Oligarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy: Ancient and Modern
Power to the People
[Note: an expanded version of this essay exists here]
Aristocracy and democracy have this in common: they are both expressions of human power. Oligarchy (which I take here in the sense of “rule by the wealthy”) is the reign of the abstract, of money, of exchange. The oligarch, being of an abstract essence, must simulate the humanity of some other class. In antiquity it was the aristocracy that he simulated, putting on the airs of kings and lords (which are military, and hence aristocratic functions). Today it is the working masses that he simulates.
The ancient oligarch, depending on the same mode of production as the ancient aristocrat, was a pseudo-aristocrat. The real power of the ancient world was military power. Apart from the defenses provided by either dedicated military castes (i.e. aristocrats) or armed militias, agriculturally based settlements could not defend themselves from nomadic hordes who neither cared for nor needed the agricultural mode of production in order to sustain themselves. Today, the real power is productive rather than military. Therefore, the modern oligarch, depending on the proletarian mode of production, is a pseudo-proletarian. He invests himself with an aura of “hard work”. He “hustles” for his wealth, and therefore, naturally, he also “deserves” it. Today, the wealthy even make a point of dressing down, of appearing “down to earth”.
The oligarch is a pseudo-class. His class position is based purely on formality, and a pure formality is an illusion (as opposed to a formality which, at least, represents a concrete state of affairs). This pure formality is the fiat declaration of ownership, the artificial scission of a private sphere of business from out of the sphere of public affairs. The aristocratic power was founded on an enforced monopoly over military arts and military equipment. Oligarchic power is founded on our belief that he has power. It is, in other words, a form of hypnosis. Hypnosis requires that a subject relinquish his control to the hypnotist. This does not mean that such control must be somehow wrested from the subject. The most efficient way to do this is to simply convince the subject that the hypnotist already has control. The subject, then, believing that the hypnotist already has control, relinquishes his self-control on the assumption that he does not even possesses it. A hypnotist might, for example, tell his subject to lift his arm, and then intone with an air of authority “You feel your arm beginning to grow very heavy…heavier and heavier…” and so on, in order to induce a state of hypnosis. Yet, it is perfectly natural that someone with his arm lifted up would experience heaviness. This would happen even if the hypnotist were not present. The trick lies in the subject’s becoming convinced that the hypnotist is the cause of the sensation. The moment the subject becomes convinced that the hypnotist is the cause of such a naturally occurring reaction (e.g. as heaviness in the arms or the eyelids) is the moment he relinquishes his control over to the hypnotist—because he comes to believe that the hypnotist already possesses control (as evidenced by his “ability” to cause the subject’s arm to grow heavy).
That this social class seems to possess concrete power through such instruments as the police and the military is misleading. The subservience of the police and the military to the oligarchy also demonstrates their belief in this class’s illusory power. Under a dictatorship of the proletariat, for example, police and military become the instruments for the proletariat’s subjugation of the bourgeoisie. The uses of these instruments, therefore, is not indelibly fixed. They can serve the one class or the other. Their subservience to the proletariat would constitute an acknowledgment of the concrete rootedness of proletarian power. Their subservience to the oligarchs is an expression of the reigning belief in formal illusions.
The connection of hypnosis to ancient (and still existing) religious practices (in the form of induced trance states) is interesting because it reinforces the connection of priests to monetary power which has existed since ancient times. Minting coins was often the privilege of temple priesthoods, and such coins frequently bore religious insignia. Money is simply another instrument of their “magic”, an instrument of social hypnosis. The ancient Greek term for money, “numisma”, is etymologically related to that of “custom” or “law”, “nomos”—in other words, “formality”.
In the ancient world, democracy was an option, among others, of governance, though one not frequently chosen, and, I confess, I cannot think of a single example besides the Athenian model of limited democracy. In our contemporary world, it is an entirely different matter. We do not have the same array of options which were available prior to capitalism. Our options for governance are not premised on the same bases, and much erroneous political thinking proceeds precisely on the assumption that anciently passed models can be reproduced as “options” for us to peruse irrespective of the conditions which produced them.
Democracy is when the demos (masses) have kratos (power). Voting is a completely secondary and incidental feature. What, therefore, is the basis of democratic power, and what distinguishes between ancient and modern democracy? Furthermore, what is modern democracy?
