Feudalism might not be as common as we think of it; it's simply very visible in the historic record.
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As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms: because we care.
Many forms of organising humans in the past and present have had specific mechanisms installed to prevent single people from getting too much power. (Including preventing them from converting wealth into power -- something we take for granted that one can just do today.)
As a case in point: I live in a condo association. We and all our neighbours collectively own and maintain this building. We vote on big issues and elect representatives for everyday duties. It would be very hard to consistently appropriate large amounts of resources over a longer time period, compared to, say, a small business owner.
We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out.
I strongly recommend reading Graeber's The Dawn of Everything to start out.
The question is not why would people choose to live under supposed egalitarianism, but why would that be the default system. It relies on non-betrayal behavior across multiple actors in whom power is vested, which depends on many non-intuitive cultural innovations in thinking about your peers and social responsibility. Feudalism is at least straightforwardly plausible as the point towards which high entropy systems descend. Conversely, it's very hard to see how democratic communalism would just spontaneously emerge and maintain itself without consistent effort and cooperation, both fragile dependencies.
Two reasons:
1 - More egalitarian societies are more efficiient - they produce more because exploited peasants are not peoductive 2 - Who wans to die to protect their tyrant?
As an example - historically agricultural productivity was not a question of labor organization, or labor efficiency. A farmer could only grow but so much food with the land aloted, available water, and crop/fertilizer technology of the time. This amount was relatively close to subsistence.
The sowing of crops could be made more efficient in terms of person hours. But, without a production surplus, and no additional land to cultivate - there wasn’t much else for the individuals to do with the surplus hours.
Similarly, in a modern society labor productivity can be decoupled with economic output. Google search will be the dominant search engine regardless if it’s engineering team is efficient or inefficient.
This is true of some key areas, such as farming. But industry and at least some service sectors tend to benefit a lot from scaling up. Walmart is incredibly efficient, and Amazon only more so.
Just because they are exploited profitably, does not mean thats their best contribution to the economy. Its just that their more efficiebt aopkication camkot be easilly privatised
How does that work? Did Walmart shut a medical school?
You may not like Amazon or Walmart, but people work at Walmart because it's better than their alternatives at the time.
Walmart/Amazon didn't make their alternatives bad.
The point was, these people COULD do more than move boxes from A to B, could have been more productive, and could contribute more to the economy, if they were provided training.
Why they didn't get training is irrelevant - you can debate all day if Wallmart or Obama is at fault. But you don't get any credit for making humans move boxes A to B like monkeys. If they took a bunch of homeless people and made them into engineers, then yes, that would be noteworthy.
As to your starman - you could find a homeless person and cruely exploit them, by offering them dangerous work or getting them into prostitution. It could make you a lot of money if done at scale, and most people would call you a terrible person.
You did not make them homeless to begin with, but I think most people would not buy that as something that vindicates you.
But suddenly if your name is Amazon then it has a veneer of a respectable business.
Yes, they could, but what does that have to do with Walmart or Amazon?
And, at least for now, boxes need moving.
You persist in your belief that offering someone an "opportunity" that you don't like is exploiting them. It isn't, no matter how bad that opportunity is.
As to people with no good alternatives, that's on you as much as it is Walmart and Amazon.
I trust my two-year old to carry his glass to the table because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that.
I don't trust my two-year old to not fall down stairs because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that and he has failed to show it.
That's how it works in an egalitarian society too. You give people a chance to show they can be trusted. If they fail to show that, you stop trusting them.
At least please provide some specific and tangible reasons why you believe this is so obviously true, instead of repeatedly alluding to these numerous, incontrovertible, imminently applicable examples. Your statements are, I imagine for most readers, directly opposed to what history has shown about human nature and the nature of power.
Yes, I do honestly believe the wealth- and power-preservation interests of the few are one of the reasons we live in such undemocratic forms today.
Yes, I have experienced various forms of organisation in both the big and the small, along the authoritarianism--democracy axis, and the more democratic have consistently been the better, in almost all respects except that they make it hard to amass wealth and transform it into power over others.
