You don’t need the peasants to support you by voting for you; you need the peasants to support you by not storming your castle with pitchforks, roasting you and your family alive, and eating you.
There’s 200+ years of social theory, history and economics that says differently.
Except, as well as having a more equitable distribution of wealth (with, again, a significant population of smallhold farmers who were neither very poor or very rich), the plebes had something none of those other groups had. Not the peasants of imperial Rome or the medieval period, not the serfs of the Russian empire, or for most of their existence the industrial working class. The plebes had a significant voting role in a representative body with real power, the citizens assemblies.
Unlike all those other groups throughout history their only recourse to influence government decisions was not turning up as an angry mob with lots of pointy sticks (though they did do that, particularly when the senatorial class started rolling back their democratic powers which they did a lot). They got to vote and their vote mattered (not a much as the rich senators did, but it did matter)
The fact that the rich senatorial elites considered the plebes a indistinguishable unwashed ungrateful mob, doesn’t make them that.
1800 years later the elites in France divided society into “those who worked, those who fought, and those who prayed” without having a label for the rising middle class, but they definitely existed and were not “societally negligible”.
The term “working class” wasn’t coined until 1757 by the not well remembered Malachy Postlethwayt and rarely used for a century after that. Although artisan labor had been growing in London, the term wasn’t necessary as a broad description until the world changed to demand it.
I similarly disagree with everything else you write, although I want to make clear to others that I think our differences are more of emphasis and influences than cold fact. Nevertheless, the plebeian class in Rome is no more a true forerunner of democracy than Hero’s depiction of a steam engine was a forerunner of the Industrial Revolution.
You can have the last word on this, but I’m going to drop this side excursion.
It was the claim that the working class is “essentially equivalent to earlier classes like peasants and serfs.” I was doubting. There is 200+ years of social theory, history and economics explaining how the working class is very very different to the to earlier classes like peasants and serfs.
I don’t entirely disagree with this statement. Because while the plebes absolutely did have access to a democratic body with real power, and there was nothing on the scale of that in the ensuing 1500 years. It wasn’t really that democratic body that served as a forerunner to modern democracy. We have a Senate not a Peoples Assembly.
1600+ years later when modern democracy gradually started to emerge, it was incredibly heavily influenced by the Roman Republic, which was pretty much worshipped by the educated classes in Europe at the time. But it was writings of the elite senatorial class, like Cicero, who influenced it. And those patricians had nothing but contempt for the plebes and the peoples assemblies. To this day when people think of representative Roman government they think of the Senate. Even though the Roman Senate was neither particularly democratic or particularly unique to Rome (plenty of places before and after have been at least partially ruled by voting by a small group of aristocrats)
Not true - Pacific Northwest Native Americans certainly had sufficient social stratification to have developed an aristocracy. It would not be surprising for the same to be true of other sedentary HG cultures with complex cultural remains, like the Anatolian or Jomon ones.
The pre-contact population of that region was in the hundred of thousands. Their society had developed beyond the tribal stage.
Sure, they were evolving into the chiefdom level of Service’s classification. Some groups had more powerful individual chiefs, others didn’t, there was a range across the whole PNW. But they still had tribes as their base social organization, with the House moiety systems on top of that. They had hundreds of separate groups - that’s not really out of the tribal stage yet.