this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Well…serfs in the Middle Ages actually did work less than we do today. Which was the church’s idea in order to keep rebellions from happening.
Now, that was indentured servitude, so it’s not a 1:1 comparison. But if we’re talking about output, exploitation, and profit, we are working more, creating far more value, and we are still working to afford the ability to consume and live with necessities.
Now, I’m staunchly anti-capitalist. But as a logical anti-capitalist anarchist in modern times, I can still look back at history and say that capitalism is inextricably tied to some human progress…but only because it was the dominant system while humanity progressed. So, the progress that led to better, healthier lives cannot be separated from the outcomes of capitalism. Fine, capitalism has walked hand in hand with humanity through progress.
But. First off, “hand in hand” is a generous way of putting it. We work for a system, we sacrifice lives for a system, as opposed to bending or altering the system to better serve human lives. We squeezed people into an order that served capitalism.
My point is that as we’ve progressed, we held humanity back for the sake of capitalism. We had to fight capitalists/the ruling class for the most basic of human rights, and those were bloody, bloody battles. Capitalism and its proponents gleefully slaughtered people in service of a system that favors those with the money and power. And the “worker rights” we have today are the most basic imaginable. We fought for an 8 hour day, to keep kids from dying in mines, to keep harmful products away from money making ventures, to have days off at all…and after all of that, we still work more than middle age peasants.
And maybe “indentured servitude” isn’t exactly in practice today (in most of the world, but it’s definitely not completely eradicated), I don’t know exactly on a granular level, how those of us that survive by the skin of our teeth on incredibly low wage jobs really differs all that much from indentured servitude. People work to keep their houses and to keep from starving. And the majority of houses are still owned by the higher classes! And we have entire markets that thrive off of the suffering thatcomes with poverty. Credit card and credit reporting, payday loans, the entire system of rent, foods affordable for lower income people being addictive and deadly…we’ve built a system that pushes people down, and then wrings them dry. And we still work more than peasants in the Middle Ages.
The figures I can find suggest that medieval peasants worked longer hours than people today in Western Europe. I am not sure if the comparison is valid, though. The modern figures only give hours worked while employed. In any case, we work for a considerably higher standard of living for a much larger population.
You are right that this situation did not simply happen, but had to be brought about through social change; largely through unions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE97S0KV/
It’s not about hours worked/day, it’s just vacation time
Saturday and Sunday off is 104 days of "vacation". Add in 6 weeks of actual vacation and you get 134.
I'm not American. I don't know why they work so much. They seem happy with it, though. When it gets to AI, people worry about running out of work. People who welcome that and only want the income to be redistributed seem to be a minority here. More people seem to want AI to be stopped, so that the work remains for humans. I don't know if that's just this bubble, or if these pro-work people are even American.
I'm pretty much with you all the way. My take is that capitalism, corrupted by the ruling class is hardly distinguishable from indentured servitude at this point.
It's just that our collars/shackles are invisible, we are given the illusion of freedom, and our pain is more psychological than physical.
Yeah, but we do sacrifice our bodies for labor. We just have better medicine these days. Sitting for 8-12hrs a day, lifting/bending for 8-12hrs, etc. It’s all sacrificing our bodies, causing physical pain. We have different kinds of pain now, because there were never really jobs back then where people sat for so long. Since the Industrial Revolution, we still sacrifice our bodies for capitalism. We’re just not bending over in fields as much (though, the most exploited among us still do, I.e. immigrants), we instead bend over machines and hunch over computers.
You definitely hit on something that I didn’t: our shackles are now invisible. We have powerful computers in our pockets, where we misspend our “leisure” time—still in service of capitalism. And there are all of these “amenities” that the ownership class points to so they can say, “please, you don’t have it that bad with your starbuckses and iPhones!” The means with which they extract more value from us have become a literal science. They addict us in order to suck up all of our attention and free time we have away from injecting value with our labor, so we can continue to inject value into their system with our consumption (and more recently, with our data profiles they are always building). They have made our chains invisible, where once, yes, we were sometimes literally shackled to our jobs and the property of the landed gentry, aristocracy, and church, but now even our injected value is nearly invisible. Literally everything about us as people has been monetized. And thus we have greater wealth inequality than the gilded age.
It’s not that we didn’t learn anything from history, it’s just that the wrong people learned how to avoid the wrong repercussions for recreating the same history.
As someone suffering from sciatica as a result of desk time, I feel this. This is why I consider the monetary system as it is abused and designed currently to be a cleverly masked slave system.
When the ruling class are able to dictate both how much money you get, how much you can buy with money, how can you even place a value on it. Shit's worthless. We've seen it become worthless overnight. I can't eat it, I can't shelter in it, I can't drink it. In my country, it's plastic, so I can only sympathise with the ecosystem we've been so careless of.. Not even burn it.
This is something I realised young, when my parents and grandparents described how much return they got for their time. It's even more evident across my lifetime.