If you want, I can refer to many more well-reasoned criticisms of capitalism than I can author. But it sounds like you'd be familiar with those already, so I'm not sure it would help you change your mind.
Socialism is what bootstrapped many ancient human communities, even if they didn't know the name
It is known (and sustained by scholars) that many societies of the past were socalist in nature, hell, even Jesus teachings are considered socialist.
It is by far more popular and spontaneous than feudalism, because it worked.
Interesting thesis, now prove it!
First of all you're conflating two arguments, excessive governments and socialism.
Excessive government in the past was bad because bureaucracy was slow, meaning physically slow.
Proto-socialism or community driven government made it possible for people to form smaller communities inside larger settlements where they could offload some of the burden to others in a mutually supportive way.
People scared today of government intervention think they still live a thousand years ago. Like that country that wait 11 weeks between election and inauguration of a new president because the process was designed around stagecoaches that brought the votes to the capital.
Secondly: your question is frankly showing that you went straight to the comments without even reading what I wrote Socialism is what *bootstrapped* many ancient human communities, the answer is there.
We are talking about spontaneous and "default economic system" after all, not the best at something.
If you really think ranking historical civilizations means anything, well you'll agree that Egyptians were quite THE civilization, does that mean that the best way to run a country is having a semi-god Pharaoh that builds pyramids in the desert?
The US is a glitch in history compares to what ancient Egyptian or Romans or Chinese or Greek or Mongols have achieved, it's quite possible that how the US are run today is a glitch in history as well that do not depend by the way they are run but only by the position they found themselves in after WW2, inertia is a bitch, it took centuries for the roman empire to fall.
They are in fact challenged (and somewhat defeates) by China, which is [drum roll] a socialist country!
It's quite possible that if the US switched to the political system of France or Sweden they would be as rich as today.
Also, to counter your naive argument: the Minoans.
And do ancient Greek qualify?
scholars have extensively argued that Plato and Aristotle led the foundation of socialism in their philosophies (it is now accepts that Marx was influenced by his ancient Greek studies)
The argument challenges a widespread interpretation of the connection between antiquity and socialism in Marx's work-that his socialist vision takes its bearings from the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship between necessity and leisure. In Marx's view, the fundamental legacy of antiquity was the notion of freedom as masterlessness. The roots of this legacy are in the political experience of the democratic polis, not in Aristotle's reflections on the ideal household. The core of Marx's project, then, is not to open a realm of freedom beyond necessity, but rather to create spaces for democratic action within the realm of necessity itself, to ensure that work is free and compatible with leisured activities. [1]
All work and no play, which is much more common in the US that here in Europe, makes Jack a dull boy.
Socialism and proto socialism have and will keep having a much longer history and importance than feudalism will never have and occur much more spontaneously and "by default" than many other systems, especially today that we should be more aware of our limited time on Earth and much less addicted to sacrifice for the benefit of the few (AKA the masters).
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/a...
they won't understand.
This seems like a pretty reasonable theory, but does indicate a little problem I think -- the people have experienced the feudal system will only be around for a couple generations after the change-over. So, at least to the extent that this is the cause, it would likely be a transitory configuration, right? (ignoring some unusual circumstances, like being neighbors to a particularly unpleasant feudal state and having them as a constant contrast). I wonder what that sort of configuration decays toward.
But yes, you're onto something with the neighbour hypothesis too -- egalitarian and hierarchical (or beaurocratic and violent) societies often come in pairs, right next to each other.
The people retelling the story don't understand it - we have stories and kings and feudalism, go on the street and ask a random person any question about how feudalism works:
What rights did peasants have? What right does the lord have over his peasants? could peasants be sold and how are they different from slaves? Which 'levels' of nobility does what? Who pays taxes to whom?
If put theae people into a feudal society tomorrow, and just renamed 'baron' and 'lord' to something else, they would not know it. We could call it 'landlord' and 'investor'
This is going to sound sarcastic or something, but I'm actually curious -- do they? I would tend to assume that they appear to come in pairs, but this is largely because we happened to find history books written by the self-professed egalitarian society, and not their rivals, to whom they allocate every vice.
