Feudal System Quotes

England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.

If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn't capitalism...In many ways, it resembles classic medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers.

Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.

So really, it was no wonder that her lecture on the function of the feudal system consisted of exactly two bullet points, one of which just said, "PEASANTS??

When you objectify and dehumanize a class of people”—whether that’s women or a racial minority or both or anyone—“it becomes easier to mistreat them without guilt.” Scholars have a clever word for this kind of social structure in which power is formed through a brotherhood that objectifies and dehumanizes those on the outside: they call it fratriarchy. Many think this is a more accurate way to describe our culture’s post-feudal system, which is ruled not by the fathers, but by peer networks of the brothers. Backstage talk that otherizes all things feminine is part of the mortar that keeps the walls of fratriarchy standing strong. And when you are part of an especially close group, like Donald and his bus bros, it makes it even harder to dissent, because you risk giving up that bond and the power that comes with it. So you end up like Billy Bush, laughing along.

New political systems and philosophies were imported into the Near East under the general term democracy and grafted artificially into a society which was feudal in nature and theocratic in spirit. The results were not happy...

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets.

High school is meant to be socialism for beginners. Instead, it becomes a strange TV movie for the feudal system. You end up with a commingling of everything bad in the world.

Such an institution could only prevail at a time when ordinary means of justice were excluded by the hand of power, and when, in order to bring the guilty to punishment, it required all the influence and authority of such a confederacy. In no other country than one exposed to every species of feudal tyranny, and deprived of every ordinary mode of obtaining justice or redress, could such a system have taken root and flourished.

Literature and other fields of scholarship have become feudalized in a modern manorial system. Monopolies of knowledge have been built up by publishing firms to some extent in co-operation with universities and exploited in textbooks.

Prior to the American Revolution, through centuries of feudalism and monarchy, the interests of the rich lay in the expropriation, enslavement, and misery of the rest of the people. A society, therefore, where the interests of the rich require general freedom, unrestricted productiveness, and the protection of individual rights, should have been hailed as an ideal system by anyone whose goal is man’s well-being.

The Black Plague!” Niobe exclaimed. “What good did that do?” “It alleviated the European population pressure, decimated the labor force, and-so paved the way for the end of the feudal system,” Satan said. “You can't keep workers in peonage when there are so few that their value is great.

The leaders of many countries condemn feudalism and monarchies and boast of adopting democracy or communism. But those same leaders, whose subjects revere them and whose misdeeds are kept secret, will hold office until their last breath, or until a handpicked heir takes over. Little has changed from the old feudal systems.

In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism—equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term—increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate. That is true of feudal societies like medieval Europe, India before independence, and much of modern South America, where inherited status determines position. It is equally true of centrally planned societies, like Russia or China or India since independence, where access to government determines position. It is true even where central planning was introduced, as in all three of these countries, in the name of equality.

Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge – unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism.

frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call “the primitive accumulation of capital.” These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.

In traditional society like the feudal system, people had a certain place, and they had certain rights-in fact, they had what was called at the time a "right to live." I mean,under feudalism it may have been a lousy right, but nevertheless people were assumed to have natural entitlement for survival. But with the rise of what we call capitalism, the right had to be destroyed: people had to have it knocked out of their heads that they had any automatic "right to live" beyond what they could win for themselves on the labor market.

Caste is a very important element of Indian society. As soon as a person is born, caste determines his or her destiny. Being born is not in the control of a person. If it were in one’s control, then why would I have been born in a Bhangi household? Those who call themselves the standard-bearers of this country’s great cultural heritage, did they decide which homes they would be born into? Of course, they turn to scriptures to justify their position, the scriptures that establish feudal values instead of promoting equality and freedom.

final factor that helped agriculture take off was that early farming was not as laborious and miserable as it later became. The very first farmers certainly had to work hard, but we know from archaeological sites that they still hunted animals, did some gathering, and initially practiced cultivation on a modest scale. Farming pioneers surely had challenging lives, but the popular image of the incessant drudgery, filth, and misery of being a farmer probably applies more to later peasants in feudal systems than to early Neolithic farmers. A

If we want to understand why these technology companies behave this way we should listen to the words of those who built them. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist behind Facebook, Palantir, and Paypal, spoke at length about how he no longer believes “freedom and democracy are compatible.” And in elaborating his views on technology companies, he expanded on how CEOs are the new monarchs in a techno-feudal system of governance. We just don't call them monarchies in public, he said, because “anything that's not democracy makes people uncomfortable.

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not.

A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the mediaeval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax. Man did not see 'just leather', he saw the beast - perhaps one of his own - and knew the effort of slaughtering, liming and curing. Communities were smaller and whether our man lived on the outskirts of some feudal system, had escaped from it, or was entirely isolated, he would work alone, or daily with the same fellow-workers - conversation would soon languish. But THINK he must.

Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.

this attempt to control … We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old. They began at the time when Florence, Italy, was the most important city in the world. The basic idea of science—that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational—that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science.

Capitalism differs from other social forms because producers depend on the market for access to the means of production (unlike, for instance, peasants, who remain in direct, non-market possession of land); while appropriators cannot rely on 'extra-economic' powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion - such as the military, political and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labour from peasants - but must depend on the purely 'economic' mechanisms of the market. This distinct system of market dependence means that the requirements of competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental roles of life. Because of these rules, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labour by technical means. Above all, it is a system in which the bulk of society's work is done by propertyless labourers who are obliged to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage in order to gain access to the means of life and of labour itself.

