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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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I usually take these post less as 'look how great peasants had it' and more 'look how much better we could have it'.
This idea that peasants had it better because there were more "holidays" (which were feast days for specfic groups and religious holidays, mass was not optional) is asinine. There are good reasons they had a shorter expected lifespan.
I'm old enough that my grandpa in 1930's was living not much different than a serf and was constantly malnourished, and it was in one of most fertile parts of Poland, country famous for its fertile fields (it's even in name, Poland means "Land of the fields/farmlands"). And that was 70 years after serfdom was abolished, because before that it was one huge horror story and literal slavery.
In short: peasants did not had it good.
There's a staunch libertarian view on Lemmy, wherein people will advocate for personal liberty ahead of technological progress. The Country Mouse has it better than the City Mouse, because he can own a gun and drive a big truck and smoke weed without the neighbors ratting him out to the cops. The lack of basic amenities - subways and school systems and high speed internet and big medical centers - is worth the increased personal autonomy.
The "Serfs had it better" trope takes this to its logical conclusion. Rolling back the technological frontier 500 years is worth it, because the surveillance/police state and the corporate oligopoly even on the fringe of society is seriously that bad.
I don't agree. But I can't really argue against it. This is just a personal preference. Its not any kind of objective truth.
The idea that medieval peasants somehow had more free time than the average modern american still is absolute bullshit as far as I'm aware. Unless "necessary preparations for survival" count as free time just because it's not contracted work (it doesn't that's not what free time means).
Paleontologists will tell you otherwise. One reason you had all those giant cathedrals going up in the Medieval Era stemmed from the enormous excess labor just wasting around in between harvest seasons.
Agricultural surplus creates free time. It's the whole reason why people opt for farming over hunter gathering.
your highness, the peasants are bored out of their minds
oh yeah? put em to work building some crazy shit before they start killing each other for a thrill
This but unironically. I've got a coworker who took vacation days to help build a temple up in Pennsylvania. He was incredibly proud of his contribution and happy to participate.
That's what I was thinking!
Yeh yeh, I get it, Lemmy, we're all wageslaves now and religion is Absolutely Always Bad(TM) /s...but objectively here...
Things like churches and temples were for everyone to commune and worship and gather. They were, and still are, architectural marvels!
Any of us would be so lucky these days to feel any kind of attachment to our community, and to do some kind of work that we can look at and say "That's there because of us."
It's hard for most of us to imagine, I think, because alienation from the results of our labor and each other is so wildly beyond reason in our lifetimes. Even building is essentially factory work anymore. Architecture as art is mostly dead in favor of brutalist templated concrete cubes everywhere.
Not to mention, we're all constantly burned out and exhausted from meaningless grinds that usually amount to "Have a pulse (optional), deal with people, send emails to nowhere in particular. Produce nothing but Co2."
But I like to think this was a positive thing. Building wonders, being a part of your community, having something to be proud of doing, like a collective hobby.
Lol I know I'm waxing romantically whilst likely being very inaccurate, I'm not historian, but I also think we can take the best notions of the past to make the future less awful...
The peasantry worked fewer hours because of the nature of production. Capitalist commodity production seeks to maximize profits, and does so by ensuring wages are regulated by cost of subsistence and replacement. Feudalism operated differently, peasants worked for themselves and produced essentially rent for their feudal lords, and thus did not have maximized working hours.
-The Principles of Communism
This isn't to say the serfs had it materially better, but that their mode of production was different. Their low level of technological development stood in the way of great progress, and we cannot return back to such a model, but instead should progress onward to Socialism now that Capitalism has largely run its course and centralized most modern industries for central planning and public ownership.
Marxism is useful for understanding this phenomena, I made an intro to Marxism reading list if any of you are interested.
^ exactly what he said
It's always funny when these dense contrarians completely bowl over the point of the person they replied to and respond to a non-sequitur showing that they're uninterested in anything resembling a conversation.