Neue Debatte - Special Edition - Long Essay on Left Strategy #002 - 04/2017 | Page 16

2 On democracy
privileged land owning, aristocratic elite. The archaic tribal communi-
ty became outdated and the state emerged into history. The histori-
cal change was enormous. Land was no longer a gift of nature to be
used by the tribal community. It changed its character. In the Aegean
hemisphere it became parcelled out and allocated to individuals as
private property, which had to be marked and secured through exact
definition. Hence, for the first time in human history the early Greek
state brought forth a legal system, which made private property the
sacrosanct basis of their class society by endowing private ownership
with the perpetual, unrestricted power of disposal and control. That
is the main reason why even today the bourgeois-capitalist societies
still cherish the Greek heritage as the dawn of Western civilisation.
So let us keep in mind the lesson of history that private property not
only of land but of all social means of production (including today’s
company shares and finance and banking products) is only valid by
legal declaration that benefits a propertied elite and can thus be ad-
justed anytime by modernised, more appropriate definitions and new
statuary regulations. I will return to this when we have to reflect on
social strategies.
Democracy is a system of government in class societies. The various
formations of the early state resulted from the power balance and
the confrontations between the elites - palace, temple, aristocracy
and landlords– the first ruling classes in history. The famous Greek
polis was merely a historic peculiarity of the era of state formation.
To understand the Attic Democracy (the rule of the demos) requires a
proper sociological analysis of the early Athenian class structure in
order to clear who belonged to the demos and whom they held sway
over collectively. If you isolate the demos from the rest of society you
will never understand what democracy was about. Yanis, you should
be careful using the Attic democracy for any political reasoning and
historical parallels. Of course, it may appear pertinent to our current
situation if we get to know the demos operating internally by majori-
ty vote with officials selected by lot. Nevertheless the demos were
just some thousand, land owning and property graded free male citi-
zens, who ruled as the upper stratum over the unprivileged and de-
pendent and unfree bulk of the population.
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