#pauper serf

[davidsunrise]

Witnessing a wizard battle, minding my business at willows.

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

I really liked the scene in which Alphard gets into muggle clothes, and looks at himself in the mirror, comparing himself with Tom. It feels a lot like the Prince and the Pauper, but only on Alphard's head. Like, the idea of himself not being a Pureblood, or worse, not being a wizard at all, seems a rather close thread of thought he could have easily reached. And I know he would be horrified and, to his horror, intrigued by.

It all comes together when he compares himself with Tom. Because Tom is beautiful, is talented, is everything a wizard should be except for the fact he is muggleborn. And, for a moment, Alphard thought, or almost thought, about what it could be if they exchanged places. And he knows he would be even more invisible and plain than he already sees himself.

And Tom seems excited by the idea of Alphard dressed as a muggle. Aroused too. And a perverse part of me wonders, I must admit, if this whole line of reflections could end up as them role-playing. One in which Alphard is muggleborn or a muggle (since, after all, he already is acting as muggle when he becomes Tom's fiancée), and Tom as a Pureblood. On the other hand, Tom in your fics seems too socially conscious and resentful to actually want to be a Pureblood, other than because of the privilege and power it may give.

I think a lot about those two. Alphard somehow became one of my favorite characters in HP, and he is barely even mentioned in canon. I really love what you (as in you and Vinelle) created when writing him.

Amulette d'Amour by me and @therealvinelle

Ooooh, thank you, anon! Look, @therealvinelle, praise!

I'm deeply flattered, anon, very deeply flattered, your thoughts are beautiful, and I love every word of this, but I'm also laughing because "I think a lot about those two" and this chapter you're describing came out yesterday.

Yesterday.

(And Tom is both very socially conscious and resentful and, at this age especially, he uh... would be very conscious period of any kind of 'I'm a bad bad Pureblood prince and you're my naughty Muggle sex serf' routine.

The man may want to be a pretend Dark Lord, a very serious occupation he assures you, but notice that his pretend Dark Lord was not going to form himself a pretend harem or build a pretend sexual dungeon.

And yes, this is where Tom's head immediately go if suggested any kind of 'role play' even though he and Alphard could role play anything they want or do what they're already doing where they entertain little old ladies in costumes at dinner parties and pretend they're getting married.

Tom would die, just die, if Alphard accused him of wanting this,

"It's not like that, I swear, I really am just a bad bad man.")

[communist-manifesto-daily]

The Communist Manifesto - Part 8

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In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

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[psalm22-6]

June 1907 Century Magazine published a letter said to be addressed to an Italian Count Victor A. Pepe, written by Victor Hugo, and translated into Italian "probably" by Hugo's secretary. The Count's daughter, Countess Rozwadowska, came into possession of the letter, believed to be unpublished, and shared it with the Century Magazine. However, I haven't been able to find out any more about Pepe or Rozwadowska. You will probably recognize the letter in question (which I will put below the cut) as the one Hugo wrote to the publisher of the Italian translation of Les Miserables, M. Daelli of Milan. Perhaps it was first published in English in 1907 but it had definitely been published in French as early as 1890, at the end of the edition of Les Mis published by Émile Testard and I believe it was included in the original 1862/3 edition of the Italian translation, based on a google translate of this auction listing. The last mystery for me is the signature, which doesn't look to me like Victor Hugo's signature at all. The letter was apparently quite interesting to English-speaking readers and I found several newspaper articles discussing its publication. If you know anything else about this letter please share!! I'm sure I've read something else about it...somewhere....

HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.

You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Misérables is written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: "Open to me, I come for you."

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism, that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin. Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent rags on man.

Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone. The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same thing as to understand the Gospel badly.

Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism be yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance, whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization acknowledges?

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience? military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy? Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris? What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons. Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes! Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves, Miserables.

From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.

I resume. This book, Les Misérables, is no less your mirror than ours. Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,—I understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.

