Friday, February 21All That Matters

The history of work and the current corrupted system

18 Comments

  • As someone who has held this channel in formerly high regard, it’s especially depressing to watch them engage in a form of serf trutherism where they portray medieval serfdom as some place of idyll when that goes against all of our historical consensus.

    Historians have covered extensively the misconception that any non-work time was time for leisure. The video correctly points out that medieval peasants didn’t have much of a use for money… because they had to produce almost everything required for their survival themselves in a non-market economy. The reason for fast days and slow days is because peasants needed enough time to tend to their own crops or they would literally starve and there was a maximum that an extractive feudal economy could extract from them without widespread depopulation. The 40 or 50 or 60% of the time peasants spent “working” was to earn them the “right” to rent enough land that they could grow non-market crops to barely feed themselves a high carb, low nutrient diet and hang on (and not even then most of the time as the numerous famines indicate).

    In addition, until relatively recently, women’s work has been a blind spot in much of the accounting of how work was performed. Just clothing alone was estimated to take a family 3000 hours a year of labor to produce a bare minimum quantity which is over 8 hours of work each day, every day for a single person.

    Highly recommend checking out the collections of essays [Bread, How Did They Make It?](https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/) and [Clothing, How Did They Make It?](https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/) on [Historian Bret Deveraux’s blog](https://acoup.blog/) for a far more realistic depiction of the political conditions of serfdom.

    Not in any way arguing that our current system is humane or justified but arguments against the status quo shouldn’t be founded on fallacious history that the rich in the past were some wise and benign influence and only under capitalism have they been evil. The wealthy throughout time have been bastards running extractive economies to primarily benefit themselves at the hands of the oppressed and that is important to recognize.

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  • The first half of this video is very bad in its depictions of the lives of serfs and peasants. It’s hard to imagine how a channel which has done in-depth depictions of the politics, culture and war of the Roman Empire could get it so wrong. And it makes me question and wonder about the accuracy of his other videos. Plus, the second half ain’t much better either. For example, it mentions the psychological and health impact of the “clock” which already seems to be lacking evidence, and seems to ignore that life expectancy in England at this time had never been higher. And are we genuinely supposed to believe that the lives of serfs and peasants were free from poor health when they were beaten, enslaved and famished by their masters?

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  • Ah yes, the ole you’re better off being a medieval peasant than a modern worker trope based on faulty information.

    Just try and live the life of a medieval peasant for one day and you’ll never make this stupid argument again. We live in a society with vertically integrated economies of scale in which people have specialized in making just one thing with appropriate machinery intended for it. It’s cheaper to hire people to do something for you than do it yourself because of this specialized machinery.

    See how much free time you really have when you have to make your own clothing, wash your own cloths, grow your own food (good luck!), make every single thing you use from absolute scratch and do all your own repairs on absolutely everything.

    You’ll find sooner rather than later that you’re working the entire day just to survive.

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  • absolutely terrible video from a channel I otherwise respect

    modern wage work simply cannot be compared to subsistence agricultural labor. The two are so far apart that they are just not remotely comparable, and a video *favorably* comparing modern labor in an industrial society to subsistence agriculture is alarmingly ignorant

    there are no days off in subsistence agriculture. Think about it like your daily tasks that you have to do outside of work. You have to cook dinner, you have to clean your house, you have to walk your dog or feed your cat, you have to feed your children, you have to wash your clothes. These things are not “work”, you are not paid to do them, yet they are necessary on a daily basis

    And every one of those things that modern people do took *orders of magnitude* longer in the past, and had *literally life threatening consequences* if you failed to do them, unlike today. If I don’t want to cook, I can buy food that somebody else cooked or eat processed foods. Those things simply did not exist in the past

    On the contrary. If I want to eat food in the past, first I have to grind my grain – because everybody except the rich’s diet is heavily grain based. I can either take my grain to a miller, who will take a huge part of my harvest for himself or as taxes, or I can *hand grind* my grain. Which sucks about as much as you’d imagine

