The Brute Economics of Slavery
Preramble: I posted this on my blog exactly a year ago today, in slightly different form. Dan linked to it once, from here, just a few weeks before I started writing for Angry Bear. Recent comments got me thinking about it again.
In thinking about the economics of slavery, I’m considering slavery and serfdom to be economic near-equivalents. Of course, I recognize that there are qualitative differences between chattel-slavery and serfdom:
– In slavery, the master owns the person of the slave; in serfdom the master owns the labor output of the serf, either as a stated labor quantity, a stated output quantity, or some combination.
– Serfs enjoy some measure of freedom, and can accumulate personal wealth, after the rents are paid; slaves do not and cannot. (The point, though is to keep rents so high that accumulation is prohibitively unlikely.)
– It might be easier to gradually and incrementally impose serfdom on an existing population. First generation slaves need to be captured, conquered, or in some other way removed from – and deprived of – their native state. Thus, serfdom is imposed on the indigenous population, slaves are more typically imported.
– The individual slave is a depreciating asset. But, as a population, slaves are self-renewing, since, unlike Shakers, they reproduce. Serfs are factor inputs rather than assets. (On the other hand, the master also owes the serf protection, and sustenance in times of famine. In that sense, the serf resembles an asset that requires maintenance.)
These are significant differences, to be sure, but mostly from a sociological or political perspective. In terms of the brute economics, they are somewhere between second order and trivial.
The necessary conditions for reducing a population to serfdom are as follows.
– A large wealth and power disparity between the haves and the have-nots.
– Perhaps more significantly, the ownership of virtually all assets by an elite class, with severely limited opportunities for the general population to own or accumulate assets.
– A poorly educated population with limited skill sets.
– Severely impaired individual mobility, due to an impossible debt and/or tax burden and legal restrictions.
– Government of the masters, by the masters, for the masters, with little or no sense of worth or justice for the serfs. This enforces and reinforces the previous point.
– A social and/or religious system that recognizes the inherent meritocracy of the master class.
– A population that is scared or coerced into ceding their freedom to the masters in exchange for security.
– The political will to deprive people of their fundamental human dignity.
Via Krugman, we find Delong’s repost of a short treatise on slavery and serfdom by Evrey Domar.
Domar points out additional requirements, and a mechanism for serfdom to develop.
– Low population density: Labor scarcity favors slavery/serfdom, since the cost of freeman labor will be high. I’ll admit I didn’t get this until is was stated the other way around. Population growth favors freeman labor since the competition for jobs drives wages down. (Note the implicit denial of the “Lump of labor fallacy” canard.)
– A large class of what Domar calls “servitors” who owe allegiance, taxes, and military support to a higher authority. They are the equivalent of medieval vassals of a liege lord, who extract from the local peasant population not only their own means of existence, but that of their liege, as well. This is the beginning of, and most literal sense of “rent-seeking.” The process is that, starting with a free population, by taxation or other forms of indebtedness, the freedom of the common people is eroded. Those whom Domar calls “servitors” I call leaches.
– Explicit Government complicity in restricting mobility, via legal structures. Besides limiting the population’s mobility in a gross sense, it also eliminates the possibility of competition among different servitors.
In this way, serfdom developed in depopulated* Western Europe during or after the late Roman Empire, and in Eastern Europe many centuries later – in fact, long after serfdom has disappeared in the West. In each case, the critical enabling factor was low population density, resulting in a critical shortage of labor.
Basically, it comes down to an economic evaluation of costs and returns. But these are not easy to determine with any precision in the abstract, and probably not in the actual event, either, unless the increment is quite large. The slave, and even the serf, needs maintenance in a way that the free laborer does not. The serf can be compelled to work past his willingness in way that the free man cannot. On the other hand, the free man might have higher willingness and unit productivity. The wild card here is what the free man can demand as wages, and that depends on the competition for available jobs. The bottom line is that serfdom will dominate whenever the profit (revenues less costs) of keeping a serf is greater than that of hiring a free laborer.
Of course, all of this was long ago – pre-industrial revolution in fact, and centered on a low-technology agrarian system. What message does it have for us today? Here, Krugman wonders** why, after the the plagues of the mid-14th century, serfdom wasn’t reestablished in Western Europe, since the population was greatly depleted. Domar has no clear answer, and Delong won’t hazard a guess. I will — but it’s only a guess. Perhaps society had moved on, and the culture was no longer accepting of serfdom as a social institution. Serfdom had faded away from lack of interest and due to population growth many decades before the plague epidemics occurred around 1350. There were sufficient numbers of artisans, craftsmen, guilds, merchants, and bankers, such that tying people back to the soil might not have been easy, or even desirable. The growth of towns might have played a part. Another social factor is that in late Eastern European serfdom, the servitor’s status was determined by the number of serfs he controlled. I don’t think that was ever the case in the West. Sometimes social factors trump economics.
Also, as Barbara Tuchman points out in A Distant Mirror (Ch 11, frex.), though the population decreased due to the plague, total wealth in coins and material possessions did not, and they were largely in the hands of the elite. It could be that with this wealth maintained, the brute economic drive for serfdom was absent, or severely attenuated, despite the labor shortage.
Krugman also wonders: “And an even bigger question: why hasn’t indentured servitude made a comeback in the modern era? Yes, I know, human rights and all that – but if it was profitable to have indentured servants in the modern world, I’m sure that Richard Scaife’s think tanks would have no trouble finding justifications, and assorted Christian groups would explain why it’s God’s will.”
Well, that was in 2003, when Scaife was well known and the Koch brothers weren’t. This statement also gets a lot of ridicule in comments at Delong’s Domar post. But, there were certainly many Christian apologists for slavery, and you can see today that tea-baggers and the Christian Right do not exactly align themselves on the side of human rights vs the brute force of the elite.
So Krugman’s question remains, hanging over us like the sword of Damocles. Here is the way I see it. First off, you need to be skeptical about translating a socio-economic phenomenon from a different place and time to the here-and-now. Our population is not sparse nor badly educated (yet), and we do not have a pre-industrial agrarian economy. But these differences effect the possibilities and modes of implementation. They don’t effect the ongoing defects of human nature that Krugman obliquely alludes to. These are greed, ego, and the lust for power, and you can see them manifesting themselves right here in the U.S. today in the struggle between labor and the minions of the wealthy elite.
When I think about serfdom, I also think about more modern analogs – sharecroppers, coal miners who owed their soul to the company sto’e, child laborers in early industrialized England, indentured servants, the exploitation of illegal immigrants, and the union busting practices that have been highly successful here since 1980.
In evaluating the conditions that favor and disfavor serfdom as such, something is missing from the analysis. That is that somewhere along whatever spectrum of conditions makes serfdom more or less economically favorable to the elite, there is a point (or region) of indifference. If working people are reduced to the point where the economics are no less favorable to the elite than serfdom, then actually going through the formality of making them serfs simply isn’t worth the effort, and doesn’t make any economic difference.
What do we have today?
– The largest wealth disparity since before the great depression – at every stratum of society, growing larger every day.
– An all out assault by the moneyed elite on the wealth and status of working people. Union busting is one of the tools.
– Deliberate undermining of public education.
– Segments of the population tied to the land by under-water mortgages or the inability to unload a property.
– Popular social movements with religious backing that favor the interests of the elite over the interests of the people.
– Constant fear-mongering as a pretext for inducing people to give up their basic rights.
– A moneyed elite that effectively owns government.
Krugman’s apparent underlying assumption, which I share, is that – for the servitors at least, and possibly for the serfs as well – serfdom is a strategy of least resistance, and therefore the default social order, whenever the conditions for it are right.
One of the things that can make conditions not right for serfdom is regulated entrepreneurial capitalism – inventiveness, innovation, industry, and real competition. Capitalism generates wealth, increases wages, opportunities and the standard of living, and reinforces concepts of freedom, liberty, and fair practices. Effective regulation assures that fair practices are maintained, keeps the playing field even, and increases the likelihood that reward is in some way proportional to a combination of skill and effort. Capitalism is expansionist by nature, serfdom is static.
