cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23300120
Repost inspired by seeing a self-proclaimed communist commenter recently muse on how much better monarchy was than capitalism.
Serfs had more vacation than us and the lord responsible for their suffering had to live near them. Wealth is more concenteated to the elite now than ever before. Capitalism still aims to become neo feudalism where you own nothing and ‘belong’ to multiple lords you’ll never even know the name of. Direct anachronistic comparison isn’t the most telling, and the only undebatable thing capitalism has over feudalism is that youre not born into your job, well some people still are, but thats the only undeniable improvement tbh.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Meanwhile, economist Yanis Varoufakis:
A comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm
The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
What makes Marxism communist is structurally you are more brutally exploited than a serf. A lord who kills his serfs stops being a lord, a boss who kills his employees is hiring. That nature of the exploitation left open an opportunity for a minority bourgeoisie to form and replace the lords last time, but this time capitalism doesn’t allow room for that. It flattens everything into one homogenized capitalist class and one homogenized working class, so the only possible revolution is those two switching places. If Marx believed you were freer or more powerful than a serf he wouldn’t be communist, he would be looking for which faction of workers was going to break out into a middle revolutionary class and replace capitalism with their own system of exploitation.
A comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age.
In that same chapter he literally notes that the wage-laborer was an incredibly small part of society at the time.
The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class.
I see you, unlike Marx, don’t understand what a medieval commune is in contrast to serfdom, or what the transition to bourgeois in the late medieval period was like. He’s talking about class relations and development, as usual, not praising feudalism, Christ. Read another two chapters of the Manifesto, for Christ’s sake, it’s not that fucking long
What makes Marxism communist is structurally you are more brutally exploited than a serf.
Jesus fucking Christ.
A lord who kills his serfs stops being a lord,
what.
It flattens everything into one homogenized capitalist class and one homogenized working class, so the only possible revolution is those two switching places.
That is pretty fucking contrary to a Marxist view of a workers’ revolution.
If Marx believed you were freer or more powerful than a serf he wouldn’t be communist, he would be looking for which faction of workers was going to break out into a middle revolutionary class and replace capitalism with their own system of exploitation.
fucking what.
Capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others that have been tried.
Capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the ones it sabotaged and suppressed.
Plenty of better systems out there. It’s just that feudalism ain’t one of 'em.
