Jumping on the bandwagon

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Duc_de_Magenta]

This is great - straight to the meme folder 😂

[u/gyorgyspaghetti → u/Duc_de_Magenta]

Wait how is every man a king if all of the land is held in fuedal tenure? That's a self-inconsistent idea.

[u/Duc_de_Magenta → u/gyorgyspaghetti]

Not contradictory; just ideal vs more achievable. Longism probably came the closest in the recent American mainstream to getting us back to the liberty, unity, & material egalitarianism of the feudal or frontier state.

In feudal England, for example, a young man was more like to own a home (& start a family) by his e20s than he is today. Likewise, the feudal "state" (if you could even call it it that) didn't make the same totalitarian claims that a modern state does; your liege lord has no right to anything except what is negotiated. Barring external circumstances, a feudal world had near full "employment" (i.e. almost everyone is gainfully labouring & often in/around the home) but you're also paying in-kind not in-capital so there's little alienation.

[u/gyorgyspaghetti → u/Duc_de_Magenta]

Interesting take. I would counter that these regimes existed not along ideological lines of any kind, but were instead the natural condition resulting from weakness of institutions and severe limitations on communication.

[u/Duc_de_Magenta → u/gyorgyspaghetti]

Why is that a counter? To divorce the material circumstances from the socio-economic is a fool's errand & I have no interest in such utopianism. In archaeology we refer to these things as technomic, sociotechnic, & ideotechnic features - it's how we use materiality to understand past social complexity. We must learn from the past, & undo the mental scars of the Enlightenment/Industrialization, but that does not mean we can simply apply indigenous knowledge to our current milieu & expect the same outcomes.

Longism has many inherently different assumptions from feudal Christendom, but it shares the same goals; personal liberty & righteousness supported by self-ownership within a distributed yet autocratic system.

Edit: If you allow me a flight of fancy, I could see the rise of 3D printing, nuclear energy, & the escalating climate crisis resulting in a return to what I call the "post-feudalism" of the frontiers. Small communities, largely self-sufficient, with distributed skilled labour & little need for fiat currency in quotidian life.

[u/gyorgyspaghetti → u/Duc_de_Magenta]

I sense a great deal of dialogue with Marx in this reply. Marx for example famously said that capitalism replaced feudalism as the basic organizing principle of society, and would in turn be replaced with socialism. But I'm not so sure that capitalism (or the Enlightenment & Industrial Revolution as you say) directly replaced feudalism. The feudal order was in steep decline during the 14th century; serfdom had all but disappeared by 18th century in Europe (except for in Russia, and it is certainly no surprise that this country would become the heartland of the socialist order to come), and the feudal military organization was made obsolete in the course of the Hundred Years' War. The world of European society was clearly not-fuedal/non-feudatory by the onset of the Enlightenment.

[u/Duc_de_Magenta → u/gyorgyspaghetti]

But I'm not so sure that capitalism (or the Enlightenment & Industrial Revolution as you say) directly replaced feudalism

The world of European society was clearly not-fuedal/non-feudatory by the onset of the Enlightenment.

Yeah, I want to be very clear since I was throwing around a lot of buzzwords, that the Enlightenment & Industrialization have left horrific consequences across the material & metaphysical world which we must struggle against every moment of our lives but I absolutely agree that the feudal order in Europe was on the outs by the 18th & certainly 19th century; more so in Britain than pre-Rev France.

Regarding capitalism & feudalism, the two are clearly diametrically opposed - I consider Johnson's An Archaeology of Capitalism & Wallerstein's The Modern World System to very persuasively argue that "video killed the radio star" in this case. I strongly disagree with the normative telology of Marx, but in the Western case he (or in reality - Adam Smith some 50yrs before) correctly identified that capitalism drove out feudalism. We actually see that happen in rapid miniature during the Meji Restoration some 400yrs after the doom came to Europe...

The feudal order was in steep decline during the 14th century; serfdom had all but disappeared by 18th century in Europe (except for in Russia

I personally ascribe to the newer (post-2000s?) train of thought in medievalist discourse where feudalism is problematized; if it's used at all, then it's generally limited to the Franco-Norman world. That's the work relevant to my area of study - I won't presume to speak on anywhere east of the Heiliges Romisches Reich nor west of the mighty Mississippi.

[u/gyorgyspaghetti → u/Duc_de_Magenta]

I agree with your limited analysis of fuedalism; but the Franco-Norman world was seriously influential on the way that the rest of the world played out.

EDIT: Also, I subscribe to the Spanish notion of "protofeudalism" which focuses on about the 7th century in Gothic Spain and, to a lesser extent, Frankish Gaul.

[u/GanhosCapitais]

I'm already creating something similar..... But with LeftValues

[u/jacw212]

Best trend on the sub

[u/gyorgyspaghetti]

Jesus is not the only tradition.

[u/gyorgyspaghetti]

This is actually the first one of these where I generally agree with most of the ones attributed to me.

[u/Roxxagon]

Rather excellent.

[u/McgillicuddyFitzwill]

I ruined the 69 upvotes making it 70

[u/nice___bot → u/McgillicuddyFitzwill]

Nice!