Unfortunately, over time, capitalism transmogrified into Corporatism.
Corporatism, for all its acquisitiveness, is a very different phenomenon. Ownership is remote. Assets are used in large part for executive bonuses, dividends, and mergers and acquisitions. Though the track record of M&A in meeting stated goals is dismal, the real net effect is monopolization – corporatists hate competition. Corporatism seeks always and everywhere to decrease wages, and is utterly indifferent to the living standards, freedom, and opportunities of anyone outside the elite. Ethics and fairness are non-existent. Rewards are in proportion to rapacity. In other words, Corporatism is the new feudalism.
This is why I say that the goal of the Republican party, as servitors to Scaife, the Koch’s and their ilk, is to take us back to the 12th century – or whatever it’s 21st Century near-equivalent might be. I’ve stated that trans-national corporations with no loyalty to anyone or anything constitute the real road to serfdom, in contradistinction to what Hayek said. That is a bit inaccurate, though. Once wage scales are reduced to the par value of slave maintenance, it doesn’t matter what the correct technical description of our condition is, and the elite won’t care.
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* Antonine Plague of 165-180, Cyprian Plague of 250-270, Justinian Plague of 541-2
** The link to the Surowiecki article that Krugman mentions is broken. It can be found here.
jazz
thanks for the essay. it is something we ought to think about. unfortunately i think you are probably wrong and unduly influenced by your political views… which i mostly share. i hope Bruce Webb will be along to correct our history.
My guess is that slavery has always been with us… though in varied forms as suited the “means of production” of the times.
I would guess that slavery/serfdom was actually ended as the dominant form by the rise of capitalism or something close to it. for the first time fairly ordinary people could set up on their own without a master. of course what replaced medieval serfdom was modern factory-slavery which may not have been much of an improvement… absent that capitalist escape hatch. i think this may be one of the reason our friends on the right equate capitalism to “freedom,” though they are not above treating their employees as serfs or less.
it’s funny that the people in America who have most violently opposed “government slavery” (poorly put) have been the people who owned slaves, real slaves, themselves, or their intellectual (if the word applies) descendants.
you might, if you can get over your hatred of “religion” note the role that the church and family have in limiting the power and ratioinalizatioins of slavery.
i will mention in passing that when Paul told slaves to be “loyal” to their masters, he was not endorsing slavery, he was giving good advice on how to “live with” something they could not change. for all the people who have claimed religious endorsement of slavery, it was religious people who took the lead in abolishing it.
And let’s take a look through the political lenses of just who’s doing all this?
– The largest wealth disparity since before the great depression – at every stratum of society, growing larger every day. (This is a bi-partisan issue and continues regardless of who has been in the White House or controls congress. But we do know that people who are Congressmen/Presidents are part of the Elite).
– An all out assault by the moneyed elite on the wealth and status of working people. Union busting is one of the tools. (Again both sides do this. To the point the Unions themselves are corporations and don’t look after their members interest first, but the interests of the Union leaders and senior members. Lastly one of America’s largest strengths is corporations ability to hire/fire people quickly in response to market forces. Something Europe lacks and is a big contributor to their huge unemployment problems. And don’t forget Steve Job’s/Apple’s solution).
– Deliberate undermining of public education. (Primary education has been the sole domain of the Democratic party for quite some time. We know exactly whom to blame for its products)
– Segments of the population tied to the land by under-water mortgages or the inability to unload a property. (BK solves this problem. You can’t stop stupid and the limits to freedom required to stop stupid would make the cure worse than the disease. Anyone who bought a house for over 10 times their income was either irrational or committing fraud or had fraud committed on them)
– Popular social movements with religious backing that favor the interests of the elite over the interests of the people. (Not sure who your discussing here. The ones on the right favor more ‘individual’ freedom over ‘group’ freedom and basically want to be left alone. The ones on the left tend to want to tell you how to live, where to live, what to buy and how to think)
– Constant fear-mongering as a pretext for inducing people to give up their basic rights. (Seems to be a bi-partisan problem as I don’t remember the Dems making it a priority (well they did overwhelmingly support it originally) to roll-back the security state constructed after 9/11. Heck even Gitmo is still open…)
– A moneyed elite that effectively owns government. (Buffet has Obama’s ear so no argument here).
I’ll add two more:
– A cultural elite that calls for any idea or speech that might offend them in any way to be suppressed and the proponent of such speech to lose their job or be jailed. Usually without any due process of law. Most commonly seen in our secondary education institutions (Yale and Harvard being particularly poor in this regard) and in our legacy media outlets.
– A government bureaucracy that owes its allegiance not to the people but to their masters in the government and to themselves. Almost perfectly fits your description above of medieval vassals. It’s been most obvious for the past year in Wisconsin as the people pushed back through their elected leaders against this system.
There are many ways to serfdom. But the clearest way is to limit individual freedom. Speech, movement, personal defense, ownership and acquisition of property. And in every case the people doing the limiting are Democrats….
That’s why I say the goal of the Democratic Party is to bring back the serf, the proles of the world of Orwell’s […]
Dale –
You think I’m probably wrong, but haven’t indicated any points of disagreement, so I’m not sure where to go with that.
The idea that mass exploitation has always been with us – whether it’s slavery, serfdom, or some other mode – is actually central to my thesis. Remember, I called it “the default social order.”
I’m absolutely pro-capitalism, with appropriate regulations, as we had in the first few post WW II decades. Unregulated transnational corporatism is the problem, in my view.
Where did you get the idea I hate religion? Have I ever said anything to suggest that? I do have a serious problem with some people who consider themselves to be religious, but distort religion to their own fell purposes. But this isn’t a problem with religion. It’s a problem with certain types of people.
Cheers!
JzB
Buff –
I don’t have the time or energy for a thorough point-counter point, so I’ll just focus on a couple of these.
Lastly one of America’s largest strengths is corporations ability to hire/fire people quickly in response to market forces.
Except it doesn’t work that way. Corporations are loaded with dead wood. I’ve seen several downsizings in my checkered career, and never observed anything like a quick response to market forces. Long delays, not particularly discriminate head chopping, incentive packages that induce people to leave who a sensible company would want to stay – that’s the real world, and it sucks.
(Primary education has been the sole domain of the Democratic party for quite some time. We know exactly whom to blame for its products)
Is this more blaming the teachers? I’m talking about no child left behind that forces teaching the test, not the subject matter, funding cuts at all levels, the drive to charter schools, the drive to education provided by corporations.
Popular social movements with religious backing that favor the interests of the elite over the interests of the people. (Not sure who your discussing here
The religious right, the tea party. I didn’t think that was hard to suss.
It’s SOP for conservative readers here to take my criticism of the Republicans as somehow indicating partisan support for the Democrats. Overall, you are reading this post through a specifically conservative Republican partisan lens. That induces you to both project (what I take to be*) your version of partisanship onto me, and also make the error of drawing false equivalence.
There is a lot to dislike about the Dems in general, and Obama in particular. The worst of it is stuff where the D’s and R’s are alike. You have pointed some of this out.
But they are not alike on everything, and the differences are not trivial. I present the Ryan budget as exhibit A. And vaginal probes as exhibit B. The Dems might be 2nd worst, but, alas, in a two animal race, that still makes them the best.
* Because I see on the right wing all the time. Everything an R does is OK. Everything a D does is wrong. If a D does today what an R did yesterday, it was right then, but wrong now – cap and trade, many details of foreign policy, Obamacare – a plan hatched by the Heritage Foundation almost 20 years ago. Not so long ago, R’s were all about the unitary executive. Now, Obama answers a question about the SCOTUS, and he’s undermining the foundation of our democracy.
JzB
This is a really thought-provoking post. I had never thought about the role of population scarcity in promoting serfdom — my own theory was that serfdom was an outcropping of a wardlordism focused on controlling a certain territory (as opposed to predacious raiding, a la the vikings) and crucially tied to the concept of titles to land. I’ve read that pre-modern slavery among Africans functioned a great deal like European serfdom.
