When it was still in fact a "movement," it was carried out by the poor, who suffered under the continual threat of enslavement due to debt bondage. When the system was reformed and the poor won the status of citizens, then as you say, citizens became the relatively privileged group.
Do the ratios of citizen to non-citizen in the city-states show the former were actually a "minority"? (I'm not sure.) But if in addition to resident slaves you add the motive for war and imperialism built into the "democratic" Graeco-Roman system, then yeah the citizens were very clearly a minority.
>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.
Modern democracy sounds similar doesn't it? Relative privilege for the citizens of rich nation-states, where the richest can't persuade their less well-off fellow citizens to toil as much as they'd like, and the harshest labor gets exported to the global south or to resident non-citizens.
Actually, it would be interesting if in some PR campaign the anti-IMF/WB movement drew some parallel between their own enslavement by "debt bondage"/democracy demands, to the democracy/anti-debt bondage movement in antiquity. The demand for democracy in the current movement is more encompassing, and at any rate this time around there are no other Others to pass on non-citizenship enslavement to.
The comparison could nicely highlight the similarity (both democracy movements started as movements by the poor) and the key difference. One more way to remind Westerners that their own triumphant democracy narrative had this exploitative underside, while casting the global south's democracy movement as more "evolved" (in every sense) than the earlier Western ones.
Maureen