undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdalke11y ago0 comments

[My reply was too long for HN. This is part 1/3. Sorry!]

What David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years" years has taught me, above all else, is that most economists from Adam Smith onwards know little about history and anthropology. I already knew that people like to spread just-so creation myths. In many cases, these end up being ungrounded in reality, but instead are meant as short-hand for the general culture belief of how something worked, rather than the reality.

A somewhat relevant example, look at http://westernreservepublicmedia.org/middleages/feud_peasant... as an example of how people tell untrue stories about the Middle Ages. The source is the Northeastern Educational Television of Ohio, and the page says "The main crops were corn, wheat, and beans. Near their homes, peasants had little gardens that contained ... tomatoes..."

In the US corn means maize -- "Indian corn". In the England "corn" refers to wheat, and in Scotland and Ireland it refers to oats. So either this is saying that maize (and tomatoes) somehow made it from the Americas to Europe before Columbus, or that the main crops were "wheat, wheat, and beans." Either way, it's wrong.

Here are more specific issues I have with your simplifications:

1) "The Feudal Era ... I specifically picked England, post-Reformation, after Henry the VIII."

The feudal era was already in decline by that point. Compare your statement to https://medieval-global-studies.wikispaces.com/Feudalism :

> At the end of the middle ages, feudalism still somewhat existed, but King Henry VIII gave the last blow. In the feudal pyramid, the pope was higher than the king. King Henry VIII broke away from the pope, and the feudal system had ended.

This is relevant because the Irish people believed that the Pope was the feudal head of Ireland, with Henry acting at the Pope's representative.

Or to http://karelma.com/english/history/henry-VIII.html :

> Thomas Wolsey ... was tirelessly ambitious, very quick-witted, and also ingratiating by aptitude, which appealed well to Henry VIII. Together they gave a strongly anti-feudal, reformist character to the politics.

Or to http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/content/docs/Decline%20of%20... :

> It follows that [feudalism's] disappearance [in England] between c.1300 and c.1500 changed medieval society fundamentally.

Or to http://www.sixwives.info/henry-viii-accomplishments.htm :

> King Henry VIII added Imperial concepts of Kingship to existing Feudal concepts

I cannot accept your use of a post-Henry VIII England as being representative of a feudal structure. By all accounts, feudalism was a minor part of Late Medieval England. I find it easier to believe that it's representative of a new and growing imperial structure, and an increasing centralization of power.

Compare England to Sweden, which did not have serfdom. The Swedish Empire was from 1611 to 1721. During that time, Sweden was one of the great powers of Europe. Your thesis would mean there are some intrinsically important differences between the absolute monarchy in England and the absolute monarchy in Sweden, because one was based on serfdom and the other was not.

Could you describe a few of the key differences between the hierarchies of the English and Swedish monarchies of the 1600s that were due to serfdom? Because I can't think of any, and your thesis requires that there be key differences.

2) "Allegiances in feudal societies tended to be very local ... why did all the soldiers follow Macbeth?"

This is, well, nonsense. Why did the soldiers follow Julius Caesar? Or for the same time period, look to Norway. Norway never had a feudal society. Why did all of the Christian, medieval, people of Norway follow their kings, even into battle?

Macbeth is nominally about Mac Bethad mac Findlaích, who died in 1057. Feudalism came to Scotland later, as part of the Davidian Revolution (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davidian_Revolution ) during the reign of David I (1124–1153).

So not only are you using a fictional example to justify your views, but that fiction isn't even historically accurate.

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

dalkeOP11y ago· 2 in thread

[My reply was too long for HN. This is part 2/3. Sorry!]

3) "all of us would have been serfs ... that was the vast majority of history"

Serfs are not part of the "vast majority of history." Quoting now from Wikipedia, "It was a condition of bondage which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century."

You started in Henry VIII. There were few serfs in that era. Go back in time, and there were certainly more. Go back further and they didn't exist at all.

There were rough equivalents, certainly, but slaves, serfs, indentured servants, etc. are all different. During feudal England, serfs were also different from villeins or smallholders, though all were peasants. (See https://books.google.com/books?id=ax0ed_OEzvwC&lpg=PA49&ots=... for an example of a town with "about 90 villeins and smallholders, plus about 9 serfs or bonded labourers.")

I can accept that you mean to paint with a broad brush, but the brush should be labeled "peasant" or "slave", not "serf". Modern people do sometimes call themselves "wage slaves", after all, and slavery existed for far longer than serfdom.

