#serfs — Public Fediverse posts

#Serfs #Peons #Kings #Lords #MakeItMakeSense

“With its rapidly increasing population, religious and royal wars, Irish ethnic cleansing, and fear of rising crime, Britain excelled among the European imperial powers in shipping its people into bondage in distant lands. An original inspiration had flowed from small-scale shipments of Portuguese children to its Asian colonies before the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the world's premier long-range shippers. Vagrant minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British Isles might labor under differing names in law and for longer or shorter terms in the Americas, but the harshness of their lives dictated that they be, in the worlds of Daniel Defoe, "more properly called slaves." First in Barbados, then in Jamaica, then in North America, notably in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, bound Britons, Scots, and Irish furnished a crucial workforce in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1618, the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay £5 per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hence the children's sobriquet "Duty boys." Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children—a quarter of them girls—were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.”

― Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People

#colonyBuilding #indentures #servitude #bondage #England #Britain #GreatBritain #UK #USA #Atlantic #deportation #NellIrvinPainter #quotes #citation #history #slavery #enslavement #EuropeanCulture #Barbados #Jamaica #agriculture #Virginia #Maryland #Pennsylvania #colonies #serfs #slaves #adultDomination #adultism #children #vagrancy #WestIndies #Caribbean #DutyBoys #homeless

"#Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’ Yanis #Varoufakis on #extremism, #Starmer, and the tyranny of #BigTech" (Observer interview)
In his new book, 'Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism', the maverick #Greek economist says we are witnessing an epochal shift. At his island home of Aegina, he argues it’s no longer the global finance system that shapes us, but the ‘fiefdoms’ of tech firms"
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"We’re now in servitude, Varoufakis argues, to the fiefdoms of our new global masters, Lord #Zuckerberg of Facelandia and Sir #Musk of the rotten borough of X."
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“Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”

It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/yanis-varoufakis-technofeudalism-capitalism-ukraine-interview

#Capitalism #CapitalismKills #Feudalism #YanisVaroufakis #Socialism #Bezos #JeffBezos #Zuckerberg #MarkZuckerberg #Musk #ElonMusk #Politics #Economics #Economy #Serfs #Serfdom #Workers

“‘I’ve often wondered what being poor was like.’
‘You’re going to get a huge opportunity to find out.’
‘Will I need training?’
‘It comes naturally,’ said Rincewind. ‘You pick it up as you go along.’”
Terry Pratchett; Sourcery
#DiscWorld #BankOfEngland #ChiefEconomist #HuwPill #KnowYourPlace #Serfs #ToryCostOfGreed #WealthTaxNow