I’ve often had the thought that modern debt peonage looks a great deal like indentured servitude. Bankruptcy has costs that impair one’s freedom, just as running away from one’s creditor/master would.
I’ve read else where that labor exploitation is less costly to the owners of production and requires far less investment in labor as a depreciating asset. It’s much easier to replace worn out employees than a dead or fleeing slave. Capitalism is more rewarding to the owners of production than either slavery or feudalism.
JzB,
At least Ryan has a budget (laughable as it is). Last time they voted (like within the last 5 days.) Obama could not get even 1 Democrat to vote for his budget. Not one. And the Dems in the Senate have not passed a budget in 3 years even though they only need 51 votes. Why did the Senate not vote on Obama’s budget??
I agree with you about one thing, the worst of the stuff is were they come together.
The security state is the big one. What are the odds we will see the TSA dismantled in our lifetimes? Or the Orwellian named ‘Homeland Security’?
NCLB was another place were the two parties came together. Or have you forgotten Kennedy and Bush chumming it up at the signing ceremony? I don’t blame the teachers – I blame the administrators (overwelmingly Democratic) on the current state of our schools. The model has failed as we see Obama screwing up the vouchers that worked in DC and not sending his kid to the DC schools (which have been overwelmingly run by Dems for decades)
My point is that the Dems are much, much worse on fundemental individual liberties than the Rs. In almost any case, excpet for the entire abortion issue which brings out the crazies on both sides, that is true.
And I have never said the Rs do everything OK. But after 3 years of Obama the Dems are definitely won the title of first worse. My last two paragraphs stand.
There are many ways to serfdom. But the clearest way is to limit individual freedom. Speech, movement, personal defense, ownership and acquisition of property. And in every case the people doing the limiting are Democrats….
That’s why I say the goal of the Democratic Party is to bring back the serf, the proles of the world of Orwell’s 1984. The uber government that sees all, controls all, and has no limits on its authority. So they can tell us all how to live, what to buy, what to think….just like they try to do today.
Islam will change
Perhaps of some interest: http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughcan/fitzcan.html
jazz
perhaps i was reading carelessly. i certainly agree with you about corporatism being the new feudalism. or as i like to say about the civil war: the South learned that it was cheaper to rent than to buy and that white was as good as black.
you tend to talk about religion as if the “religious right” was representative. and while that is unfortunately truer than i like, i believe the history of religion is that it has been on the whole better for human rights and liberties than what it was replacing at the time. it is of course also true… if you will pardon what sounds like superstition but is only a way of speaking… that the devil can dress up like a Franciscan and quote scripture. Jesus warned about this. Whatever else you think about Jesus, he did not advocate not thinking for yourself. Nor did he advocate superstition.
Jack
well, as they said at my previous place of employment: the whippings will continue until morale improves.
ah yes, the human capacity for rationalization is unlimited.
Buff –
I am in awe. All I can say is that we do not live on the same planet.
JzB
Dale –
you tend to talk about religion as if the “religious right” was representative.
Have I talked enough about religion here to give any kind of representative sample? I’m actually a pretty big fan of Jesus, believe it ot not. Now, Saul of Tarsus is another story entirely . . .
JzB
Will –
I don’t disagree. I had some trouble wrapping my head around the population aspect. Read the Evry Domar paper, if you haven’t already.
NY and New England.
That’s why I believe in regulated capitalism, strong unions and a robust safely net. All that New Deal/Great Society stuff that is so last century.
JzB
Jack –
Back in the day, I believe that line of reasoning was used to defend slavery as a better alternative to the exploitation of European immigrants by Yankee industry.
That’s why I believe in regulated capitalism, strong unions and a robust safely net. All that New Deal/Great Society stuff that is so last century.
JzB
I’ll leave the plight of the modern US to Americans. On serfdom – the key is that sparsely-populated areas exposed to outside aggression have two choices. One is to retreat into the forests ot hills, the other to erect a state. the latter involves extracting more than the individual member of the population is willing to give (always better for them to run away or join the barbarians). So you bind them down. The Western Empire had the barbarians, the Slavs the various neighbours who treated them as a people mine (that’s why the word for slave is as it is in most European languages and Arabic – it derives from “Slav”), Eastern Europe the Turks and Tartars, early Western Europe the Vikings, Magyars and Saracens.
Quite different from slavery, which has a different rationale and trajectory.
It’s possible to come in at this at something of an angle.
For example, Anglo Saxon serfdom (as opposed to slavery, they had both. Serfdom was within the society, slavery of those from without it) was generally voluntary….to a point. One pledged to be a serf when it was necessary to call upon the the Lord for food for example. People would pledge serfdom for access to food in a famine perhaps. It’s a method (not a good method, not one I’d like to see again, but a method) of providing a social safety net.
There are others who say that certain forms of (largely western European) serfdom were pledges for military protection.
Now, if you want to update this we could argue that we are now all serfs of the State. It is that State which provides the military protection and the social safety net. And we most certainly all have to pay taxes into the system as a result of that system existing. You Americans cannot even leave the country to avoid having to so pay (something a serf, at least in the English system, could, get into a town for a year and you were free).
Agreed, I’m talking extremes, but it is indeed possible to substitute the current State for those feudal overlords as at least a talking point if not the entire reality.
“That’s why I believe in regulated capitalism, strong unions and a robust safely net. All that New Deal/Great Society stuff that is so last century.” JzB
No doubt. And its not so last century. It is much the way western Europe has been operating and Germany is an excellent example. They’ve got what may be the strongest economy in the world and they’ve also got direct union and state representation on their Boards of Directors. Southern Europe has never had the strong manufacturing base and its showing. Agriculture has always been a tough way to make a living.
What was it that was said about the lawyers during the coming of the revolution? Better to include the financiers, especially the ones using your money as risk capital. Not exactly the way JP Morgan did it.
This analogy with serfdom just doesn’t make it across the multitudinous generational divide. At that time tribal survival depended on the toughest guys leading the rabble into battle. The biggest and toughest took their pounds of flesh from those they “led”. Conquest played a big role as well. William of Normandy made it very clear to his new English serfs that they had him to thank for their short lived freedom. The French tough guy nobility were no better than the English they replaced, to a man.
Capitalism is a whole different ball of wax comparable maybe to mercantilism, but not serfdom.
jazz
it’s not that you talk so much; it’s that you throw off references to “religious” people all of whom happen to be not just conservatives, but the lying conservatives we — here — all hate. it’s easy to think… because for a lot of people its true — that you think all religious people are like that.
and, yes, old saul is easy to dislike. he sounds like one of those TV evangelists sometimes, but he also is the person, apparently, who carried the word to the gentiles… and ultimately its the word that matters. he is also badly misunderstood by people who either can’t read a whole paragraph to get the meaning of the words they like to quote, or don’t understand the real world context in which Paul was preaching.
which i dont mean to do here.
except that liberals do their own cause a great deal of harm by “attacking” “christians”… even the bad kind… and i think may do themselves some harm by failing to understand the whole point of christianity which is not very different from what they think they believe.
Tim
and it is possible to bend language to the point where it has no meaning. yes we do not live in a libertarian paradise. no, we are not serfs of the state… yet. but it remains to be seen whether our new overlords are leftists or rightists… or just money-ists.
would add to your mix the debt-slavery which seems to have been a big part of the way the world worked … and, some would argue, sill works, courtesy of the imf and now the “deregulation” of the financial industry.
a fundamental distinction between chattel slavery and serfdom was the former’s inability to acquire and possess personal property is not well supported by history, not even in the United States where that was pushed pretty far.
In many ancient civilizations a certain category of slaves were often among the richest stratum. In particularl slaves of the Roman Emperor, who were in fact legally chattel were often the wealthiest and most powerful financial and political agents of their day, typically if not always only second to the Emperor and the highest class of nobility. You could read about this in a fictionalized version in the contemporary Petronius’ the Satyricon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon, or if you wanted a really over the top visual spectacle version of it the movie Satyricon by Fellini .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon_(film) . And while you could argue that the fabulously wealthy Trimalchio was a freedman rather than a slave that just proves the point, in imperial Rome as indeed in the ante-bellum South it was not unknown, though certainly not typical, for slaves to buy themselves out of slavery, even if under certain legal theories their wealth was not “theirs”.
