01: A Democracy of Slaveowners

from Section ONE: Pieces of Slave in How to Dismantle an Empire

In this video, I read the first chapter of my book How to Dismantle an Empire in front of my newly-dubbed Doc Malik wall. I painted it—in four metallics—while listening to his warm and engaging interview of James Blott (a new subscriber!) and two of his supporters. These are ordinary people showing the best of humanity.

Ahmad is planning an interview of me in the new year, if I don’t scare him off by challenging the views of his guests, one of whom didn’t respond well. I hope he presents me as Extra Ordinary—two words, which is how I see myself. I’m a nobody and nobody is perfect. Ahmad quotes me saying I’m just a housewife. That means that anything I can do, you can do better. Together we’re going to figure out these psyops. Starting with Chapter One: A Democracy of Slaveowners.

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Humanity is divided into two: 
the masters and the slaves; 
or, if one prefers it, 
the Greeks and the Barbarians, 
those who have the right 
to command; and those 
who are born to obey.

—ARISTOTLE, POLITICS

But ye who have store of good, 
who are sated and overflow, 
Restrain your swelling soul, 
and still it and keep it low:
Let the heart that is great 
within you be trained 
a lowlier way; Ye shall not 
have all at your will, 
and we will not for ever obey.

—SOLON

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A Democracy of Slaveowners

A cornerstone of the American myth is that civilization has been a natural progression culminating in Western democracy. Every schoolchild is taught that the principles of good governance began with our intellectual ancestors in Greece, were refined by our revolutionary ancestors in Western Europe, and reached their apex through the Founders of the American Constitution. All that's needed is for us to be true to their intent, a model of wisdom from which we've strayed.

I examine the first two tenets in this section, "Pieces of Slave," and continue to the third in the next section, "Two Ways to Make a Slave." My argument, and it's up to the reader to decide if I make it credibly, is that all of these democratic governments were built by slave economies. Moreover, rather than being a corruption of its purpose, democracy was invented in order to quell rebellion and perpetuate slavery. It induced the middle class to identify with the wealthy and compete to serve their interests, rather than identify with the producers of the wealth, who were fighting for land rights.

In “The Democratic Roots of Athenian Imperialism in Fifth Century BC,” Timothy Galpin writes:

Although the primary values of Athenian democracy ... all imply political freedom and equality before the law, the Athenians willingly acquired an empire in which the subjects faced both limited political freedom and inequality before the law. There was, of course, some controversy in the Athenian political arena over imperialistic policies, and even over democracy itself, but there seems to have been a strong consensus supporting both. Despite this apparent contradiction between empire and democracy, the Athenian ethical system did not preclude rule over others; rather, the ‘radical’ democracy of Athens during the fifth century BC required imperialism for both ideological fulfillment and the establishment of certain characteristic institutions. Indeed, for the Athenians, the imperial precept of rule over others actually derived from the principles of freedom and quality.

To see how this worked, let's imagine a scene from the famous Ecclesia in Athens, the voting assembly where matters of state were settled.

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a democratic empire

After the philosophers finished debating the virtues of democracy, slaves mopped the floor and emptied the chamberpots. The granaries of the attending landlords, whose surplus qualified them to be in the assembly, were filled by their tenant farmers. The wives of the farmers prepared the feasts that their daughters served at patrician tables. Meanwhile, their sons were off fighting in "barbarian" lands that became export colonies, supplying the rulers with raw materials, paid tribute, and captive labor. This is what enabled the life of leisure that made one worthy to argue the most civilized form of self-governance.

Looking back on Greek democracy, no one who participated in the forum could have survived a week, much less a winter, without the farmers, servants, slaves, and women who provided his material support. This self-governance without self-reliance was a sham, a handful of consumers propped up by a pyramid of producers. The imperial system weakened the capacity of citizens to provide for themselves, since they couldn't compete with slave labor in the market. Within the empire’s reach, the greater a community's capacity to sustain themselves, the less likely they were to have the freedom. From its very origin, democracy was backed by stolen labor, stolen language, and stolen land.

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the cradle of capitocracy

In the 6th-century BCE an Athenian statesman named Solon laid the foundation for a combination of democracy and empire. The Athenian Constitution states that at that time:

...there was conflict between the nobles and the common people for an extended period. For the constitution they were under was oligarchic in every respect and especially in that the poor, along with their wives and children, were in slavery to the rich. ... All the land was in the hands of a few. And if men did not pay their rents, they themselves and their children were liable to be seized as slaves. The security for all loans was the debtor's person up to the time of Solon. He was the first people's champion.

Ancient Athens was ruled by nine archons chosen by the Areopagus, made up of retired archons. Those eligible for office had to be of noble birth and wealth, as measured in weights of precious metal. A talent of silver, weighing 57 pounds, was equivalent to nine man-years of skilled labor. There was no coinage of small quantities of metal so ordinary debts were measured in labor or grain.

