The gig economy has many, many downsides, but those downsides don't share much at all in common with feudalism, even by analogy.
If we let all words deteriorate to mean simply "good" or "bad" (with gradations of good or badness), we're barely communicating.
doubleplusgood and ungood comes to mind.
"things I like" and "things I dislike" are far more honest and genuine.
Unless you're talking from a purely nihilistic viewpoint which might be rational to some extent but not really productive. "Nothing matter, nothing is wrong, nothing is right, stuff just happens". Okay but where do we go from there?
Take the following thoughts:
Killing people is a bad thing. During wars, soldiers kill people. Soldiers are virtuous people.
Do you believe/know that someone could think they believe all 3 of these things? If yes, what are their values?
Everything is situations. It's context. It's why philosophers play with so many variances of the trolley problem. Nothing is clean and easy, everyone is a hypocrite, nothing matters, stuff happens, and trying to rule a group by trying to worry about individual beliefs instead of aggregate beliefs shared among a majority (a slight difference from your statement that I took as "minimal set of shared values" which I assumed you meant applied to literally everyone).
Point is once you get a group above a certain size, there's only ever going to be majority favored ideas, not universally shared.
But, are shared values the same as good and bad? We generally consider certain forms of lying to be bad but they are not illegal. And, not everyone agrees on those. So they aren't entirely shared. If we go down the rabbit hole of reason and logic on this it's not so simple.
IMO the problem with modern political discussion (especially online) isn't vocabulary, it's lack of nuance and empathy. "Good" and "bad" are not really the problem, but rather when you only classify things are either completely good or completely bad with no middle ground.
All I'm suggesting is that we take care in our language and be up-front about subjectivity rather than mask it with objective-sounding reifications. This isn't an attack on morality nor its importance, rather it is an acknowledgment of the fact that such judgments are ultimately based on what we as individuals or as a society find acceptable or unacceptable (i.e., like or dislike). It is perfectly possible to have a strong sense of ethics without claiming that one's ethics are somehow objectively or empirically "true".
There are plenty of examples where the "right" thing to do is not pleasant, it is not socially acceptable, etc because it is instead congruent with a greater ethical structure. Please check out some moral philosophy before throwing the whole field into a bin.
Calling a type of employment relationship feudalistic because of the amount of power the employer has is at least somewhat descriptive.
/ˈfyo͞odlˌizəm/
noun
the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.
Sure isn't even "somewhat descriptive"
edit for formatting
“The classic definition, by François-Louis Ganshof (1944),[3] feudalism describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs.[3]“. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism
It included both economic and military relationships, but importantly: The granting of a landholding to a vassal did not relinquish the lord's property rights, but only the use of the lands and their income; the granting lord retained ultimate ownership of the fee and could, technically, recover the lands in case of disloyalty or death. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fief
Thus these relationships where in effect an extreme form of employment even among the nobility. Much like how joining the US Army has more obligations than going to work for Google.
While it doesn't fit a strict definition of "communism", large parts of socialism are very exploitative, which is also a characteristic of communism. And communism is generally regarded as a bad thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
> Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon claimed that independent contracting amounts to “corporations trying to oppress workers.” He continued with, “When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, and the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism, all over again.”
I think if you take a look over the wiki page [1], he's probably talking about the similarity between classes. It's also in context about more than just the gig economy. And it's also in reference to what people are saying, the way they talk about it, and the way they are selling it to other people. Not talking about the gig economy itself as a concept.
Yes it has. Feudalism was that exactly: all society, from bottom to top was based on individual asymetrical pacts between two parts, the vassal and the lord. This kind of relation existed between peasants and lords and between lesser and greater lords.
For example a gig economy employee can withdraw their labour at any time; can choose how much or how little they work (sometimes within some very wide bounds); can often choose where they work; can change from one employer to another and back again freely; in some cases can choose to only work at certain times and locations that have better compensation.
Yes of course there are disadvantages and maybe those should be regulated, and maybe in some cases the relationship is abusive by employers, but the above doesn't sound anything remotely like feudalism to anyone who has even the most basic knowledge about feudalism.
The feudalism term clearly seems to be introduced because of that, not because something's good or bad or whatever, but because it's atomizing labour relations.
As an example of something that would be apropos, Industrial Revolution working conditions and employer/employee dynamics would be far better analogies, although obviously imperfect themselves.
