Are we all still just serfs, slaves, and freemen?
My wife has been interested in Russian literature for a long time now. She’s also been interested in their language. Recently she just read a book called “Dead Souls” by Gogol. She’s been interested in the serf life in Russia so just started reading “Four Russian Serf Narratives” compiled by John MacKay.
We’ve talked on and off through many years about slavery, serfdom, freemen, lords, and more. What I believe is that as history looks back at this time they will not think it much superior to the past ages. Most think of themselves as free people. I don’t think we are anything close. Maybe close to what people called freemen or “free tenant” (see here, here, and here for the basics) were but maybe not even as free as many of them were.
I haven’t heard of people asking for reparations for serfdom or indentured servitude, but it’s not all that much better than slavery. In my view serfdom is a sort of slavery tied to an area of land. There is a lord or master over that area and a lot of your labors are funneled away with the head of that property selling that effort or paying their dues to keep the land in the master’s possession. With slavery you could sell the person and it isn’t associated with the land, the person (slave) and the property are separate entities. With serfdom the person (serf) is tied to the land. In Russia they seemed to blend the two to an extend. And they were late to the game, it seems they were just copying Europe. So it came and went quickly in Russia where in Europe it built up very slowly and stuck around a lot longer before emancipation of serfs and later slaves.
Today people are in a state of freeman or lord over their own life and possessions. But that doesn’t mean they are truly free or a sovereign over their life. Above them they have masters called mayors, governors, congressmen, senators, vice presidents, presidents, and countless agency members and law enforcement agents pressing their rules and regulations upon their subjects. The musical chair game makes it more palatable because those rulers seem to be in a temporary position and the most naive people seem to think they could even gain such a position – which gives the illusion of equality of sorts.
But seriously. What would it be to be truly free? In the past the idea was that you could keep the fruits of your labor. So what percentage of your earnings do you keep? Consider what goes out to your basic living conditions. For most people much less than 35% of the earnings stay at home (see here). The rest goes out to food, mortgage, cars, car insurance, healthcare, life insurance, clothes, other odds and ends. And people want those things, but isn’t that a form of servitude? You are a servant to the food industry, housing industry, car industry, insurance industry, healthcare industry, clothing/textile industry, and other odds-and-ends industries. And after all of that you are very lucky to keep even close to 30%. And what do people do with that… Well most invest it so they are servants to the banking industry, investing industry, and many markets that they think worthwhile to dump excess into.
So are we free? Perhaps we are just “freemen” or maybe just mobile serfs. Maybe nothing has really changed. Maybe things are just as bad, worse, or slightly better but the rulers have become much better at pulling the wool over our eyes. Maybe we are better at deluding ourselves and feeding on the lies. Maybe we want to be free so badly, that we just have become masters at pretending that we don’t have masters.