A boundary marker called a horos indicated that the smallholder farmer was a hektamoroi who owed a sixth of his farm’s expected yield, often for protection or a loan. Failure to pay could result in enslavement of the debtor and his family. The majority of the population consisted of laborers with no land and slaves who owned neither land nor their own labor.

Among the slaves, some were dispossessed Greeks while others were barbarians. The word barbarian comes from the onomatopoetic Greek term for babbling, and all those who were not native Greek-speakers or who spoke the language with an accent were termed barbarians.

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the hypocrisy of democracy

Alarmed by the conflict, the Areopagus appointed Solon as archon and mediator, based on a poem he had written in which he had presented the case for both sides. He was of noble birth but middle income, which forced him to be a merchant rather than an aristocratic landowner.

First he lowered the requirements for entrance into the privileged classes, based on the applicant’s ability to arm himself militarily. The required wealth, measured in barleycorn, was 6000 gallons a year for a military general or strategoi, 3600 for the cavalry or hippeis, and 2400 for the infantry or hoplite. The majority, who had far less than this, were called thetes and were excluded from public office or debate.

In his economic reforms, Solon required every son to either be taught a trade or be released from the obligation to support his parents in old age. He offered citizenship to foreign tradesmen if they settled their families in Athens. And he sanctioned the cultivation of olives, which took six years to bear fruit after planting, while prohibiting all other food exports. But most importantly, Solon erased all debt including the horos that marked indebted farms, and repatriated the citizens who had been sold into slavery.

Little is known with certainty from the scarce records of the 6th-century BCE, but some things can be extrapolated. The hektamoroi, or small farmers, would have depended on landless laborers to cultivate their fields, making them reluctant to give their labor-force land of their own to farm. They would have been sympathetic to other Greek citizens enslaved for unpaid debts, from whom they were one step removed. But barbarian slaves and women would be beneath their notice or concern.

So the uprising led by the hektamoroi would have skipped over the pivotal issue of land redistribution and use of the commons in its demands, lest every able-bodied laborer start working for themselves. They would find common cause with enslaved Greeks and desire the removal of the horos that threatened their own enslavement through land debts. Their revolution would notably stop short of including the landless, the women, the slaves, and the colonized.

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quality over equality

By not reforming land monopoly, Solon's lasting change was to allow mobility for the middle class based on wealth rather than birth. Prior to Solon, only noble blood and ownership of land established one’s social ranking. Now the hektamoroi had a path to the privileged classes by using their surplus grain (grown and harvested by landless laborers and slaves) to equip their sons for the military. This military would be used to crush future rebellions within Greece or in the barbarian colonies.

The thetes understood that land was the key to owning the product of their own labor, and they were close enough to overthrowing the old order to make the archons nervous. But Solon’s reforms introduced a new temptation to small farmers—they too could have a share of reaping what they did not sow. Instead of doing manual labor themselves, their sons could step onto the lowest rung of the hierarchy and work their way up. Why revolt in order to sweat like slaves and thetes? Through this device the middle class was co-opted, tipping the balance of power back to the archons.

Solon also granted citizenship to the foreign merchants, who were rich barbarians, and made the sons of farmers learn a trade—establishing a capitalist order rather than agrarian. By taking youth off the farm and sending them into town, they would come to regard fieldwork as beneath them. The monoculture export of olive production replaced grain crops and appropriated the "wastelands," which were the only common lands that thetes were allowed to use.

Solon didn’t flatten the pyramid of slavery, he simply added more layers to make it possible to step from one to the other, becoming a little bit more master and little bit less slave. The result was a democracy through capital, or what might be called a capitocracy: the voice one had in government was in proportion to one's possession of a surplus wealth created by someone else. The higher a person was in the pyramid, the more people they were able to command to create the requisite 2400, 3600, or 6000 gallons of barleycorn.

History gives the impression that the citizens of Athens had a high quality of life, which is corroborated by their architecture, aqueducts, and epic sagas. To the extent that was true, it was largely because Athens’s barbarian colonies were supplying them with labor and grains. Quality, in other words, took precedence over equality. Leisure time and freedom from manual labor were the prerequisites for a cultured life, which meant that the lofty flag of democracy was rooted in the soil of colonization.

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the hypocritic oath

In summary, Greek democracy was a pretty word laid over systemic violence. When debt and slavery had reached a boiling point and commoners threatened to unite, this was a concession that divided farmers against the landless, soldiers against the colonized, and citizens against the enslaved.

It didn’t have to be this way. The hektamoroi might have created a human economy of subsistence farms, each trading their surplus and specialty crops with neighbors and foreigners alike. Instead they joined with the archons in a commercial economy that intensified the ordinary violence of withholding access to land and the extraordinary violence of using people as a trade commodity.