As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French, Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more, human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.

Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.

In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight, with having transgressed the bounds of what they call "French taste"; I should be glad if this eulogium were merited.

In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"

This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one phrase in your letter. You write:—

"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: 'This book, Les Misérables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French read it as a history, we read it as a romance.'"—Alas! I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it, sir. Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished sentiments.

VICTOR HUGO.

[msclaritea]

The Great Reset is not a button in the hand of Klaus Schwab, but a lever that elites have pulled for 122 years.

An early manifestation of the concept is found in the 1901 non-fiction book 'Anticipations' by science fiction writer H.G. Wells. In his boom, Wells said society was historically and properly split between the “superior class” and the “working cultivator, peasant, serf or slave.”

That changed with the Industrial Revolution and “the appearance of great masses of population” who enabled “an entire disintegration of that system.”

“[W]ithout a total destruction and rebirth of that fabric, there can never be any return,” he warned.

Wells called the common people usurping power a “bulky, irremovable excretion of vicious, helpless and pauper masses … drifting down towards the abyss.” He deemed them “inferior in their claim upon the future … [which] cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power…. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.”

Anticipations said the “increase in population” fueled by better living standards was “the greatest evil in life.” Therefore, the “ascendant or dominant nation” would be one “that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports or poisons its people of the abyss.”

He called for a “new republic” that “can prevent the birth of just the in-adaptable, useless or merely unnecessary creatures in each generation.”

Wells predicted governments would “hold life to be a privilege,” guiding it with eugenics and imposing death “with little pity and less benevolence.” Instead, “[T]hose swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency … will have to go.”

Book publishing would be restricted to “intelligently critical men … of the new republic… developing the morality and education system of the future.”

Open markets, denigrated as “the region of the scramble,” could not last either. A true competitive environment threatened the elites’ economic hegemony, just as a real democracy threatened their political power.

“The emergent new republic will be attacking that mass of irresponsible property that is so unavoidable and so threatening under present conditions … [with a] scheme of death duties and heavy graduated taxes upon irresponsible incomes,” Wells predicted.

While the “competent” elite could protect their wealth in foundations and leverage it to transform the world, taxes would “expropriate and extinguish incompetent rich families” — the wealthy who didn’t share Wells’ vision. “[W]hether violently as a revolution or quietly and slowly, this gray confusion that is democracy must pass away inevitably… into the higher stage — the world-state of the coming years,” Wells said.

Through “elements of technical treason,” elites and leading officials in governments would form “a new republic as a sort of outspoken secret society” of “a confluent system of trust-owned business organisms… universities and reorganized military and naval services” that mimicked a state.

Did politicians distance themselves from this radical? Sadly, no.

After 'Anticipations' was published, Wells had a public audience with U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt who Wells later called, “the creative will in man” he admired. Before 'Anticipations,' Wells named Woodrow Wilson among the “intelligently critical men of the new republic.” His 1913-1920 presidency fulfilled Wells’ vision as the Federal Reserve Bank, graduated income taxes, and estate (death) taxes were introduced. An academic advisory group Wilson formed in 1917 later reconstituted itself as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR.)

In the 1920s, Wells had an affair with Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who later advanced the birth control pill. Wells called her “the greatest woman in the world” and predicted “the movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time in controlling man’s destiny on earth.”

Wells met three times with President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. He called Roosevelt “continually revolutionary” and “the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order.”

Although Wells died in 1946, his ideology did not.

In 1991, the late David Rockefeller said, “The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto determination practiced in past centuries.”

