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.
Also they were essentially tasked with being in control of an area of land where they lived and worked.
Almost. We are proletarians working under late-stage Capitalism, where markets have largely coalesced into monopolist syndicates and cartels, and competition is rapidly dying out. The conditions are ripe for siezure, public ownership, and central planning, ie Socialism.
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
We cannot simply pretend the serf and the proletarian share the same nature of exploitation, rather, Capitalism’s unfettered thirst for growth drives further exploitation and misery despite producing abundance, while feudalism did not share the same thirst for absolute growth overall, as technology largely didn’t allow for it until inventions in production that gave rise to the Proletariat and Bourgeoisie.
The serfs had it worse, but owned more of their production.
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. Also they were essentially tasked with being in control of an area of land where they lived and worked.
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.
Now we are tied to corporations and state as slave-likes
Almost. We are proletarians working under late-stage Capitalism, where markets have largely coalesced into monopolist syndicates and cartels, and competition is rapidly dying out. The conditions are ripe for siezure, public ownership, and central planning, ie Socialism.
You see wild shit on lemmy .world
To be fair, they aren’t entirely out of range of reasonableness here.
-The Principles of Communism
We cannot simply pretend the serf and the proletarian share the same nature of exploitation, rather, Capitalism’s unfettered thirst for growth drives further exploitation and misery despite producing abundance, while feudalism did not share the same thirst for absolute growth overall, as technology largely didn’t allow for it until inventions in production that gave rise to the Proletariat and Bourgeoisie.
The serfs had it worse, but owned more of their production.