And though I know much less about them much the same seems to have been true of Ancient Egypt and Classical China where titular slaves, often castrated eunuchs of the Pharoahs and Emperors again often were the backbone of the bureaucratic class and as such in perfect position to skim off the proceeds for their own use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch
That is what we have in play here is a related phenomenum to that which would treat the economic theory and system in place in late 18th century Northern Europe as ‘THE’ economy on which self-evident economic ‘truths’ (Ricardian Equivalence etc) are derived. The rigid distinction between free man and slave that underlies JzB’s thesis with serfs occupying some ambiguous middle ground actually puts the cart in front of the horse. I would argue (and have in the past) that it was the introduction and imposition of Roman ‘Civilian’ Law initially via the Universities starting roughly at the end of the 11th century http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Roman+Law%2c+Reception+of that imposed the dualistic notion of ‘either free or slave’ on a social system that in practice and history was much more of a continuum. http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14209032 ” Still, not only there was no blind wall between the opposite statuses of freedom and slavery, more often than not the status could not even be ascertained. « Gaius’ dichotomy » (Gai. 1.9: omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut servi) does not imply the sharp border between the two statuses in practice. Every man’s status could be either free or servile, but it was not necessarily unchangeable and was sometimes hard to be proved. The possibility of transition from one to the other produced many curious situations: legal actions concerning the status (causa liberalis) was not uncommon, and a whole titulus of the Digesta (40.12) was dedicated to it.”
In fact my last paper in Grad School was on the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 and entitled “Why Kill the Lawyers?”. It is a puzzlement that in this English revolt, traditionally explained as anti-feudal and so directed against landlords, was in fact marked by much more violence against lawyers than […]
Ryan does not have a budget. He has an aspiration of a world where capital is simply not taxed at all and yet revenue is unaffected. I posted on the original Ryan Roadmap back when he was still in the minority www.angrybearblog.com/2010/08/real-ryan-roadmap-tax-freedom-for.html
The Real Ryan Roadmap: Tax Freedom for Billionaires.
In the actual CBO ‘score’ of this proposal (in quotes because it was at that point not in legislative form but a simple proposal from the then Budget minority ranking member) CBO staff pointed out not once but twice that revenue projections were specified by Ryan’s staff and not in fact supported by any analysis, instead CBO was simply INSTRUCTED to score the results of eliminating all taxes on dividends, interest and estates and a radical restructuring of tax on corporate receipts (basically to a quasi sales tax) as imposing NO change on revenues as a percentage of GDP. Basically a nice blend of Dynamic Scoring and Magic Beans.
And in both the subsequent Ryan Roadmap put forth in the last budget and the new version now endorsed by Romney Ryan simply refuses to specify the incidence of cut backs in deductions that will supposedly compensate for both the elimination of most tax on capital (this version not being as radical as the 2010) AND a lowering of top rates on what remains.
It isn’t a budget, it is a Randite fantasy that seeks to out Voodoo what the elder Bush accurately id’d as the Voodoo Economics of what became known as Reaganomics. Ryanism is just Reaganism with extra Magical Bean driven Voodoo Flatulence. Prick it with a artithmetic pin at any point and the Ryan Budget either explodes or rockets away in corkscrew fashion.
I do sometimes wonder were you live.
I do appreciate your and Bruce’s history lessons. They are very informative. You just go off the rails when you try to extrapolate that to ‘Rs are bad, D’s are good.’
But I always reads you post since they are informative until you get to the hyper-partisan part…
Islam will change
The above was just a response to the first two paragraphs, luckily I hadn’t read down to the Domar piece or I would have truly despaired. Because now I guess in order to be fair I need to read the treatise so as to respond in detail. But at the risk of being a flip asshole let me respond to this: “Here, Krugman wonders** why, after the the plagues of the mid-14th century, serfdom wasn’t reestablished in Western Europe, since the population was greatly depleted. Domar has no clear answer, and Delong won’t hazard a guess.”
Well my answer is that the fundamental premise is pure deterministic crap, I am not aware of any evidence from the medieval European record which shows increased direct labor exploitation in the form of either chattel slavery or the more coercive versions of ‘serfdom’ in times of lower population density. If anything the relation seems to have worked the other way, certainly in England where the legal and economic disabililties of the servile classe were vastly increased during the course of the 13th and early 14th century as population density increased and opportunities for labor mobility tended to lessen. It was precisely this fixed pool of labor competing for the limited supply of local employment that enabled the Agricultural Revolution of the 13th century which in many ways paralleled the Industrial Revolution of the 18th. Though ironically the fixed and indeed increasing pool of urban labor that fueled the latter was directly a result of the displacement of the pre-existing rural population that was the ultimate outcome of the combination of the 13th century + intensification of agriculture via improvements in labor productivity (better equipment and technique plus suppressed ‘wages’) with the say 15th-16th century beginnings of the ‘Enclosure’ movement which displaced agricultural workers and subsistance crops in favor of sheep and exports.
In a similar vein I guess I have another reading assignment due to this:
“In this way, serfdom developed in depopulated* Western Europe during or after the late Roman Empire,”
because I know of no evidence that this was true at all. First I would have to follow up the links to see if those cited plagues really had much effect on most of what we now call ‘Western Europe’ which for the most part didn’t have the urban densities of Italy or the Eastern Empire that would allow plagues to actually ravish the population. Instead the history of the Western Empire subsequent to the Antonines was one of pull back and consolidation of the frontiers in response to increasing pressure from first nomadic peoples like the Alans and Huns and then the more agriculturally oriented German tribes (Vandals, Alemmani ‘The All Men’, Saxons, Franks ‘Free Men’, Visi- and Ostro-goths’) themselves mostly marked by a warrior kingly class ruling over a warrior/farmer people. With slavery mostly being a marginal phenomenon until and unless the Germans inherited previously existing more urban structures.
The ideal that ‘serfdom’ as defined here flourishes in time of labor scarcity (presumedly in the form of direct violent exploitation) and descreases in favor of contract labor in times of labor density is in light of actual historical knowedge (mostly developed SINCE classical economists settled on their historical models) something that needs to be shown rather than asserted. Not only that but there seems to be a fatal misunderstanding of the very nature of medieval serfdom PRIOR to the re-introduction of Roman Civil Law after some seven or eight […]
BTW the last sentence fragment of the preceding post is an orphan that was not deleted.
But it is worth noting that the various Germanic languages and including English seem to have no natural native vocabulary to indicate ‘slave’. That is ‘serf’ is a direct import from Latin ‘servus’ and is I think a product of the time after the Germans crossed Roman frontiers, while ‘slave’ may be in origin a geographic term. That is while some would find the origin of the ‘Slavic’ people as derived from ‘slave’, my semi-informed opinion (I am not by training a historical linguist) is that it is likely to be the other way around, that war captives from areas to the east of German controlled territory were known as ‘slaves’ even as that term didn’t seem to be applied to similar conquered people to the west who were termed as ‘wales’. Which while the Germanic Philologists who dominated the field defined as meaning ‘foreigner’, is etymologically identical to ‘guales’ (think guardian/warden) or resident of Gaul. (Which despite the attempts of Germans to assert that the Romans and Gauls and Galicians and Galatiansand the Welsh all adopted this loan word from barbaric Germans to describe Celtic peoples and lands, seems pretty native to me).
In short it is hard to see real evidence that agricultural exploitation in Western Europe was originally founded on a servile basis and developed towards a more contract oriented form rather than the other way around, your prototypical Dark Age European farmer owed services and allegiance to the chiefs and ‘kings’ but was not by that token equivalent to s slave per se, whose economic role was much more peripheral (body servants and herdsmen being typical roles). Or at least I would want me to show that evidence so that I could examine it myself.
Thanks Bruce. I thought it might be something like that, but I have no real knowledge to base my thought on.
