#serfdom

[racefortheironthrone]

How did people become serfs? Like, birth was probably the answer for some, but were other people made serfs after being born in a different social class? And how did it get started, anyway?

Given that the legal default in medieval society was that you were born into the legal status of your (usually male) parent and could not change it, most serfs post the first generation were born serfs.

But as I was suggesting in my post about the Normans, you could be made into a serf through a change to the underlying land tenure that defined your legal status. So for example, you could start out a free churl (wasn't initially a pejorative, but there is something insidious about the way that words for working people get transformed into insults), and then 1066 rolls around.

All of the sudden some collaborator translator is explaining to you what some French-speaking foreign priest is saying about how the new king's new legal system doesn't recognize "churl" as a valid status, please tick the box for either "knight" or "serf," and if you complain there's this French-speaking illiterate violent maniac on horseback backing him up - and the maniac thinks he owns the land your father's bones are buried in and you and your family come with the land, and he'll kill you if you disagree or if he gets bored.

As to how it got started...arguably it all goes back to Diocletian. As a reforming Roman Emperor in the Crisis of the Third Century, Diocletian was having trouble getting his hands on enough hard cash to pay the troops who guarded the borders (who were increasingly led by men with titles that would be later translated as Duke, Count, and Baron, which is a bad sign), so he started paying them in-kind and extracting taxes from the coloni (tenant farmers) in-kind. In order to ensure that revenue from the coloni remained consistent, Diocletian issued an edict that it was illegal for the child of a coloni to hold any other occupation than coloni, and that it was illegal for coloni to leave the land upon which they farmed.

Pretty soon, once the Emperor goes away and there's only the Duke, the Count, and the Baron running the show, the local warlord just cuts out the middle-man and takes the in-kind taxes directly, calls them rent, and asserts that they own the land (or at least the right to rents and taxes from the land) while menacingly sharpening a sword. And hey presto, you've got serfdom!

[warsofasoiaf]

What is the difference between slaves, serfs, and indentured servants?

Obviously, this is oversimplifying because the various rights of slaves and serfs could vary greatly from location to location and time period to time period.

Typically, the big distinguishing mark of chattel slavery is the ability to buy and sell people as property. The slaves are property of their owners to dispense with as they please. Serfdom, meanwhile, has the serfs as part of the land. Serfs typically cannot be bought or sold, and remain with the land holding that they are tied to. Indentured servants typically sell a contract of their unpaid labor for a set duration. These contracts could be sold the same way someone sold a loan, so it was possible (and indeed, very common) for the indentured servant to have their contract sold. The classic example of indentured servitude happened in passage to the New World. The indentured servant sold their indenture to a captain in exchange for passage, and when the captain arrived, he'd typically sell the indenture to large planters for a tidy fee.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[arabdoll]

“Write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how one fine morning he awakes to find that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave but that of a real human being.”

Anton Chekhov, letters to a friend

[addressingsophism]

In Defense Of "Anti-Work"

Many people attempt to justify Neo-Calvinist Work Ethic, which is a self-contradicting piece of pseudo-religious dogma stating that all people must work for religious purposes, but not equally. The philosophy also pushes the belief that the wealthy inherited the earth and became wealthy only by way of innate virtue and should only perform unburdened laborless management and collect the majority of the wealth produced by others, and that the poor must perform hard labor and hand the money up the societal ladder to save their souls.

Early Calvinist Work Ethic dogma was used as a justification for serfdom and slavery from the late 1500s (AD) till today. Neo-Calvinist ideology forms much backbone for much of gatekeeping in Western society; as it is related to System Justification, victim-blaming and "societal weeding".

Contrary to current Western common belief, most of the world didn't belive in anything even remotely close to this concept until fairly recently. While serfdom and slavery had existed in pockets and within waxing and waning empires (with various restructuring of labor beliefs and practices), it wasn't part of a universal belief that humans were required to access the resources of the world they were born on solely through repetitious labor associated with pyramid'esque-scheme systems.

In fact the "work week" wasn't invented until the 1800s and the idea of standardization of Brute Capitalism didn't exist until the 1950s (which lead to economic downfalls and crime waves during the 1960s and 1970s).

People often assume that the majority of the world's idea of work and taxes has been standardized for millennia, and pretty much look the same across all of history, but this is simply not true.

