The Interventionist History of Ancient Athens Shows the Inaccuracy of a Famous Lenin Quote
Every so often on the political side of the internet, one may come across a quote on a meme from Vladimir Lenin claiming that: “Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.” This quote comes from Chapter Five of his 1917 book The State and Revolution. It is clear what Lenin and the people sharing this quote in agreement are trying to say: that in the market economy, as in Greek city-states, governments never look out for the interests of everyday people, but rather those of the rich, whether they be people voluntarily providing employment to people in mutually beneficial exchanges or people violently holding others in bondage and forcing them to labor for the gain of their captors. Putting aside the monumentally offensive comparison of chattel slavery and agreeing to exchange labor for money, as well as the absurd claim that there is just as much freedom for the average person in both economic arrangements, an overlooked problem with this quote is that it ignores the interventionist economic history of ancient Greek city-states, such as Athens and thus undermines its own premise.
Contra Lenin (or whoever wrote this quote), ancient Greek republics did not just let everyone who was not a slaveowner simply fend for themselves. Quite the contrary. In the food trade at least, the ancient Athenian government acted in a very similar manner that Lenin’s creation of the Soviet Union millenia later would. As Robert L. Schuettinger and Eamonn F. Butler explain in their classic Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation, Athens encountered frequent problems with grain shortages and relied on imports for at least half of it as a result. Rather than let the prices ebb and flow with supply and demand, the Athenian politicians decided to look out for the common people in much the same way that Lenin himself would have doubtless have viewed himself to be doing with his October Revolution. What did this concern for the common good look like? Why, it involved employing an army of grain inspectors, known as the Sitophylakes, whose whole job was to dictate what prices should be and make sure they were, as Artistole put it, a “just price”. This giant bureaucracy was placed in charge of dictating prices not just for grain merchants at markets, but also for millers and bakers. For bakers, the weight of the bread had to be deemed sufficient as well. This hardly sounds like a government concerned only with the wellbeing of slave owners. It sounds like one infected with what Friedrich Hayek would later deem “fatal conceit”. That is to say politicians and bureaucrats thought they had the wisdom to just set prices. It is not hard to predict what the results of this were: abject failure.
Black markets formed despite the penalty of death in the midst of Lenin’s War Communism and they formed under the same circumstances in ancient Athens. Central planners in ancient Athens found their controls nearly impossible to enforce. Economic history has shown that if there is a demand for something, somebody will be willing to supply, legal consequences be damned. The sheer frustration that this caused for Athenian statesmen can be found during the trial of a merchant caught selling grain above the fixed price. Lysias publicly stated: “And consider that in consequence of this vocation, very many have already stood trial for their lives; and so great are the emoluments which they are able to derive from it that they prefer to risk their life every day, rather than cease to draw from you, the public, their improper profits.... If then, you shall condemn them, you shall act justly and you will buy grain cheaper; otherwise, the price will be much more.” So, in this diatribe, we can see two of the complaints against markets that economic illiterates like Lenin would likely agree with all those years later: that profits could somehow be “improper” and that all one has to do to have lower prices is have the government dictate what the prices will be. In reality, if profits were not “improper” and prices were not too high, the Athenians would have destroyed any incentive for anyone to go into the grain trade in the first place and the grain shortages would have only gotten worse. It seems the phenomena of politicians not understanding how supply and demand works is far from a new one.
So, did the Athenians of the five century B.C. learn their lesson and allow for an ancient equivalent of Lenin’s New Economic Policy wherein private property and capitalism would be respected? Of course not. Instead, the Sitophylakes bureaucrats were themselves liable to be executed when their fruitless exercise in controlling prices failed. One cannot help but be reminded of Stalin’s executions of government members who went against his plans for an omnipotent government. Despite terrorizing both the merchants and the bureaucrats and making them both liable for execution if results did not go as planned and thus discouraging people from going into either career path, ancient Athens was still never able to stop the black-market price of grain from coming down to the supply and demand of the product.
Ironically enough, history was not being progressed with Lenin’s October Revolution, but rather regressed. However autocratic Tsarist Russia was, they did not attempt to dictate prices for food staples with zealous fanaticism, as ancient Athens did. Rather, with the exception of the New Economic Policy, that was to be the policy of Lenin’s creation of the Soviet Union and most socialist states that came after it. The government would decide what prices were to be and harshly punish anyone trying to sell on the black market. Whatever else could be said about capitalist societies, it seems that “freedom for slave owners” was more a thing to be found in slave and socialist societies. Only capitalist societies seemed to grant the freedom to buy and sell at prices deemed mutually acceptable. One wishes the people sharing this blithe Lenin quote knew any of this, but this is to be expected by people who take Lenin seriously despite it being past 1989.
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