It is a good manner, my parents told me, to show reverence to everyone, but a little more to someone who earns a living through manual labor. They called them blue collared workers, as opposed to educated or better educated white collared workers. While the origins of these terms do not happen to date back to 600 BC, readings on ancient Athens suggest that the factor that divided Athens’ society into two major groups, slaves and free men, was the nature of the tasks that they performed. In particular Osborne and Hornblower base their analysis on the nature of the work done by free men and slaves, no doubt in different terms. Osborne talks of how slavery and the manual labor of slaves “enabled the fiction of citizen equality (for free men) to be maintained”[1], while Hornblower gives the credit of “active political life” and “eventually democracy”[2] to possession of slaves, a group or class of people who did the manual labor. Osborne clarifies his position by admitting that what slavery enabled in Athens was “not democracy” but a “homogenous body of men, none of whom were subject to constraints imposed by other individuals”[3]. But if I have understood Hornblower right, he means to say that slavery was a condition for democracy to flourish in Athens and if I may deduce so, if it was not for slavery, the origins of democracy, would have not dated back to ancient Athens as commonly perceived.
I see the connection. However, I don’t agree with drawing a connection of this nature between slavery and democracy, basically due to the implications that it could have for some countries like Afghanistan where people love to follow precedents. The fact that slavery was the socio economic foundation of those times when people’s rule was taking shape in Athens does not mean that slavery was a necessary condition for the growth of democracy. No matter how poles apart in practice due to different circumstantial reasons, but apparently and by definition, democracy meant rule of people, while slavery as a system is based on economic exploitation of one group by another to start with. Yes, slavery can lead to a system of government based on political exploitation of a majority by a minority in possession of Godly powers, inherited dominance or wealth, but then is that a democratic form of government? If approached from the point of view of economic infrastructure being the basis to superstructures such as political system or culture, etc. slavery as a form of economic exploitation can only lead to political exploitation, not democracy. One could blame slavery, as a system based on exploitation for lack of equal political rights or rule of people in true sense, but one may not term slavery as a condition useful for growth of democracy as we tend to define it.
I might seem to be following Derrida and his strategy of careful textual analysis, but I am basically concerned with what it may mean to the citizens of countries at their early stages of political development towards a democracy that on one hand should have Dahl’s six characteristics or even go beyond that, but where on the other a majority does manual labor and a minority manages to get higher education and thus be politically active. So I am basically concerned with how such an argument would be perceived and what would be the implications in my country for instance, where majority history text books consider ancient Athens as the origin of democracy, and where the general tendency is to follow set patterns and precedents instead of developing an independent situational analysis to figure out the starting point. I do not say that societies may revert back to slavery as a system, but a bleak picture of a society where an educated powerful minority class or group lives and prospers at the cost of an uneducated or less educated majority involved in manual labor is possible to draw. Of course, one could argue that perhaps there is need for nations of this sort to attempt at changing their ways of doing things, especially since having over 70% of population under the age of 25[4] means a new generation of leaders in a couple of years, but this will not change the fact that the situation could be worse depending on the nature of intellectual nourishment or food for thought that they receive. This has to change, even if this is a pattern in today’s well developed democracies such as the US, where according to Osborne the growth of democracy for some has been and continues to be at the cost of exploitation of Negros and immigrant laborers respectively[5].
[1] Robin Osborne, The Economics and Politics of Slavery at Athens, p. 38
[2] Simon Hornblower, The Creation and Development of Democratic Institutions in Ancient Greece, p. 4
[3] Robin Osborne, The Economics and Politics of Slavery at Athens, p. 38
[4] UNDP/ Afghanistan National Joint Youth Programme Annual Report 2007, Kabul: UNDP/ JNYP, 2007
[5] Robin Osborne, The Economics and Politics of Slavery at Athens, p. 38