---

Side note: The anti-work isn't a movement in opposition to task completion, but in opposition to fallacies associated with ideologies that claim human beings should naturally be treated as machines used for repetitious labor in order to support classist structures and to restrict social and economic mobility.

The current systems aren't about maximizing everyone's potential, nor about focusing on justice and accuracy.

It's simply about creating and maintaining a series of networked exploitation-focused pyramid schemes. This is ensured mostly by way of early indoctrination, and encouraged via peer pressure (pride, shame, etc).

[silverbridge-harbor]

when transphobic radfems start getting into feudalism

call that "serf and terf"

[avandelay20]

Modern media piracy as it has been established under law used to be pretty clear: if you illegally copied a DVD or a game disc or a cartridge or an album, or you downloaded a digital version of something normally purchased in a store in order to avoid paying for it, you were a pirate. That was theft.

As a legal concept, that made sense!

But what do we do now if in an increasing number of cases we can't really own the thing we're paying for? And even the ones we're borrowing--or, in the case of those PlayStation movies, we purchased!--disappear and can't be paid for at all?

We traded ownership for convenience. Now "content" is disappearing, and without CDs or DVD boxsets as backups, that content is at risk of disappearing forever.

As the Video Game History Foundation is getting tired of reminding us, often the only way to preserve important works of human expression is to...well, technically break the law and pirate them.

If we can't own anything anymore, and everything created in the modern world is only made available at the privilege of a few greedy assholes, then downloading something and sharing it to keep it alive isn't piracy.

It's all we've got left. 

[lord-kiwi-the-wizard]

Hmmm...

We need free food, free power, free clean water. But how do we convince these people to stay put and make us these things for free.

Hmmm...

[covenawhite66]

Peasants in England were either Freemen and Serfs.

Serfs were bound to labor for the lord

Feemen had more freedom in the labor they chose to perform. They paid rent to their lord

Peasants had obligatory Sundays off, religious holidays such as feast days were common. Plus weddings, births, and funerals.

One of the biggest industries in Europe during the medieval era was the wool industry, and the best wool came from England.

Diseases during the medieval era were thought to emanate from “miasma,” transmitted through bad odors. Animal fat and wood ash mixed together made an excellent soap.

Unlike Roman enslaved people, peasants had opportunities to make a decent living and actually become wealthy. The peasants practiced crop rotation and were aware of the need to retain the quality of the soil by planting certain crops at certain times of the year.

[kacperd2000]

Aleksiej i Katierina

[racefortheironthrone]

how would a castle like winterfell feed everyone on a day to day basis?

Well, just like any manor house or city-state, there would be agricultural land around Winterfell that was the lord's land held outright and agricultural land around Winterfell that was leased to feudal tenants (who would also work on the lord's land on a paid or unpaid basis, depending on whether they were serfs) either on a cash or in-kind basis.

At harvest time, the castle would take in all of the crops from its own land plus the rent from the leased land (sometimes as a share of the crop and sometime as cash). These staple crops, as well as garden vegetables and meat and livestock byproducts, would be processed by mills, smokehouses, and the like and then stored in granaries, storehouses, cellars, and so forth, and then distributed by the servants according to custom and practice.

[dyslexicpieceofgay]

2024 feels like we’ve just weaseled our way back into serfdom without any of the benefits of serfdom.

[russia-libertaire]

Nikolai Gogol

'Nikolai Gogol decided that it was his mission to save Russia by his writings. His various works portrayed the imperial state, with its uniforms and ranks, as a Moloch which destroyed people's lives. The empire lived on "dead souls": the novel of that name plays on the administrative fiction that all serfs counted in the last census are still alive till the next one, and on the official terminology designating a taxpaying adult a "soul." The spectacle of the mountebank Chichikov buying up these "dead souls" becomes a symbol for the unreality and inhumanity of official Russia. Gogol hoped in the second part of the novel to redeem the nightmare empire in the spirit of Orthodoxy, but in the event he was unable to complete the text and finished by burning the manuscript. So his greatest work ends with the enigmatic image of Russia as a troika, racing headlong over the snow, in an unknown direction, while other peoples draw back in amazement and horror. A contemporary wrote of Gogol that he "broke under the weight of his own calling, which in his eyes had taken on enormous dimensions".'