The analogy I want to make here is this. That if the ostensibly divinely ordained caste organizing principle of the Europe's feudal-Christian order was fundamentally secured by the Absolutism of its Scholastic order of knowledge, (including its pre-Columbus geography of the earth and its pre-Copernicus Christian-Ptolemaic astronomy), the ostensibly evolutionarily determined genetic organizing principle of our Liberal Humanist own, as expressed in the empirical hierarchies of race and class (together with the kind of gender role allocation between men and women needed to keep this systemic hierarchies in place), is as fundamentally secured by our present disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This arrangement, in which users take advantage of services and the company gains all the upside of the data they generate, may sound novel, but it is actually very old. Prior to the rise of capitalism, feudal labor arrangements worked similarly. Lords insulated their serfs from fluctuations in markets and guaranteed them safety and traditional rights to use the land and to keep enough of their crop to survive. In exchange, lords took all the upside of the market return on serfs’ agricultural output. Similarly, today, siren servers provide useful and enjoyable information services, while taking the market value of the data we produce in exchange. We thus refer to this contemporary system as “technofeudalism.

The government system we have now is set up just like that of Rome and is changing into a system I call Corpocracism (Babylon, United States). Corpocracism is a word derived from some entities of feudalism, democracy, capitalism, classism, and corporatism to form a government system into a dictatorship and police state. This system is being brought about by a group of people in our own government, corporations, financial institutions and foreign entities. It is an ideology of hypocrisy that is leading to an JerUSAlem (America) that will sale off every aspect of its nations people to be captive to foreign entities such as corporations, governments, lawyers, financial institutions, banks, individuals and groups of individuals.

He belonged to the old school of country gentlemen, ruling his estate with semi-benevolent tyranny and turning his back on all symptoms of social innovation. Under his domination the Packlestone country had been looked after on feudal system lines. His method of dealing with epistolary complaints from discontented farmers was to ignore them; in verbal intercourse he bulled them and sent them about their business with a good round oath. Such people, he firmly believed, were put there by Providence to touch their hats and do as they were told by their betters...And as such he continued beyond his eightieth year, until he fell into a fish-pond on his estate and was buried by the parson whose existence he had spurned by his arrogance.

It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it—the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the west—the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and resolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit in Islam.

All this attempt to control... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old... The basic idea of science - that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational - that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn't really work any more. It didn't work economically, it didn't work intellectually, and it didn't fit the new world that was emerging... But now... science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting to not fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it can not tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways - air, and water, and land - because of ungovernable science... At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn't make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Godel's theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know what we call 'reason' is just an arbitrary game. It's not special, in the way we thought it was. And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rain storms we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old - the dream of total control - has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly... We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now... it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question - What should I do with my power? - which is the very question science says it cannot answer.

...Rusche and Kirchheimer relate the different systems of punishment with the systems of production within which they operate: thus, in a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional labour force -- and to constitute a body of 'civil' slaves in addition to those provided by war or trading; with feudalism, at a time when money and production were still at an early stage of development, we find a sudden increase in corporal punishments -- the body being in most cases the only property accessible; the penitentiary (the Hopital General, the Spinhuis or the Rasphuis), forced labour and the prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. But the industrial system requires a free market in labour and, in the nineteenth century, the role of forced labour in the mechanisms of punishment diminishes accordingly and 'corrective' detention takes its place.

Capitalism as a system has coexisted with and in on occasion sponsored feudalism, monarchy, fascism, slavery, apartheid, and under development. It has also been the great engine of progress, development and innovation in a certain few heartland countries. This means that it must be a system studied as a system and not as an idea. Its claims to be the sponsor of freedom are purely contingent. It's good propaganda but it's not very good political science.

Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted society where the economic no longer monopolised so much time and energy. That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. When you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by an affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as these predecessors ever did. Marx's work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure.

25:10. a jubilee: you shall go back, each to his possession. In the law of the jubilee, YHWH commands that every fifty years all property is to return to the original owners. This appears to be an economic program designed to prevent the feudal system, common in the rest of the ancient Near East, from developing in Israel. That is, it functions to prevent the establishment of a class of wealthy landowners at the top of the economic scale and a mass of landless peasants at the bottom. Every Israelite is to be apportioned some land (described in the books of Numbers and Joshua), and the deity commands that in every fiftieth year the system returns to where it started. If an Israelite has lost his ancestral land as a result of debt or calamity, he regains ownership of it in the jubilee year. Land is unalienable. Individuals can suffer difficult times, but there is a divinely decreed limit to their loss, and the nation as a whole can never degenerate into a two-tiered system of the very rich and the very poor.

... this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic, it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality poor as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in place!

Our past is not sacred for being past, and there is much that is behind us that we are struggling to keep behind us, and to which, it is to be hoped, we could never return with a clear conscience: the divine right of kings, feudalism, the caste system, slavery, political executions, forced castration, vivisection, bearbaiting, honorable duels, chastity belts, trial by ordeal, child labor, human and animal sacrifice, the stoning of heretics, cannibalism, sodomy laws, taboos against contraception, human radiation experiments - the lists is nearly endless, and if it were extended indefinitely, the proportion of abuses for which religion could be found directly responsible is likely to remain undiminished. In fact, almost every indignity just mentioned can be attributed to an insufficient taste for evidence, to an uncritical faith in one dogma or another.

