Quotes About Serfdom

As we will see many times in this book, economies based on the repression of labor and systems such as slavery and serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the ancient world to the modern era.

The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, "the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both....

This can be explained in part by understanding and accepting the historical fact that almost all past cultures, however seen as great, otherwise, were fundamentally based on massive broadband slavery, serfdom, and various other under-classes whose principal function was to be in servitude to the upper overlords. Such was certainly the case, for example, in ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Roman, Chinese, and most old Nordic cultures, etc.

In the beginning, there were farmers and animal husbanders. Life was hard, brutal, and short. Taxes and other requirements imposed by chiefs, landlords, or the state were onerous. Many people were serfs or slaves, devoid of autonomy and dignity. Poverty and injustice were the norm, save for the lucky few.

knew about chicken factories. I knew about the lightless cages, the clipped beaks, the overhead drizzle of shit, the poison-laced corn and soy shoved down their gullets, the farmers bullied into serfdom. I knew about growth hormones and preservatives and artificial flavors, the obscene categorization of body type by cooking method: fryer, broiler, roaster.

The serfdom was as much a cultural as an economic matter. "Slavery is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law," Frederick Douglass lamented. "Customs, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South.

At the time of the Russian emancipation, about 20 percent of the Russian population lived in serfdom. In the United States at this time, about 10 percent of the population lived in slavery.