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So "feudalism" = "things I think are bad?" The gig economy has many, many downsides, but those downsides don't share much at all in common with feudalism, even

So "feudalism" = "things I think are bad?" 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.

qazpot 7y ago
> 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.
lugg 7y ago
No, linked in article: > 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. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism
- simonh 7y ago
  It's still got nothing to do with actual feudalism, except that it's also 'bad'. Except for those people who like working in the gig economy and for whom it works very well.
  - narag 7y ago
    It's still got nothing to do with actual feudalism... 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.
    - simonh 7y ago
      All employment contracts are asymmetrical. Almost all contracts are asymmetrical. The defining features that make feudalism different from any other master/servant or employer/employee relationship are completely different from the gig economy and the gig economy oppresses people in completely different ways. 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.
      - narag 7y ago
        Asymetrical is not an essential part of the definition, but the fact that it consists of individual pacts. That's different from modern labour in that employer-employee relation has certain rights for the employee recognized because it's a one to many, powerful to powerless... considered individually, while with these rights recognized there's collective bargaining and government-mandated clauses. 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.
- maehwasu 7y ago
  "Corporations oppressing workers", while being a very bad thing that I am very against, has almost nothing to do with feudalism, even by structural analogy. 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.
lexapro 7y ago
While it doesn't fit a strict definition of "feudalism", large parts of the gig economy are very exploitative, which is also a characteristic of feudalism. And feudalism is generally regarded as a bad thing.
- simonh 7y ago
  Which is allowing feudalism to degenerate into just meaning 'bad', rather than actually, you know, meaning feudalism.
- maehwasu 7y ago
  You're inadvertently making precisely my original point: "exploitation" and "bad thing" are incredibly general properties that exist in many systems, and it's not useful or insightful to compare them to feudalism.
  - Retric 7y ago
    If someone called a haircut feudalistic because it was bad then that’s dumbing down words to just good or bad. Calling a type of employment relationship feudalistic because of the amount of power the employer has is at least somewhat descriptive.
    - irishcoffee 7y ago
      feu·dal·ism /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
      - Retric 7y ago
        That’s an incomplete definition. “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 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 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.
BaronSamedi 7y ago
We could even take an additional step on the path of honest communication and instead of "good" and "bad", say "things I like" and "things I dislike".
- mfer 7y ago
  Who decides what's good or bad? Who decides who decides? Where is the depth of knowledge, logic, and reason behind that? When it comes to good and bad we often lack these things and if we did I would wager we are not on the same page. "things I like" and "things I dislike" are far more honest and genuine.
  - simias 7y ago
    How do you think a society could functions without a minimal set of shared values? Stuff like "killing each other is not super nice" and similar? Aren't values about "good" and "bad"? 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?
    - moate 7y ago
      Values are about personal preference. "Killing each other is not super nice" isn't a value in any real way due to the dilution words you add. 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.
    - 7y ago
js8 7y ago
I see analogy between capitalism and feudalism in how some people defend rich founders and owners of private companies. 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.
- zaroth 7y ago
  There is a system where it works more like the way you are suggesting -- it's called communism. 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.
  - js8 7y ago
    I think you misunderstood my argument. I am not defending a particular system (and almost certainly not communism). I am pointing out that same arguments used to defend the privileges of capitalists were used to defend feudal privileges. The feudal lords also competed with each other. The freedom of mobility is not relevant if your only choice is just another feudal lord.
harimau777 7y ago
My understanding is that the definition of feudalism is: - 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.
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  One of the reasons that feudalism ended was the evolution of military technology. 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.
heymijo 7y ago
> Feudalism: 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 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. 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".
- mrfredward 7y ago
  >The power imbalance in feudalism and the gig economy is clear. 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.
weberc2 7y ago
Feudalism is joining the esteemed ranks of now-meaningless words like “violence”, “cancer”, “white supremacy”, and “patriarchy”.
- krapp 7y ago
  > Feudalism is joining the esteemed ranks of now-meaningless words like “violence”, “cancer”, “white supremacy”, and “patriarchy”. All of those words have well-established and commonly understood meanings.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    They do, but that doesn't rebut the fact that they are (recently) commonly used without intelligble meaning.
    - krapp 7y ago
      They are used with intelligible meaning. 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.
      - weberc2 7y ago
        I would love for someone to give meaning to those terms that I might have something concrete to disagree with (or perhaps even agree with--who knows?). The historical, well-known, coherent definitions patently refute their espousers' arguments, and if there was an alternate meaning why can't anyone articulate it coherently? If there are coherent, alternate meanings, they're kept as closely guarded secrets. Why would these people use words, but keep their meanings secret? It seems far more plausible that these people are choosing words with some specific negative emotion attached and applying them to their political opponents, and using the lack of any actual meaning as a sort of plausible deniability.