Their egalitarian neighbours where only just starting to discover. In part because their traces are less obvious, and in part because we've had a mental confirmation bias against finding them. I refer back to The Dawn of Everything if you want more details!
I am also pretty sure ancient (pre-classical) world with its massive centralized empires do not count as feudal, or otherwise the term becomes so broad as to be meaningless...
This is a bit of a fallacy since productivity and efficiency are just as important in a steady-state economy as a growing one, and perhaps more so. The inefficiency of large politically-enforced monopolies would merely turn zero into negative growth.
It's when those checks against individual power fail that those ways of organizing ourselves fail.
Elinor Ostrom got an economics Nobel in what I think is the economic side of this.
In any system where wealth converts to power, it does because the majority of people implicitly agree with playing the game that way.
In a practical egalitarian society, if the person with all the furs decided one day to not share, then the people would stop sharing their food, tools, building skills, childcare, medicinal treatments, fire, feasts, etc. with this person. They wouldn't have any choice but to rejoin society or try to go truly independent.
Somehow, they have to first be convinced that the wealthy has some sort of moral right to their possessions. In other words, they have to play along in the game of wealth distribution.
They would need to organize themselves collectively somehow.
> Somehow, they have to first be convinced that the wealthy has some sort of moral right to their possessions.
No, they just need to be convinced that they don't have any collective organization.
Slaves don't need to be convinced of the morality of their situation, just the hopelessness on it.
...unless you have convinced them of your moral right to those furs. That's literally the only way a large group of people can be "unable" to expropriate them.
Each individual bodyguard has no reason to think they would have a higher rank after a coup replacing the "one person."
They absolutely don't need to believe that the person at the top is irreplaceable. Sometimes they've lived through a replacement or two!
I'm talking about an egalitarian society where one person suddenly tries to convince a band of friends that it's in their interest to close themselves off from the rest of society and try to extract value from it without contributing back.
There's no "rank" to be gained from refusing to join that band -- quite the opposite! You get to go back to a society that's free from rank.
^ At best they get to split the furs up among 40 people instead of 41.
(And if the 1 removed is actually doing any work, there's also more work to assign.)
There's little reason for any individual goon to think they're going to get a better deal this way. Let alone enough to compensate for the risk.
Removing the guy who takes "the lion's share" produces someone new to take the lion's share.
Unless they think they can do away with that entire structure. But then they have to believe they can change everyone's behavior all at once from collectively enforcing inequality to collectively enforcing equality.
The kind of social structure that makes this possible is the kind of social structure that the powerful person will make sure can't arise (by controlling information, removing potential leaders, etc.)
You seem to be approaching the question "in a hierarchical society, what makes it impossible for small bands of people to overpower the entire system all at once?" which is an interesting question, but a very different one.
I'm just saying that underling guards in general don't actually need to believe in the narrative the guarded elite uses as self-justification. Maybe they do believe it, maybe they feel obligated to pretend to believe, maybe it's all naked self-interest... regardless, what really keeps them in their position is the grid of power/interest.
In order to even have a concept of "owning wealth" there must be a physical defense of wealth already set up.
It's "inherent" in that sense. Owning the thing means having some means of physical militaristic defense of the thing.
The underlying fact you're referencing here is simply that the means of defense is never an individual's physical power.
What it is instead, is their position in a social graph of interests. Other people in the society have their own lives structured so that it's in their interests to serve and protect power.
However, ownership exists in egalitarian forms of organisation too. It's not the "exclusive right to prevent others from using the thing", but in any human arrangement people understand that some objects are needed by some people (crutch, broken leg), some objects are more actively used by some people (household hatchet, cutting wood every week), and some objects have sentimental value for some people (grandma's ashes.)
These things normally count as property, with no violence to enforce it.
"all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed"
Yes and no. Human societies in general have concepts of personal property (i.e. something you use, like your toothbrush).