No? And yet you are a part of it, like I was, and I’ll wager you don’t like it any more than I did. Well, why am I the black sheep of the Butler family? For this reason and no other—I didn’t conform to Charleston and I couldn’t. And Charleston is the South, only intensified. I wonder if you realize yet what a bore it is? So many things that one must do because they’ve always been done. So many things, quite harmless, that one must not do for the same reason. So many things that annoyed me by their senselessness. Not marrying the young lady, of whom you have probably heard, was merely the last straw. Why should I marry a boring fool, simply because an accident prevented me from getting her home before dark? And why permit her wild-eyed brother to shoot and kill me, when I could shoot straighter? If I had been a gentleman, of course, I would have let him kill me and that would have wiped the blot from the Butler escutcheon. But—I like to live. And so I’ve lived and I’ve had a good time…. When I think of my brother, living among the sacred cows of Charleston, and most reverent toward them, and remember his stodgy wife and his Saint Cecilia Balls and his everlasting rice fields—then I know the compensation for breaking with the system. Scarlett, our Southern way of living is as antiquated as the feudal system of the Middle Ages. The wonder is that it’s lasted as long as it has. It had to go and it’s going now. And yet you expect me to listen to orators like Dr. Meade who tell me our Cause is just and holy? And get so excited by the roll of drums that I’ll grab a musket and rush off to Virginia to shed my blood for Marse Robert? What kind of a fool do you think I am? Kissing the rod that chastised me is not in my line. The South and I are even now. The South threw me out to starve once. I haven’t starved, and I am making enough money out of the South’s death throes to compensate me for my lost birthright.

Why should I fight to uphold the system that cast me out? I shall take pleasure in seeing it smashed.' 'I never heard of any system,' she said crossly. 'No? And yet you are a part of it, like I was, and I'll wager you don't like it any more than I did. Well, why am I the black sheep of the butler family? For this reason and no other-I didn't conform to Charleston and I couldn't. And Charleston is the South, only intensified. I wonder if you realize yet what a bore it is? So many things that one must do because they've always been done. So many things, quite harmless, that one must not do for the same reason. So many things that annoyed me by their senselessness. not marrying the young lady, of whom you have probably heard, was merely the last straw. Why should I marry a boring fool, simply because an accident prevented me from getting her home before dark? And why permit her wild-eyed brother to shoot and kill me, when I could shoot straighter? If I had been a gentleman, of course, I would have let him kill me and that would have wiped the blot from the Butler escutcheon. But-I like to live. And so I've lived and I've had a good time. . . . When I think of my brother, living among t he sacred cows of Charleston, and most reverent toward them, and remember his stodgy wife and his Saint Cecilia Balls and his everlasting rice fields-then I know the compensation for breaking with the system. Scarlett, our Southern way of living is as antiquated as the feudal system of the Middle Ages. The wonder is that it's lasted as long as it has. It had to go and it's going now. And yet you expect me to listen to orators like Dr. Meade who tell me our Cause is just and holy? And get so excited by the roll of drums that I'll grab a musket and rush off to Virginia to shed my blood for Marse Robert? What kind of a fool do you think I am? Kissing the rod that chastised me is not in my line. The South and I are even now. The South threw me out to starve once. I haven't starved, and I am making enough money out of the South's death throes to compensate me for my lost birthright.

There can be no doubt–and this very fact has led to false conceptions–that the great revolutions that took place in trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, along with the geographical discoveries of that epoch, and which rapidly advanced the development of commercial capital, were a major moment in promoting the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production. The sudden expansion of the world market, the multiplication of commodities in circulation, the competition among the European nations for the seizure of Asiatic products and American treasures, the colonial system, all made a fundamental contribution towards shattering the feudal barriers to production. And yet the modern mode of production in its first period, that of manufacture, developed only where the conditions for it had been created in the Middle Ages. Compare Holland with Portugal, for example.49 And whereas in the sixteenth century, and partly still in the seventeenth, the sudden expansion of trade and the creation of a new world market had an overwhelming influence on the defeat of the old mode of production and the rise of the capitalist mode, this happened in reverse on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, once it had been created. The world market itself forms the basis for this mode of production. On the other hand, the immanent need that this has to produce on an ever greater scale drives it to the constant expansion of the world market, so that now it is not trade that revolutionizes industry, but rather industry that constantly revolutionizes trade. Moreover, commercial supremacy is now linked with the greater or lesser prevalence of the conditions for large-scale industry. Compare England and Holland, for example. The history of Holland’s decline as the dominant trading nation is the history of the subordination of commercial capital to industrial capital. The

Land reform was enacted through enforcing a 100-acre ceiling on the size of any single family's holding; ending absentee ownership; capping rent on leased lands; strengthening the legal rights of peasants (al-fellahin); and, crucially, confiscating hundreds of thousands of fertile acres from major landowners and distributing them to millions of landless peasants. Today, almost five decades later, the footage of Nasser distributing landownership titles to poor peasants in drab jalabeyas is still a powerful – and moving – symbol of the rise of the poor classes (Al-Tabaquat Al-Fakeera) and the transformation of a feudal system into one based on ‘equity and progress’.

I think that the thematic, formal history of the literary form ultimately harkens back to a different political system. That is to say, a feudal order: the aristocratic dispensation of leisure time, the refinements of the self. With the shift from feudal aristocracy to democracy there has been a long process of evolution. I think we’re in the throes of a kind of steep, logarithmic shift, and I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

For example, the patroon system in New York State’s Hudson Valley, under which wealthy oligarchs such as the Rensselaer family extracted feudal rents from their tenants, lasted until the mid-1840s.

