The anti-imperialism of fools

[Maureen Anderson]

Tahir:
>  The democracy 'movement' in ancient times was in my understanding a 
>movement of the relatively privileged, those who were citizens (a 
>minority).

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