Blog 44 The New Feudalism, Saluting Nelson

Blog 44  The New Feudalism, Saluting Nelson

Have just ordered a book with "Feudalism" in the title. It promises to be an interesting read. So in preparation for a likely blog on it, let me, briefly, recall the traditional historical stuff on feudalism.



Place:  Europe

Time:  say, 1000 to 1400 AD

Subject: Economic and political organization of mediaeval society.
Whoa!! That's a large pretentious mouthful. Take it one word at a time.

Highlights (with key points underlined for quick reading.)

Three classes: nobles, peasants, and clergy. Not much in the middle.

Wealth based on land-owning.

That means wealth was not based on manufacturing, trade, finance, factory fishing fleets, tourism, mining, or transportation infrastructure construction. So forget this paragraph

Instead, focus your imagination on farm laborers tilling and toiling, without our modern machinery, to produce food for the owners of the land. All the land was owned by the secular nobility (few) and the Church "lords" (few). Most of the rest of the population were peasants, who labored on the land, or, when needed, fought their lords' wars to grab more land.

The law of money operated then as now. Wealth (land) bought power, and power (land) seized wealth (some other lord's land).

A critical feature of the unequal distribution of wealth was the absence of trade and transport between territories. Local states, kingdoms, dukedoms, were isolated from each other (towns were rare).  That is, feudalism looked like the total opposite of today's integrated, global, urban economy - except for the unequal distribution of wealth in both.

The feudal system came out of the disintegration of the largest international community hitherto known to Europe - the Roman Empire.

By 476 AD, when the last Roman emperor was deposed by a barbarian* invasion from the north, local strongmen all across Europe had begun a thousand-year process of forging their own independent, self-sufficient estates based on agriculture and warfare.

It was a shoddy business. (During the process they even forgot how the Romans had made concrete!) So the feudal age was all about localism, agriculture, petty wars - oh, and religion.

Thomas Hobbes, looking back, glumly called it life in a state of nature. "No arts, no letters (literature), no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  (1561).

Perhaps you can see why Joyce Nelson's new book, Beyond Banksters: Resisting the New Feudalism, interests your thoughtful blogger. I survey our own fracturing world, in which our rulers (bound by the law of money) have possibly brought us to an irreversible (?) tipping-point into revolution, separation, isolation and war.

Well, we'll see what Nelson has to say about the irresistibility of it, and report to you.  "Irresistibility". Wow, seven syllables and five 'i's!. It should be banned.

The book can be ordered at http://watershedsentinel.ca/banksters.  About $25.

* Another verbal footnote:  barbarian. The Romans, charmed by their own melodious Latin, thought that the speech of the northern Franco-German invaders sounded like barbarbarbarbar.  So they called them barbarians. But if your name is Barbara, you should know also that dark Mediterranean men have for centuries been bewitched by blue-eyed, blond Nordic women...

Blog 43 After the Election

Blog 43 After the Election; (Your Humble Historian Predicts)

Does it matter who wins? Whether it's Hillary or Donald, she/he will do what all presidents, particularly Republicans, have done of recent decades. Once elected, distance yourself from the main bank of electors who supported you. For Trump, that will be the white, slightly racist, somewhat xenophobic working slobs who have taken a beating in recent years in the great transfer of wealth, and, of course, the Christian Right, who also long for the return of the good old days. In neither of these groups will Trump see anything useful to him. So "You're fired!" He'll take the short term view, confident that when he starts running for a second term sometime in 2019, they'll be easy to bamboozle again. Clinton may do a little more to benefit both Trump supporters and her own 2016 base in young people, women, Latinos. But as for corporate wealth and power? She'll find it easier to join 'em than to buck them. 

Forecast: The United States of America is in for twenty years or more of continuing decline in consensus. "United" they will not be in social cohesion nor national patriotism. Nor even in political union.

In my modest forecast: the states will claim their constitutional power to secede into separate ideological islands, which they will justify defending, if necessary, with pure citizen firepower. The Second Amendment was never intended to permit every man woman and child to pack a gun. But what it did intend we may well see - citizen militias exerting their right to do so in defense of their "states". So forget  about "Unum", and start again at "Pluribus"

Sooner or later, let us hope, a new generation will see the folly of their parents in the early 21st century and insist on at least a return to peaceful co-existence, or, better - who knows? - happy reunion and a "great" American democratic republic again.

They will recall one of the greats: Abe Lincoln, who said "A house divided against itself cannot stand." He was talking about slave and free. The same will be said about poor and rich.

The irony would be rather amusing, too, to hear future historians, recording the big picture, giving credit for the resurrection of the great new American democratic "Share the Wealth" republic to President Trump, because he started it all.  I'm serious. So don't be anxious about Tuesday. It just a blip on the cosmic screen.