- Royalty allows vassals to "own" land in exchange for a portion of the income from the land.
- Royalty has an obligation to protect the vassals while vassals have an obligation to fight for the land owners.
- Similarly, vassals allowed peasants to "own" part of their land and were obligated to protect them in exchange for part of the income from the land.
- Peasants often were not allowed to leave their land (effectively change employers). However, it's not clear to me if this is an inherent feature of feudalism.
In terms of whether any of this is analogous to feudalism:
- I think you could draw a pretty solid analogy in a situation where a corporation provided a major piece of property (e.g. a vehicle) in exchange for continued labor. However, that seems more like something you see in trucking than in the modern gig economy.
- You could maybe argue that situations where a person rents the property they need to do their job (e.g. a car for Uber) is analogous to the way that peasants rented their land. However, a better analogy might be to some of the schemes where, for example, employees are paid in scrip which they also had to use to purchase their tools.
- You could argue that, feudalism is analogous to how working class people in many cities are unlikely to ever make enough to own a house and therefore they only "own" them (via renting) as long as they keep working. However, this seems like it's more about inequality in general than the gig economy specifically.
- The fact that employees often have to keep working for bad employees in order to avoid being labeled a "job hopper", due to a non-compete, or just due to the difficulties of changing jobs has reasonable similarities to peasants being unable to leave their land. However, these are problems that are actually more common in jobs that are outside the gig economy.
- In at least one sense modern employment relationships are worse than feudalism: In feudalism the vassal has an obligation to protect their peasants while a corporation can fire an employee at a moments notice. However, again this isn't restricted to the gig economy.
Overall, I agree with you that feudalism is a poor analogy for the gig economy specifically. However, I think it is a fair analogy for some aspects of modern capitalism as a whole.
When dominant technology was scarce, it-- armor, warhorses, swords, nutrition, training-- was the dominion of feudal lords, which gave them real power over the peasantry.
The crossbow, and then the pike, gunpowder, and advances in organization & discipline such as those coming out of the old Swiss Confederacy and Gustavus Adolphus's Sweden changed everything. The fact that sovereign power relied on sizeable armies of citizenry to wage war was politically enabling for the peasants.
Combined with increased individual agency from economic output due to pre-industrial and industrial advances in tech, and the stage is set for democracy.
Some Swiss still carry their swords, now heirlooms, to the polls. If they did not have swords, they would not have polls.
If technology now removes the economic and military agency of the individual, it will also remove his political agency.
In feudalism, it was common to ascribe the collective success of a nation (or a smaller, land-owning group of people in a given region) to a single individual, the feudal lord. He had the ultimate (and hereditary) authority over the operations of the group, by virtue of successfully coordinating the defense of the group against external threats.
In modern (19th to 21st century) private companies, there is a similar dynamic. There is founder, who is ascribed unlimited power within the domain of his private company, just by the virtue of coordinating its expansion. (He "deserves it" because he "took the risks".) And this power is hereditary - he can decide to pass the ownership of the company to his own descendants.
Sure, the powers of modern capital owners over lives of people are much smaller than in feudalism. But the arguments used to justify the power of capital owners over the operations (and profit distribution) in the company are in principle the same as those used to defend feudal lordship.
In the political domain, humans eventually wisened up and decided that feudal lords should be replaced with democratic republic, because success of a nation is a collective effort, and so the decision making should also be done collectively.
I think this will eventually happen to founders in capitalism too.
The key reason why capitalism isn't "Feudalism 2.0" is because companies compete in a marketplace against each other, and there is freedom of mobility between employees across those companies. So maybe you could say that anti-trust law is a key component to ensure that your analogy is false.
The feudal lords also competed with each other. The freedom of mobility is not relevant if your only choice is just another feudal lord.
It's a neat metaphor in a storybook sort of way, which is why it seems like you are making a political point and not a economic argument.
> The freedom of mobility is not relevant if your only choice is just another feudal lord.
There are ~30 million small businesses in the US, anyone can start one, and many people do. Anyone cannot decide to become a feudal lord; it is a position taken through force and violence and maintained at the tip of a spear.
> In the political domain, humans eventually wisened up and decided ... I think this will eventually happen to founders in capitalism too.