I would hazard… again without knowing anything… that medieval “serfdom”was a more “natural” arrangement under the times than we are led to suppose by hollywood. and the growth of the entirely free and independent laborer was a mixed blessing.
i don’t know what the relation between landlord and tenant farmer in 19th Cent Ireland (or America for that matter) counts as, but i guess as long as the farmer could throw down his tools and move West, that might make the critical difference with respect to “serfdom”.
BTW if you want to stumble on an excellent way to get laughed out of any medieval history seminar room just cite any work by Barbara Tuchman. Who in these matters is given just a little more credence than previous generations of popularizers like the Durants (Will and Ariel) or earlier Toynbee.
A Distant Mirror may be an excellent read and not a bad way to get a reasonable impressionistic feel for the Middle Ages, but whether you attribute it to pure snobbery or not is not generally cited in academic work.
I would not have looked at the book (I have not read it.) were it not recommended. I would have expected a rehash of John C. Calhoun’s accusation that the North treated its workers worse than the South treated its slaves. But it has passages like this (not the best selection, but short ;)):
“If, in any transaction, I get from you some portion of your earnings without an equivalent, I begin to make you my slave – to confiscate you to my uses; if I get a larger portion of your services without an equivalent, I make you still further my slave; and, finally, if I obtain the whole of your services without an equivalent – except the means of keeping you in working condition for my own sake, I make you completely my slave. Slavery is merely one development of a general system of human oppression, for which we have no comprehensive term in English, but which the French Socialists denominate exploitation – the abstraction, directly or indirectly, from the working classes of the fruits of their labor.”
Bruce –
I appreciate your insights. I took Domar at face value. If he has it wrong, then that part of my exposition is wrong as well.
But the real crux of it, for me, is in this paragaph.
In evaluating the conditions that favor and disfavor serfdom as such, something is missing from the analysis. That is that somewhere along whatever spectrum of conditions makes serfdom more or less economically favorable to the elite, there is a point (or region) of indifference. If working people are reduced to the point where the economics are no less favorable to the elite than serfdom, then actually going through the formality of making them serfs simply isn’t worth the effort, and doesn’t make any economic difference.
My point is that wherever and whenver the social mores and physical infrastructure are compatible, some form of domination by a small, wealthy elite over what we can call the 99% has a very high probabiity of occuring.
I put the first few post WW II decades in stark contrast.
Cheers!
JzB
buff –
I don’t extrapolate to R’s are bad. I look at what they do and draw the only conclusion that makes sense to me. Look at the “president is a thug” nonsense. Is the dog whistle outside your hearing range? Look at the reverence the R’s bestow on Rush Limbaugh. They are literally his disciples. Look at ALEC. Look at the new R govs who are ruling on a platform starkly different from what they campaigned on – and every one of them using the identical play book. Look at the hostility toward women. Look at the unification on the right to defend George Zimmerman. Look at the efforts toward voter suppression in R controlled states.
There is simply nothing lake these things among D’s or the progressives (not quite the same thing.)
I don’t extrapolate to D’s are good. That is a figment of your imagination.
JzB
Congratulations Buff. No matter how cynical I get you usually manage to surprise me.
Dale –
Isn’t this along the same lines as buff’s conclusion that I think democrats are good?
You are extrapolating from what I said, then criticizing the extrapolation – which is your mental construct, not mine.
I don’t know which liberals attack Christians. But there’s a lot I don’t know. When I see liberals talk about Jesus, it’s that he was one of them. Indeed, I have a very hard time reconciling Christianity and conservatism in any way that relates to ideas and principles.
There is a type of person – and I take them to be the authoritarian followers that comprise about 22% of any population – who views religion and politics through the same dogmatic lens. This is not the fault of religion. The republicans have very cleverly and deliberately courted this group over the last 4 decades, and now they have a solid voting block.
JzB
Which is why I see the thrust to the new quasi-serfdom – or, exploitation, if that is a better term – coming from trans-national mega corporations with no loyalty to anyone or any set of principles other than profit; not from government, per se.
Representative government, at least in theory, has some regard for the welfare of the citizens. No so, the corporation.
OTOH, when corporations control government, well, then you have the worst of everything.
JzB
Worstall do you have any evidence for any of that??
“For example, Anglo Saxon serfdom (as opposed to slavery, they had both. Serfdom was within the society, slavery of those from without it) was generally voluntary….to a point. One pledged to be a serf when it was necessary to call upon the the Lord for food for example. “
Now I generally take care to disclaim authority when it comes to economics generally, noting that I was not formally trained in that subject and even my understanding of labor history in the post-medieval period came about outside any formal training. But my area of expertise before I dropped out of my PhD program in the History Department at UC Berkeley was precisely Roman and Early Medieval Britain. And I know of no period or region of Britain that was marked by ‘serfs’ ‘pledging’ to their ‘lords’ in exchange for land. In practice it was overwhelmingly the other way around, peasants (a much better term than ‘serfs’ for the period at hand, for example your typical peasant farmer was NOT described as being ‘servi’ in the 11th c. agricultural and service land survey known as the Domesday Book while ‘servi’ was the term used for people who would be classified as ‘slaves’, in light of that an opposition of ‘serf’ to ‘servi’ is stretching things), or to resume peasants generally ‘entered’ into ‘tenements’ (literally holdings) on a largely hereditary basis. Now this entry was often, perhaps generally marked by a death duty (the ‘heriot’, typically in the form of the ‘best beast’) from the estate of the previous holder and an entry fine from the new holder and so from modern perspectives has a quasi-contractual appearance but there are few signs that contemporaries looked on the transaction in this fashion.
It would seem that the idea of a pure transaction in land not derived from heriditary principles was a product of the introduction of Christianity and the need of newly founded churches and monasteries to have some sort of secure title in land outside the existing system of heriditary entry. Thus from early on in Anglo-Saxon times we see the emerging distinction between ‘bok-land’, land held by ‘bok’ – ‘book’ or charter and firmly contractual in nature (typically in the form of prayers from the monks for the king who granted it) and ‘folc-land’, land held by the ‘folc’ or folk and firmly inheritable within the kinship group. But I think it is a grave mistake to confuse the symbolic or even practical exchange of pledges or goods on entry of the heir into folc-land as being ‘exchange’ in the free contractual sense, the land-lord was not in the modern sense the owner of ‘leasehold’ with rents to be negotiated on entry of the new tenant.
Indeed on my reading in Domesday and preceding Anglo-Saxon sources (because Domesday was the product of a new Norman ruling class trying to make sense of an existing Anglo-Saxon land holding system) the fundamental distinctions among peasants (literally inhabitants of the ‘pays’ or ‘countryside’, cognate with ‘pagans’) were not in degrees of personal freedom as such but instead derived from the size of the holding. That is you had ‘virgates’ and ‘virgaters’, semi-virgates, bovates, bordarii, and cottari whose statuses derived from their degree of self-sufficiency and whose labor services and/or rents in kind varied accordingly. As noted in a previous comment the rigid distinction between ‘free man’ and ‘serf’ was more a product of the Reception of Roman Civil Law starting in the late 11th century and culminating perhaps in the 13th on top of a legal ‘system’ that was not in any sense that dualistic.
I am afraid that you are to some degree a victim of what I might call the ‘Dark Age Pathology’ that lumps the […]
Oh dear. As a “liberal” I’m “offended”.
Jack you are one of my favorite people. Really.
But the above is cartoonish in the extreme. The evidence of Domesday Book, compiled in 1086 or the 20th year of William the Conqueror’s (aka William of Normandy) shows a rather slavish (if the word is appropriate here) acceptance of the social and economic structure of England as it existed at the time of Edward the Confessor, of whom William considered himself (and from many perspectives correctly) as the legal heir. That is almost every entry in Domesday contrasted the holdings and rent as it was in T.R.E. (termpus regius Edwardi) or before the Battle of Hastings with the current date (1086 and after a couple of decades of rebellion). And the continuity is striking, in fact many of the lands were in the same hands and under the same conditions as before the Conquest. Making the idea that William just wiped the slate clean in 1066 and claimed everything by Right of Conquest historical nonsense. The idea that all land titles in later medieval England derived by pure grants by William to his followers simply collapses decades of continuity in land holding after 1066 into a schematic that was awfully handy for 13th century lawyers to argue that peasants in fact had no legal land rights in relation to their lords whose title derived directly from the sharing out carried out by the Conqueror. Well that never happened, and the messiness of later English land titles is precisely because William did not wipe the slate clean and lay down the law to “his new English serfs”. Nor was that “short lived freedom” either particularly short or due to William.
