Tahir wrote:
>Secondly it ignores the role of the merchant class in Greek society,
>who were the main promoters of democracy against aristocracy.
Where do you get this? I'd thought merchants in Greek society were non-citizens (or low-status former slaves). And that the promoters of Greek "democracy" had been the poor, in revolt against debt bondage. At which point the Homeric system's ranked statuses gave way to the city-states, where fellow citizens couldn't exploit each other. An arrangement which, as you say, made the exploitation of non-citizen slaves all the more essential.
Tahir: I'll go and check some of this soon as I can. But the question which Carrol's post raised (if you go back to it you'll see) was that the 'people' in Greek democracy were equivalent to the working class under capitalism. This I criticised as being ahistorical. The democracy 'movement' in ancient times was in my understanding a movement of the relatively privileged, those who were citizens (a minority).
>The fact is that from the time of the Greeks up until the 18thC
>bourgeois revolutions and beyond, democracy as a discourse has been
>shaped by the merchants and capitalists who have presumed to speak
>in the name of the people as a whole. It is not much different today.
Your "not much different today" probably has you reading antiquity anachronistically. I'm not seeing why else you'd think Greek society had anything like a merchant-capitalist class, much less one that spoke in the name of people as a whole.
Tahir: Didn't say a "merchant-capitalist class". What I was disputing is whether one could see Greek democracy as a movement of something called a "working class". I find the idea absurd.
The 18th century bourgeois/cap revolutions, yes of course. But their democracy discourse reflects the peculiarities of capitalism, our current system. A system that justifies itself in part by projecting its peculiar dynamics on to other times and places while triumphantly casting itself as the most unfettered embodiment of these "universal" features. Don't aid and abet them! Maureen
Tahir: Actually it seems this modern democracy is in most respects more progressive than the ancient variety, which never even posited a formal equality. The majority tended to be consigned to the category of non-citizens and the rest were stratified from those who could take part in the electoral process to those very few who could hold office. Doesn't seem like much of a proletarian movement to me.