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From Kenneth Jupp’s “European Feudalism from Its Emergence through Its Decline”:

“"In the US, paragon of so-called 'capitalism' in the enlightened times in which we live, Tax Freedom Day in 2000 fell on the third of May. Assuming his taxes at all levels to be concentrated at the beginning instead of being spread throughout the year, that was the average date that an American could start working for himself instead of for the government. Of course, conditions under feudalism were not uniform, but taken as a whole, the number of days annually that the feudal tiller of the soil was obliged to work on his lord's demesne was certainly no greater, and may well have been considerably fewer, than the 123 that an American is obliged to work for Uncle Sam and his state and local uncles. For his labor, the medieval peasant received, in addition to protection, a cottage with garden and field, and access to the village commons. On top of his labor, a gebur paid ten pence to his lord at Michaelmas, 23 bushels of barley, and two hens at Martinmas, and either a young sheep or two pence at Easter. But his lord would have set him up for life with livestock, implements of husbandry, and basic household furnishings."

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Jupp’s point is salient.

Let's add to his calculation some others modern costs. Many Americans spend about a third of their income on state, local, and federal taxes. Most spend another third to half on housing costs, usually rent to landlords or mortgage payments to banks. Many also have additional debt, such as car and education loans, that are directly tied to employment and not voluntary consumption.

I have no idea how to calculate how many hours we work each year to fund our employers' salaries and other capitalist profits, but we can generally observe that the average American spends most of the year laboring for others—the state, the capitalist employer, the landlord, the lender-and not for themselves.

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Medieval peasants also labored for others, either in the form of corvee (compulsory labor) or in rents to landlords. Some of this labor was servile and some of it was "free," but in neither case do the hours worked compare unfavorably to modern American work hours. We work A LOT.

These peasants then had to work for themselves, producing food, much as we also have to work for ourselves to generate revenue to purchase food. And the medieval peasant also had to perform considerable self-provisioning labor. The production of cloth and manufacture, maintenance, and cleaning of clothes was, in particular, a major component of a peasant's labor.

But the last time I checked, I also spend considerable time each day engaged in self-provisioning labor-washing clothes and dishes, child care, home maintenance, etc.

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This isn't an argument about how onerous the labor was. Farm labor is enormously physically taxing. Setting aside the very real health costs of sitting at a desk in an office each day, many of us cannot argue that we have harder work than a medieval peasant did. But many of us can: people still work on farms or otherwise perform grueling physical labor.

And there are also many people today who, after completing all their compulsory labor and working to generate income for themselves and performing self-provisioning labor, also pay gym fees to perform grueling physical activity, for fitness or cosmetic purposes, that medieval peasants performed as a matter of course-plowing, weeding, harvesting, chopping wood, hauling water, etc.

(The English long bow, which English men and boys were required to train on by law from 1363, could have a draw weight of up to 130lbs. An English archer might have been able to send 8-10 arrows downrange per minute. These guys were jacked in ways that crossfitters-commuting to the gym after a day at work but before they have to drive home and make dinner and do laundry-could only dream about.)

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But did they work more?

Here’s Juliet Schor in “The Overworked American”:

“"The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official—that is, church—holidays included not only long 'vacations' at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' and rest days. They were spent in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking, and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales-to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancient regime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year."

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Schor has been heavily criticized for years for her numbers. Oh, she’s just counting the hours worked for the lord (in corvee or other rents). Oh, she’s not counting all their work to produce food for themselves or their self-provisioning. Etc etc forever.

But, as I’ve noted, we also work for most of the year to pay rents to other people, and then the remainder of the year to generate revue for ourselves, AND work hours every day at self-provisioning tasks. Even if you’re not willing to accept that medieval peasants might have worked fewer hours than we do, it’s harder and harder to claim that they worked more.

It’s time to set aside the fantasy of the miserable peasant toiling endlessly in the mud, or the myth that capitalist modernity has somehow liberated us from endless work.

