We're all Serfs

In any class on medieval history, much of the discussion of society revolved around the system of serfdom in Europe. Serfdom was the practice by which, in medieval Europe, peasants were tied to the land of a particular lord or knight. They worked particular plots of land for the lord, who in return, provided the serfs with protection. This protection took the form of both military and police protection, often with the lord sitting in judgment over civil disputes between his serfs, punishing law breakers and enforcing order. The lord got the benefits of the serfs' labor, the serfs got the protection of the lord and his armies. Depending on where in Europe you are looking, the formalities of the arrangement differ, but generally, the serf was oath bound to do the lord's bidding and put the lord's business above his own affairs. In return the serf was granted the rights to certain lands where he could earn a living. As the system grew and cities grew larger, the complexities of the arrangements changed, with taxes substituting for labor where the profession of the serf in question earned him money instead of harvests from the land. I use harvests here, because I'm including both resource extraction like mining and traditional farming yields. In the end, a serf was a man bound to work a plot of land for his lord.

This is often negatively compared with the modern era. In a modern first world country we are not oath bound to work the land, we may choose our own professions and we may leave our homestead and make a life of our own elsewhere. Serfdom is also often compared with slavery because the serfs were oath bound to a particular bit of land and a particular lord, with no ability to leave or find a new one. But this ignores a significant and important distinction between slavery and serfdom, namely that slaves lives were owned by their masters, to be dealt with as they saw fit and serfs were not. Any act, any request of the lave owner to the slave was to be followed without question, with the penalty of arbitrary death hanging over a slave's head. A serf, on the other hand, while oath bound to his lord, was still considered a living human being, he could not be denied the amenities required to maintain his life, he could not be blocked from attending the local church, got holy days off work and was not obligated to do any immoral acts for his or her lord.

Now that we have covered what serfdom was, this brings us to the title of this piece, namely, that we are still serfs despite living in the modern era. As I said above, serfs were oath bound to work for the benefit of their lords. However, as professions beyond mere resource extraction were born, serfs started to pay their debt to their lord in taxes instead of labor. Today we follow much the same practice, and in many industrialized parts of the world pay between 1/4 and 1/2 of our annual labor in taxes to federal, state and local governments. While we enjoy the freedom to move about our countries, we are still bound to the countries where we are citizens. In fact, citizenship can rightly be viewed as just an oath given to a country whereby you get the protections of the government and are given the right to work within that government's borders. So, we are bound to our government and its land and we still owe it a significant chunk of our labors; the only real difference between our situation and that of serfs then is that we have a right to vote for who runs the government whose laws we are subject to. But in an era where the parties are entrenched in both law an society, where the differences between the parties in practice is very small, where many local elections go uncontested, query whether or not our votes actually make a bit of difference in how and by whom the country is actually run. Does a sham say in government matter more than no say at all? If we are still bound to a country by citizenship, still owe taxes to our lords, and our opinions have very little impact on how the countries we live in are run, how exactly are we different from the serfs of the middle ages? We're all still serfs.