They claim that their vision of a truly free world … had never been tried before on the planet. Their opponents said that indeed their system had been tried, over and over again throughout history, and in fact was itself the history of every civilization in the world during its most chaotic and feudal time.

he locked members of guilds—from bakers to hog merchants—in their occupations, forcing sons to follow their fathers. In the East, which had always been more stable and prosperous, this legislation was rarely enforced and had little effect, but in the chaotic, turbulent West, it was heavily pushed, and the result was the feudal system, which would take deep root and not be overthrown for a thousand years.

The historian David Arkush once compared Russian and Chinese peasant proverbs, and the differences are striking. "If God does not bring it, the earth will not give it" is a typical Russian proverb. That's the kind of fatalism and pessimism typical of a repressive feudal system, where peasants have no reason to believe in the efficacy of their own work. On the other hand, Arkush writes, Chinese proverbs are striking in their belief that "hard work, shrewd planning and self-reliance or cooperation with a small group will in time bring recompense.

It is strange that people should talk so much about ending all war at a time when the ravages it causes are greater than they have ever been, not only because the means of destruction have been multiplied, but also because, as wars are no longer fought between comparatively small armies composed solely of professional soldiers, all the individuals on both sides are flung against each other indiscriminately, including those who are the least qualified for this kind of function. Here again is a striking example of modern confusion, and it is truly portentous, for those who care to reflect upon it, that a 'mass uprising' or a 'general mobilization' should have come to be considered quite natural, and that with very few exceptions the minds of all should have accepted the idea of an 'armed nation'. In this also can be seen an outcome of the belief in the power of numbers alone: it is in keeping with the quantitative character of modern civilization to set in motion enormous masses of combatants; and at the same time, egalitarianism also finds its expression here, as well as in systems such as 'compulsory education' and 'universal suffrage'. Let it be added that these generalized wars have only been made possible by another specifically modern phenomenon, that is, by the formation of 'nations' -a consequence on the one hand of the destruction of the feudal system, and on the other of the disruption of the higher unity of medieval Christendom.

Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the foot of the feudal system!

Mao] turned China from a feudal backwater into one of the most powerful countries in the World ... The Chinese system he overthrew was backward and corrupt; few would argue the fact that he dragged China into the 20th century. But at a cost in human lives that is staggering.

Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated? How Tokyo became the largest city? Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city. There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue. A technological Metropolitan No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.

Feudalism is a total organization of society. It specifies the status of the individual and his relations with his superiors and inferiors. It includes an economic system based on land; in general a man’s rights to land correspond with his social rights. It is a scheme of political organization, legally based, overlapping the social and economic organization. In medieval feudalism the overlord was, in theory, socially, economically, and politically supreme. He granted some part of his rights to his vassals, noble companions and servants. The granted rights took the form of rule over a unit of land, a fief. An implicit bargain was struck: The lord offered maintenance and protection; the vassal promised military aid to his lord. Feudalism was, then, a military, political, social, economic, and legal system emerging from the breakup of Carolingian society.

An honest man falls in love with an honest woman; he wishes, therefore to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this. If any system—feudal, servile, or barbaric—does, in fact, give him so large a cabbage-field that he can do it, there is the essence of liberty and justice. If any system—republican, mercantile, or Eugenist—does, in fact, give him so small a salary that he can't do it, there is the essence of eternal tyranny and shame.

Owing to slave revolts which were, so to speak, the first struggle in history of the exploited working masses for Chajusong, and to peasant struggles against feudalism in the Middle Ages, the slavery and the feudal system collapsed. That meant progress in the struggle of the working masses for Chajusong. But that was only a replacement of the chains of slavery with feudal fetters, which in turn were replace with the yoke of capital, not the abolition of class domination and oppression itself. In the history of human society, capitalism is the last exploiting system which tramples on the masses' aspirations and demand for Chajusong. It is a violently oppressive system which combines class domination with national oppression.

The tendency for more market-like property rights and relationships to develop near the top of an economic hierarchy or, in rarer cases, across the whole economy, as societies emerged from poverty, is an important characteristic of social organization. It is equally important to note that the most common organization of agricultural society historically has been essentially feudal, with market relations at the top and the closed village system at the bottom.

There is much in Judeo-Christian doctrine and history that can be used to support a peace system, but it is so far a minor current. The main stream has adopted the violent, dominator mode of late Palestinian Judaism with its foundation in Old Testament holy war. It is a somber fact of history that in the name of Christ men have murdered and condoned murder, tortured women and children, slaughtered in war, and executed each other without remorse. The Crusaders saw Jesus in terms of their own society, that is, as their feudal lord.

