In his book Aristophanic Comedy and the Challenge of Democratic Citizenship, John Zumbrunnen speculates on the relevance of Assemblywomen in contemporary discussions of economic change and redistribution. Drawing on the work of other scholars, he describes the acute differences between the Ancient Greek and modern capitalist understandings of class, and acknowledges that, due to these differences, there “can be little point in attempting to make a Marxist of Aristophanes” (Zumbrunnen 105). While this assumption is most certainly correct - after all, the nature of labor has changed drastically since 3rd century BC, so the nature of class has of course changed with it - the myriad similarities between the Aristophanic and Marxist conceptions of communist revolution deserve more attention.
At a very basic level, Karl Marx and Praxagora, Assemblywomen’s assertive heroine, have the same ultimate goal: to “establish one and the same standard of living for everyone” (Assemblywomen, lines 573-574). Their methods are also somewhat similar, involving the forfeiture and redistribution of all property. Most importantly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s communist movement, like Praxagora’s plan for a utopian Athens, both take female concerns into account and involve a major change in the status of women. The Athenian wives who populate Assemblywomen, as it turns out, actually have quite a lot in common with Marx’s proletariat.
Zumbrunnen describes the events of “recognition” (the women of Athens being recognized - or in this case misrecognized - as citizens) and “redistribution” (the actual communalization of property) as being dramatically separate in Assemblywomen, asserting that the link between the two is “pragmatic and contingent rather than inherent or necessary” (Zumbrunnen 112). In other words, there is no essential connection between the enfranchisement of women and the later economic reform.
But closer consideration makes it clear that the latter event must inevitably follow the former: as Jeffrey Henderson observes in Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women, “In classical Athens women were not legally competent either to acquire or to dispose of property, so that their proposal to do away with private property is both a logical consequence of the abolition of male rule and in their own interest” (Henderson 153). Since the wives in Assemblywomen have no private property rights and are already accustomed to sharing household items among themselves, it logically follows that, when reshaping the polis into a structure more familiar to them, they would do away with the concept of property in favor of the establishment of a communal store.
In this sense, the Athenian women’s situation is quite similar to that of Marx’s proletariat. In defending the Communist intent to abolish private property, Marx points out that, due to exploitation by the bourgeoisie, “private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population” (The Communist Manifesto 87). According to Marx, the proletariat’s labor produces only capital, not property, which remains concentrated in the hands of the elite. Doing away with private property, then, will only affect the bourgeoisie, while the proletariat will continue on much as before. Likewise, it is only the men of Athens who object to surrendering their possessions, a concept that is already intimately familiar to their wives.
The issues that the women of Athens raise with the current male leadership are also strikingly similar to those flaws Marx identifies in the bourgeoisie. Praxagora describes the Athenian assembly as “never content to do well with a tried and true method” and criticizes them for “always fiddling around with some pointless novelty” (Assemblywomen, lines 200-201). These constant innovations have contributed in part to the downfall of the city, and Praxagora reasons that women, who are more traditional in their behavior than men, will be superior leaders.
Similarly, Marx claims that “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society” (The Communist Manifesto 77). The proletariat, who has no control over the methods of production, is the one who suffers from these ceaseless upheavals, just as the women of Athens, who have no voice in the assembly, suffer as a result of their husbands’ new, ineffective ideas.
Like Aristophanes, Friedrich Engels also explicitly links the goal of economic redistribution with the enfranchisement of women. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, he compares the struggle of the proletariat to the plight of oppressed wives, claiming that “The first class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy, and the first class oppression with that of the female by the male sex,” (Engels 79). He envisions a post-revolution world in which “all the fundamental conditions of classic monogamy have been abolished,” explaining that the institutions of monogamy and male supremacy were established purely so that private property could be preserved and inherited. After the revolution, there will be no more private property, so male rule will also dissolve (86).
In Assemblywomen, Praxagora accomplishes this exact goal by doing away with the concept of the oikos. Henderson describes the Athenian household as “a mechanism for maintaining and transmitting inherited wealth within a male family line” (Henderson 153), a mechanism that has now been rendered obsolete by the removal of men from power and the communalization of property. In doing so, Praxagora eliminates all concerns about inheritance and legitimate children, anxieties that had previously placed great responsibility on women to preserve the reputation of her male guardian’s oikos. No longer confined by the strictures of monogamous, male-dominated marriage, the women of Athens are now free to assert their sexuality.
These women are, in a sense, living out Engels’ vision. In The Origin of the Family, he argues that, in a world without traditional monogamy, sex will no longer have any negative moral or economic consequences, hopefully bringing about a “gradual rise of a more unconventional intercourse of the sexes and a more lenient public opinion regarding virgin honor and female shame” (Engels 92). In his proposed utopian society, “the private household changes to a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public matter. Society cares equally well for all children, legal or illegal” (92).
This vision for a utopian communist society is strikingly similar to the one proposed by Praxagora, who transforms Athens by “knocking down all partitions and remodeling it into one big household” (Assemblywomen, lines 684-685) and makes the moral and social education of children the responsibility of the city as a whole: “everyone in the younger generation will consider all older men to be their fathers” (lines 632-633).
Of course, it is still important to call attention to the obvious differences between the communist society in Assemblywomen and the one described by Marx and Engels. As Zumbrunnen points out, the economic redistribution in Assemblywomen primarily concerns material wealth, while Marx’s communist revolution involves a communalization of the means of production. When asked who will farm the land and produce raw materials for Athens, Praxagora flippantly replies “the slaves” (line 653); in other words, the means of production are relatively unchanged, the only difference being that the slaves perhaps bear an even greater burden than before. As Zumbrunnen points out, however, Praxagora does communalize land, suggesting that she is at least somewhat interested in transforming the means and methods of production.