    Once I have my grain ground (not as well as modern flour, which digests better), I now need to turn it into bread. No gas or electric ovens back then! If I’m lucky there is a village bakery and we collectively stoke it with firewood, burn the wood for hours, and then bake our bread in the residual heat a couple times a week. If I’m not lucky, I smear a wet dough on a rock over a fire, which *I still have to gather firewood for* and cook it

    What about other foods? Surely I can just go into the woods and gather food right, maybe do a bit of hunting? Nope! All woodlands are owned by nobility and the penalty for “hunting in the woods” (poaching) is death. Can I go fishing? Sometimes, but usually the rivers and ponds are owned by somebody and I owe them tax in fish if I use it! What about my own animals? Is it late fall? If not, then nope! Those animals are far more valuable alive as beasts of burden or producing milk and eggs or other animals

    Oh and speaking of those animals – you know those “days off” that medieval peasants totally had? They did not have those days off of course, because *you have to take care of your animals every day*. If I don’t guard my sheep and goats, people or animals might steal them. If I don’t take the cows to pasture, don’t milk them, the milk dries up. If I don’t gather the eggs, the hens stop laying. If I don’t feed the chickens, they die. And if I fail to take care of my animals and they die, *I and my family die too* because we live at the edge of starvation and the only thing getting us through winter is the animals we fattened up all year and then slaughter in late fall.

    Oh, and about those saints’ days that are often counted as “days off”. Surely those are holidays right, even with my household chores? Nope! I am *required* to go to church, and most villages did not have a church, or didn’t have a big enough one for saints’ days! So what do I do on my “day off”? I get to walk hours to a cathedral town near me, spend hours there at the service, and guess what? Part of those saints days often involved *doing volunteer work for the church*. On my “day off”, I’m working on the Church’s land! Other “days off” are part of my *legal obligations to my feudal lord*, who owns his own land but certainly doesn’t work them. Guess who works those lands? You guessed it, it’s me! And when do I work those lands? On my “days off”. Maybe, if he’s generous, he might repay my labor in food and drink. But oftentimes not – my feudal contract, which was established generations before I was even born, stipulates that I work certain days on my lord’s land, not my own

    And then there is women’s work, something this video completely and utterly ignores

    To give one particularly powerful example, spinning cloth. Clothes are something we completely take for granted today, they are incredibly cheap. It’s the first thing that humans industrialized, and that’s why it is so cheap. Machines plant, harvest, spin, weave, and ship most clothes that we wear, and today, clothes are a trivially small part of modern people’s budgets. Even in the recent past they were much more expensive – the average American spent 40% of their income on clothing in 1910, today that figure is 5%

    But for the vast majority of human history, it was far far worse. Women’s work has been nearly every waking hour of every woman who has ever lived was spent spinning cloth, using a primitive drop spindle. Indeed, historians think that the entire traditional division of labor between the sexes comes from this – spinning cloth is one activity that you can pick up and put down in between breast feedings of infants, unlike farming, where you might by miles away from home

    And this entire video is based off of extremely outdated sources about medieval life, at a time where most historians didn’t care about women and thus didn’t take their work into account

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  • Ahh yes, the marxist serf

    > works 50% less than a modern day worker

    > subsides on bread and beer

    > takes a bath once a year

    > dies from gonorrhea at 40 years old

    I’m a straight capitalist but if you want real socialist/communist commentary, consider SecondThought on YouTube who can construct a cogent argument, not this bullshit

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  • I also think the clock is bad. Lot of smart people hating this dude, and i don’t know anything but i think this system is inhumane and we deserve fast and slow days, and to work leisurly. Even if that isnt historically accurate.

    Lets make new history.

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  • Oh my good the bootlicking cope is so real in here, all the historians are out to cry about context and still fail to give my man any quarter here, within the amount of context you can gice to make a point in a youtube video. He is not trying to make his point through this idea that there was a medieval peasant utopia, he is just trying to highlight where there was this shift in attitude towards a the concept of a work day the attitudes and roles. I can just feel your capitalists bones quivering as you jump into captain ackshully mode. HC makes a good point in this video, capital is shit.

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