It had taken about two centuries for the feudal system of economy to show its superiority over the slave system, Stalin said, and about a hundred years or less for the bourgeois system to prove its superiority over feudal economy. Because technological progress had now greatly accelerated the pace of development and change, however, the socialist system of economy could advance with “giant strides” and out-perform capitalism in a much shorter period.

sees the revolutionary dimension of the war not simply as a triumph of freedom over slavery, or industrialism over agriculture, or the bourgeoisie over the plantation gentry—but as a combination of all these things. Plantation agriculture in the South was not a form of feudalism, Moore insists; rather, it was a special form of capitalism that spawned a value system and an ideology that glorified hereditary privilege, racial caste, and slavery while it rejected bourgeois

One of the earliest treatises was written at the end of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth by a shadowy figure called Walter of Henley, who may have been a bailiff. He seems in some ways to anticipate the changes that were to occur with the breakdown of the feudal system. Walter of Henley describes an essentially feudal estate operating both two-year and three-year rotations and employs the didactic style so popular with Roman writers.8 He advises on how to select labourers, rather in the Roman style. He has a small section on manure, so clearly its value was recognised even then: “Do not sell your stubble… or… you will lose much. Good son, cause manure to be gathered in heaps and mixed with earth… And before the drought of March comes let your manure, which has been scattered within the court and without, be gathered together… Put your manure which has been mixed with earth on sandy ground… Manure your lands and do not plough them too deeply.” Walter seems to ascribe the benefit of manuring to its ability to retain moisture in dry weather, especially if it is mixed with marl or soil.

feudal system,

As the various barbarian tribes took over different parts of the Empire, they attempted with varying degrees of success to main tain Roman administration, though with their own personnel overseeing it. As they converted to Christianity, they frequently put bishops into their governments as well. Unfortunately, Germanic and Roman principles for governing were radically different, and as a result it took centuries before a stable system would emerge, one drawn from blending the Roman and Germanic cultures with Christianity. That system, known as feudalism, was based on personal bonds (an element of German culture) regulated by oaths (again, German) and a legal contract (an element of Roman culture). The basic idea was that the proper structure for a society was based on lordship, in which one person was owed allegiance and service from others. This applied not only in the political realm but in the economic as well (where it is called “manorialism”). As in any society, politics and economics were tied together by fundamental ideas about the “natural” way people should relate to each other.

In general, “laying foundations” is a good summary of the first half-millennium after the fall of Rome. Scholarship may have been stagnant, but it preserved the ancient texts that enabled medieval scholarship to flourish later. Charlemagne laid the foundation for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the central political authority of medieval society. Manorialism laid the foundation for the rural economy, and feudalism for the basic political system that would govern most of Europe during the rest of the Middle Ages.

So it irks me when I see good people worn to the bone working ten, twelve hours a day for nine bucks an hour. They have a lousy place to live and their kids don’t have good clothes and their car if they have one doesn’t run well, and you can see from the beaten, exhausted look in their eyes they think the reason they aren’t doing better is their fault. When in reality everything is stacked against them, and the system wants them to be broke and work hard because that way it squeezes the maximum out of them for the minimum investment. They think they’re failures in life when in reality they’re trapped, serfs in our modern feudal world.

Under the influence of the leaders of the colonists an entire new legal system was introduced. About 962, after the victories of the kings of Wessex, one of them, Edgar, declared: “I desire that among the Danes the secular law continue to be regulated according to their good customs.

Though the uprising had freed the vassals from any obligations they might have had to their former masters, it had yet to profit them. In fact, as the villagers had to man their new borders, build their own prisons, police their markets, and look after the judges they appointed, the amount of money that went to communal use steadily increased. Many ended up paying out more this way than they ever had under the deposed system. But the uprising was never undertaken for riches; it was about basic human dignity. Nor was it for revenge, but self-determination; not for shedding blood, but ending bloodshed. Above all, it was about realizing fair access to natural resources. Two years after discarding the old shackles, they kissed their wives and children good-bye and headed for the trenches, many of the village men would look back at the distances they had traveled and shake their heads in disbelief. Indeed, what an exhilarating feeling it must have been for someone who had never made a decision for himself to have, finally, his destiny firmly in his grasp: to grow the crop of his choice, to paint his home the color he fancied, to marry his daughter to the man he favored, and to be able to send his children to school, all without fear of repercussions from a feudal master. What is more, the peasant no longer needed to submit himself to the humility of waiting on his master’s guests while his wife and daughter labored in the kitchen, preparing food they were not allowed to sample. The peasant might die fighting to hold on to his newly gained freedom; in the past he had always been dying fighting for someone else’s cause. This was a feeling many outsiders, Duke Ashenafi and Reverend Yimam, above all, would never understand.

feudal systems

The Bourbons might have preserved themselves,” said Napoleon, “if they had controlled writing materials. The advent of cannon killed the feudal system; ink will kill the modern social organization.

His family and hers had good songbun, which made their position in society secure. Songbun is a caste system that operates in North Korea. [...] Within the three broad categories there are fifty-one gradations of status, ranging from the ruling Kim family at the top, to political prisoners with no hope of release at the bottom. The irony was that the new communist state had created a social hierarchy more elaborate and stratified than anything seen in the time of the feudal emperors.

This is Shakespeare and Company, it's the most famous bookstore in the world." She pointed to the shelves that reached the ceiling. "Surely you have something on the feudal system or the court of the Sun King?" "All our books are in English, and there is not a great demand for works on the French aristocracy." "That's the problem with Americans, they're only interested in themselves," she sighed. "I learned about the Civil War every year from the fifth grade, but I never studied the Wars of the Roses.

She knew now why mercenaries unnerved her, not only because they were dangerous in themselves but because they were outside the only system on which her society, real society, was built, whereby everybody owed duty to somebody under feudal law, just as her tenants, free and unfree; her knights; and her manor holders had to pay her in various taxes and service, just as she, their tenant in chief, had to render taxes and service to the ultimate earthly authority, the king. Mercenaries were unattached from the only mechanism that gave order to the world; they floated free of all responsibility except to those who paid them, like disgusting flies sucking at a sweetness to which they had not contributed. That was why

The feudal system was the most perfect social system in history. It even had a safety valve, to release any pressure of energy in it. An exceptional, ambitious, and gifted boy might get his master’s permission to learn to read and write, and enter The Church. Church discipline was strict, but The Church represented the spiritual world, and in it, all men were equal. Any priest might become the Pope. A serf’s son did become a Pope.