If we step back and examine William’s reign as a whole we can see that rather than him taking over all English land by pure claim of conquest, instead he followed existing law. As in his eyes he was legal successor to Edward he took control of the ‘terrae regius’ or ‘land of the king’, but notably not interfering with lands held by Edward’s Queen, even though Edith was the sister of King Harold who William saw as usurper and killed at the Battle of Hastings. Nor did he confiscate the land of Earl Stigand, pretty much the sole surving top A-S nobel. Because unlike Harold and his brothers the Godwinsons, most of their followers, and in subsequent rebellions many of Williams own Norman followers, Stigand never rebelled. And rebellion against a lawful King in the 11th century as it was for many centuries after was legal grounds for confiscation of all lands. It just turns out that by 1086 and the compilation of Domesday just about every top land holder of 1066 Saxon and Norman alike with the exception of Edith, Stigand and the Church had participated in one or more rebellions and so had their lands confiscated. And in turn regranted by William to new lords. Which in the collapsed view of history was essentially equivalent to the situation if William had just confiscated everything in 1066. Which a millenium latter has become the dominant narrative. Just not supported by the evidence.
But returning to Jack. It seems you too have collapsed history and taken a model of “tribal survival” perhaps more suited to Germany in the fourth century and used it as a touchstone for the gradual displacement of native A-S nobility by their Anglo-Norman successors over the course of a century or so. Frankly the idea that the order of battle in 11th century Europe had any resemblence to “the toughest guys leading the rabble into battle” is humorous. Because oddly life, history and military structure didn’t stand still between the times of Attila the Hun (died 453) and the Battle of Hastings (1066). Or even the Viking raids against Britain starting c.900 and 1066. The model of local lord affording protection and refuge for ‘his’ peasants in […]
Ireland is a special, and tragic case. The initial invasions of Ireland by the Anglo-Normans was much like that of that of England by the Norman-Normans a century and more before, you had a combination of military conquests and dynastic alliances that melded the old Irish nobility with the new Norman overlords, themselves the immediate product of a similar process in Wales. And ironically many of the leaders of the latter Irish resistance against the English and Scottish Orangemen were in origin Norman. While most Americans think of ‘Fitz’ as being prototypically Irish as in FitzGerald, FitzPatrick, and FitzWilliam, it is instead simply the Norman ‘fitz’ ‘son of’ and fully cognate with French ‘fils’. And of course Gerald and William are thouroughly Norman and not Celtic names, and even Patrick was originally British and not Irish at all. But at least the various FitzGeralds were co-religionists of the people they conquered/inherited, the real Troubles in Ireland were IMHO directly derived from the 17th Century plus Establishment of the Protestant Anglican Church over a Catholic Ireland, which among other things meant compulsory tithes from all Irishmen to support a Church Establishment foreign in all senses. When you couple this with Protestant landlords who cared not a fig for their ‘dirty’ ‘Papist’ tenants and established an agricultural regime pretty similar in practice to that of Czarist Russia (the notion that your typical Irish peasant was getting ‘protection’ from his landlord being as laughable as Tevye the Tailor gettting ‘protection’ from the Cosssacks in Fiddler on the Roof).
Actually part of the larger problem is that the theory of classical economics grew up in a time and place where notions of pre-industrial peasant economies were drawn from the contemporary reality of Ireland on the verge of the Famine and the Scottish Highlands in the wake of the Enclosure Movement. In the late 18th and 19th centuries the dominant paradigm of capital P progress shared by both what became classical liberals and Marxists made the ideal that conditions among the peasantry five and six centuries before were in an absolute sense much better than contemporaries in Ireland and Scotland was dismissed as simple Whiggish ‘Merrie Olde England’ Romanticism and not to be taken seriously. And truthfully no one would mistake typical medieval village life for that of Hobbiton. But neither was it the life of filth you see in Monty Python and the Holy Grail or your typical movie from the German Wars of Religion.
But really all you have to do is to look at any National Geographic special depicting Third World countries or even peasant Europe and the prototypical scene is women washing clothes in the river and people sweeping out their huts. Give people access to clean water or even unclean water and they will use it for what hygeine they can. That is city style slum conditions are not in themselves primitive survivals of Thog throwing his mastadon bone over his shoulder into the back of the cave, instead people adapt lifestyles to available resources. And you only have to dabble in either classical or medieval literature and folklore to encounter stories of fair maidens bathing in streams when the hero comes across them. This is not because people in the Middle Ages just had brilliant imaginations and dreamed up the concept of cleanliness but never thought to practice it themselves. It helps to have a well and a flowing stream convenient. Something say not particularly present in the Irish inhabited slums of Manchester c.1750.
coberly: “except that liberals do their own cause a great deal of harm by “attacking” “christians”
Liberals attacking Christians? Sorry, I missed that. I have seen some supposed Christians claiming that they are being attacked, but where is the evidence?
Jazz
again, i don’t know anything. but i think we would need to begin with some “shared” definition, or understanding, of “serf.”
then i think i understood Graeber and at least one book I read about ancient Greece, to be saying the transition from free man, or even “cousin,” to serf went through a process something like predatory lending and debt peonage. Moreover the “laws” that may have formalized the condition were rather ad hoc applications of “the way it is” by the local strongman/boss/judge.
I don’t know that a legal/formal process is necessary. It seems the poor will always drift into a condition not very different from “serfdom” with respect to the rich, absent a very large space into which they can run away.. perhaps attached to the chief’s nephew who can’t stand his uncle anymore and offers a good deal to any “followers.”
Bruce
G.B.Shaw, who may or may not have known anything… he was an Irishman of the 19th Cent… was pretty sure that Irish country poverty was more pleasant than English city poverty.
But he also seems to have felt that in some cases at least the Norman was a better landlord than an Irishman who made good.
Min
all around you. i suspect you don’t notice it because you take it for granted that it’s the religious people who are attacking you. as, in some cases, of course, it is…. if you take their word for it.
am
not sure what i see there to be offended at. i am not complaining or accusing. i am just wishing liberals were smarter so they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.
it would be hard anymore to avoid alienating the people who should be your natural friends, because the right has done such a good job of using your perfectly reasonable causes to frighten them.
but you (you lefties, you know) can be reliably counted on to play into the rights propaganda by reacting as if you were still in danger of suffering the Spanish inquisition, or the dunking stool.
jazz
except that as a habit of speech, and perhaps thought, you talk about that 22% “as if” they were the whole set of people who identify themselves as religious.
and of course i may be doing the same thing here with respect to you. i am taking a few casual phrasings from your exposition here and reading them as part of the very severe ridicule of “religion” i hear from people who don’t know what they are talking about… except the very stereotype they create with their ridicule.
Bruce
thanks for the help.
Jack, and I, have to work with the popular history… as taught in public schools and Hollywood. It will be hard to remember your corrections, and you may find me at least repeating the errors in some future comment. Be kind.
and of course i may be doing the same thing here with respect to you.
That’s how I see it.
JzB
It was “ironic”. (that one in quotes always confuses me too…)
My reading of history only taught me one thing about slavery: Never teach them to read. It only causes problems later.
Well more or less pleasant doesn’t come into play if you are effectively evicted. Or are literally starving because your food source (potatoes) is dying of blight even as your landlord continues to demand you deliver rent in the form of food stuffs he can market (grain and meat animals). The combination of potato blight plus continuing rent demands drove millions of Irishmen to emigrate either to English city poverty or to New York and Boston in the 1840s.
GBS wasn’t born until 1856 and so didn’t come to any kind of adult understanding until at earliest the late 1860s and as such his judgement about the tolerability or not of Irish country vs English city living had fuck all to do with conditions starting maybe a hundred years earlier or even a generation before his birth.
