this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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"Peasant" was basically a farmer. Some peasants had land, many didn't. If you were a tenant farmer not only did you not own the land, in many cases the land owned you. In many cases you were born on the land and you "rented" it from the manor lord. That meant that you were allowed to grow crops on that land, but you owed the lord for letting you use his land. You'd pay that back with shares of your crop and/or labour on his crops. In return, he was responsible for defending you... but that meant he'd conscript you into his army and you'd fight the invaders.
If you didn't like that deal, too bad, if you were a villein you couldn't leave the land without the lord's permission. You weren't a slave exactly, but you weren't free to go find work elsewhere.
There were peasants who did own land, but it wasn't common. The equivalent today would be if you rented from a landlord, but you had to use a uber-jobs app that required you to do odd jobs for your landlord for free for 1-2 days a week.
Yeah, there was nothing good about it. My great great grandfather was a serf as a kid until it ended at the end of the 1840s. Almost all of the food they produced was taken by their lord. The little bit his family was allowed to keep wasn't enough to stop them from being sickly from hunger. They lived in a tiny cabin, and slept on what effectively were picnic table benches - two people per bench with their arms and legs hanging down to the floor from each side. There were just a couple differences between that and being slaves. Slaves were legally considered dead, serfs were not. Serfs were bound to the land, slaves were not. That meant a serf could only be bought and sold with the land, and serf families could not be split apart. It also meant they could not legally be murdered or raped. But they were expected to work for and give almost everything they produced to the lord, and they were not paid. They could not leave because they were bound to the land.
A lot of rich capitalist billionaires really would like to bring that back.
Yeah, a lot of people bitch about capitalism without realizing that capitalism was a significant step up from feudalism / manorialism for most people. When they bitch about capitalism, a lot of what they hate is evidence it's actually drifting back towards feudalism. Renting instead of owning, for example. Or monopolies in control of things instead of there being healthy competition.
I'm all for the Star Trek future, which shares a lot in common with communism. But, it's a future where there is no scarcity. In the present where scarcity is a real issue, communism always seems to quickly become an elite ruling over a population that can't vote them out. Unless someone can prove that there's a system better than capitalism that we can actually get to from here, I'd rather focus on trying to fix capitalism than overthrow it and inevitably end up with something worse.