Until his passing in 2017, Rockefeller was part of the enormously influential CFR, Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission, which he founded in 1973. In a 2003 interview, he said he knew more heads of state than anyone, except possibly Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger eulogized his “friend” Rockefeller in the Washington Post. The former U.S. Secretary of State has been a CFR member since 1956 and was a mentor to his Harvard University pupil Klaus Schwab. Schwab founded the European Management Forum in 1971, and rebranded it as the World Economic Forum in 1987. From the beginning, Schwab’s organization gathered hundreds of executives annually in Davos, Switzerland to shape the direction of corporate influence. He founded a mentorship program in 1993 called the Global Leaders of Tomorrow, rebranded as the Young Global Leaders in 2004.

An excusive and influential list of political and economic leaders have been mentored by the WEF or participated in its events, including Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who sits on its board of directors. A comment by Schwab at Harvard University on Sept. 20, 2017 was telling.

“We penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I will know that half of this cabinet or even more … are from our Young Global Leaders.”

In 2020, Schwab proposed a “’Great Reset’ of capitalism” that would “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.”

Citizens worldwide should be wary. It's not a new idea...

Rule by the elites would be for the elites and leave government by the people for the people an expired 250-year experiment.

[jathis]

Rewatching the Prince and the Paupers and…

Micky: Don’t forget to free the serfs!

Micky is the anti-royalist icon of the group

[atthevoidsedge]

The America I grew up in was never supposed to happen.

The human race emerged from the mists of pre-history worshiping genocidal psychopaths as gods. Only gradually, grudgingly, did human societies evolve into limiting the “divine right of kings” and acknowledging the rights of (some, landowning) men (but not women). The Confederacy’s defeat in the American Civil War began to normalize the idea that human rights are not subject to whitedude feelings at the state and local level. But even thereafter, America was still highly stratified in ways that dated back to ancient times, with royalty, nobility, serfs, and paupers just going by different names, only now defined less by blood and titles than by race, gender, and most of all, material wealth. It worked out well if you happened to be on the top, but could be cruel and brutal if you were born at the bottom of a caste system in which you existed to serve your betters.

But this, so it was said, was the way it was supposed to be. “Natural law,” you see. The weak, the unfit, the inferior, and the immoral are too degenerate and stupid to govern themselves. They need “natural elites” and religious authority to give them their place, and in some cases, masters to serve. “Hey, I don’t make the rules. This is what GOD said.”

Then, an historical fluke happened.

The national mobilization for World War II together with FDR's New Deal proved that government works just fine at solving problems and mitigating inequality when it's allowed to. Women were integrated into the American workforce at a level previously unheard-of. Poverty in America was cut in half, and the following decades saw the United States rise to a position of global leadership. Strong unions kept the Good Ol' Boys in check, while marginal tax rates gave big business incentive to invest their wealth rather than hoard it. While communism was delivering dystopian blight and starvation overseas, regulated free enterprise brought the "World of Tomorrow" into the homes of everyday folks. What were once considered luxuries for the elites became necessities for all. And not just the material kind. The kind that make the difference as to whether or not you're really free... Civil Rights.

For a certain kind of person, this was the worst catastrophe possible. Not because it "didn't work," but because it DID.

Just as for another kind of person, the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War was the worst catastrophe possible.

And for yet another kind of person, the Enlightenment from which the principles of inalienable rights arose - at the expense of the political power of unquestioned religious authority - was the worst catastrophe possible.

What do the New Deal, the Civil War, and the Enlightenment have in common?

All three were events that in their own ways brought about the kind of progress we now take for granted, and overwhelmingly consider to be self-evident goods, to the extent we ever learned about them in school and remember a little about them. All three to some extent mitigated social inequality along one axis of hierarchy or another: wealth, race, and religious authority in reverse historical order. And in so doing, they brought us a little closer to the ideal of equality under the law whereby voters choose their leadership, rather than micro-cliques of Good Ol’ Boy elites choosing their voters… Or worse, some asshole wearing a Burger King hat passing it on to his grubby little shithead son, forever.

