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...