Bitch, you are a serf.
We're in- we're in fucking 1320, motherfucker. You are a serf. Bitch, you live in Alsace. You are a peasant. You need to give your fuckin lord the GRAIN. Your - your fucking children, you've had 15 child - you've never taken a bath. You have literally never. washed. your. penis. You're fucking a- you've never used toilet paper! Motherfucker, you have WORMS. You are dying. You've had forty children, three of them are alive, two of them are child soldiers in the duke's army. Bitch, the greatest thing you can hope for, is to die at the ripe old age of thirty six. You - you fucking can't read? You fucking, you dont know what TV is? You are literally, if you were transported to today, you would be the worst gamer of all time. You don't know shit, you literally probably don't even know what the direction LEFT is.
So, I'm sure some "medieval guy" is gonna get mad at me for this, bitch, i've been to the renaissance fair. I've eaten a large turkey wing that the juggalos call 'bitch beaters' which i think is problematic but a funny thing to call them. Motherfucker.. you've gotta - you've gotta recognize where you are. And then, you've gotta get past that. You gotta be - you gotta be unemotional, and i know im not being a great, great uhh display of that myself, but you've gotta - you can't sink into this hole. you LIVE in the oubliette. your job is to crawl up the ladder motherfucker. You live in the hole. You're in the hole. You are a rat. And the rat, when he's in the hole, gets FUCKED. People, they only throw trash in the hole. You know what you need to eat? you need to eat a BODY, and you need to carry the plague. And you need to carry the plague around this whole world that will change this whole fucking world. And, and, and - and all your fucking enemies will vomit black bile and they will choke on blood and grow boils and DIE, but only if you get together with your other rats, and you come up with some kinda super-plague, to fuckin END YOUR ENEMIES and END THIS NIGHTMARE.
The secret is that reactionary sentiments in this vein are really common in the hyperonline left. There's way too many people who seem to operate under some delusion that capitalism is actually worse than feudalism, despite how obviously absurd suggesting that is.
Personally, I think it's derived from an aesthetic preference for 'real culture' as opposed to the somehow 'non-existent/shallow' 'western' culture, there's a broad trend of opposition to popular culture and mass media in general. A lot of people seem to believe that after the RevolutionTM we'll go back to 'real' culture and all art will be communally produced garage bands and indie games and nobody will ever do a 'consoom' ever again. Anti-consumerism is a cancerous tick on the left that leads to all sorts of issues like this, not to mention that it's an incredibly unpopular position with most people and makes leftists look like fun-hating assholes. Doesn't hurt that internet leftists seem determined to prove that they're fun-hating assholes half the time.
If I didn't know better I'd suggest anti-consumerism as an idea is an op, but that'd be underestimating the stupidity of most internet leftists.
A lot of people seem to believe that after the RevolutionTM we’ll go back to ‘real’ culture and all art will be communally produced garage bands and indie games and nobody will ever do a ‘consoom’ ever again.
This but unironically
There’s way too many people who seem to operate under some delusion that capitalism is actually worse than feudalism, despite how obviously absurd suggesting that is.
There are some ways in which it is worse. Yes, generally capitalism is better than feudalism, but that doesn't mean every single aspect of it is better. I do think I'd rather be a medieval peasant on a good year than a modern worker in the middle of this pandemic and general collapse.
I don't think my human happiness would be particularly improved by being a peasant whose life consists of either grueling physical labor or doing shit with people that I better hope I like because if I don't too fuckin' bad I'm stuck in this one village of like 30 people for the rest of my life. Better hope I don't commit any social sins or in general ostracize myself!
I feel like leftists really romanticize tightly-woven small communities and forget that they're usually awful prisons for anyone stuck in the midst of them who doesn't fit in.
It's not so much that, it's that feudal life is hard work and oppressive in a different way. Capitalism relieved thos issues while adding many of its own.
Anyone who's got an idea of what farmwork takes knows when you do need to work it's backbreaking and you do it or you starve. The work is less consistent but still pretty hard and in hard times survival can be a lot more difficult than urban work or artisanship.
Remember, the landowners Mao killed were mostly Feudal, not capitalist.
I'm well aware that the idea is inaccurate, but that doesn't mean it wasn't still shit. It just wasn't parody-level awful.
And yes, capitalism was a liberation for the bourgeoisie, but that doesn't mean it didn't also put the working class into a better position. It was a secondary effect of the material conditions that allowed capitalism to arise.
forget that they’re usually awful prisons for anyone stuck in the midst of them who doesn’t fit in
ok but I usually do
I don't really know what to say to that, honestly. What, exactly, do you consider to be better about feudalism compared to capitalism? I can't think of a literal single thing.
. What, exactly, do you consider to be better about feudalism compared to capitalism?
I mean there were some pretty sweet parts of it. The moral certainty, the sense of community, the lack of environmental collapse, the government usually not concerning itself with you as long as you didn't bug em
Shit, Being The Dude seems pretty possible back then, sounds comfy. Obvi living nowadays is better, but thats only because of technology
of all medieval stories I've read it's the most Dudes Rock of em all. YW m8
got to say though, feels bad knowing that i will never get to eat hash with a judge, impress the sheikh with my long dong, and be rewarded with a cushy job eating more hash and telling stories in his court :sadness:
I suppose this is more a criticism of industrialism, rather than capitalism, since a feudal society might have this same problem in the modern day (who knows, haven't tested it). But, as the post pointed out, medieval peasants had significantly more free time than we workers do now. If you're a farmer, a good chunk of your time is just spent waiting for your crops to grow. There's nothing you can do to make them grow any harder. You've just gotta wait for the sun and the dirt and the rain to do their job.
So you can do whatever you want. Fuck off into the woods, watch some birds. Hang out with your friends. Build something for your own satisfaction. Make a work of art.
I don't consider free time in and of itself to be better than the lack of it, especially when there is not that much to actually do in all that free time. I'd rather be occupied with something I hate than feel like I don't have anything to do, if I was ok with existing in a null value I probably would've killed myself already.
Also either way this kind of critique is meaningless because in no reality is industrialization ever going away, unless we get wiped out by a meteor or something. Even in the worst case scenarios climate change will not make the conditions for industrial society impossible, it'll just make those industrial societies much smaller and deprive them of most luxuries and pleasurable items in general. Hell, the continued industrial-ness will probably be mandatory to survive in worst-case climate scenarios.
especially when there is not that much to actually do in all that free time.
This is just bad history. Medieval peasants occupied themselves with hobbies just like we do. Just because they didn't have video games doesn't mean they had nothing to do.
I didn't mean to imply that and frankly regret writing that first paragraph because it just takes away from the more meaningful second paragraph. Obviously they still did things and had hobbies there's bundles of archeological evidence for that, but the breadth of possible things to do was much narrower.
Perhaps it's just a matter of personal preference but if forced to choose I will always prefer a wide variety of options with less time to do them in than a narrower variety of options with more time to do them in. Although obviously more time and more options is always better, and sufficient automation might get us there at some point.
If I didn’t know better I’d suggest anti-consumerism as an idea is an op, but
BUT
ok moviebob
yeah but the cucks who slept through history class and get their knowledge from libs obsessed with le enlightenment stuff will never listen to you
Can't be racist if race as a concept hasn't been invented yet!
dude pointing at his head picture
It's a false perspective to look at capitalism as a kind of qualitative progress from feudalism in a quality of life sense. There is and never was a progression from more oppression to less oppression or some such (Marxist linear view of history as socioeconomic systems getting "better", more humane, etc. notwithstanding), instead you had adaptation and re-adaptation of socioeconomic systems to better fit the needs (meaning the ability to practice hegemony) of the ruling class (be it a traditional or an ascendant one that struggled and subdued it's predecessors). Kind of like evolution via natural selection is a tug of war between adaptation to changing geological circumstances and the drive for species and individuals within those species to secure their safety and ascend to the apex of the food chain. As such the distinctions between feudalism, slave-owning societies, capitalism, some future fascist techno-totalitarianism are purely academic. The only distinction that matters is between systems of exploitation on the one hand (that have pretty much totally dominated human "urbanised" or "settler" history) and systems of mutual cooperation and advancement of civilization on the other. As such the main working class (be they slaves, peasants, proletarians, conscious ai with robotic appendages) never benefits in this arrangement because it is literally the source of the prosperity of the ruling class, the exploitation of the former the latter's lifeblood. So no, capitalism has not and by its very nature cannot bring more happiness or prosperity or safety to its human economic base - any assumed betterment in your quality of life as compared to the medieval ages comes solely from scientific-technological progress. Or in other words it is a mere side-effect of you being in the right place at the right time.
This is factually and historically incorrect, but it's a common idea in capitalist propaganda.
Capitalism was so unpopular that landowners had to remove peasants from the land by force, crowding them into shitty disease-ridden city slums to work 6.5 days a week for factory owners. Quality of life and life expectancy plummeted. The cities were abattoirs in which the poor died early miserable deaths.
In contrast, a peasant working the fields had rights recognized by all and the means to produce everything they needed to live, including land held in common to grow their own food. On average feudal peasants were far healthier and had much more leisure time and respect than the miserable proletariat slum dwellers their descendants became.
The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelmen is a decent intro to this subject. Here's an overview: "“Everyone But an Idiot Knows That The Lower Classes Must Be Kept Poor, or They Will Never Be Industrious”" .
“The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical political economy,” writes Perelman. “In reality, the dispossession of the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx, or at least his translators, labeled this expropriation of the masses as ‘‘primitive accumulation.’’
Perelman outlines the many different policies through which peasants were forced off the land—from the enactment of so-called Game Laws that prohibited peasants from hunting, to the destruction of the peasant productivity by fencing the commons into smaller lots—but by far the most interesting parts of the book are where you get to read Adam Smith’s proto-capitalist colleagues complaining and whining about how peasants are too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited, and trying to figure out how to force them to accept a life of wage slavery.
Here's a piece that suggests peasants had a 35 hour work week. Who gets that these days? The Anglo-Saxon Hide, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and the 35 Hour Work Week
