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! 🙏
There’s a podcast called “We’re Not So Different” that has covered many aspects of everyday life for working people in (mostly) medieval Europe. It’s super informal and insightful, both co-hosts are Marxists and one is a history professor. I know they’ve specifically talked about the “peasants had more days off” point, but I can’t remember when. But for anyone who’s interested in getting deeper into the subject (but maybe, like me, sucks at reading) I’d give it a big recommend.
Here’s the Spotify link, but you can probably find it on your preferred platform too: https://open.spotify.com/show/5dd2yPjrJJA48s1QXyENZN
So firstly feudal could be 1000 years and half a continent if we stick to Europe. A lot of things changed, feudalism is a term falling out of favour for manorialism among historians btw, because it’s more myth than reality.
Materially? No. Illness and pain were common, labour was backbreaking, women were deeply oppressed. Child birth was extremely dangerous, punishments harsh, exploitation ubiquitous, recreation limited.
Socially it is harder to say. In many ways life was very communal, they did not have the same epidemics of alienation and isolation. Many people appear to have found happiness. While they did not really have “free time” as we do they spent more time working on things which directly improved the lives of themselves and those around them. In some places and times life was relatively cosmopolitan, others deeply monocultural.
There were large and lavish celebrations, big communal events bringing people together. However you also had to like maintain your personal crops/animals/clothing/house etc during this time. Frozen meals and movie nights these holidays were not.
Also you were probably in pain a lot of the time, I need to emphasise just how impossibly cool medicine and especially dental care are when you actually have good access to them.
We shouldn’t look to the past as a place to return to, but a place where we can find lessons. We can see some ways in which peasants might have been more fulfilled. Some are not so useful, like the sureness that comes from a religious monoculture, some perhaps we can ask “Why do we live such isolated lives? Why do we not have shared communal holidays? Why do we work so many hours for others and have so little time for our community?”
Of note we have very limited recordings of what peasants actually thought at various times. Most records concerning peasants are about what nobles or the clergy thought about peasants/what they ought to be doing. Like handbooks on how priests should give sermons and shit, reference books on punishments for sin and so on.
We need to be cautious about what we infer from, these sources and we can’t project our values onto people living in radically different contexts.
No. We should finally end this myth. It serves nothing but fuel the primitivist bullshit and its derivations from anarcho-whatever and chuds retvrn-to-tradition. We should value progress, just the controlled one instead of capitalist anarchy of production.
It serves nothing but fuel the primitivist bullshit and its derivations from anarcho-whatever and chuds retvrn-to-tradition.
One of the things it serves that is helpful is challenging the pro-capitalist narrative that capitalism has been a force for good in the world. If someone’s immediate conclusion from the belief that pre-capitalist peoples were not all worse off is “destroy factories”, that’s a problem of binary thinking and not being presented with enough context of where problems derive from, not a problem with looking at quality of life before capitalism. Industrialization and capitalism, for example, are not inherently the same thing, even if they have developed alongside a lot. Trade and capitalism are not the same thing; capitalism is just a particular form of relation there.
I would say it’s a pretty important distinction to address at times because some people have been propagandized to conflate things like invention with capitalism, as if they are one and the same. The takeaway of the argument in my view isn’t “go backwards in technological development”, it’s “better understand just how badly capitalism is hurting people and how much better life could be if it was gone and all the development we have was put to use in a humane, communal system.”
In comparison to feudalism capitalism has been a positive change.
Demonize capitalism all you like but feudalism was way worse for innovation.
Monarchs and lords have nothing to gain by changing things because they have no local threats to their power. The only time they want to innovate is when their position is threatened from the outside.
Capitalists are constantly looking for an edge to use because they are always in competition. They are never secure in their position because there is always a threat right there.
Removed by mod
Frankly I’m confused that someone calling themselves a communist hasn’t read the manifesto.
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”
I never said demonising capitalism was bad (I said “do it all you like”). I am saying that romanticising feudalism is worse.
I never said demonising capitalism was bad (I said “do it all you like”). I am saying that romanticising feudalism is worse.
A strange way to word it then, is all I can say. In my experience, that kind of wording would imply being bothered by the so-called demonization, as in, being defensive, which matched with your defensiveness of capitalism and innovation. In any case, nothing in what I have said anywhere in this thread romanticizes feudalism and you are welcome to quote my own words at me if you believe otherwise. But it is a reality that the capitalist narrative has a tendency to portray history as linear, with capitalism as inherently an improvement. And it is not inherently so, and it would be contradictory and confusing, especially to people who have no understanding of communism, if there were some communist push that it inherently is (one does not need to hand it to capitalism, even if indirectly). What is, I think safe to say, well understood among marxist-leninist and similar is that having a working class, or socialist, state to transition away from non-communist systems toward communism is valuable and important, and that these states cannot afford to be idealized projects that skip over the constraints of current conditions at home and abroad. So China, for example, has a system that has some characteristics of capitalism, but it is heavily controlled by the dictatorship of the working class. It is this controlled communist vanguard system that is behind lifting 800 million people out of poverty, out of a feudalist system, and propelled into significant global influence through mutually beneficial ties with other countries—not capitalism. I choose to use them as an example because it is one that is at times labeled “state capitalism”, as if it’s just “capitalism with regulation” and not something distinctly different; and if viewed as a form of capitalism, it could be confused with an example of capitalism being “better than what came before.”
Frankly I’m confused that someone calling themselves a communist hasn’t read the manifesto.
This feels like the rough equivalent of quoting the bible at some to win a religious argument. I’m not sure what that passage is supposed to even have to do with what we’re talking about. I see no value judgment in it about quality of life and invention’s relationship to it. I can only take a guess you’re going for the line about “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production”, but this is not a god speaking, for one, and again, it is not clear that it is talking about the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Beyond what I’ve already said, I’m not sure how to proceed here because the most good faith interpretation I can come to with the information I have on hand is that I see the kind of position you’re taking in your replies to me as essentially romanticizing capitalism, if not worse. And you’re viewing it as some kind of denial of how bad feudalism was, which has nothing to do with what I’m trying to accomplish here in messaging; if that’s misrepresenting you, feel free to tell me. I’m just trying to make sense of what page we are on vs. think we are on and am having to do a fair amount of guesswork in responding to what I think might be relevant. The forum format makes it hard to do a simpler back and forth.
The problem I am having with your messaging is that it is steeped in idealism and not in historical materialism. “people have been propagandized to conflate things like invention with capitalism, as if they are one and the same” The overlap of capitalism and the rise in living standards etc. are historically intertwined and you cant undo that.
Trying to separate capitalism and the progress made under it is not possible in a materialist lenses. Dealing in hypotheticals is idealism and not effective agitprop. You don’t counter capitalist propaganda by comparing it with feudalism. If you want to counter the myth that communism stops innovation you can do that with one word “sputnik.”
Capitalism was a step forward, in the right direction even. But we didn’t move on from it yet. We need to move forward and asking whether we are worse off now than before capitalism is not how to encourage people to move forward that encourages them to go back.
“people have been propagandized to conflate things like invention with capitalism, as if they are one and the same”
Yeah, they have. Trying to twist “historical materialism” as a buzzword to defend the lens that has been pushed on you by a predominantly capitalist world doesn’t change this fact.
The overlap of capitalism and the rise in living standards etc. are historically intertwined and you cant undo that.
K, tell that to someone who is being exploited for cheap prison labor in the US. Or any number of other examples of exploitation, especially in some of the more exploited (by imperialism/capitalism) countries in the world. It’s not idealism to push back on poor attempts to universalize concepts that do more harm in messaging than good.
If capitalism was fundamentally a rise in living standards, we would not be talking about it as so fundamentally exploitative! Many people don’t benefit from it, that’s like kind of one of the most important points of criticizing it in the first place. You know who is usually the one going to people and giving them some insistent spiel about how capitalism is actually an improvement somehow and ya know, it could be worse? Capitalists. So forgive me for wondering where your priorities are at here.
Capitalism was a step forward, in the right direction even. But we didn’t move on from it yet. We need to move forward and asking whether we are worse off now than before capitalism is not how to encourage people to move forward that encourages them to go back.
No, no, no. History is not linear and things are not automatically universal just cause some people with the predominant status quo lens say that they are. This is not how anything works. Aspects of things in the past can actually be better and be something to model after. The whole notion of communism itself is in part based on communal societal structures of the past. Marx, Lenin, and others like them did not pull the concept out of thin air and “invent” organizing communally. What they did was observe the systems they were dealing with in a scientific manner, as well as historically, and then try to work out through a mixture of theory and practice what would get the outcome they wanted to be. The modern notions of communism are meant to be a kind of merging of the benefits of industrialization and technology, and the political/social/economic structure of something communal. They just don’t idealize it as something you will achieve by being nice to the dominant power structure and hoping it allows you to do your thing. The notion that the past is inherently worse overall I’m certain has some ties not just to capitalism, but also to colonialism and its lens of civil and savage, its lens of “primitive” indigenous societies that were doing a lot better off than they were portrayed.
None of this is saying “return to the past, romanticize it, think only in binary terms!” It’s saying something is not inherently worse in all aspects because it came before. It’s saying if you find yourself using talking points that sound way too close to what the capitalists are using, maybe that should give you pause. I cannot with the audacity of telling me I’m being idealist in this situation, while talking about history like it’s an RPG skill progression ladder.
I don’t know what in the world is going on with the train of thought that thinks historical materialism means saying capitalism was good for the world. That is effectively what you are arguing when you say “the rise in living standards etc. are historically intertwined and you cant undo that”. Meanwhile, climate change is threatening to upend the entire species. But sure, let’s have the priority be that nobody dare ever think any pullback on industrial excess could ever be necessary. Who needs the Amazon rainforest, right, as long as we have Amazon the service. Everything is linear progress overall, even if it threatens to make the planet unlivable for humans. History is over, right. Never mind the ecosystem. We’ll push our way through it with sheer force of rugged individualist linear history will.
Utterly exhausting.
Removed by mod
challenging the pro-capitalist narrative that capitalism has been a force for good in the world
Doesn’t Marx have some things to say about how capitalism was historically progressive compared to feudalism?
The answer to “capitalism was an improvement over feudalism” isn’t to argue the point. The answer is that just as capitalism was an improvement over feudalism, so is communism an improvement over capitalism.
I mean, purely on the medical part, I’d say no. Dentistry and lowering infant mortality rate along with lowering maternity mortality rate is a very very very recent thing, although dispersal and access to these qualities aren’t evenly distributed today, globally and even among class divides in the imperial core.
Anyway, I just can’t imagine likely dying to childbirth in the course of having 10+ kids where 3-4 survive to adulthood if you’re lucky being Better :/
!! Also no baby formula. If you have a hard time producing [enough] milk (this is a common problem!) your infant is likely to have a hard time thriving. Animal milks are NOT a substitute for human milk for an infant. Peasant women who recently had a child/still produced milk would often be the ones providing nursemaid services for higher class families. Many other points about pests (even royalty had fleas…) and hygiene also. I’m yammering a lot but obligatory: technological progress in these measures aren’t necessarily brought about by specific economic models, eg not specifically capitalism in and of itself.
I agree on the medical side of things. I accept that we have a higher life expectancy than people did then. I was more interested in comparing the quality of life. This includes things like happiness, community, and so on…
It depends when in the (European) feudal period. Very early feudal era was basically slavery with extra steps. It’s like if we look at capitalism in the 60s and 70s, where you didn’t have to have a college degree to make a living wage and could buy a house on one income, and think this applies to all of capitalism. But if we compare capitalism to itself I still prefer 2025 capitalism to 1860 capitalism.
Hickel studied this though and his results was that extreme poverty, ie the inability to fulfill shelter, food or clothing needs, did not meaningfully exist prior to capitalism.
Oh to be a white man born in the 1950s. Can you link me any of Hickels work? Sounds interesting.
This is Hickel’s paper in question if I’m not mistaken (taken from a ProleWiki reference): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169!
Mostly just no. Feudalism was a highly variable system from one lord to the next but just like under capitalism the most exploitive policies were the most common because the ruling class nearly always chooses short term profits over long term.
Peasant paid variable amounts taxes to their lord and got next to nothing in return. When times were hardest for the peasants the lords made things worse by demanding more taxes to make up the short fall. The church took an additional 10% of everything peasants produced and was the source of the little amount of social services.
Roads, sewage removal, and basic infrastructure like that was usually built and maintained by the peasants out of their own pocket/free time but could easily be claimed by a lord who could then charge people to use the infrastructure in order to raise extra taxes.
Peasants were bound to the land/lord. If a disaster struck and the land became unlivable a lord might sell his peasants to another lord but likely only the most useful and the rest would just die.
Peasants often got conscripted into wars with no training often having to supply their own weapons.
Hi, these are great points. Do you have any sources for these claims so I can look into them? Appreciate it.
Pretty sure Marx touches on this in Capital. Mental my bibliography isn’t very good.
I think a much more interesting comparison to make is between modern western workers and bronze age societies. A lot of the societies in the bronze age were quite advanced. Way nicer than feudal Europe imo.
Something i found online at https://www.ariacunningham.com/?faq=daily-life-bronze-age
It’s easy to imagine our ancestors hanging around the great table, drinking wine, and devising plots to overthrow their kings and queens. It’s far harder to imagine what the daily life of an average person might be. When I was studying Classics back at Berkeley, I was surprised to realize how advanced the common person’s life truly was.
Once a civilization gets past a basic level of survival needs, society breaks into specialized trades. A person can focus on one skill set or talent, instead of spending all their time hunting and gathering. In the Bronze Age, there were several different trades people employed, and they bartered with one another in a trade system that used slag metal or strait trade goods for payment. Coins weren’t minted for several hundred more years.
In Greece, common trades were working in textiles, pottery, metal, and wood working. The majority of lands lived under a “Palatial System”, meaning a strong central king who collected tribute from his subjects, and usually provided protection and some measure of subsistence security. In many ways, it was very similar to the vassal/serf system of the Middle Ages, except citizens of the ancient world had more rights.
The palaces would own large workshops where most of the elite goods were crafted. Craftsmen in the employ of the crown would work from sun up to mid-day, then they were free to work in their own shops. Certain Masters gained notoriety and would stamp their work. It was prestigious to study under such a ‘Master’.
HOWEVER – Merchants, people who would resell other people’s goods for a profit, were considered vulgar, their profession distrusted.
Slaves were an unfortunate fact of life. However, even slaves had rights in the ancient world and could own some of the fruits of their labor. This was probably because, high or low, anybody could—and sometimes did—become a slave. Slaves were made from warfare, and it wasn’t tradition to consider one region of people as holistically a lesser class.
This is a larger question than can be addressed in a simple post, especially when we get into superstitions, religious beliefs, and differences across kingdoms. But the idealized life on grecian urns is less likely to be a realistic portrayal of the Bronze Age citizen’s reality.
Honestly it seems like physical pain was far more prevalent, for the average person
I’ve heard that peasants had more holidays and rest
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:
- Using “hours worked” as a proxy for quality of life leaves out all sorts of important factors (e.g., modern medicine).
- As a proportion of all workers, the share of workers in the most strenuous jobs is lower today than it was in feudal times.
You’d probably find this video interesting.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Thanks for this. Only just now did I have the time to sit down and watch the video. All I can say is, this is a great video. The video confirmed by suspicions. Nice to know we have it worse than our predecessors.*
Edit: *In terms of work
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4968445
Edit: changed link to original post
Thanks for this. I’ve long been suspicious of the notion capitalism is some kind of inherent improvement from what came before, especially on the point of loss of community under capitalism, and this lays things out well.
