There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.

54 Responses to There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.

1. Bluthner says:

   February 21, 2013 at 4:06 pm

   Dog,

   ‘Specially when you find out they been keeping two sets of books and you gotta send someone round to get feudal on their ass.

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2. I owe my soul says:

   February 21, 2013 at 4:37 pm

   In that scenario, resistance would be . . .

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3. NatashaFatale says:

   February 21, 2013 at 6:28 pm

   Expat,

   Re your 6:40PM of yesterday – started this earlier but work intruded. I thought it deserved a little more effort than I could afford until now, and thus time has passed. Sorry for my tardiness.

   Since we’re in open minded learning mode this week, I’d say your head is in a good place – because “as for ‘feudal fuckers’ Harvey – and Marx – seem to harken back to that time wistfully” is about as close to tabula rasa as one can get in terms of economic history.

   The most fundamental precondition for feudalism is a virtual absence of money: feudalism can last exactly as long as no one can buy or sell labor or its fruits, and not an instant longer. Until money returns, there is no significant media of exchange beyond barter and servitude, and the servitude is overwhelmingly agricultural.

   The Frankish invention of the stirrup established the horseman (eventually, the chevalier, from which, chivalry) as king of the hill: a man who has a horse and stirrups can swing his sword and stick any number of pedestrians with his spear, and there isn’t a whole lot they can do about it. In the absence of money, nobody can hire cavalry, so such cavalry as exists becomes the ruling class. What industry you get is barely worthy of the name. Trade in any modern sense is simply impossible.

   These essential features of feudalism are obscured by the fact that the feudal world was not homogeneously feudal. In England, in particular, there was always a little cash lying around, and the imported feudal system of France never wholly took root. Some countries (Switzerland) and some regions (in Italy, for instance) never went fully feudal, which is how the medieval Swiss could hire their fellow citizens out as mercenaries (they still work at the Vatican) and the Venetians could import pasta from China and invent modern accounting. Then, too, cities arose, and city dwellers (bourgeoisie, that is) slowly invented pre-industrial capitalism, while feudal social relationships hung on like death just beyond the city gates.

   Live in a feudal society for a few hundred years and you’ll evolve a highly complex society full of arcane peculiarities. What you won’t get, absent money, is capital, and without capital, you can’t have capitalism. Much less, without production, can you have the means of production, and without that, even a concept of socialism. Nobody, outside of maybe sixteen kooks in Idaho, is proposing a reversion to feudalism: no Austrians, no Keynesians, and especially no Marxists. Nobody is even proposing a reversion to neo-feudal sharecropping, much as the south was riddled with pockets of it for the century after the civil war. All that’s just nostalgia anymore. Let it go.

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4. Expat says:

   February 22, 2013 at 4:37 pm

   Thanks Natasha

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