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Re: The Death of Democracy?
by W0rmW00d (allchaka@hotmail.com)
on Mar 24, 2006 - 07:12 AM
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Feudalism only requires a landed class and an absolute monarch, or other state body that can grant the right of fife to the landowner. Although in practice it does really need villeins (people attached to the land) to be feudalistic they don't really need to be there. They could be vassals in potentia.
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Re: The Death of Democracy?
by Monolycus on Mar 25, 2006 - 04:32 AM
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We can get really bogged down in a semantic discussion about arbitrary constructs like "classes"... although, with the rapid disappearance of the "middle class" in the "hockey stick wealth-distribution" of the U.S., I think that recognising anything more than Haves and Have-Nots is stretching the issue.
The de facto reality is that we in the US have a landed aristocracy (and an increasingly dynastic one at that!) and people who are "tied to the land" by calculated inequalities of the system such as the recent SCOTUS rulings regarding imminent domain and a host of Congressional bills such as Public Law 109-8 ("The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005... which I have written about extensively on another blog). And how much more "tied to the land" can we become than to end up on a "no-fly" list due to our dissenting opinions? At least with wage-slavery and credit-indenture, they only make it economically impossible for one to leave, but not illegal.
The ideal situation for the plutocrats would be to populate the land with serfs that protest to the death that they are not actually serfs. Maybe this is why I have seen so many "W '04" stickers in the windows of third rate hovels that sit in the shadow of McMansions.
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