We cry out against the feudal barons who did not permit anyone to settle on the land otherwise than on payment of one quarter of the crops to the lord of the manor; but we continue to do as they did―we extend their system. The forms have changed, but the essence has remained the same. And the workman is compelled to accept the feudal conditions which we call "free contract," because nowhere will he find better conditions. Everything has been appropriated by somebody; he must accept the bargain, or starve.

The “East Asian development model” is an adaptation of the strategy advocated by German economist Friedrich List (1789–1846), which in turn drew inspiration from the “American System” created in the early United States by Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay. The United States and Bismarck’s Germany (which adopted much of List’s program) were the two most successful “catch-up” economies of the nineteenth century. Japan’s first modernization drive, which turned it from an agrarian feudal state to Asia’s first industrial power in the decades after 1870, more or less copied the German model.17

Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all the time and handed on the fight to their descendants. The chips on some shoulders had been passed down for generations. Some had antique value. A bloody good grudge, Lancre reckoned, was like a fine old wine. You looked after it carefully and left it to your children.

The French Revolution was dedicated to the principle of ‘a career open to talents’. The American Revolution advanced the idea that people should be allowed to pursue life, liberty and happiness without being held back by feudal restrictions. The Industrial Revolution unleashed animal spirits. The liberal revolution, which was headquartered in Britain but influential across middle-class Europe, introduced open competition into the heart of government administrations and educational systems.

Feudalism, that discreet system of gentlemen gangsters and serfs, had never died out in the region, and was concealed in the trappings of modern buildings and streets. Only a lunatic would quarrel with his master; only a fool would not understand that he stood in the steel jaws of death his entire life.

In the civilized world, only an elected political party serves the state in a genuine democratic context, and in the rest of the world, only feudal families dominate the state. Factually, it mirrors the worst dictatorship in a mask of a false democratic party system.

We have just been seeing political power concerned to break a "clandom" which preceded it in time. Let us now see how it behaves in regard to a clandom which is its contemporary. It may be said in effect, paraphrasing Shakespeare: "Monarchy and feudal aristocracy are two lions born on the same day." There was something of an act of piracy about the foundation of the European states. The Franks who conquered Gaul, the Normans who conquered England and Sicily, and even the Crusaders who went to Palestine, all behaved like bands of adventurers, dividing the spoil. What was there to divide? First of all, the ready cash. Afterwards, there were the lands; no deserts, these, but furnished with men whose labor was to maintain the victor. To every man, then, his share in the prize. And there we have the man-at-arms turned baron. This is shown to the evolution of the world of the word baro, which in Germany meant "freeman" and in Gaul denoted the name of the class. There the remains for seizure the apparatus of state, which there was one: naturally it is the share of the chief. But when a barbarian like Clovis found himself confronted with the administrative machine of the Late Empire, he did not understand it. All he saw in it was a system of suction pumps, bringing him a steady flow of riches on which he made merry with no thought for the public services for which these resources were intended. In the result, then, he divided up along among his foremost companions the treasure of the state, whether in the form of lands or fiscal revenues. In this way, civilized government was gradually brought to ruin, and Gaul of the ninth and 10th centuries, was reduced to the same condition as that in which William of Normandy was to find England of the 11th. There was imposed the system of barbarian government known as government by retainers. Let the Charlemagne use as points d'appui of Power, the influential men who are already on the spot, or let William create his own influential men by a share-out of big fiefs in England - it was all one. The important thing to note is that the central authority appoints as its representatives in a given district either the chief proprietors of the soil who were there already, or those whom it sets up in their place. By a slant common to the barbarian mind, or rather by an inclination which is natural to all men, but in barbarians encounters no opposing principle, these influential men soon confound their function with their property and exercise the former as though it were the latter. Each little local tyrant then becomes legislature, judge and administrator of a more or less extensive principality; and on the tribute paid by it he lives, along with his servants and his men-at-arms. Power thus expelled soon returns, however, under the spur of its requirements. The resources at his disposal are absurdly out of proportion to the area, which depends on it and to the population, which calls it the sovereign. The reason is that the manpower has been taken over by the barons. What was in other days a tax is now a feudal due. The only way is to rob the baronial cell of its withheld resources. That is why monarchy establishes townships on the confines of the baronial lands; they act as cupping-glasses, drawing away the best elements in the population. In that way, the barons will get fewer villeins, and the king more bourgeoisie who will be grateful for the franchises conferred on them and will help the king in his necessities from their purses.

The history of the medieval era brings to mind the feudal system with its handful of nobles constantly fighting for territory and the competing forces of various kingdoms and the all-powerful church. But these are pictures of Western Europe.

The feudal system became more complex during the Kamakura period.

End of the Feudal System

The feudal social system was abolished in 1871 with the surrender of the daimyo estates.