Interestingly, Marx and Engels draw a distinct line between the slave and the proletariat, explaining that while “The slave is sold once and for all, the proletarian has to sell himself by the day and by the hour” and even going so far as to say that “The slave may… have a better subsistence than the proletarian” (The Communist Manifesto 55). The women of Athens, then, rather than the slaves, seem more akin to the workers that Marx describes, and the wives of Assemblywomen do, in a sense, seize the means of production. Of course, the women of Athens have always been responsible for cooking and crafting, but their labor does undergo a significant if subtle change after they take power.
In Assemblywomen, the end result of economic redistribution is a city in which men are no longer required to work and can instead spend their time indulging in food, wine, and sex, a life that, according to Henderson, would have seemed enormously attractive to Ancient Greek men, even if this way of life may seem “to modern Westerners… pointless and degraded” (Henderson 153). Marx’s communist utopia, however, involves “an equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished,” and he does not expect work to cease even then. He addresses the concern that “upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us” by observing that, if this were true, then “bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness” (The Communist Manifesto 63). As Marx explains, it is not that the proletariat despises labor, he only dislikes the circumstances - namely, bourgeois greed - that make their work monotonous and devoid of pleasure:
“Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him,” (79-80).
Following the revolution, the proletariat will no longer work simply for the acquisition of capital, and, no longer feeling degraded and dehumanized, will be able to take pride in their labor.
Likewise, the women of Athens actually seem to enjoy their work, wishing only that they might go about it peaceably and take pleasure in it without the interference of their male guardians. As Henderson observes, in Assemblywomen “women are portrayed as satisfied with their traditional domestic roles, complaining only that they are disrupted in their routine by the domestic suspicions and public actions of their husbands” (Staging Women 153). Once they have taken control of the city and eliminated the tiresome institution of monogamous marriage, they are able to take joy in their work.
It is also necessary to mention that, despite his dislike of traditional monogamy, Freidrich Engels does not argue for the total dissolution or marriage. In tracing the evolution of the family throughout human history, he takes time to harshly criticize the sexual practices of the Attic state, denouncing both the hetaerae and the practice of pederasty in a tirade that betrays quite a lot of passion and notably less historical accuracy:
“In spite of all seclusion and watching, the Grecian ladies found sufficient opportunity for deceiving their husbands. The latter who would have been ashamed of betraying any love for their wives, found recreation in all kinds of love affairs with hetaerae. But the degradation of the women was avenged in the men and degraded them also, until they sank into the abomination of boy-love” (Engels 79).
It should be noted that, in The Origin of the Family, Engels is concerned mostly with the plight of Victorian women and, despite the radical nature of some of his ideas, his attitudes about casual sex, prostitution, and homosexuality reflect a distinctly Victorian mindset. Though hardly an ardent Christian, it is nonetheless difficult for Engels to separate his own judgements from the puritanical Christian belief system that permeated all of Europe. The frank discussion of sexual intercourse in Assemblywomen would have seemed vulgar to its audience in 3rd century BC, but then again, that was the point; without the influence of Christian modesty, the subject of sex was comedically obscene, yes, but not totally outrageous.
In addition, the plight of Praxagora and the Athenian wives differs greatly from that of the working-class Victorian woman, who, in addition to tending to the affairs of the household, also worked long factory shifts to supplement her family’s income. Many Athenian women did labor in the fields or ply their wares in the agora, but these women were often poor, and all evidence in Assemblywomen points towards Praxagora and her compatriots being upper-class. Even though, as previously argued, they have much in common with the situation of the proletariat, the mere fact that they have the time to meet and rehearse their scheme to pack the assembly suggests that they are not obligated to spend that time supporting themselves and their families and are therefore more akin to the bourgeoisie.
Perhaps the most important difference between Aristophanes, Marx, and Engels is how the men explain the origin of the divide between rich and poor. Aristophanes frames this wealth disparity as the consequence of pure chance and the will of the gods. In his play Wealth, the god Wealth is literally blind, and this is why wise, just people always seem to end up poor while the unjust and dishonest enjoy wealth. Wealth’s blindness is attributed to the actions of Zeus, demonstrating that class divide is completely out of mortal control. Marx and Engels, on the other hand, see class struggle as resulting from deliberate exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie.
Many of the disparities between the vision of economic redistribution set forth in Assemblywomen and the one proposed in The Communist Manifesto can be chalked up to the major changes in religion and the nature of labor that took place in the many centuries separating the two works. When writing Assemblywomen, Aristophanes could not have possibly foreseen the rise of Christian morality or the technological advancements of the industrial revolution, so we cannot expect his work to have much relevance when it comes to the modern economy. It is quite possible, however, that Marx and Engels, two well-educated men, may have read the works of Aristophanes, been inspired by his musings on economic redistribution, and refined them to reflect the contemporary social situation. While it may be true then, that, as Zumbrunnen says, it is useless to make a Marxist out of Aristophanes, the many similarities between their works suggest that it may yet be worthwhile to make an Aristophanic out of Marx. Works Cited
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. United States, C. H. Kerr, 1902.
Henderson, Jeffrey, translator. Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women. Edited by Jeffrey Henderson, Routledge, 2010.
Marx, Karl, et al. The Communist Manifesto. Edited by Jeffrey C. Isaac, Yale University Press, 2012. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vm1x2. Accessed 1 May 2020.
“Fantasy, Irony, and Economic Justice: Assemblywomen and Wealth.” Aristophanic Comedy and the Challenge of Democratic Citizenship, by John Zumbrunnen, Boydell & Brewer, Rochester, NY; Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2012, pp. 99–122.