qazpot 7y ago

> 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.

lugg 7y ago

No, linked in article: > 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. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

simonh 7y ago
It's still got nothing to do with actual feudalism, except that it's also 'bad'. Except for those people who like working in the gig economy and for whom it works very well.
- narag 7y ago
  It's still got nothing to do with actual feudalism... 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.
  - simonh 7y ago
    All employment contracts are asymmetrical. Almost all contracts are asymmetrical. The defining features that make feudalism different from any other master/servant or employer/employee relationship are completely different from the gig economy and the gig economy oppresses people in completely different ways. 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.
    - narag 7y ago
      Asymetrical is not an essential part of the definition, but the fact that it consists of individual pacts. That's different from modern labour in that employer-employee relation has certain rights for the employee recognized because it's a one to many, powerful to powerless... considered individually, while with these rights recognized there's collective bargaining and government-mandated clauses. 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.
maehwasu 7y ago
"Corporations oppressing workers", while being a very bad thing that I am very against, has almost nothing to do with feudalism, even by structural analogy. 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.

lexapro 7y ago

While it doesn't fit a strict definition of "feudalism", large parts of the gig economy are very exploitative, which is also a characteristic of feudalism. And feudalism is generally regarded as a bad thing.

simonh 7y ago
Which is allowing feudalism to degenerate into just meaning 'bad', rather than actually, you know, meaning feudalism.
maehwasu 7y ago
You're inadvertently making precisely my original point: "exploitation" and "bad thing" are incredibly general properties that exist in many systems, and it's not useful or insightful to compare them to feudalism.
- Retric 7y ago
  If someone called a haircut feudalistic because it was bad then that’s dumbing down words to just good or bad. Calling a type of employment relationship feudalistic because of the amount of power the employer has is at least somewhat descriptive.
  - irishcoffee 7y ago
    feu·dal·ism /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
    - Retric 7y ago
      That’s an incomplete definition. “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 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 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.

BaronSamedi 7y ago

We could even take an additional step on the path of honest communication and instead of "good" and "bad", say "things I like" and "things I dislike".

mfer 7y ago
Who decides what's good or bad? Who decides who decides? Where is the depth of knowledge, logic, and reason behind that? When it comes to good and bad we often lack these things and if we did I would wager we are not on the same page. "things I like" and "things I dislike" are far more honest and genuine.
- simias 7y ago
  How do you think a society could functions without a minimal set of shared values? Stuff like "killing each other is not super nice" and similar? Aren't values about "good" and "bad"? 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?
  - moate 7y ago
    Values are about personal preference. "Killing each other is not super nice" isn't a value in any real way due to the dilution words you add. 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.
  - 7y ago

js8 7y ago

I see analogy between capitalism and feudalism in how some people defend rich founders and owners of private companies. 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.

zaroth 7y ago
There is a system where it works more like the way you are suggesting -- it's called communism. 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.
- js8 7y ago
  I think you misunderstood my argument. I am not defending a particular system (and almost certainly not communism). I am pointing out that same arguments used to defend the privileges of capitalists were used to defend feudal privileges. The feudal lords also competed with each other. The freedom of mobility is not relevant if your only choice is just another feudal lord.

harimau777 7y ago

My understanding is that the definition of feudalism is: - 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.

i_am_proteus 7y ago
One of the reasons that feudalism ended was the evolution of military technology. 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.

heymijo 7y ago

> Feudalism: 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 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. 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".

mrfredward 7y ago
>The power imbalance in feudalism and the gig economy is clear. 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.

weberc2 7y ago

Feudalism is joining the esteemed ranks of now-meaningless words like “violence”, “cancer”, “white supremacy”, and “patriarchy”.

krapp 7y ago
> Feudalism is joining the esteemed ranks of now-meaningless words like “violence”, “cancer”, “white supremacy”, and “patriarchy”. All of those words have well-established and commonly understood meanings.
- weberc2 7y ago
  They do, but that doesn't rebut the fact that they are (recently) commonly used without intelligble meaning.
  - krapp 7y ago
    They are used with intelligible meaning. 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.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      I would love for someone to give meaning to those terms that I might have something concrete to disagree with (or perhaps even agree with--who knows?). The historical, well-known, coherent definitions patently refute their espousers' arguments, and if there was an alternate meaning why can't anyone articulate it coherently? If there are coherent, alternate meanings, they're kept as closely guarded secrets. Why would these people use words, but keep their meanings secret? It seems far more plausible that these people are choosing words with some specific negative emotion attached and applying them to their political opponents, and using the lack of any actual meaning as a sort of plausible deniability.