality of 
political opportunity between the male citizens was as close to being a 
reality as it ever has been in history.

Classical democracy also launched (thanks, ironically, to ancient theorists 
who were deeply opposed to it) the whole tradition of western political 
analysis, from Plato and Aristotle on - as well as giving a kick-start to 
numerous 19th century movements for political change. Most of us in the UK 
have reason to be very grateful that those behind the 1832 Reform Act, such 
as the historian George Grote, rejected the idea that democratic Athens was 
a dreadful warning of the dangers of mob rule and saw in it instead a model 
for the extension of the vote and electoral change.

But is it a model for us now? To be fair, very few people still imagine 
that we can draw directly on the Athenian experience - except a few 
crackpots who would like to have the members of the House of Lords 
selected, Athenian style, by lottery (and even they have come to seem less 
crackpot over the past few weeks). The danger of Athens's example is more 
insidious than that. By choosing - or clinging to - a tiny community with a 
narrowly restrictive idea of citizen rights and of nationality as our 
founding democratic myth, we are in a sense turning our back on the central 
political issues that face us now. Not so much "democratic myth", more 
"head in the sand".

The big problem for the 21st century is surely how to redefine the notion 
of "people power" (Greek demokratia) so that it can work for vast political 
conglomerates from which almost everyone feels alienated, and in which 
power has moved decidedly away from the "people" in any meaningful sense. 
There is also, as Paul Cartledge hinted in some recent discussions of 
Greece on Radio 4's Westminster Hour, the need to reconfigure ideas of the 
rights and obligations of citizenship in the new context of a global 
political economy that transcends the boundaries of the nation state. In 
projects of this kind, the founding myth of a small city, the size of a 
large student union - and with a decidedly unglobal and unmulticultural 
agenda - is more of a hindrance than a help.

· Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge University
mb127@xxxxxxxxx


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