America: Land of the unfree!

Now sure everyone knows theres all sorts of things the dupes of the Tea Party following the corporate agenda of their billionaire masters should be getting angry about lots more important things than people not reading Ayn Rand (because if they did there wouldn't be a Black president!) but seldom do you such a simple illustration of just how far off the mark they are:


hint: look at the bottom line of the graph

This graph comes from an editorial by an American living in Britain talking about the culture of taking time off work in the UK and the US. Which brings up the fact once again that Thatcher and Reagan were monsters who completely screwed over the vast majority of the population in every way possible. Its an interesting comparison and reading it as a Briton to an extent gives me that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you're all snug and warm indoors and you look outside and see it raining/snowing. That is to say sure workers rights in Britain are pretty shitty across the board but daaaaamn we're doing better than America.

But anyway, he covers that stuff better than I could, what with him having experience of working in both countries so lets look at something slightly different. The title is slightly more than a play on words but relates to my very limited knowledge of medieval peasants in Britain and the distinction between ranks of the peasantry. The details aren't particularly interesting or noteworthy but at the start of the feudal period the harshness with which peasants were tied to a particular bit of land varied. (Tying peasants to the land was a very important part of feudalism because until the industrial revolution the wealth of the elite was generated by the land they owned, the more and the better the land you held the more wealthy and powerful you were but that land was only valuable if it was worked, in the early medieval period the population across europe was too small to work all the land so the elites needed ways to keep the lesser sorts working their land.)

Anyway the reason this is important in regards to the plight of Serfs. At the start of the medieval period Serfs pretty much free men, a clear step above villains (the lowest class of peasants, the current meaning of the word derives from when these near slaves got uppity and rebelled against their rightful rulers) who only had slaves and those who lived on the very margins of society to look down upon. However as time went on Serfs became unfree, in the same general position as Villains. This did not mean they were slaves but it did mean their duties and obligations to the owner of the manor they lived upon became more stringent, their property rights weakened and their freedom of movement greatly diminished. Slaves were generally prisoners of war (nowadays they're prisoners of the war on drugs, how things change) or criminals.

This concept of unfreedom is especially salient for all citizens of the west (with Americans being in the vanguard of being shit on). Real wages haven't risen since the early 1980s, civil liberties are being eroded rapidly and other rights are starting to disappear, as we see in America even though holidays are technically available in many jobs people don't feel free to take all the vacation they're technically owed. This of course stems from the loss of another freedom of sorts, the freedom to believe you have long term employment, these days of course no one is secure in their job so they're less free to exercise other rights they technically have. Then there's the manner in which Thatcher and Reagan weakened the unions so workers were even less free to exercise other rights and on and on it goes.

Now its not a one to one match but still it is something one should be very much aware of, the gradual of erosion of rights and freedoms makes it easier to weaken other rights and generally lower the social status of huge chunks of society. People should be as mad and as vocal as the Tea Party are but about radically different things.