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In “Bullshit Jobs,” David Graeber reminds us of another feature of medieval labor, even bonded labor, that is the envy of most of us today:

“The main reason why work could remain so irregular was because it was largely unsupervised. This is true not only of medieval feudalism but also of most labor arrangements anywhere until relatively recent times. It was true even if those labor arrangements were strikingly unequal. If those on the bottom produced what was required of them, those on top didn’t really feel they should have to be bothered knowing what that entailed.”

Bob Black made a similar point in “The Abolition of Work”:

“The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as ‘discipline.’…Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace—surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do.”

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It’s hard to even fathom this now. We’re so used to the regimentation of the clock, of the threat of unemployment if we’re late or leave early. Amazon drivers are monitored by camera and AI the entire time they’re working. Remote workers have every keystroke and mouse movement logged by their employers. Our employers watch us while we work, contact us when we’re at home. Some of them check our urine for forbidden substances. They tell us when we can eat, what we can wear, when we can sit down, when we can defecate. The modern employer is intrusive, and we are subservient to that employer, in ways that would have been alien to many people in the past, even many servile laborers.

In “The Labor Problem at Jamestown,” Edmund Morgan reminds us of how frustrated English elites were in their efforts to command peasant laborers:

"The Statute of Laborers in 1495 is preceded by the complaint that laborers 'waste much part of the day...in late coming unto their work, early departing therefrom, long sitting at their breakfast, at their dinner and noon-meat, and long time of sleeping after noon."

English and later British history includes a long list of laws designed to simply order peasants to behave in ways that landowners struggled to impose themselves. It wasn’t until the culmination of the enclosure movement, when they finally stripped the peasantry of the last of its independent sustenance, that the British elites achieved their dream of an obedient work force.

Before then, their workers worked when they pleased and slept when they pleased; they ate and drank and took Mondays off as an unofficial drunken holiday, Saint Monday.

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The point of all this is not to argue that the past was better somehow than the present, or vice versa; comparisons like this are trite and facile.

What we can take away is that the past is much more complicated than we're generally encouraged to think it was, and that many of the "benefits" of capitalist modernity are, in fact, dramatically more ambiguous at best when the past is genuinely considered.

This is not to say “nothing has changed.” This is not to say “there is nothing good today.” This is not to say “we should Return to Peasant.” These are strawmen. Can you read this on a mobile device anywhere in the world the moment I hit publish? Yes, probably, and that’s pretty amazing. Are there people alive today who enjoy fewer rights to property and freedom than medieval servile laborers? Also yes. This isn’t a game where the past and present compete for points.

We're taught constantly to believe that the past was a misery from which capitalist modernity has saved us, and that however bad it may seem we must remain ungrateful and above all else not rock the boat, lest we Return to Toiling Endlessly in the Mud. The status quo seems much less appealing when you consider the ways in which the past was not as bad as we've been taught to think and how little—if at all—modernity has improved our quality of life.

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@neonsnake

I do!

@HeavenlyPossum

How you feeling about getting up early and tending to it, tomorrow, on the weekend?

My guess is - if not "excited," as such, although you may well be - far more engaged than getting up on Monday to work (whether at home or not)

Is it more back-breaking than whatever you do for a "living"? I'm gonna go straight ahead and assume so.

Am I wrong?

@neonsnake

I sincerely doubt I’d enjoy feeling obligated to do *anything,* but I also chose as a hobby the labor that we imagine medieval peasants were crushed by. We also pay extravagantly for many of the amenities they enjoyed as a matter of course—with money for the fresh air and farm-to-table organic cuisine to our mental health for the absence of community and chronic alienation.

I’m not interested in this sort of facile game, and I encourage you to read the entire thread.

@neonsnake

I certainly work in an office environment at a job that has cost me dramatically in terms of mental health as well as physical, in different ways, but even if we assumed that every office worker was a pampered Lord Fauntleroy, not all workers today—even in “rich” countries—are office workers. Many engage in similarly strenuous physical labor, and probably for more hours a year with less freedom and control over their work than medieval peasants would have exercised.

@neonsnake

Oh sorry, I totally misread what you were saying!!

@HeavenlyPossum

okay. thank you.

@_chris_real

@anarchademic

Yes! A brilliant paper.

@saltphoenix

Thanks for the recommendation!