4) "you worked as a serf on a manor that the lord oversaw. You didn't see the other manors. ... You probably never traveled [to the town over where your cousin worked]. You might not even know about that cousin."

There is an internal inconsistency error here. The parents of me and my cousin were siblings, from the same parents. If what you say is completely true, then how did my parent and his/her siblings end up on different manors from where they were born?

There were alternatives, even for peasants. Here's the Charter of London - https://books.google.com/books?id=7nBZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA109&lpg=... . Should someone be in London for a Year and a Day, "without reclamation of his Lord", that person would be granted rights to stay permanently in the city. Increasingly after the Black Plague, there was the chance of buying out one's own bondage.

There was also travel in that era, even for peasants. Perhaps the most popular was to go on a pilgrimage. According to http://www.aromasysabores.com/camino/historical_background.h... :

> In the 11th and 12th centuries, millions of people from all over Europe made pilgrimages to Santiago [de Compostela]. It has been estimated that in the 12th century 10 percent of the population of Europe was involved in making or in some way supporting the pilgrimage to Santiago.

According to http://www.pilgrimisverige.se/att-vara-pilgrim/historia-1727... (in Swedish; I couldn't find an English source):

> Miljoner och åter miljoner människor var ständigt på väg och man har beräknat att mellan år 1150-1450 deltog mellan 20 och 50 procent av Europas vuxna befolkning i pilgrimsvandringar.

> [My translation:] Millions upon millions of people were constantly in route and it's been calculated that between 1150 and 1450 between 20 and 50 percent of Europe's adult population took part in a pilgrimage.

From "Canterbury Tales" we get an idea that people from all walks of life went on pilgrimages. But there's no need to resort to fiction. See https://archive.org/stream/englishwayfaring00jussmiss#page/2... where it says (p 263, and footnote 2):

> .. but in such another county, they heard or supposed, there was better pay an less exacting masters [2].

> [2] See a concrete example of such reports being brought from the north to the south by pilgrims, further, p279.

> [p279] The report had been brought to the city of Canterbury by pilgrims, peregrini, arriving from the North, obviously to worship at the shrine of St. Thomas.

Certainly even serfs had knowledge about the outer world through contacts like this.

And finally, from that same source (https://archive.org/stream/englishwayfaring00jussmiss#page/2... ) we see that the ravel restrictions even at their harshest were not to the manor, as you said, but to the hundred, city, or borough. A hundred is a subdivision of a county and contains several parishes and many towns and manors. It is very likely that you would know your cousin the town over because it's within the same hundred.

dalkeOP11y ago

[and part 3/3]

5) "nobody thought to end the system and try something new, they were trying to stop the king from acting arbitrarily"

What does "new" mean to you?

You advocate organizational structures which eliminate or at least greatly reduce management. You give Semco as an example, saying "[the owner] recently celebrated 10 years of owning the company and not making a single decision."

Yet this is a classical capitalist structure. Semler owns the company, and its capital, and employs labor. Should he wish, he could sell the company or fire all of the workers. In that regard, it isn't a new idea, only a clever variation on way for a capitalist to accumulate wealth without doing any work. It appears to be successful. No wonder other capitalists might be interested in such a system! There's no need to pay for stewards and reeves when the peasants will do that themselves.

I mentioned Mondragon Corporation because not only does it have the workplace democracy you extoll, but it's a company based on co-operative ownership of capital. See for example Richard Wolff's lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKbukSeZ29o , where he also mentions that the employees hire and decide how much to pay the management.

Are you therefore really proposing something different? Or just another variation of the same capitalist system?

So when you say "in no way considered that a different system might be better", what does that mean? The peasants called for an end of serfdom. How is that not an expression of a desire for something different? Or rather, what evidence would you need to be convinced that there were desire for other systems? The Twelve Articles from the German Peasants' War also called for an end of serfdom.

I do not think it's tenable to say that the peasants of that era did not believe that a non-feudal system might be better than what they had.

Ovid11y ago

I just want to thank you for the very insightful comments you've made and it will definitely help me reform the background of what I've written. I think that largely my key points about modern corporations are generally on point (particularly lack of innovation and command-and-control structures), but it's clear that I could do better with my analogy than comparing it to post-reformation England.

I knew about co-ops, but many of them that I could were largely agricultural or small stores and didn't resonate with my audience, but perhaps I've done them a disservice. I'll look into Mondragon also, thanks!

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse