More dysentery also… like a LOT more dysentery. So much so that people often believed their soul exists in their lower abdomen because when you feel pain there you die shortly after.
Wow that’s a lot of dysentery.
Sorry your point lacks proper context based on reality.
That’s really a western Europe thing and American thing. Even then no where near as much as you’re suggesting, not for the last 10k years or so at least. Beer/wine taking over and replacing water drinking unironically eliminated most of that, and in other cultures sanitation prevented it. English serfs had a lot of dysentery though, since they were too stupid to use Roman infrastructure.
You don’t know how bad peasants actually had it.
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.
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.
Question 8 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf?
Answer : The serf enjoys the possession and use of an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he hands over a part of his product or performs labour. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf frees himself either by running away to the town and there becoming a handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money instead of labour and products, thereby becoming a free tenant; or by driving his feudal lord away and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering in one way or another into the owning class and into competition. The proletarian frees himself by abolishing competition, private property and all class differences.
-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.
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.
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.
I don’t think that being a peasant was bad, it doesn’t seem to have been exploitative in the same way capitalism is. Peasants were largely farmers who grew food and provided the landowner with a percentage of their crop. They were integral to human survival and as far as I know the percentage taken by landowners was not comparable to the wealth extracted from workers today.
Ah, the good old days of serfdom when peasants were tied to the land/manor and its Lord in a slave-like state.
You see some wild shit on Lemmy apparently.
To be fair, they aren’t entirely out of range of reasonableness here.
Question 8 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf?
Answer : The serf enjoys the possession and use of an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he hands over a part of his product or performs labour. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf frees himself either by running away to the town and there becoming a handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money instead of labour and products, thereby becoming a free tenant; or by driving his feudal lord away and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering in one way or another into the owning class and into competition. The proletarian frees himself by abolishing competition, private property and all class differences.
-The Principles of Communism
Marx’s analysis of Capitalism and predictions of where it heads are proven more correct with the passage of time. The reason the Proletarian is exploited to a greater degree than the serf is due to the nature of commodity production. As the M-C-M’ circuit, whereby M is an initial sum of money, C the commodity produced with M, and M’ the greater sum of money after selling said commodity is the basis of Capitalist production, said process is incentivized to be maximized. In Feudalism, rent is extracted and the rest kept for subsistence, in Capitalism wages are set by cost of continued existence and replacement, moving up or down mostly by societal norms.
The serfs did not have it better, of course. However, the nature of their production was limited to the low technological development of the time. With mass factories Capitalism was transitioned to, and now with complex development of production in the hands of massive, monopolist syndicates and cartels, we can move beyond Capitalism to Socialized prodiction, central planning and public ownership, far easier than ever before.
The serfs had it worse, but owned more of their production.
Marx’s analysis of Capitalism and predictions of where it heads are proven more correct with the passage of time. The reason the Proletarian is exploited to a greater degree than the serf is due to the nature of commodity production. As the M-C-M’ circuit, whereby M is an initial sum of money, C the commodity produced with M, and M’ the greater sum of money after selling said commodity is the basis of Capitalist production, said process is incentivized to be maximized. In Feudalism, rent is extracted and the rest kept for subsistence, in Capitalism wages are set by cost of continued existence and replacement, moving up or down mostly by societal norms.
Question 8 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf?
Answer : The serf enjoys the possession and use of an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he hands over a part of his product or performs labour. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf frees himself either by running away to the town and there becoming a handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money instead of labour and products, thereby becoming a free tenant; or by driving his feudal lord away and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering in one way or another into the owning class and into competition. The proletarian frees himself by abolishing competition, private property and all class differences.
-The Principles of Communism
The serfs did not have it better, of course. However, the nature of their production was limited to the low technological development of the time, and now with the mass factories and complex development of production, we can move beyond Capitalism to Socialism.
I highly recommend those interested to check out my Introductory Reading List on Marxism.
What, specifically, are you asking about? Are you asking about why it was dissolved from the top down and sold for parts to the west? Or is this about something more specific?
For clarity, the Soviet Union marked dramatic improvements for the lives of the Working Class, and showed that Socialism is a working economic model. Asking what went “wrong” without asking specifics helps nobody, the best answer to that is just directing you to Blackshirts and Reds, which took a critical look at what went right and what didn’t in the Soviet Union and how it collapsed, along with the brutal reintroduction of Capitalism that killed 7 million people.
You are a serf. removed, you live in Alsace. You are a peasant. You need to give your fuckin’ lord the grain. Your fucking children, you’ve had 15 children. You’ve never taken a bath. You’ve literally never. washed. your. penis. You’ve never used toilet paper. Motherfucker, you have worms. You are dying. You’ve had 40 children, 3 of them are alive. 2 of them are child soldiers in the Duke’s army.
removed, the greatest thing you can hope for is to die at the ripe old age of 36. You fucking can’t read. You don’t know what TV is. If you were transported into 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. I’m sure some Medieval guy is gonna get mad at me for this, removed I’ve been to the Renaissance Fair. I’ve eaten a large turkey wing, which the Juggalos call ‘removed beaters’, which I think is problematic but a funny thing to call them.
Motherfucker, you gotta recognize where you are, and then you gotta get past that. You gotta be unemotional. 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 only throw trash in the hole.
You need to eat a body. And you need to carry the plague. And you need to carry a plague around this whole world, that will change this whole fuckin world. And all your enemies will vomit black bile and will choke on blood and will grow boils and die. But only if you get together with your other RATS. And you come up with some kind of super plague, to fuckin end your enemies and… END THIS NIGHTMARE
