Reading about the actual history and government of Sparta is a hilarious exercise in proving Marxist dialectical materialism is the superior science.
Sparta is one of the most heavily mythologized ancient civilizations. A lot of this stems from the scarcity of sources, and since the sources we do have are universally rich assholes who wanted an exclusionary oligarchy as their ideal government with contempt for the filthy hoi polloi, they are mostly biased in favor of Sparta's system.
But Sparta declined into self-destruction because of the immutable structural force of - get this - class struggle :curious-marx:
The gist is that Spartan society was a tiny minority of landed citizens (spartiates) ruling over an exponentially larger mass of non-citizens and slaves. The spartiates were privileged to the point that doing physical labor as a spartiate was viewed as contemptuous. Hence their ability to live as essentially professional warriors - the slaves did all the work.
But maintaining your class position as a spartiate required considerable expenditure - you had to participate, essentially pay significant dues, in certain institutions and maintain arms and armor for warfare.
Over time, Sparta experienced catastrophic demographic collapse. The expense of maintaining the spartiate lifestyle, intermarriage of wealthier spartiate families, and random chance of natural disasters and male inheritance meant the spartiate class shrank over time. Once you fell out the bottom of being a spartiate, Spartan society was structured as such to make it practically impossible to climb back up into it. And this demographic collapse was accelerated by a huge earthquake circa 5th century BC that killed off a shit ton of slaves, which threw tons of poorer spartiates out of the upper class because the wealthier spartiates higged the scarce labor supply. Land became more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
This is a serious problem if your landed citizens are supposed to make up the core of your army, which you need primarily to maintain your extremely cruel slave society.
Amidst this collapse, the Spartan political system was completely paralyzed to do the obvious - redistribute the freaking land to make new spartiates. This was because two its three governing institutions were controlled by the wealthiest spartiates - the two kings, and a literal council of elder citizens, who were mostly friends of one of the two kings. It was directly in the class interests of the wealthiest spartiates to never address the land problem, even if it was to the detriment of Sparta as a whole.
This system was literally impossible to reform from within its own confines. Spartan preeminence was broken forever when they were defeated disastrously at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, decimating the already-tiny spartiate numbers. King Agis IV tried to do land reform, and after being narrowly defeated in the vote his entire immediate family and allies were all killed and had their lands seized by rivals. The next king who tried to reform said to hell with this and basically had all his rivals killed or exiled and made himself a traditional Greek tyrant. But at this point it was centuries too late, Sparta had been eclipsed by Macedon in particular, who ruthlessly crushed this attempt at a Spartan revitalization.
As we enter our own American Crisis of the Third Century, keep in mind historical lessons like this on how ruling classes will in fact consciously commit suicide to maintain their immediate short-term interests at the expense of everything else. See also: ancien regime France and tsarist Russia.
it is a very interesting and obvious case of a system that was doomed to collapse in on itself over time. though, I've seen so many chuds over the years claim that women inheriting was one of the key downfalls of Sparta lmao. Spartan women were quite independent and many of them did accumulate vast estates, but their political system was just so top heavy that is was bound to have that demographic collapse regardless of if a man or a woman had that massive estate
A really interesting book that follows this line of thinking (although not re: Sparta, but instead the UK and the Dutch empire) is First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers that lays out exactly the process you've outlined here. Build off of Arrighi's The Long 20th Century but includes a lot of inter-elite conflict that leads to paralysis and collapse. As an elite class consolidates power and stops adding to its numbers, relying more on hereditary than meritocratic positions, etc etc it all goes downhill. We're in exactly that stage now. Absolutely love your characterization as the American Crisis of the Third Century, totally fits and will be stealing it thanks!
Reading about the actual history and government of Sparta is a hilarious exercise in proving Marxist dialectical materialism is the superior science.
Sparta is one of the most heavily mythologized ancient civilizations. A lot of this stems from the scarcity of sources, and since the sources we do have are universally rich assholes who wanted an exclusionary oligarchy as their ideal government with contempt for the filthy hoi polloi, they are mostly biased in favor of Sparta's system.
But Sparta declined into self-destruction because of the immutable structural force of - get this - class struggle :curious-marx:
The gist is that Spartan society was a tiny minority of landed citizens (spartiates) ruling over an exponentially larger mass of non-citizens and slaves. The spartiates were privileged to the point that doing physical labor as a spartiate was viewed as contemptuous. Hence their ability to live as essentially professional warriors - the slaves did all the work.
But maintaining your class position as a spartiate required considerable expenditure - you had to participate, essentially pay significant dues, in certain institutions and maintain arms and armor for warfare.
Over time, Sparta experienced catastrophic demographic collapse. The expense of maintaining the spartiate lifestyle, intermarriage of wealthier spartiate families, and random chance of natural disasters and male inheritance meant the spartiate class shrank over time. Once you fell out the bottom of being a spartiate, Spartan society was structured as such to make it practically impossible to climb back up into it. And this demographic collapse was accelerated by a huge earthquake circa 5th century BC that killed off a shit ton of slaves, which threw tons of poorer spartiates out of the upper class because the wealthier spartiates higged the scarce labor supply. Land became more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
This is a serious problem if your landed citizens are supposed to make up the core of your army, which you need primarily to maintain your extremely cruel slave society.
Amidst this collapse, the Spartan political system was completely paralyzed to do the obvious - redistribute the freaking land to make new spartiates. This was because two its three governing institutions were controlled by the wealthiest spartiates - the two kings, and a literal council of elder citizens, who were mostly friends of one of the two kings. It was directly in the class interests of the wealthiest spartiates to never address the land problem, even if it was to the detriment of Sparta as a whole.
This system was literally impossible to reform from within its own confines. Spartan preeminence was broken forever when they were defeated disastrously at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, decimating the already-tiny spartiate numbers. King Agis IV tried to do land reform, and after being narrowly defeated in the vote his entire immediate family and allies were all killed and had their lands seized by rivals. The next king who tried to reform said to hell with this and basically had all his rivals killed or exiled and made himself a traditional Greek tyrant. But at this point it was centuries too late, Sparta had been eclipsed by Macedon in particular, who ruthlessly crushed this attempt at a Spartan revitalization.
As we enter our own American Crisis of the Third Century, keep in mind historical lessons like this on how ruling classes will in fact consciously commit suicide to maintain their immediate short-term interests at the expense of everything else. See also: ancien regime France and tsarist Russia.
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:chavez-guns: :gun-felix: :hst-gun:
it is a very interesting and obvious case of a system that was doomed to collapse in on itself over time. though, I've seen so many chuds over the years claim that women inheriting was one of the key downfalls of Sparta lmao. Spartan women were quite independent and many of them did accumulate vast estates, but their political system was just so top heavy that is was bound to have that demographic collapse regardless of if a man or a woman had that massive estate
A really interesting book that follows this line of thinking (although not re: Sparta, but instead the UK and the Dutch empire) is First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers that lays out exactly the process you've outlined here. Build off of Arrighi's The Long 20th Century but includes a lot of inter-elite conflict that leads to paralysis and collapse. As an elite class consolidates power and stops adding to its numbers, relying more on hereditary than meritocratic positions, etc etc it all goes downhill. We're in exactly that stage now. Absolutely love your characterization as the American Crisis of the Third Century, totally fits and will be stealing it thanks!
I love you all weird nerds, please don't leave this as a forgotten comment in a thread I never read.
very cool history fact, thanks @DeathToBritain :fidel-salute-big:
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