You can’t collapse history and come to any kind of reasonable conclusions. We too often forget that the period from the founding of Jamestown in 1608 to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was the same amount of time as the distance from the Adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to my birth in 1957. Yet the way we teach American history you would think that James Smith of Virginia signed the Declaration of Independence. Or to put more of a point on it that Benjamin Franklin of Boston shared religious leaning of Governor Bradford. As if the Founding Fathers fled Holland in search of Religious Freedom (then defined as the ability to impose your own religious tests rather than those imposed on you by the Church of England).
Well on my brief review of Domar as linked he took conditions holding in Russia in early modern times and generalized them to Western Europe back for hundreds of years. GIGO.
As to the transition from free man to serf mentioned by Dale via Graeber this assumes a dualism that maybe never existed and a historical process that didn’t either. Personally I don’t know of any time in pre-classical Greece whether Homeric or Mycanean times when the society was ever characterized as a pure association of free men. Instead the earliest stratum we are aware of already shows a middle eastern pattern of king, warrior and slave somewhat foreign to what we could now see as characteristic of Indo-European society where roles were differentiated more by function than hierarchy. That is if we follow Dumezil and Duby and think of Indo-European society as fundamentally tri-partite with societal functions divided between the priest-seer, the warrior, and the farmer, it is difficult to see those as fundamentally hierarchal as such. That is when you examine the person of the Indo-European King as seen in classical mythology he tends to subsume all three functions of wisdom, skill in arms, and fertility even as he has brothers or sons with more specialized functions. That is where Zeus or Odin were certainly identified with the priestly/seer function each was known as the ‘All Father’ and in the case of Zeus amazingly promiscuously so.
But you really can’t find an Indo-European society where this tri-functional arrrangement of free men didn’t ride on top of SOME sort of serfdom. That is in India the Arya include the top three castes who were socially and economically superior to the fourth caste the Sudras who in turn were superior to groups formally outside the caste system altogether (Untouchables etc). And similarly you will look long and hard at any of Italic, Hellenic, Celtic or German groups where there were not at least some slaves, though mostly extra-tribal (slavs-slaves or nativi-natives). I just need a lot more evidence to find the emergence of serfdom in some deterministic argument based on population density or debt peonage or even to find any fundamental ‘transition’ at all. Except for the transition that started in the 11th century that used Roman legalisms to force free farmers into a legal category of ‘serfs’ and equated them with pre-existing ‘slaves-servi’.
Oy.
“In evaluating the conditions that favor and disfavor serfdom as such, something is missing from the analysis. That is that somewhere along whatever spectrum of conditions makes serfdom more or less economically favorable to the elite, there is a point (or region) of indifference. If working people are reduced to the point where the economics are no less favorable to the elite than serfdom, then actually going through the formality of making them serfs simply isn’t worth the effort, and doesn’t make any economic difference.
Shorter Dumar: assume classical economic theory that would have all class relations arise out of exploitation of labor in the interests of maximizing return on investment.
Unfair? Maybe. But Dumar seems to assume that the invention of the abacus somehow came prior to the establishment of class systems, or that with the Chicago folk that humans are simply born with an internal calculator infinitely sensitive to marginal changes in return on effort/investment. “Christ at a tax rate of 33.5% I might have built that new factory, but 39.6%? Who are you kidding here???” I find the idea that there is some similar tipping point “of indifference” which divides freedom of labor contract against forced labor as post hoc at best. I mean who was the genius who in the face of particularl population densities suddenly came up with the concept of debt peonage out of nowhere?
No, religious people are not attacking me. 🙂
True, there are some people who are attacking religion. For instance, the guy who burnt the Quran. And Sam Harris. I do not see the connection with liberalism, though.
Min don’t you know? Dickhead Atheist Richard Dawkins speaks for all liberals that ever existed. His attacks on religion make all of us guilty.
On the other hand Rush Limbaugh is just an entertainer whose views impose on responsibility on any conservative that ever lived or will live.
its simple when you know the code words: “Sistah Souljah! and Reverend Wright! So there! Its indubitable! Oh and by the way Strom Thurmond was a national treasure.” Because guilt by association not only goes just one way, but no conservatives were ever really guilty of anything to start with. Just liberals projecting their own hatred.
Hope this helps.
Bruce
in defense of Shaw, I don’t think he was talking about history, 1850, but about “now,” 1895. And in defense of me, I have no clear idea about history at all, but think I see in a vague sort of way the same relations between rich and poor at all times in all places, but taking on the local color and conditions.
jazz
here are some quotes from your essay today:
A social and/or religious system that recognizes the inherent meritocracy of the master class.
but if it was profitable to have indentured servants in the modern world, I’m sure that Richard Scaife’s think tanks would have no trouble finding justifications, and assorted Christian groups would explain why it’s God’s will.“
there were certainly many Christian apologists for slavery, and you can see today that tea-baggers and the Christian Right do not exactly align themselves on the side of human rights vs the brute force of the elite.
Popular social movements with religious backing that favor the interests of the elite over the interests of the people.
i think i know what you will say about what you “meant,” but I hope you can see why someone might conclude that you had a grudge against “religion.” And I hope I won’t confuse you if I say that up to a point I agree that “religion” has indeed been part of the government of the poor by force and fraud for a very long time.
But the trouble is when you just casually allude to “religion” meaning the bad guys, you, whether you mean to or not paint with the same brush the very good guys who more than likely taught you (us, historically) what “good” even means. And you certainly alienate the folks who think their religion is all that saves them from hell on earth… and may also have a case.
min
see below about five comments or so, my reply to jazz.
Thanks for the details Bruce. Yes,I was short cutting history a bit, but didn’t mean to suggest that Willy took over all the land. My point was that “your land is our land” was a persistent problem back in the day, and strength of arms (actual hand to hand, arrow to chest) was paramount to survival. Feudalism is the structure within which the serfs receive protection and pay with their labor, which was coin of the realm of the day. Within the structure of capitalism money is that coin along with ownership of the means of production which differs from ownership of the land for the production of food.
If Richard Dawkins did not exist we would have to invent Him. 😉
What protection? From whom?
Dividing points in history are by nature arbitrary but there are reasonably secure boundaries for the Viking Age. Large scale raids can be said to start with the sacking of the monastary on Lindisfarne in 793, in fact contemporaries did so say it http://www.lindisfarne.org.uk/793/index.htm
““AD. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.”
Entry for the year 793 in the Anglo Saxon chronicle.
This launched a time of sea-borne raids not only around the various seas bordering on the Atlantic but even in the Med where at almost any moment peasants and particularly townsmen might have to rely on the rudimentary armed forces available to the local chieftain for some sort of protection in line with the standard model. But the Viking Age as such was pretty short lived as raiders transformed into settlers and Viking chieftains established themselves as rulers in the exact mode of those who came before. That is Viking Rollo became Robert 1 of Normandy and the Viking Prince Cnut became King Canute of England even as other Vikings established the County of Sicily which later became the long lasting Kingdom of the Two Sicilys (including s. Italy). That is by 1100 the Viking Age as such was over, and even long over, as both the Scandinavian launching points and the European and Mediterranean targets had settled into a fairly standard set of proto-national states echoing both the Carolingian and A-S models from before and the ‘feudal’ states and kingdoms after.
But after this period of what could reasonably be called anarchy where peasants needed to look (though as the ultimate success of the Viking kings showed mostly fruitlessly) for protection from their lords from outside threats, this ceased to be true for the several centuries. Instead during what is now known as the High Middle Ages and the fullest developement of Feudal Europe your typical peasant more needed protection FROM his lord than BY his lord and most of the violence was in the nature of war BETWEEN feudal lords and princes, wars where peasant holdings were not targets as such (as they were during the early Viking era) but instead collateral damage.
