I think it’s important for people to be able to imagine a future in which things both different and better. One of the most successful, insidious, and harmful capitalist projects over the last couple centuries, has been the re-writing of history to cast an idealized version of capitalism as some sort of natural order. By convincing people that capitalism is effectively a benevolent force of nature, the folks at the top have a ready-made excuse for any problem that might arise – we need to stop interfering with The Free Market, and give more power to the capitalists, who gained their wealth through a quasi-mystical mastery of the workings of Capitalism, and will therefor spend the money in a way that benefits all of us. This perspective is so pervasive, in part, because people believe that “mutually beneficial transactions” are the foundation of all human resource management throughout the history of our species. Before there was money, there was barter, right?
Well, not so fast. The reality is more complex, and less friendly to the capitalist view of the world, as Andrew Sage explains:
The video about barter economies was interesting, but I was struck most by your observation:
Yeah, that’s basically what we hear from the Ayn Randians; but David Brin has pointed out numerous times in his blog that the economic system that has, in fact, existed for almost all of recorded history until fairly recently (until the last couple of centuries, give or take) is feudalism. That’s the natural order, and what we want to stay away from.
Unfortunately, I fear that we’re headed back in that direction. I even observe using religion as an excuse to concentrate power. (It’s not about morality. Their moral arguments are typically simplistic and self-contradictory.)
Am I wrong to think of the current batch of oligarchs as feudal lord wannabees?
I think feudalism has long been an apt approximation of what would happen if US libertarians and “anarcho”-capitalists got their way.
There’s also the fact that Zuckerberg is rather obsessed with Augustus Caesar.
So yeah. Innuendo Studios made the case that the development of conservatism and capitalism were, at least in part, about protecting the aristocracy from democracy.
Only if you use the term “feudalism” in such a broad and non-specific way as to render it almost meaningless… Feudalism is a specific form of social organisation found in Western Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries (although vestiges of it hung on much later in some places) involving a complex hierarchical system of obligations, rights, and responsibilities relating to land ownership, law enforcement, and military service. There are some vaguely similar systems in other places and times (e.g. Edo period Japan), but none of them are really the same, and most societies in most of recorded history aren’t really anything like it at all. (It should also be noted that some historians have argued that feudalism as we now understand it is actually an invention of other historians with an axe to grind, and which flattens out a much more complex and nuanced reality of life in medieval Europe.)
Unlikely. One of the key characteristics of feudalism is reciprocity – yes, you owed service to your feudal superior, but he had obligations to you in return. That does not seem like something those people would be keen on. (Also, the amount of feudal service actually owed really wasn’t all that much for most people. Your typical medieval serf spent a much smaller proportion of his time on feudal service than the modern employee does to pay taxes.)
I think the approximation you’re actually looking for is slavery.
Fair points.
Dunc @3:
I’m using the term broadly, but I don’t think meaninglessly. I mean a system in which a few lords have basically all the wealth and all the power, while most folks barely get by. There may also be a kind of “middle class” composed of folks who, say, know how to read and write and provide the lords with what these days we’d call “professional services”. Membership, and rank, in the lordly class is based mostly on ownership, in the past ownership of land, but easily extensible to the “capital” of “capitalism”.
OK, the term has a technical meaning that I was unaware of. So what?
Similarly, “fundameltalism” has the technical meaning of an American Protestant theology that’s about 150 years old, give or take. Does that mean that we can’t talk about, e.g., “Islamic fundamentalism” and expect readers or listeners to know what we mean?
LOL! I don’t doubt that there were some “good lords”; but I’ll bet that there were plenty who wouldn’t practice such reciprocity any more than our current batch of oligarchs would.
(“Oligarchy” probably has a technical meaning that’s not exactly what I mean.)
I don’t think that ownership of persons is required; but that’s another technical meaning. I’m OK with extending that to something like what these days is called “wage slavery”; and that’s certainly part of the problem; but the real issue is grabbing wealth and power in some kind of zero-sum (at best) game.
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I’ve long thought that our present day oligarchs, like the lords of old, don’t really care about absolute wealth, but rather about relative wealth — they want to be richer than you and me (and each other). It’s their only source of self-esteem since they lack marketable skills.
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Sure, but they generally didn’t last very long. It’s not just lords and peasants – there’s umpteen levels in the hierarchy, everyone’s relationships are just with the levels immediately above and below them, and everyone’s very aware of their rights and obligations. If the king doesn’t hold up his end of the bargain as the barons see it, you get stuff like Magna Carta and civil wars, and so on all the way down to the village headman and the local villeins.
It’s much more complicated than the bullshit Ren Fair caricature most people imagine – and that caricature is another one of the myths that were invented to make capitalism look good in comparison to an imaginary version of the past.
@5 billseymour
That is too broad. Given that definition it’s hard to find any large scale societies that are not feudalism. Your describing any society with large gaps in social classes.
I wouldn’t use the word feudal to describe a state unless it had an element of feudal obligations and promises. The original feudal states were built on agreements between people. Commoner agreed to serve a lord in certain specific ways in exchange for the lords protection and specific things from the lord. Warriors agreed to serve the lord in exchange for gear, loot, food and pay. A contract written without much reference to cash money, a system for a country where taxation of the population wasn’t practical.