What too many of us seem to have overlooked - or missed altogether - is how long and how deeply certain kinds of people have nursed visceral disgruntlement and resentment over the repercussions of the New Deal, the Civil War, and the Enlightenment... and by extension, of Western multiracial democracy. Not because they suffer from them in any real way, but because it OFFENDS their sense of the what the rightful, "natural," "God-ordained" hierarchy of human society should look like. This takes many forms, and the focus will vary between clusters of the aggrieved. On paper, they may seem to be at odds with one another, but taken together, their various clouds of motives begin to suggest a common set of "enemies":

"Government exists to enforce the Bible and to keep the bad people in their place. Nothing else."

"Government exists to protect natural elite job creators from the looters and moochers. Nothing else."

"Government shouldn’t exist, because fuck everybody."

"Representative democracy was a mistake, because not-white-dudes are unfit to have a say in anything. We need to go back to the good ol’ days of the divine right of kings and elite men telling the riff-raff how it’s gonna be, who aren't afraid to launch a good old fashioned race war when Christendom is on the line."

"We doomed our culture by allowing women to vote, own property, work, and have lifestyle choices besides being married homemakers, or being otherwise under the dominion of their fathers or religious authority. White, uh I mean 'Western' civilization will drown in brown unless we put women back in their place by involuntary coercion, shame, and force whether they like it or not. Has to be done, you see..."

The progress of the last three centuries has been a series of victories - always against resistance - expanding the inalienable rights of landowning white men to apply to all people. These are the best stories America has to tell. But for both the anti-freedom and anti-equity wings of the anti-democracy insurgency, these are catastrophes to be undone at all costs.

We're now in a moment in which multiple varieties of bad actors are laying aside their differences, pooling their resources, coordinating their narratives, and focusing fire on one globally-scaled goal: denying the legitimacy of Western representative democracy to justify tearing it down.

The America I grew up in was never supposed to happen.

We were never supposed to be this free. It was an historical fluke, far beyond any of our lifetimes, a fluke in the greater arc of the history of the human race, fully against the wishes of the little men who see themselves as this world's rightful rulers. The freedom won in the Twentieth Century had never happened before, anywhere, and now, the world's worst people are now set upon ensuring that fire is trampled out and can never be lit again. If they get their way, we're going back to the divine right of kings and worshiping genocidal psychopaths as gods.

This is the year the fash make their move.

Stay Frosty, My Friends.

[allcirclesvanish]

Hitherto every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

- from The Communist Manifesto // Marx & Engels, 1848

[davidsunrise]

Shrimple as that.

[way-to-the-future]

#18: Moe - Devil’s Advocate

((cw: mind control))

Every creature must justify itself. When we are ushered forth, given succor, nurtured to our potential, we must realize it – or else we are waste. In ancient days, my peers measured their worth by the reach of their word and their spellcraft; I am told that simple and base folk, now as then, still take pride in their plots of earth and the spawn they deliver to toil. All must prove the good of our birth. What irony that I, they, having lived so long only now realize that I have never proved the worth of mine.

               Solitude among the magnolias and the reaching vines has encouraged me to study the question. When I came to be, I had an incomplete code, a cast half-struck through which to take the measure of this changed land. Aimery’s sight was incomplete, and though he understood much, he could give little of it meaning. Matters as mundane as the taste of red fruit, the sweetness of the air, the grasping chill of water – these occupied my every thought. My awakening was not unlike that of a child to wisdom and sense, and now that I have grown into myself, into this land, I turn to grander pursuits.

               Not long after I came to understand what I was, I hungered for a new dominion as that of old. It is a pauper’s court I have fashioned, but bedecked in all garlands of fine-smelling herbs, woven of lustrous grasses and draped in verdant apparel. The ones I have lured here, be they man or beast, sink and scrape before me for my favor. These woods are still haunted by those who bow at the memory of Amdapour’s name, but I am cunning and fleet, and my kingdom has many legs on which to crawl and slither into the deep places, where we cannot be found.

               The subjects I have collected all have their purpose; that which I and nature have sketched for them, and each goes gladly to their apportioned part. But they make for poor conversationalists, these serfs and devotees, and even worse interlocutors to judge the weight of a deed. What is the matter of my kingdom, here in this deep and flowered tangle, with none to hear of its renown? Every fly I draw with honeyed nectar is merely another mouth suckling at my tremulous bounty, and not a one of them has a witty word to say of my place, of my destiny, new-formed and mighty as I might be. I have begun to feel they are dull.

               The raving of my frustration spreads through my roots slowly and insidiously, like hunger, like a cancer, until my subjects begin to quail with the fear of my anger. By day I languish, even as I bathe in their sun-stained adoration, and by night I wind between them, blunting the ache of boredom with the weight of my blessings. It is, in a word, interminable; without peers, without aims, my paradise sours in my grasp.

               I cannot expect it when my wishes are answered through no call of my own. I sense the little flare as it creeps along the edge of my realm, but think to myself, what is the use of one more dewy flower in my garden of delights? Not number nor variety are the cure for this blight, but quality – and yet this little beacon advances deeper, heedless of my traps and grasping talons, the sentries I have made of those with still enough wit to hold a weapon.

               I confess some surprise when she stands before me, dressed in her worker-woman’s garb, holding aloft that scepter. Its like, much as its wielder, I have not seen before. She raises it above her head, and I feel how it helps her to resist me - how this charm, so simple and foreign, bends the gleam of my will around her and shields her from its radiance. She comes not bearing sword nor malice, but with curiosity, and a mind sharp enough to sense my nature. How welcome, and how new.

               Her voice is small and firm when she speaks her terms: how she will ask of me what she wishes, and I will teach her my art, and for each answer exchanged she will lead another of my servants out of this wood. I laugh, and the grove laughs with me – who is she to make such demands? I could knock that toy out of her hand, and she would beg for leave to remain her, to fill her mouth with nectar that she might forget to speak.

               “I,” she declares, frightened but still so determined, “am the only friend you will ever have.”

               I dread to know that she is right.

[cozy-the-overlord]

Fake title: Loki the Overlord

Weird AU in which Asgard operates in a similar fashion as feudal Europe, with the royal family being overlords to the nobles in the kingdom, who were then lords to the peasants and serfs living on their section of the land. Loki, however, doesn’t like being an overlord, and makes a deal with a serf he comes across to use his magic to switch appearances so they can take each other’s places. Prince-and-the-pauper-esque shenanigans ensue.

Or, conversely, Loki just marries me and becomes Mr. Overlord 🤪

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Moses: An Example

by J.C. Ryle

"By faith Moses, when he became of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he looked to the reward." (Hebrews 11:24-26)

The eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews is a great chapter; it deserves to be printed in golden letters. I can well believe it must have been most cheering and encouraging to a converted Jew. I suppose no member of the early Church found so much difficulty in a profession of Christianity as the Hebrews did. The way was narrow to all, but preeminently so to them. The cross was heavy to all, but surely they had to carry double weight. And this chapter would refresh them like a cordial--it would be as "wine to those that are of heavy hearts."

The three verses I am going to explain are far from being the least interesting in the chapter. Indeed, I think few, if any, have so strong a claim on our attention. It seems to me that the work of faith described in the story of Moses comes home more especially to our own case. The men of God who are named in the former part of the chapter are all examples to us beyond question. But we cannot literally do what most of them did, however much we may drink into their spirit. We are not called upon to offer a literal sacrifice like Abel, or to build a literal ark like Noah, or to leave our country literally and dwell in tents and offer up our Isaac like Abraham. But the faith of Moses comes nearer to us. It seems to operate in a way more familiar to our own experience. It made him take up a line of conduct such as we must sometimes take up ourselves in the present day, each in our own walk of life, if we would be consistent Christians. First, Moses gave up rank and greatness. "He refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter." We all know his history. The daughter of Pharaoh had preserved his life when he was an infant; she had adopted him and educated him as her own son. Moses might have been, if he had pleased, a very great man. If he had been content with the position in which he found himself, he might easily have been among the first (if not the very first) in all the land of Egypt.

Let us think, for a moment, how great this temptation was. Here was a man of like passions with ourselves. He might have had as much greatness as earth can well give. Rank, power, place, honor, titles, dignities--all were before him and within his grasp. These are the prizes which there is an incessant race in the world around us to obtain. To be somebody, to be looked up to, to raise themselves in the scale of society, to get a handle to their names--these are the very things for which many sacrifice time, thought, health, and life itself. But Moses would not have them as a gift. He turned his back upon them, refused them, gave them up! Moses refused pleasure. Pleasure of every kind, no doubt, was at his feet if he had liked to take it up--sensual, intellectual, social pleasure--whatever could strike his fancy. Egypt was a land of artists, a residence of learned men, a resort of every one who had skill or science of any description. There was nothing which could feed the "lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or the pride of life," which one in the place of Moses might not easily have commanded and possessed as his own.

Pleasure, be it remembered, is the one thing for which millions live. Pleasure and enjoyment in the holidays is the grand object to which a schoolboy looks forward. Pleasure and satisfaction in making himself independent is the mark on which the young man in business fixes his eye. Pleasure and ease in retiring from business with a fortune is the aim which the merchant sets before him. Pleasure and bodily comfort at his own home is the sum of the poor man's wishes. Pleasure is the shadow which all alike are hunting--high and low, rich and poor, old and young,--each, perhaps, despising his neighbor for seeking it, each in his own way seeking it for himself, each secretly wondering that he does not find it, each firmly persuaded that somewhere it is to be found. This was the cup that Moses had before his lips. He might have drunk as deeply as he liked of earthly pleasure, but he would not have it. He turned his back upon it. Moses refused riches. "The treasures in Egypt" is an expression that seems to tell of boundless wealth which Moses might have enjoyed had be been content to remain with Pharaoh's daughter. We may well suppose these "treasures" would have been a mighty fortune. The pyramids, obelisks, temples, and statues are still standing there as witnesses.

Let us consider the power of money, the immense influence that "the love of money" obtains over men's minds. Let us look around and observe how men covet it, what amazing pains and trouble they will go through to obtain it. Tell them of an island many thousand miles away where something may be found that may be profitable, and at once a fleet of ships will be sent to get it. Show them a way to make one percent more on their money, and they will reckon you among the wisest of men. To possess money seems to hide defects, to cover faults, to clothe a man with virtues. But here is a man who might have been rich and would not. He would not have Egyptian treasures.

Add to all this that Moses did it deliberately. He did not refuse these things in a hasty fit of youthful excitement--he was forty years old, in the prime of life. He did not refuse them because he was obliged to. He was not like the dying man who tells us "he craves nothing more in this world;" and why?--because he is dying and cannot keep it. He was not like the pauper who makes a merit of necessity and says, "he does not want riches;" and why?--because he cannot get them. He was not like the old man who boasts that "he has laid aside worldly pleasures;" and why?--because he is worn out and cannot enjoy them. No! Moses refused what he might have enjoyed. Rank, pleasure, and riches did not leave him, but he left them. Others have refused much, but none, I think, so much as Moses. In the way of self-sacrifice and self-denial, he excels them all.

Now, I wish to consider what Moses chose. For one thing, he chose suffering and affliction. He left the ease and comfort of Pharaoh's court and openly took part with the children of Israel. They were an enslaved and persecuted people, an object of distrust, suspicion, and hatred. To the eye of sense, there seemed no chance of their deliverance from Egyptian bondage without a long and doubtful struggle. If ever man seemed to be choosing pain, trials, poverty, need, distress, anxiety--perhaps even death--with his eyes open, Moses was that man.