The word democracy comes from demos or common people and kratos, rule or strength. The Greek “democracy,” however, was not the strength of the common people but a way to divide and weaken them through competition with one another. In Gnostic theology, the archons are the false rulers who have usurped the power of God. Hierarchy is the inheritance order of the archons who rule over everyone beneath them. And anarchy is self-rule—an- meaning without archons—rather than the violence and chaos with which it's been associated.

But the hierarchy, with whom the hektamoroi sided, turned out to be the most violent of all. If the smallholders had sided with the landless, the slaves, the women, and the barbarians, they could have collapsed the hierarchy and let each person be master of themselves. Instead they chose to become masters over others. And coinage would soon calibrate exactly where one stood in this pyramid.

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CHAPTER 1 EXERCISES

The text builds its system of thinking by challenging paradigms. Using examples from the book, or from your own research, logic and experience, comment on the following:

Paradigm Shift #1

Democracy was invented, not for rule by the people, but to preserve the class structure by allowing social mobility based on accumulated wealth rather than inherited wealth only. Those who produce the wealth, or whose labor backs the wealth, are often excluded from participation.

LEXICON

Explain how each of the following concepts affects the dialogue around a social problem. Is there another word or phrase that describes the concept today? If not, how does the absence of a way to express this concept affect potential solutions?

archons: the rulers over the voting assembly of those who owned others through land and resource monopolies, backed by the legalized social violence of police and prisons.

horos: a boundary marker that indicated conditional tenancy based on debt. It assumed the nobles to be the default owners and natural lords of the land.

hierarchy: in etymology, the status of archons (-archy) by which they were heirs (hier-) to the power to write the rules by which the society was governed.

anarchy: direct democracy where the rules that govern a society are written by the people governed; maximizes self-determination at the lowest level possible in anything that doesn't take away the same right from others.

democracy by proxy: rule by appointed or elected leaders who write the laws, including over those where violence was used or continues to be used to make them subject to the laws, perpetuating a class structure.

capitocracy: a proxy-democracy based on capital accumulation, in which money, symbolizing ownership of land and labor, replaces inherited titles in determining the hierarchy of who gets to write the rules by which a society is governed.

capitalism: an economic and political system that concentrates ownership of land and labor (symbolized by money) in the hands of fewer and fewer people through the rules written by those who already had usurped the most wealth from the people—the capitocracy.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:

Is there any way in which democracy can be compatible with empire or are rule over oneself and rule over others mutually exclusive concepts? In your opinion, what is the size at which self-governance works the best—hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or over a billion people? Which is more important, do you think, size of self-governance or form of government? Are there forms of government that work better at smaller or larger sizes?

Is the US a capitocracy? How does money determine power? The literal meaning of privilege is a private law written for an individual, generally the king or liege (a word that originated as the leader of a band of free men, ironically). Who are the true lords of the land today, who have the exclusive privilege to collect debts against property they don’t own? (Hint: not the landlords.)

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Shoshana is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and has been called the Karl Marx of our era. In Russell Brand's Under the Skin interview, she debates whether "a spiritual solution under autocracy is a fringe thing, full of despair that can't be realized", and only democracy can save us. Russell states that incremental reformism is an insipid milksop inoculating against real change. I explain why Russell is right and Shoshana is wrong, along with looking at the politics of narcissism and what a Marxism for our era would look like.

On James Corbett's Solutions Watch, he interviews Keith Knightly (author of The Voluntaryist Handbook) and Larkin Rose (Jones Plantation & The Most Dangerous Superstition). They respond to the feasibility of anarchy. I give my answers from my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. I compare the policies of Terezania to Corbettville, Knightopia and Roseopolis.

In the comment thread, Julius Skoolafish quoted that “The word ‘freedom’ in the West has been butchered to the point where it now almost means the opposite of what it originally was meant to be.” I responded:

Check this out, Julius, you inspired me to look at the etymology: https://www.etymonline.com/word/freedom. The word can only be defined in opposition: to slavery, to bondage, to obstruction, of constraints. Free derives from pri- which is to love, to take to wife, members of a clan, children of the same family. -dom is related to doom as a statute, judgment, jurisdiction.

In other words, freedom has no meaning without the context of slavery. A free woman is one you can't rape, which was the origin of the veil to mark a woman as someone's property. Women who wore a veil without being 'free'/owned could be stoned to death—unveiled women were free to take. As free trade means free2raid.

A friend, from the same root as free and loved, couldn't be treated like a slave, unlike the rest. It was a legal status that exempted certain people—and perhaps only nobles—from what was the norm, which was enforced servitude.

So those who talk about freedom are unconsciously reinforcing the status quo of slavery, and claiming an exception. Whoa. The trickery of word spelling continues.