Monday, 8th August, 1960

MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

I am about to speak on a subject which is as difficult as it is possible to be, particularly to be treated in a series of public lectures. Nevertheless, when the subject was first broached to me, I welcomed it, because whatever the difficulties — and those you will share with me, to some degree — the West Indies are, in the near future, going to enter into the great big world outside as an independent force. Despite the difficulties in the way, I think we should not miss any opportunity to investigate, from every possible point of view, the realities and probabilities of the world of which we shall soon be a constituent part. It is with that in view that I shall speak this evening and in the rest of the lectures.

I will not disguise from you that I have a particular point of view. I am a Marxist. However, my Marxism — there are always different styles of any particular doctrine that is so widespread as Marxism is — my Marxism has little connection with the Marxism that people in Communist China and Communist Russia and various other territories profess. That you will see as I develop my ideas. But I want to make something quite clear: I am not here in order to propagandize you, that is to say, to make you accept or believe certain ideas. I am not here to agitate you, that is to say, to get you to take certain actions. I am speaking here from the point of view of exposition; I am explaining a point of view. It is inevitable, where serious matters as these are concerned, that I shall speak about people and things to whom I am opposed, if not with too much energy — I shall try to restrain that — but certainly with a certain amount of scorn and contempt which they, in their turn, in my position, would not hesitate to apply to me. (laughter) But inasmuch as this is a series of lectures — and it is knowledge rather than action which guides this forum here — I propose as far as possible (and some of the points on which I shall take a position are very difficult indeed, and I am aware of the strength of the opposing arguments), I shall try for the sake of a rounded position to let you know what are the solid arguments against the views that I am putting forward.

I do not propose to be impartial. Any public lecturer on politics who says he is impartial is either an idiot or a traitor. You cannot be impartial in matters of this kind; but you can present a rounded point of view, and at question time and discussion time, I will be quite willing, not only willing, but will welcome any fairly consistent point of view which is opposed to the point of view I hold.

You will have noticed that I have got five points, more or less, in every lecture. Now every lecture is to last for about seventy-five minutes, not more, and I hope less. Five points mean at best fifteen minutes on each, fifteen minutes or a little less, because there must be a little introduction, and there must be, perhaps, a little conclusion. So when I say Point No. 1, Plato, Aristotle and the Greek City-State, it is clear that I intend no elaborate analysis either of the facts or any ideas which we can draw from them. I want to make that clear. I select the Greek City-State because I could not do without it; and I take Plato and Aristotle to make one or two references to establish certain fundamental premises; and from these premises I will draw as time goes on. But I mention these first because I say they are necessary; and secondly because after all what we are aiming at here is the expansion of ideas and the development of interest; and this will guide you to some of the things that I am saying and enable you, if you are students, either to refresh your memory, or if you are just beginning, to follow up when you leave here.

What We Owe to Ancient Greece

Now I begin with the Greek City-States. The Greek City-States were a group of states centered around the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean; they had some colonies further out, but those are not so important. The largest of them was certainly Athens; and the number of citizens in Athens was perhaps forty or fifty thousand. They had a number of slaves, but the legitimate citizens might be about forty or fifty thousand people. They were also quite poor; the land was not good. In an island like Barbados, I believe there is more wealth and material goods accumulated today than existed in all the Greek City-States added together. Yet these states, with Athens at the head, formed, in my opinion, the most remarkable of all the various civilizations of which we have record in history, including our own. In politics, in ethics, in science, in philosophy, in epic poetry, in tragic drama, in comic drama, in sculpture, in medicine, in science, they laid the foundations of Western civilization. And it is not only that we today rest upon their achievements. It is far more wonderful than that. If today you want to study politics, it is not because Aristotle and Plato began the great discussion, not at all; in order to tackle politics today, fundamentally, you have to read them for the questions that they pose and the way that they pose them; they are not superseded at all.

Now what were the reasons for the strength of this remarkable exhibition of civic, social and political organization? These questions are still disputed. I can select only two. They are, for me, the most important, and also they are the most important for this series of lectures. The first is that in the great days of the City-State of Athens in particular, the Athenians rejected representative government and followed a pattern of direct democracy.

I am going to make this as vivid as possible.

How Direct Democracy Worked

Athens was divided into ten tribes or divisions, and every month they selected by lot a certain number of men from each division. (You put names in a hat and pull them out. I don't know the particular method by which they chose.) And these went into the government offices and governed the state for that month. They required two things of him: (1) that he had fought in the wars; and (2) that he had paid his taxes; also, I think, that his family, his old parents were properly seen after. They did not ask whether you could read or you could write. I would suspect that a great number of them were illiterate. At the end of that period they went out and another set came in, chosen in the same way. It wasn't that they didn't know about representative government; they had had representative government and they rejected it in favor of this system of direct democracy. Now if you went — I will not be local — but if you went to some foreign country and told the leaders there, the mayor and councilors, that their city could be governed by just taking any thirty people, by putting names in a hat and choosing these, our modern rulers would fall apart. They would consider that that was absolutely impossible, if they were not students; if they were, they would be a little bit more careful because they would have the Greeks in their minds; and I believe they would be quite right. I doubt if you could take thirty or forty people today from anywhere and put them into some government, however small it might be, and ask them to run it. It is not because government is so difficult. The idea that a little municipality, as we have them all over the world today, would have more difficult and complex problems than the city of Athens is quite absurd....