Not all societies have concepts of private property that we have today i.e. something you never use but still control. This is a complex set of viewpoints with many conflicts. They changed a lot over time. Many are very modern.
E.g. you can become owner of land by adverse possession.
In many egalitarian societies a person hoarding excessive amounts of objects is seen as unhinged.
and all the empires that lasted millenia before feudalism emerged
stretching its duration from inception to fall, feudalism lasted around 7 centuries, after the fall of the western roman empire
it's never been the default system throughout history
For comparison Egyptian civilization lived and prospered for more than 30 centuries, not accounting for ancient Egyptian settlements and the long tail of its complete demise.
Trying to reduce human character and motivations to something simple is essentially what modern microeconomic theory tried to do and it ends up having to hand-wave away so much real life behaviour that it started to call itself "prescriptive rather than descriptive".
Why do we have laws that punish robbery and murder? Because it may be the easiest path to solve a perceived urgent need (and it comes at the expense of others). It takes much more self-control and effort to "pull oneself by the bootstraps".
So, at least some forms of advancing one's position while harming others' is codified in most laws. These laws protect what we, as a society, consider valuable. Like property, and not being murdered.
So, too, is Feudalism a quick and easy fix to maintain the status quo of leadership, but it comes in a way that harms society.
Indian feudalism
Feudal Japan
Feudalism in Pakistan
Fengjian (Chinese)
Etc
This is so easy to find that I can't understand how people on the internet make these kind of questions and even add the "in your view".
For a view of feudalism that treats it as distinctively European, below is a quote from Perry Anderson in "Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" (p19). If you doubt the relevance of Anderson, consider that he is not just quoted in the article linked above, but that he edits the journal in which it was published.
> The dual predecessors of the feudal mode of production were, of course, the decomposing slave mode of production on whose foundations the whole enormous edifice of the Roman Empire had once been constructed, and the distended and deformed primitive modes of production of the Germanic invaders which survived in their new homelands, after the barbarian conquests. These two radically distinct worlds had undergone a slow disintegration and creeping interpenetration in the last centuries of Antiquity.
For example, what you call Chinese feudalism (Fēngjiàn)
As a result, Chinese history from the Zhou dynasty (1046 BC–256 BC) to the beginning of the Qin dynasty has been termed a feudal period by many Chinese historians, *due to the custom of enfeoffment of land similar to that in Medieval Europe*. But scholars have suggested that fengjian otherwise lacks some of the fundamental aspects of feudalism. This system is often conflated with Confucianism but also with Legalism.
The name was given post-facto, but it wasn't feudalism, it was Fēngjiàn.
Techno-feudalism is simply feudalism fuelled by the control of technology instead of the land.
We could call it thechno-fēngjiàn, if you prefer.
But I also do not think that techno-feudalism is actually feudalism.
Techno-aristocracy or techno-oligarchy are a better description IMO
For once, Google doesn't need to pay and feed an army to dominate the ADV market or build castles surrounded by walls, they simply need to maintain their dominant position crushing or buying the competition and strike a deal with those they can't buy or crush.
They don't need to _yet_ that is. I always found the imagery in _The Diamond Age_ of New Atlantis to be a fun steam punk take of a future in an alternative-history. However I can't help but think of it when I read about Amazon's "Helix" and 'Amazonia' in Seattle, or Apple's "Spaceship" complex, Google's ... etc.
Really, we just need a few more legal tenets of Manorism where workers can't leave their sanctioned tech estate, ahem https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/silicon-valleys-...
This was an interesting discussion - allegations of bad faith ruin the discussion and make you look like you are unable to tolerate different interpretations of the facts.
But it started late in the 11th century, 6 centuries after what happened in Europe, hardly the "default economic system"
A stratified social-economic system where mobility between classes is a near impossibility. Economic interests are bestowed by grant or taken by force. The individuals who work for the economic interest are endentured to it.
Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system such as occurred during the industrial revolution, the expansion of agricultural land in North America, or the rise of corporations in the 1600-1700s.
When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum. Why wouldn't individuals secure sinecures in the form of monopolies or mega corporations ownership?