I have not looked into any sources on what life was like for a feudal peasant. However, I’ve heard that peasants had more holidays and rest. I also believe the life of a peasant was more communal and satisfactory with religion being a central feature. This, to me, is a stark contrast to the life of the modern proletariat in the Global North who often lives for work, is more and more isolated, and maybe gets only a month off work. Yes, we have higher life expectancy now (quantity) but I cant help but think that peasants had a better quality of life. Please educate me on this topic and provide some sources to look at. Thank you! 🙏
This is the claim I see most often – basically, that we work more now than in the past.
Even taking the claim as true, a big quality of life factor it doesn’t address is how strenuous your work is. A lot of jobs today don’t require any manual labor, and even today’s manual labor jobs require a lot less of it than in the past. On-the-job access to climate control, quality food and water, entertainment, etc. have also vastly improved.
There’s a good argument to be made that these improvements are due to technology, not capitalism, but then why claim that feudal workers had it better because they worked less if there’s so much more to “having it better” than how many hours one works?
I don’t think this is a great argument to make overall. Your comparison point (feudal societies) is so varied and ancient that it’s easy to argue against because no one really knows the truth.
Your argument is from the viewpoint as a westerner though.
Many workers in the global south are not given climate control, potable water, or consistent access to food.
Heck, even the people working on farms in the US get the shit end of the stick, and I’m not talking about tractor drivers. The actual workers, mainly immigrants, who spend over a dozen hours a day filling their baskets of berries, getting paid pennies per pound for their labor.
From a westerner’s lens (and I do this quite a bit, but we should all work to improve on it), we think of the working class as a construction worker who has OSHA mandated breaks and PPE, or a McDonalds employee who works in an air conditioned building. But there are A LOT of jobs in America that are operating illegally / do not follow regulation.
I can go on about how even the working class in the west is profiting from the exploitation of the global south, but that can be an entirely different story.
The question is about “labor aristocrats.” It’s an argument I’ve mostly seen made by westerners for other westerners, speaking about work in a western context. That’s what I was addressing.
There’s a better quality of life argument for workers in the global south, but still: