Hacker News Reader

Yeah, urm, no. Okay, the "deal" part isn't that far off.

The landed gentry lost much of its status and importance during 19th and 20th centuries, or joined (if they invested wisely) the class what the left likes to call "capitalists". This was caused by what is called "industrialization". Old aristocracy managed to continue to exist in some form in some countries (the UK is great example of that) and the class divisions didn't disappear, but turned into something slightly different.

And the implied threat socialist / communist revolution was part of the deal, but it isn't that simple. Far more important was parliamentary democracy. Of the much praised Nordic countries (the ones Bernie Sanders seeks inspiration from), only in Finland the left actually tried a violent revolution. It failed, and they were mostly kicked out and kept out of politics until after WWII. Compared to Sweden, where the factory owners and unions started to negotiate decades earlier, the deals after that were always worse.

That's one theory that is easy to believe, but it's not true and is a gross simplification of how the European welfare system came about.

Here's an even more gross simplification:

All that great free stuff you want ? You will pay for it. Probably in ways you didn't imagine.

Go look at the economic flows (not the details, just the gross flows of resources) between master and servant in pre-revolutionary france ... now compare those resource flows to those proposed in a utopian "minimum basic income" society.

Those resource flows are the same.

EDIT: to be clear, I am not knee-jerk-opposed to MBI schemes - I find them somewhat intriguing. I'm just wary of them because they introduce a dynamic that ends up being very similar to other dynamics that have, in the past, been quite bad.

Does that imply Europe is more oligarch than America?

Those days, money is more or less a direct measure of power. Inequality of power and social immobility are marks of servitude. In this regard the US doesn't fare well (and has been getting worse): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

Peasantry was different from slavery. The middle age has actually seen slavery disappearing from Europe, which is incidentally why slaves had to be taken from somewhere else to bring to the "new world".

Class struggle that led to welfare and benefits wasn't against the gentry but against the bourgeoisie (factory owners). The same bourgeoisie who had chopped the gentry's heads before.

Peasantry wasn't slavery, but they were serfs, and in the end serfdom didn't end up being very different to slavery.

AFAIK (I'm not a historian): serfdom started disappearing from most of Western Europe around XV century. In XVII-XVIII it was mostly forgotten, and peasants were free men, who either owned land or rented it from the big land owners. Having said that, their standard of living was dismal (including starvation when prices or crops were low) - often actually lower than in countries which maintained serfdom, such as Poland or Prussia.

what? America had an actual slave class. Also indentured servants.

Nobody would dispute or ignore that - of course that occurred to me when writing the original comment.

I stand by my analysis since American slaves were (at the time) a small minority of the country that existed in a fraction of the geography and lasted for less than 90 years after 1776.

No portion of americans were "systematically enslaved and disenfranchised for ... 2000 years" and no majority (or even large plurality) of americans were ever enslaved at all.

Sweden, Norway, and Finland did not have serfdom.

If your analysis is correct, shouldn't there be a large difference in the social welfare systems between those them and the Nordic countries with serfdom-like systems; the Danish stavnsbånd, from 1733 to 1788, and the Icelandic vistarband, from 1490 until 1894?, or between the Nordic countries and, say, The Netherlands?

False.

Sweden, Norway and Finland all had monarchies, a landed gentry, and a peasant class. If you'd like to make a subtle (and perhaps useful) distinction between "peasant" and "serf" then I suppose that's worth talking about, but my generalizations about Europe include the nordic countries.

"The peasant proprietors, who, under the name of the "Lantmanna" party, formed a compact majority in the Second Chamber, pursued a consistent policy of class interests in the matter of the taxes and burdens that had, as they urged, so long oppressed the Swedish peasantry;"[1]

"Outside the political sphere, however, the peasants were considered at the bottom of the social order—just above vagabonds. The upper classes looked down on them as excessively prone to drunkenness and laziness, as clannish and untrustworthy, and especially as lacking honor and a sense of national spirit."[2]

"The difference from serfs elsewhere was that the farmer did not directly own the life and property of the homesteader (Husmann), but in most cases, he practically did."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_during_the_late_19th_ce...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Finland#Peasants

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_serfdom

You said "What if a population was not systematically enslaved and disenfranchised for, oh, say, 2000 years". You used the terms "systematically enslaved" and "They were property". Those are terms applied to serfs. They do not apply to all peasants.

You therefore cannot be referring to Sweden's relatively recent and short period of absolute monarchy when you talk about 1000+ years of time. See for example https://www.quora.com/Sweden/In-Swedish-history-why-did-most... "In Swedish history, why did most of the peasants own land, and why did they ally with the king against the nobility? This is substantially different from the rest of Europe, and I wonder why it developed this way?" Quoting from it:

> The Swedes retained that almost primordial, archaic concept of individual liberties and rights when other Germanic tribes had been subsumed into other legal or property concepts, such as what happened in the Holy Roman Empire.

You second link, for Finland after it was conquered by Sweden, says:

> In contrast to serfdom in Germany and Russia, the Finnish peasant was typically a freeholder who owned and controlled his small plot of land. There was no serfdom in which peasants were permanently attached to specific lands, and were ruled by the owners of that land. In Finland (and Sweden) the peasants formed one of the four estates and were represented in the parliament.

These are not "systematically enslaved and disenfranchised" peasants who were "property".

As your third link says, the "Norwegian serfdom" social system for Norwegian lower class farmers 1) started in 1750, so well after slavery was firmly established in the American colonies, and ended in 1860, that is, before the US abolished slavery, and 2) was "not actually in serfdom by European standards". This isn't the 2000 years or even 200 years you alluded to.

"American slaves were (at the time) a small minority of the country"

11% is a minority. It is not a small minority. Slaves were also a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina. http://thomaslegion.net/statesandslaverypercentagesintheunit... .

Your start date of 1776 is irrelevant. Colonial America also had a slave class, starting in the 1600s, which the US inherited.

But the freed slaves were a disenfranchised minority and only shaped culture a little bit. When slaves were still in bondage, the European immigrants could go west for free and cheap land.

The cheap land and lack of landed gentry created a culture that values entrepreneurship. Even today America LOVES rags to riches stories.

You can also see that the black community today is considerably more liberal than the general population.

Ah yes, the American (pipe) dream...

Whether it's true now or not we still beleive in it.

The medieval peasants were slaves, too – legally they were owned by their landlord.

> (the money has to come from somewhere, after all) <

And where did they get it in the first place? When it comes to money it is effectively turtles all the damn way down.

If there isn't already an intricate system of landed class and privilege, who are "these folks over here" that give the money for the welfare and benefits?

The answer is "all of us", or at least in the very level and equal society that existed post-WW2.

As outcomes become less equal, a smaller and smaller proportion of individuals foot that bill. We should expect that as that intensifies, some of those folks are going to look around and start asking where their hereditary and class privileges are.

Let me introduce to Swedish progressive income taxation and VAT percent. Folkshemmet certainly isn't paid by landed gentry.

Post-WW2 America had less income inequality than now, but it was far from a "very level and equal society."

In 1945, the share of the total income of the richest 1% was 11.07%, while in 2014 it was 17.85%. For the richest 10%, 32.64% in 1945 and 47.19% in 2014. A big chunk of the US segregated K12 schools and disenfranchised a race of people that politicians now use as a caricature in order to de-fund welfare programs. Women were kicked out of paying jobs after substantially contributing to the war effort because men came back and expected women to be homemakers.

The belief that post-WW2 America was some kind of glorious classless meritocracy is a myth. It just took a few decades of the natural self-reinforcing loops of capital to highlight the inequality that was already there.