Russia and the Russians, by Geoffrey Hosking

[uhhhhh-jpg]

Shawty so fine she got me toiling her fields

[thecosmonautical]

If you do a good job interview it's very important to then immediately start planning out your work outfits before you even know if you have the job or not

[perseph0nescall]

I shorted the battery of my vibrator 😫😫😫

[nicklloydnow]

“Socialism Leads to Total Control

But the designs of the Communists, Socialists, and all their allies aim at something else. They want to establish the authoritarian system. What they mean in extolling the benefits to be derived from what they call "planning" is a society in which all of the people should be prevented from planning their own conduct and from arranging their lives according to their own moral convictions. One plan alone should prevail, the plan of the great idol State (with a capital S), the plan of the supreme chief of the government, enforced by the police. Every individual should be forced to renounce his autonomy and to obey, without asking questions, the orders issued from the Politburo, the Führer's secretariat. This is the kind of freedom that Engels had in mind. It is precisely the opposite of what the term freedom used to signify up to our age.

It was the great merit of Professor Friedrich von Hayek to have directed attention to the authoritarian character of the socialist schemes, whether they are advocated by international or by nationalist socialists, by atheists or by misguided believers, by white-skinned or by dark-skinned fanatics. Although there have always been authors who exposed the authoritarianism of the socialist designs, the main criticism of socialism centered around its economic inadequacy, and did not sufficiently deal with its effects upon the lives of the citizens. Because of this neglect of the human angle of the issue, the great majority of those supporting socialist policies vaguely assumed that the restriction of the individuals' freedom by a socialist regime will apply "only" to economic matters and will not affect freedom in non-economic affairs.

But as Hayek in 1944 clearly pointed out in his book The Road To Serfdom, economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. As the socialist state has sole control of the means, it has the power to determine which ends are to be served and what men are to strive for. It is not an accident that Marxian socialism in Russia and nationalist socialism in Germany resulted in the complete abolition of all civil liberties and the establishment of the most rigid despotism. Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

Now Professor Hayek has enlarged and substantiated his ideas in a comprehensive treatise, The Constitution of Liberty. In the first two parts of this book the author provides a brilliant exposition of the meaning of liberty and the creative powers of a free civilization. Endorsing the famous definition that describes liberty as the rule of laws and not of men, he analyzes the constitutional and legal foundations of a commonwealth of free citizens. He contrasts the two schemes of society's social and political organization, government by the people (representative government) based upon legality, and government by the discretionary power of an authoritarian ruler or a ruling clique, an Obrigkeit as the Germans used to call it. Fully appreciating the moral, practical and material superiority of the former, he shows in detail what the legal requirements of such a state of affairs are and what has to be done in order to make it work and to defend it against the machinations of its foes.

The Welfare State Leads to Socialism

Unfortunately, the third part of Professor Hayek's book is rather disappointing. Here the author tries to distinguish between socialism and the Welfare State. Socialism, he alleges, is on the decline; the Welfare State is supplanting it. And he thinks that the Welfare State is, under certain conditions, compatible with liberty.

In fact, the Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism. The original plan of socialist action as developed by Karl Marx in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto aimed at a gradual realization of socialism by a series of governmental measures. The ten most powerful of such measures were enumerated in the Manifesto. They are well known to everybody because they are the very measures that form the essence of the activities of the Welfare State, of Bismarck's and the kaiser's German Sozialbolitik as well as of the American New Deal and British Fabian Socialism. The Communist Manifesto calls these measures which it suggests "economically insufficient and untenable," but it stresses the fact that "in the course of the movement [they] outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production."

Later, Marx adopted a different method for the policies of his party. He abandoned the tactics of a gradual approach to the total state of socialism and instead advocated a violent revolutionary overthrow of the "bourgeois” system that at one stroke should "liquidate" the "exploiters" and establish "the dictatorship of the proletariat." It was this that Lenin did in 1917 in Russia and what the Communist International plans to achieve everywhere. What separates the Communists from the advocates of the Welfare State is not the ultimate goal of their endeavors, but the methods by means of which they want to attain a goal that is common to both of them. The difference of opinions that divides them is the same that distinguishes the Marx of 1848 from the Marx of 1867 the year of the first publication of the first volume of Das Kapital.” - Ludwig von Mises, ‘Planning for Freedom: Let the Market System Work; a Collection of Essays and Addresses’ (1952) [pages 112 - 114]