Across the ancient world, falling irretrievably into debt was to enter into bondage to the rich. For millenia, the poor typically had no collateral for loans beyond their bodies and their labo. Aristotle said that the “poor… were enslaved by the rich.”

The only salvation was for the Athenian poor – demos – to break the power of the aristocracy and revolt. Squeezed by debts and he spread of debt-bondage the common people rendered their aristocratic society effectively ungovernable. In 594 BC, in an effort to restore stability, huge concessions were made to the demos: all debts were cancelled and debt-bondage abolished. For the first time, poor men acquired meaningful rights to political participation. And they used those rights to systematically curtail the unaccountable power of aristocrats, accomplished by elevating the popular Assembly and its direct democracy above all other institutions. So interconnected were the principles of democracy and economic justice for the demos that Aristotle identified “the rule of the poor” as the essence of a democratic state. “In democracies,” he explained, “the poor have more sovereign power than the rich.”

For this reason, struggles by the rich to increase their social and economic power invariably took the form of struggles against democracy.