The most traumatic result of the abolition of the feudal system

The history of the medieval era brings to mind the feudal system with its handful of nobles

have described at some length the condition of the farm labourers in Italy because it seems to me that it is important that those who are inclined to be discouraged about the Negro in the South should know that his case is by no means as hopeless as that of some others. The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily. The Negro farmer sometimes thinks he is badly treated in the South. Not infrequently he has to pay high rates of interest upon his "advances" and sometimes, on account of his ignorance, he is not fairly treated in his yearly settlements. But there is this great difference between the Negro farmer in the South and the Italian farmer in Sicily: In Sicily a few capitalists and descendants of the old feudal lords own practically all the soil and, under the crude and expensive system of agriculture which they

The encroachment on that set of rules has begun everywhere, like a parasite feeding on the edges of its host organism, because that’s what the replacement set of rules is, the old parasitic greed of the kings and their henchmen, this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic, it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality porr as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in place!

It must never be forgotten, in viewing the history of those times, that the original object of the institution of chivalry, was to correct the evils of the feudal system; to strike the rod from the hand of the oppressor, to defend the defenceless, and to right the wronged; and had chivalry remained in its purity, it might have averted long the downfall of the system with which it was linked. The people loved the true knight as much as they hated the feudal lord; and long after the decay of the order, even the affectation of its higher qualities both won regard from the lower classes, and excited the admiration of all those above them, who retained any sparks of the spirit which once animated it.

You only took concepts that would allow you to remain the same. To not actually mature, develop or civilize, but which would allow you to pretend that you did because individual liberty sounds much more sophisticated than shamelessness. Personal freedom sounds better than amorality, irresponsibility or social irrelevance. The free market sounds much more noble than the feudal system.

In some respects all this was a sudden acceleration of the drift toward the manorial system, a process which had already gone a long way in Anglo-Saxon England, and certainly in Wessex. But even in Wessex the idea still persisted that the tie of lord and man was primarily personal, so that a free man could go from one lord to another and transfer his land with him. The essence of Norman feudalism, on the other hand, was that the land remained under the lord, whatever the man might do. Thus the landed pyramid rose up tier by tier to the King, until every acre in the country could be registered as held of somebody by some form of service. But besides the services which the man owed to the lord in arms there was the service of attending the courts of the hundred and the county, which were, apart from exemptions, courts of the King, administering old customary law.

The transition to an ecological and democratic economy will be difficult and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of storming the Winter Palace. Rather, it will be a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system. The struggle is ultimately against *the system of capital*. It must begin, however, by opposing the *logic of capital*, endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth. The basis for the creation of sustainable human development must arise *from within* the system dominated by capital *without being part of it*, just as the bourgeoisie itself arose in the "pores" of feudal society. Eventually, these initiatives can become powerful enough to constitute the basis of a new revolutionary movement and society.

Centuries ago, when Karl Marx wrote exhaustively about the callous exploitation of workers by the capitalist class, he may not have imagined how in South Asia, women as brides would be treated as commodities, pitilessly exploited, and violently murdered in their own homes by their abusive husbands for extorting wealth. As the ruthless oppression of the toiling masses could not be prevented by laws or policies, the merciless torture and murder of women could not be regulated despite establishing a legal mechanism in place. Over the decades, predatory capitalism has irrevocably acquired an altered form, and the free-market approach has devised a new mechanism of manipulation. Similarly, the viciousness of the neoliberal forces, clubbed with patriarchy, feudalism, conservatism, rampant materialism, and excessive consumption propelled by extensive consumerism, is aggravating the desire among men and their families to accumulate quick wealth using marriage as a tool to extract resources from women and their families. The bourgeoisie-proletariat categorization, in the situation of dowry practice, is expanded to include the classification of savagely privileged men versus women – rich or poor, and in urban or rural areas. Women from all backgrounds dreadfully suffer for the material gains of men and their families in a harsh and hostile environment fuelled by the neoliberal, Brahmanical capitalist patriarchy.

I felt neither ill or kind intent... Tell me, have you ever stood alone before great vistas of nature, and marveled at its beauty? Its power and indifference. We have our nobility, but this was more aristocratic than any feudal or caste system. Even if the rabble who will tolerate nothing over them succeeded in overthrowing all aristocracies, they would still have to allow one to exist. Empires and laws will fall, but the rule of nature shall always be the apex to which all others are subject.

wanting to create a monument to Shakespeare in the US capital. “The poet is one of our best sources, one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith, and our hope,” Emily Folger explained, drawing on a strain of American literary criticism that saw Shakespeare, paradoxically, as America’s poet. He had influenced the founding fathers, who saw in his villains and tyrants the dangers of monarchy and the need for institutional checks on power. Shakespeare’s history plays heralded the “inauguration of modern democracy,” Walt Whitman wrote, for they put “on record the first full exposé—and by far the most vivid one… of the political theory and results” of a feudal system “which America has come on earth to abnegate and replace.

The transition to an ecological and democratic economy will be difficult and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of storming the Winter Palace. Rather, it will be a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system. The struggle is ultimately against *the system of capital*. It must begin, however, by opposing the *logic of capital*, endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth. The basis for the creation of sustainable human development must arise *from within* the system dominated by capital *without being part of it*, just as the bourgeoisie itself arose in the "pores" of feudal society. Eventually, these initiatives can become powerful enough to constitute the basis of a new revolutionary movement and society.

free’ landless poor made their way to the cities to seek work. Those who remained on the land worked for a wage and only after-hours worked to feed themselves. On the other hand, for those who owned land, the shift from feudal to capitalist economics generated vast efficiencies, profits and hence the means to fund a growing national appetite to buy foreign food.

No one thanks you for shaving, no one thanks you for democracy. Now we’ve come out the other side. Democracy was only possible under a class system, that’s why: it was an indulgence granted by the privileged. We haven’t time for it any more: a flash of light between feudalism and automation, and now it’s gone. What’s left? The voters are cut off from parliament, parliament

Plantation owners were at the top of the social pyramid. Their “semi feudal model required a vast and permanent underclass to play the role of serfs on whose toil the entire system depended.”12 When the number of white indentured servants dried up in the 1680s, slave traders offered a solution: an abundant supply of African slaves. Since slavery was not yet legalized, the colonies enacted laws limiting the rights of Blacks. Among the first was a 1639 decree that “‘all persons except Negroes’ were to get arms and ammunition— probably to fight off Indians.”13 Before the legalization of slavery, indentured whites and Blacks had similar rights, although Blacks tended to be punished more harshly.

The Communists are only consistently carrying further what had already been long present during religious evolution, and especially in the State; to wit, propertylessness, i. e. the feudal system.

The Tokugawa shogunate established a nationwide system consisting of about 270 domains, each ruled by a daimyō. Although the shōgun led the country, each domain in this feudal system had its own political, economic and social structure. In effect, each functioned as a small country or principality that paid homage to the shogunate. Each domain also maintained a rigid class system. At the top, of course, were the daimyō, served by their samurai warriors, who were the only Japanese allowed to carry swords. Beneath them came the farmers and peasants who produced food, followed by artisans who made clothes, swords and other goods. Almost at the bottom were the merchants, segregated and ostracised because they made money from others’ labour. Underneath everyone else were the Eta: leather-tanners, undertakers and executioners, who dealt with animal slaughter and death.

Mate, I’ve only been here for a few weeks, but I don’t think anyone even knows my name. I’ve already slipped three spots down the batting order. I’ve got no idea what the lyrics to the club song are. And every time I get a hit at training, I hear the faint sound of blokes whispering that one word under their breath: “Yuck.” What am I doing wrong?’ I began, nervously. Nuggsy paused, took a long swig of his Reschs schooner, and reclined languidly into his seat. He scratched his bald head for a moment, seemingly in deep thought, before embarking on the long-winded response that would indeed shape my cricketing future. ‘Listen, bud. You’re a grade cricketer now. And it’s time you learned a little bit about what that means. This isn’t club cricket, “Shires” cricket, or that stupid school shit that you wasted your time on for all those years. This is grade cricket: the highest level of amateur cricket in the world,’ he said with pride. Just for those who don’t already know, I should quickly provide a bit of background on the grade cricket competition. Grade cricket (or ‘Premier cricket’, as it is known in some states/territories) is the level directly below the state competition.  Despite this close proximity to the professional arena, it is nonetheless an amateur competition. Sure, one or two first graders might get paid a little bit under the table, but everyone else must pay a registration fee in order to play. Normally, each club has four to five grades — first grade being the strongest; fifth grade the weakest. Those in first grade enjoy a status that the fifth graders can only dream about. Being a first grader is like being a celebrity to 50 blokes whose names you’ll never know — or never even need to know — unless you end up playing with them after a severe run of poor form (or a serious disciplinary breach). The rest of the club — seconds, thirds, and fourth grade — is basically an assortment of talented youngsters and ageing desperates. The common denominator between the young and old brigade is that they were all once told they were ‘good enough to play for Australia’. In many cases, it was the first and last compliment they ever received — and the reason why they’re still playing. In all cases, it was the worst thing that could have ever happened to them. The ultimate grade cricketer, therefore, will possess the perfect balance of good and not good enough that will haunt them for all of their playing days. All this of course, is something that can only be learned with experience. At this early stage in my grade cricket career, I considered these young players to be ‘cool’ and the older players worthy of my respect. Nuggsy tilted his head to one side as he lit up a cigarette. He took a deep drag, holding it in for what seemed like hours, before launching his head back to expel a thick plume of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Listen, great man,’ he began. ‘Success in grade cricket has nothing to do with skill, ability, or even results. It’s all about the social ladder, bud. You’ve got the big dogs up top, the peasants down the bottom, and everyone in between is just trying to stay relevant,’ he offered. In many ways, grade cricket social hierarchy bears great similarity to the feudal systems that first appeared in the Middle Ages in Europe — something I’d learned a bit about at high school. As I remembered, kings and monarchs sat at the top, enjoying their pick of the land, women and food. They were the ones who established the rules that everyone had to live under. The barons leased their land from the king; the knights leased their land from the barons; and the knights granted the lowly peasants their land.  The peasants were not allowed to marry, nor could they even leave the manor without permission. Basically, they were the fifth graders of the 8-12th Century.

The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so backward relative to what was available in Europe and the United States, so large gains could be reaped by reallocating resources to the industrial sector, even if all this was done inefficiently and by force. Before 1928 most Russians lived in the countryside. The technology used by peasants was primitive, and there were few incentives to be productive. Indeed, the last vestiges of Russian feudalism were eradicated only shortly before the First World War. There was thus huge unrealized economic potential from reallocating this labor from agriculture to industry. Stalinist industrialization was one brutal way of unlocking this potential. By fiat, Stalin moved these very poorly used resources into industry, where they could be employed more productively, even if industry itself was very inefficiently organized relative to what could have been achieved. In fact, between 1928 and 1960 national income grew at 6 percent a year, probably the most rapid spurt of economic growth in history up until then. This quick economic growth was not created by technological change, but by reallocating labor and by capital accumulation through the creation of new tools and factories. Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy.