No. We’re not supposed to believe that. Making group decisions isn’t the same as codifying the mechanisms into a well defined form of state.
At least according to an anarchist like Graeber, the state is just a way to take power out of the hands of the people and put it into the hands of the few. It’s a way to ensure that only certain people have the right to speak, and that the state has the exclusive right to use violence. Calling the Athenian state the ‘origin’ of democracy is just a way to ignore the thousands of years humans spent successfully governing themselves without a specialized class of rulers.
People did that before Athens too. Read “the dawn of everything”
The Greeks invented a form of democracy that they could rationalize co-existing with slavery. That’s what the Founders venerated. That’s what they emulated. That’s the model of government we have inherited.
not only slavery but patriarchy too. Women too were excluded
I don’t think that was a Greek invention either. I’d imagine men have been telling women that only men get to make the big decisions for as long as language has existed.
The Greeks invented a form of democracy that they could rationalize co-existing with slavery.
“patriarchy too” was for the second part ☞
❎ the Greeks invented patriarchy
✅ they could rationalize co-existing with patriarchy
Also the part where they’re definitely not gay but definitely fucking boys.
The joke of the Bronze Age Mediterranean civilization was that being around girls in any capacity was what made you “gay”.
I think there’s even some ancient literature making fun of a famous Greek orator for kissing his wife.
You have to wonder where on the evolutionary tree you atop describing our descendants as female and start describing them as women. Makes you think.
No idea why your comment made me think of that, but there we are
More of an etymological tree than an evolutionary one.
Ah that makes sense, only rich people could vote in Greece, and that’s how democracy was reborn anyways.
The definition of “everyone has a say” gets a bit sketchy when you think about it.
In a democracy, everyone has a say! Until the majority decides they don’t!
Everyone has a say, but my say if dwarfed when Shell or Aramco steps in the same room. They are the majority.
Democracy
Athens
gather all members of their community
Actually the funny bit with “Democracy” in Ancient Athens it that it was only men and only citizens (so, not slaves), a group which wasn’t even “most members of their community”, much less all of them.
I bet whatever tribes that did it well before Athens were a lot more “Democratic”.
I guess any ruling class considers itself democratic, since everyone that doesnt get a say are also not considered actual people.
I think this is from Graeber’s essay “There Never was a West”, and he does such a good job assaulting the idea that there is some coherent vision of what “The West” is in comparison to everyone else.
The underlying thread in all of his anthropological anarchism is that there are a thousand ways cultures have made (and thus we could make) society work, we just have to decide to change. If this sounds obvious to you, that’s good - because it doesn’t sound obvious to the horde of people clinging to capitalism as if divine market forces are sacrosanct and all human suffering derived from it is inevitable.
It’s either from that essay or from his book “The Dawn of Everything”, absolute banger
Quite a few enlightenment thinkers were inspired by contact with indigineous peoples in the Americas where certain democratic frameworks existed.
Several different parts of the world had various democratic frameworks throughout history including in South and West Asia, Africa, and certain indigenous groups in the Americas.
The Eurocentric narrative persists though, but perhaps for not much longer.
This quote in OPs image is by the late anthropologist who cowrote the Dawn of Everything which explores global civilizational history further.
This book is so goated I recommend it to anyone especially if you haven’t cared for anthropology so far.
I’ve always looked at it as they defined Democracy rather than made it.
Maybe also the first to set down formal rules. Getting the boys together to make a decision is one thing. A rule that everybody has an equal say, and that it’s 50%+1 for a decision to be made is different. Also, rules about when people are allowed to vote, if they’re allowed to re-vote, what things require a 2/3s margin vs. just a majority. Even things like if you’re allowed to sell your vote, if you’re allowed to make a speech before you vote, if you’re allowed to wait to see how other people vote before you vote… There are a lot of things we take for granted about how the process works.
The way i remember it being thought in school, it seemed to imply that they created the fenomena of “people ruling”, that it didnt exist before them. If you went into more depth into the question, you would get to this reduced thesis that they only defined a system that was supposedly democratic. But most kids wont pay close attention, and this euro-centric propagada succeeds in forming their worldview.
yep, they sure defined it. democracy is when a small fraction of the men get to make decisions for everyone, including the women, the poors and the slaves.
it clicks nicely with our modern western concept of democracy.
No, that’s not what it means. Next
I think the emphasis here should be on “gave everyone equal say”. That is still not the case today. Consider that children, foreigners, and some mentally ill cannot vote.
Until a few decades ago it was also customary that women can’t vote.
I think it’s not a difficult concept to come up with to collect all the people you know in a group and make decisions that way. Lots of societies historically did it that way. I’m pretty sure the germans had their Thing which is just a general assembly for general purposes (including making law). The main difference is that they only included people in the decision-making process who they thought were able to make good, meaningful decisions. Meanwhile today we include everyone in the process.
Meanwhile today we include everyone in the process.
Sometimes. It depends on if the vote is for something in particular, or if it’s a vote for someone to act as a representative. The first is more democratic, the latter is less so, especially if that person ends up not actually representing well.
Then there is the issue of whether or not “everyone” is truly included in either of these.
some mentally ill cannot vote.
And some people with multiple personalities are only allowed to vote once, not once per voice living in their head.
It’s probably a good idea to not allow absolutely everybody to have a say. It may not even be the best idea to give everybody an equal say.
Yeh but not with equally weights.
Whatever country you are, you get half candidates saying they’re right wing and half saying left wing, when in fact they’re all friends with themselves and underlings to capital and lobbying.
The kind of people who always gets what they want out of elections is corporations, because they bet on both sides.
I think it was more of the realization and actually labeling it as a practice. Naming things only come after people go (we should give this thing we are doing a name)
Yeah, classics is taught in a super fascistic way at most levels of study. Many modern classicists/historians are trying super hard to push back on this narrative but it’s not going to be easy to convince people that a many thousand year old narrative is “wrong”. That said, I will point out that Athenian Democracy is a pretty interesting innovation in it’s own right and it shouldn’t be (overly) demonized for it’s absurd contradictions (UnderpantsWeevil’s comment kinda highlights the biggest ). It’s main significance lies in how it involved people directly into “politics” and how that change in conception of “Polis”, and what it represented, changes things downstream of Athens in the historical context.
a many thousand year old narrative
Wait, you first called it fascistic and now it’s many thousand years old? How old do you think fascism is and do you think that Ancient Athens was already white supremacist?
Alright fine, proto-fascistic, or you could argue that it’s been so fully incorporated into the fascist mythology that it’s effectively a part of it. It’s not as if fascism arose from the aether. Also while I wouldn’t call your average member of the athenian polis “white” supremacist, they were absolutely supremacists.
fully incorporated into the fascist mythology
True, fascist mythology is to a big degree about projecting a golden thread through history. The Germanic people for example do not have a coherent history as the Nazis made it look like. By saying that the narrative is thousands of years old, you imply that western history really is as coherent as fascists make it look like; that European or White identity really is an old thing.
It’s not as if fascism arose from the aether.
I’ll give you a few centuries, 5 or 6 if I’m generous, but not a millennium, much less “many thousand years”.
Also while I wouldn’t call your average member of the athenian polis “white” supremacist, they were absolutely supremacists.
Which is a very different narrative.
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say. In this context “fascistic” is a descriptive/indexical term not trying to literally say “the ideological form of facism we understand nowadays arose directly from the legal code of Solon of Athens.”.
In your first comment, you said:
but it’s not going to be easy to convince people that a many thousand year old narrative is “wrong”.
So which narrative are you referring to? Is there really a narrative that is many thousand years old? Or are you saying that the narrative is about many thousand years? Your comment reads like the idea that democracy is invented in Athens (and therefore by white Europeans) is many thousand years old which doesn’t make much sense to me.
Is there really a narrative that is many thousand years old?
Yeah I’d say the Athenian political narrative had mostly matured no later than Demosthenes. Obviously it’s been interpreated and re-interpreted, and twisted and turned into all sorts of purposes, but the broad strokes have largely been taught the same in Europe since then.
A few points:
- Call me pedantic but “many” doesn’t start before 3. It’s less than 3 millennia so it’s certainly not “many thousand years”
- Antiquity wasn’t very positively viewed in medieval Europe. It’s only since the Renaissance that ancient philosophers are rediscovered, in part this was possible because they were translated into Arabic. Otherwise, a lot would be forgotten.
- Democracy had a negative connotation throughout the ancient world and medieval times. It’s only in modern times that this shifted and in great parts due to contact with indigenous people from North America. But the US for example is rather modeled after the Roman Republic than Athenian Democracy. The Founding Fathers didn’t think well of democracy.
I recommend reading the author who’s quoted in the post. There Never Was A West is a good starting point since it’s not too long but id that doesn’t matter for you, The Dawn Of Everything is great. I think you’ll find all on theanarchistlibrary.org
He’s got a point.
I don’t have an article but the !Kung say every person is “their own headman”