So once again we have the collapse ensuing from looking the wrong end down the time telescope. Conditions of anarchy that marked the beginning and the end of what was indentifiably Feudal Europe as commonly understood are invoked as explanatory mechanisms for a period that wasn’t marked by that particular style of brigandage. Now certainly there was an underlying continuum that divided society into three general categories equivalent to the three castes of the Arya: priest, warrior, and farmer, but the notion that the relation between warrior and farmer was one of contract of food for protection is some mix of special pleading and post-facto argumentation to justify straight out exploitation of the farming class, much of which was rapidly being reduced and divided into the dual classes of serf and the much smaller group of free peasants. But the places where these processes achieved their greatest penetration and most thorough systematic application which is England, Northern France, the Low Lands and perhaps latter Eastern Europe (not […]
Yes in that respect the Catholic Church on the eve of the Reformation was totally justified in insisting that the Bible NOT be translated into the Vernacular, or at least not where that book or Book might fall into the hands of people not trained to interpret it ‘correctly’.
That is Church Scholars knew full well how messy and in part contradictory the various Books of the Bible were, and over the course of centuries had adequately worked out a multi-layered interpretation (the Scholastics taught that every passage of Scripture had four different levels of meaning, I forget the terms, of which only one was Literal). And of course the very first thing Protestants did once they got access to the text of the Bible was to split into dozens and now hundreds of sects and denominations based on their varying reading of the text and the lessons derived therefrom.
That is like amatuer socilist they knew that only bad things would happen if you taught the slaves, ‘er ‘the Faithful’, to read. Because the European Wars of religion introduced mass violence via mass armies who carried out campaigns that would have made the bloodiest Viking of previous centuries blanch. And arguably at least in part because Luther and King James gave them Bibles to read.
I am an Enlightenment guy through and through but to say the least it wasn’t exactly an immediate path to freedom and universal light, insted things got and remain pretty damn messy.
I still have trouble wrapping my head around the population aspect. Fewer workers mean a lower supply of workers, so they get enslaved because the employers don’t want to pay them higher wages?
Well my partial jest also underscores the key reason why slavery was also ultimately doomed. If you can’t tolerate the contradictions inherent in allowing workers to read it pretty much permanently limits them to agricultural and low value add menial tasks. Another sort of race to the bottom, but one that also ultimately limits the prosperity of the slaveowner too.
It turns out to be one of the central challenges of the industrial and later eras: You need people smart enough to manage complex tasks and organizational skills but not so smart they will ask the wrong kind of questions. The unresolved nature of that challenge surrounds us today.
To belabor the issue is to move too far afield of the original focus of the post. Sufice it to say that throughout history the workers have gotten the short end of the bargain. The difference between slavery and serfdom (or indentured labor) is significant is general, but the similarities are apparent on an individual level. Wither position on the socio-economic ladder leaves one being stepped upon repeatedly with little chance of one’s own upward mobility.
Therein both forms can resemble current day capitalism, but this similarity has been less apparent during the mid-twentieth century as workers gained more control over their lives and a better share of the benefits of their economies. That may be changing gradually to a less reasonable circumstance wherein workers move gradually to a position increasingly resembling serfdom, if not slavery. In effect, economic elitism is destructive to all those involved. Unfortunately the destructive effects are borne first by the workers even if the behavior of the elites may eventually result in their own self destruction. Robespierre and his cohorts came to understand this point and came to understand the necessity of the elite class feeling the experience of their own self destructive activities sooner than if nature were allowed to takes its own slow course.
Bruce
it doesn’t help much. i listed a few quotes from jazz’s piece here to show what i am talking about. richard dawkins and sam harris are better cases in point… they seem to have a following, but they are mostly talking nonsense when they talk about “religion.” people who are bad at science tend also to be bad at religion.
am
finding people smart enough to do even high tech jobs, hell, even “scientific” research, is much much easier than finding peple who can think.
most… by far… of your people who “ask the wrong kinds of questions” ask those questions because someone else with an agenda taught them to ask them. and you can do that even without the people being able to read. and now that we have Television, we don’t even need to teach ordinary people to read for them to hear what the establishment wants them to hear.
but we do need to teach them to read if they are going to keep our books for us.
Jack
i substantially agree, except for two things:
one is that i am fairly sure that “most” workers are not held down by evil capitalists. they are held down by their own abilities… at least so far in America.
two is that as the economy develops according to its own internal logic, the time may be coming when the opportunities that America provided, first as a frontier, without aristocracy, and finally as a post WW2 “need for educated workers” growing industrial economy.. the time be coming when that is mostly behind us.
a few workers will find useful, even “highly paid” employment. but most people will be lucky to find subsistence wages doing menial work not only for the “rich” but for the “educated workers.”
and neither you nor the rich will be able to do anything about it.
this doesn’t mean that the rich… and the almost rich… won’t treat them worse than is entirely necessary.
@ coberly:
I see what you mean about “assorted Christian groups would explain why {indentured servitude} was God’s will”. Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon came to my mind. I do not think of them as representative of Christianity. OC, “assorted” does not mean representative, either. But I can see why a Christian might be offended.
I just wish that the religious right would champion the macroeconomics of Genesis during the Seven Lean Years. That would do some good. 🙂
Min
absolutely. that’s why i prefer to ‘argue’ with people who say they are religious and try to point out that they don’t know their own religion. just throwing the word “religion” in when you mean “bad guys” doesn’t help you get the good guys… religious though they may be.. on your side.
Oh my, I seem to be Bruce-the-Late-to-the-Party.
Is something missing from Domar’s “labor scarcity” explanation? Well, duh. Hierarchy and domination, technology and productivity, money and markets, the economics of pillage and predation, the economics of the commons and congestion, and Malthus, among others.
The simple answer to Krugman is that serfdom was not re-established after the Black Death of the 14th century, because it had not yet been dis-established. The breakdown of fedual government and manorial agriculture, with its relationships of serfdom and fie, was evolutionary, and took place over centuries. Colliery serfs were still being freed in Britain in the early 19th century!
The Black Death was, itself, a heavy blow against serfdom, or rather, the second, of a one-two punch, the first punch being the population explosion, and sudden increase in trade and population of the High Middle Ages. It isn’t the simple ratio of labor to land, per Domar, that matters, though, but the effects on productivity in agriculture and its implications for the extraction of an agricultural surplus to feed a population of urban artisans and merchants, plays a part.
Manorial agriculture, like plantation agriculture, is, at its core, autarkic. Its economics doesn’t make sense, unless you understand that it happens against a background system of extremely limited trade, and virtually no market or money to make a market. The manor must sustain itself in every respect, producing not just its food, but every other implement, good and service, and on a scale so small as to make nonsense of using money to coordinate specialization and effort.
The existence of an elite, which is interested in extracting a surplus and also interested in supporting activities, which necessitate or entail trade and a money economy, create a disequilibrium dynamic. The feudalism of chivalry and the motte and bailey castle was based on an economics of pillage. In political history, it was the outcome of a fusion, which took place when the Franks collided with the Vikings in northern France in the 9th century, and began an expansion, which fueled crusades and eventually conquered the world. If pillage and conquest continued at its expanding periphery, even into 19th century as Imperialism, the disequilibrium required legitimation of domination thru law and inheritance of privilege at home. The “servitors” started out as well-armed bandits and ended as law-givers and the sponsors of bureaucracy.
Whether the serf is “free” or not, and whether the slave is competing with free (“wage”) labor — these are not going to be issues, until serfdom or slavery co-exists with a competing economic system featuring extensive trade, markets and money. The serf doesn’t know he’s a serf, or “unfree”, until the system has evolved toward trade and cash-crop agriculture and towns populated by merchants and artisans. Whatever the historical linguistics of the terms, conceptually and legally, “serfdom” as “unfree” must be a retronym at the time of origin — there must already be in place a competitive dynamic and evolutionary momentum.
I will also submit that there must be a technological dimension. There must be some way of organizing production, which overcomes the obvious disadvantages regarding supervision and incentives and trust, which are entailed when domination reaches the extremes of serfdom or slavery. When the Roman Empire reached the limits of conquest and could conquer and pillage for slaves at its frontier no more, it is not surprising that the freedmen servants would see a rise in their status.
Slavery in the American South was directly connected to the […]