One can think of military power in the ancient world as a sort of mediator between two competing modes of production—the agricultural and the pastoral, with the pastoral constituting a more “purely militaristic” mode. With neither mode of production carrying decisive force, “on its own”, so to speak, the military power, as the common thread between them, proved the most decisive factor. Even the main basis of democratic governance in ancient times, according to Aristotle, was the military power of the navy, which required large numbers of people, that is, of the demos, in order to maintain itself. Athenian military supremacy needed the masses, and therefore the levers of power largely fell into their hands. There were many people who did not count toward the determination of this mass, however, such as women and slaves.
If aristocracy is equated to military power then the modern military can be seen as a displaced aristocracy, an aristocracy deprived of rule. In theory, then, might they not be able to reassert themselves as a ruling class? The ability of non-professional forces to frustrate professional ones in modern times (e.g. as in Vietnam), for one, suggests otherwise. For another, an aristocracy, under the modern mode of production, cannot maintain itself autonomously as a class, whereas, in the ancient and medieval worlds, nomadic peoples could be taken as an instance of “pure aristocracy”, not dependent on the agricultural mode of production and therefore both the chief threat to it and its chief recourse for defense. That is, it was the military power which furnished the chief defense of agricultural settlements, of which nomads are an instance. Incidentally, settled aristocracies were not infrequently drawn from the descendants of conquering nomads.
One decisive factor here is that military equipment, today, is produced by the proletariat, whereas, prior to the industrial revolution, it was mostly the prerogative of a class of people author Yuri Selzkine calls “the mercurians”, such as blacksmiths, a non-autonomous “service-class” dependent on the major centers of production. The military profession, recall, was at least, “in principle”, able to maintain itself autonomously through nomadic pastoralism. With the production of military equipment falling out of the hands of the totally dependent class of “mercurians”, and into the concretely independent (though, presently subjugated) class of the proletariat, the balance of power between aristocracy and the demos has fundamentally shifted. That is, it has shifted in theory. To actualize that shift is the work of revolutionary struggle.
Modern democracy, concretely, must mean public ownership of the major means of production. This is an actual, concrete expression of popular power, just as in the ancient world the participation of the “masses” in the Athenian navy was an expression of concrete popular power. A vote is an expression of formal, not actual, power, both in the ancient case and in the modern one. Naturally, to be fully democratic, both the formal and the actual are necessary, but a formal expression of power which is not founded on an actual basis (in the one case military, and in the other productive) is no power at all, but illusion. Modern democracy, therefore, is necessarily socialist. That which passes itself off as “democracy”, today, is really the purely formal disguise of oligarchy.
The “divine right of kings”, too, passed, as society developed, from a concrete mode to a purely formal one. The original divine insignia of his right to rule was the might of his rule. The force of his arms was the very the sign of God’s pleasure in his earthly dominion. As society came less and less to depend on him to provide its for its defenses, that right retreated behind a veil of pure formality. His right to rule no longer stemmed from the God-given charismata of valor and strength, but from a God-given fiat—the aristocrat rules “because God says so”. He, thus, increasingly came to resemble the priesthood, whose authority similarly stemmed from divine fiat. This is rather intriguing given the “proto-bourgeois” roots of the priesthood as the imprimaturs of coinage.
If illusions, therefore, are to reign, then who can compete with the oligarch? Neither the decadent aristocrat divorced from his former strength, nor the priest divorced from his former monetary jurisdiction, can compete here. Their illusions are sterile. The illusions of the oligarch are fertile. The power of the oligarchy is an illusion which is productive of other illusions. The oligarch is a proletarian of mirages, the worker of a dream factory. His power rests on the illusion of a fiat declaration of ownership, and in order to maintain that power he must constantly produce new illusions: the illusion of the voting process, the profusion of illusory words and concepts—a “democracy” which is not democratic, “liberty” which is a servitude to his class, “philanthropy” which is the distribution of crumbs from a stolen pie. In the land of dreams the dreamer is king, and the oligarch is the dreamer. It is his dream. It is a dream from which even he could not wake himself up if he wanted to (and why would he, since it is so pleasant for him?). The task of awakening belongs to one class alone, the revolutionary class, the class of “democracy” in the strict sense of the term: the proletariat.