I think capitalism was the "wisened up" part after the prior attempts which don't allow an entrepreneur to take a new idea, bring it into the world, and own the result for themselves. Well, aside from the ~50% which goes to taxes.
I am making an argument that the principal justification for power of these individuals is the same. It's neither strictly political nor strictly economic argument.
"There are ~30 million small businesses in the US, anyone can start one, and many people do. Anyone cannot decide to become a feudal lord; it is a position taken through force and violence and maintained at the tip of a spear."
Actually, you can decide to become a lord, it happens in mafias and gangs around the world till today. The lords in feudalism (unless it was inherited) rose from chieftains of tribes gaining more and more influence (often by using of violence) over more and more people.
Just like starting a business, becoming a chieftain and lord is very risky. In fact riskier, because the stakes are higher, but also the rewards.
Also, while there are small businesses in capitalism, yes, the core of it in practice are large businesses. And just like the lords, the owners of the large businesses are those who can either outsmart the other small owners, or just win the game of taking the risk. The issue I am talking about - winner (founder) takes all - is much more questionable in larger companies.
The fact that there is no direct violence in economic competition between companies doesn't invalidate the comparison I am making.
"I think capitalism was the "wisened up" part after the prior attempts which don't allow an entrepreneur to take a new idea, bring it into the world, and own the result for themselves."
I interpret the history the other way around. The capitalism only happened after people wisened up and figured that the republic is better than monarchy, in the political sphere. This restricted the use of violence in competition for power, and allowed the companies (and their owners) to rise in the economic competition.
But the question why should somebody keep unlimited and indefinite control over something (be it company or state) just by virtue of organizing people around creation of that something still stands.
You're drawing an analogy in the roughest possible terms. "A person can choose to become X", where X is a company or a lord, does not logically imply anything about the two things other than they are both choices. (Everything at some level is arguably a choice, so in fact this says nothing).
Similarly, "Doing thing X is risky" where X is starting a company or starting a gang, is not a logical argument for anything other than two random things are both "risky" (but perhaps in markedly different ways).
> Also, while there are small businesses in capitalism, yes, the core of it in practice are large businesses.
Roughly half of all employment, and the majority of employment gains, comes from small business. Roughly half of GDP comes from small business.
> And just like the lords, the owners of the large businesses are those who can either outsmart the other small owners, or just win the game of taking the risk.
In any competitive environment (be it sports, or selling widgets, or war) there are winners and losers depending on the preparation, skill, and execution of the players. "Football is war" is a metaphor, not a rigorous argument for why the Geneva Convention should apply to football.
> The fact that there is no direct violence in economic competition between companies doesn't invalidate the comparison I am making.
The fact that two things are meaningfully different in almost every sense does though. The only comparisons you've made are only in the most general metaphorical sense.
> The question why should somebody keep unlimited and indefinite control over something (be it company or state) just by virtue of organizing people around creation of that something still stands.
Besides the obvious point that no one has unlimited or indefinite control over anything, the tenants of private property are a well argued philosophical stomping ground. Why anyone should be able to own anything that they pay for... If they ever truly own it, if it is being taxed annually, or merely rented it from the State... If they should be able to keep it, or how much of it their family should be able to keep after they die... Whether a person can fully transfer title in something they create even if they are paid for it...
The fundamental reason that we let people own the things that they create or that they pay for is because that becomes the incentive for people to work hard to create great things, and because it's a way to give meaning to life. The fundamental reason that we don't take everything away from people the moment they die, but merely take just a large share of it, when it's over a certain amount, is roughly similar.
Other countries have tried to do it different ways, and IMO they have all turned out orders of magnitude worse for the wear.
All of those words have well-established and commonly understood meanings.
You and others may disagree with the political or cultural implications behind the way these words are used, but that disagreement doesn't render that rhetoric invalid, or make them meaningless.
Large power imbalance between the workers and those with means? Check. Not in use since Medieval times and thus an analogy unlikely to be confused? Check
An analogy, by definition, only has to bear partial resemblance to the thing being compared. The power imbalance in feudalism and the gig economy is clear.
So no, feudalism does not mean "things I think are bad".
I'd say capitalism, communism, socialism, mercantilism, and every economic system in history, when done at scale, usually end up with some people having far more power than others. If a power imbalance is as deep as the comparison goes, school is feudalism, dating with a significant age gap is feudalism, traffic stops are feudalism...everything is feudalism.