Classic antique polis: forms of appropriation and social clasters

Abstract

This article continues the series of publications on the universal evolution of the ancient civilization and its sub-civilizations and deals with the characteristics of socio-economic and social structures in a classical ancient polis, and their interrelationships and contradictions on the example of Athens. The author considers various changes in power-property relations and the role of traditional social clusters in the governing groups under the expansion of democratic institutional order and with the growing stratum of non-citizens. The defeat of dynastic proto-institutions, the competition between clanism and corporatism, the development of private property of citizens and democratic procedures promoted to the strengthening of personal and collective sub-actors in the ruling group, as well as to their consolidation in the context of strengthening of the economic positions of non-citizens. At the same time, the collision between the ruling group as a representative of the civil community in the polis and an organization relatively separated from it acquires new qualitative features, including the struggle for redistribution of the centralized surplus and necessary product between the sub-actors of the ruling group and the conversion of its parts from personal-private and corporate-clan-collective power-proprietary appropriation into various forms of private appropriation by the members of the power group. The main social clusters of the classical polis (peasants, artisans and merchants, aristocrats, non-tribal rich, hired workers, slaves, civil community) and their appropriate forms of appropriation (personal-clan, clan-private, clan- and corporate-private, private and collective-individual). Attention is focused on inter- and intra-cluster contradictions regarding the appropriation of surplus and necessary product. The author concludes about the network nature of the classic policy appropriation system and about the expediency of its further study.