I’m reading (via AI) about how the working week (at least at some period in the middle ages) was only three days, and a serf could take his lord to manorial court over him trying to extend it to four days; apparently records show that serfs often won these cases.
Today, serfs wage slaves work five days a week, are pressured to work extra for free, and the rich win most legal cases.
The elites really did refine the system didn’t they?
I’m reading (via AI)
You REALLY should not be doing that. It is designed to keep you engaged, not to inform you
Social media is designed for engagement, while LLMs prefer to minimize computation costs, and therefore want to give you an answer that satisfies your and makes you stop asking more (without any regard for truthfulness).
That’s not true, there’s a reason why most AI answers will end with a follow up question.
I think that’s due the truthfulness problem. But they do want you to use more tokens so you have to buy more tokens, otherwise they can’t keep the bubble up maybe.
They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.
Dude they’re talking like they’re caricatures of supervillains
Dude they’re talking like they’re caricatures of supervillains
They enslaved people. Bred them and sold them.
related: the serfs were not only the agricultural backbone necessary to feed the urban craftspeople and the nobility, bcs no real food trade made each region dependent on their work, but also made up the actually worthwhile military power defending the land (tbf, as catapult fodder). and basically, if you didnt make sure that the peasants will defend your land, because the neighboring kingdom had better conditions, your kingdom will be invaded to no force opposing them.
religion and its liberal use of holidays and festivals were a major tool of giving the serfs the free time they need to live a fulfilling life.
also, due to the land being owned by the king, and not private landlords, it was technically closer to state-owned land of communist practice, and the tools, the other part of the means of production, were also owned by the farmers, therefore, serfs did live quite close to the communist way of agrarianism. basically the king declared how many fields each farmer had to maintain with their produce going to the king, and all the remaining fields could be used by the farmers as they needed, with they themselves being able to choose how much they needed to feed themselves. literally planned economy + free land use for what was needed under the plan.
and lastly, the famers only had to give a 10% tithe (most cases) on what they produced in their own fields to the church, the rest they kept for themselves to feed their family as a stable way of reproducing the workforce. no need to work more than what you need to sustain yourself.
tldr: state-owned land, farmers owned their tools, religious holidays and festivities to ensure free time as a means to maintain loyalty.
unrelated: do yourself a favor and dont read info from the slop machine. maybe use it to get a list of things to read or watch about a topic, but neber trust slop machine output without verifying it, at which point, just read the priginal resource.
Again, other medievalists will point this out but there is a way in which this is misleading. You still had to do all of the usual farming and chores everyday. This only applies to corvee labor for the lords. So your lord can’t make you set aside your other jobs and do landscaping for him or even out the road because his butt hurts from all the bouncing on the uneven road in his carriage. But the weeds in the field won’t stop growing because its a Saturday and the pigs still want to be fed if it’s the feast of St. Sebastian. So these limits and holidays should more be seen as those are the days you can’t be asked to do more than your normal job of farming rather than actually having the day off.
I think this is probably because you needed 4 days to take care of yourself. You can flip a light switch to make light, you can press button to make your home warm, you can press some buttons to make an oven warm to cook, you can microwave soup in 2 minutes, you can dump clothes in a machine and press some buttons to make them clean and another machine makes them dry, and of course you aren’t harvesting and processing grain or catching fish to survive. All these things took hours of preparation. There was a guy that wrote quite a lot about how capitalism was good but doesn’t do a very good job liberating and enriching the average person and how technology and industry could and eventually will be used to that end, probably some day soon.
maybe don’t rely on the capitalist psychosis machine to do your thinking for you
Ignoring the AI thing for a moment(since everyone else has already brought it up), this is how much work they were required to do for their lord. The rest of their time was spent tending to their own crops so they didn’t starve. So they were already working full time as subsistence farmers and then had to do 3 extra days of work per week on their lord’s farm. The reason serfs were able to push back on a 4 day work week wasn’t because anyone cared about serf’s rights, but because if they worked too long on their lord’s fields, they would literally not have the time to grow food for themselves and would starve. It was a law to protect and maintain the system, not to actually try and improve the QOL of the people at the bottom.
This article written by @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml is one I’d recommend if you want to learn more about feudal society and how it relates to later capitalist society: https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/a-look-at-historically-inaccurate
Serfs were not paid a wage for their tithes. They basically worked for free for someone else for a few days a week and then had to do the job that actually made their living with the remaining days.
Which is how it is now too. Wage work does not pay you for the full amount of your labor time, if it did, capitalists wouldn’t get surplus value from you. You may be told you have an hourly wage, but the reality is that a portion of your work day is labor that you are not compensated for because your wage doesn’t reflect the full value you are creating.
What? No. You were also liable to become a levy soldier and die of dysentery maybe 50 miles from home. That is if you didn’t get a small cut in your foot that led to sepsis, which they couldn’t treat.
Materially we are so much better off.
Didn’t the industrialists think back in the early 1900’s that people wouldn’t have to work anymore?
Yes, this is a usual critique Marxists make against the Keynsians. Keynes predicted that since automation and essentially socially necessary labor time (to use Marxist jargon) was being reduced, people would have to work less. And nearly anyone’s estimate of labor productivity shows an extreme increase over the 20th century, so surely if markets are efficient and rational we should all be working 4 hours a week, since 40 hour work weeks were possible in the 30s and 40s. But because of the bourgeoisie hold the power and dictate average worker relations, instead of doubling labor productivity meaning everyone works half as much, instead half of the workforce is laid off and the remainder is paid the same wages. And marketing attempts to try to increase consumption rather than keep similar consumption levels with less labor going into it.
I’m not sure (and I’m not sure what you’re implying; I’m not smart enough to understand what you’re trying to say, lol)
I remember hearing I think on here that because of industrialization people thought work would become obsolete, or maybe I read it wrong myself.
there have been several technical innovations where some people thought we could work 1/5th as much instead of being forced to do 5x the work in the same amount of time.
Bertrand Russell, in one of the “unpopular essays” (that’s the name of the essay compilation) comments on this, that people thought about it before, and that the amount of debt financing proves that it was already mostly the case when he wrote the essay, it’s just a matter of redistribution.
You might be talking about after the Black Death when workers were able to demand better working conditions because there were so fewer workers. David Graeber has a section in his book Debt about how the nobility stepped on these working conditions again by imposing impossible to fulfil conditions on the payments of tithes and debts. The big example was debts could only be paid in silver, which was being extracted for the wealthy in South America, then being shipped straight over to Asia to pay for things there by the European elite. There’s no reason debts had to be paid in silver, aside from it being difficult for peasants to acquire.
So don’t worry, capital always comes for the conditions of labour in one form or another.