We draw back by a kind of instinct from suffering and avoid it if we can. We spend our days in fear and anxiety when we think affliction is coming near us and use every means to escape it. And when it does come, we often fret and murmur under the burden of it. And if we can only bear it patiently, we count it a great thing! Moses saw the cup of suffering that was before him if he left Pharaoh's court and chose it, preferred it, and took it up.

But more than this, Moses chose the company of a despised people. He left the society of the great and wise among whom he had been brought up, and joined himself to the children of Israel--slaves, serfs, pariahs, bondservants, laborers in the brick kiln who were oppressed, destitute, afflicted, and tormented. Moses chose reproach and scorn. Men would tell him he was mad, foolish, weak, silly, out of his mind. He would lose his influence. He would forfeit the favor and good opinion of all among whom he had lived. There are few things more powerful than ridicule and scorn. It can do far more than open enmity and persecution. Many a man who would march up to a cannon's mouth, lead a forlorn hope, or storm a breach, has found it impossible to face the mockery of a few companions--to be laughed at, made a joke of, sneered at!

Finally, let me speak of the principle which moved Moses and made him do as he did. We have the answer in the text: "Faith." He did it all because he believed. God set before his mind's eye his own will and purpose. God revealed to him that a Savior was to be born of the stock of Israel, that mighty promises were bound up in these children of Abraham and yet to be fulfilled, and that the time for fulfilling a portion of these promises was at hand. Moses put credit in this and believed. Faith was a telescope to Moses. It made him see the goodly land afar off--rest, peace, and victory, when dimsighted reason could only see trial and barrenness, storm and tempest, weariness and pain. Faith told Moses that all the rank and greatness of the earth was a poor, vain, empty thing, fleeting and passing away; that there was no true greatness like that of serving God. Faith told Moses that worldly pleasures were "pleasures of sin," ruinous to the soul and displeasing to God. Faith told Moses that these pleasures, after all, were only for a "season." They would weary him soon; he must leave them all in a few years. Faith told Moses that there was a reward in heaven for the believer that was far richer than the treasures in Egypt: a crown incorruptible.

What has all this to do with me? someone will ask. For one thing, if you would ever be saved, you must make the choice that Moses made. You must choose God before the world. I do not mean that the statesman must leave his office or the rich man forsake his property. But I mean that if a man would be saved, whatever be his rank in life, he must be prepared for tribulation. He must make up his mind to choose much that seems evil and give up and refuse much that seems good.

Are you making any sacrifices? Does your religion cost you anything? Are you, like Moses, preferring God to the world? Is there any cross in your Christianity? Do you know anything of the afflictions of the Gospel? Is your faith and practice ever a subject of scorn and reproach? Many, I fear, would like glory who have no wish for grace. They would fain have the wages but not the work, the harvest but not the labor, the reaping but not the sowing, the reward but not the battle. But it may not be. As Bunyan says, "The bitter must go before the sweet." If there is no cross, there will be no crown.

Dear reader, would you be eminently holy and useful? Would you, like Moses, make it clear as noon day that you have chosen God before the world? Then take this advice: go and cry to the Lord Jesus Christ, as the disciples did, "Lord, increase our faith." Faith is the root of a real Christian's character. Let your root be right and your fruit will soon abound. Your spiritual prosperity will always be according to your faith.

[jeanjauthor]

Hello I think thinking more high born ladies, in typically England or even France16th century. Like how could I show the importance with embroidery, needlework, making cheese, and other lady specific things in those times

Well, think of it this way: Certain regions were doing exceptional work in different things. English wool was considered superior, Flemish cloth was considered superior, French lace (in certain regions) was considered superior, England again had an entire guild dedicated to making thread-of-gold that no one else could match, Italian cheese (parmesan) was widely traded because it was preserved so well, Sweden / Finland sold a lot of tall straight trees for ship masts, and so on.

Do a little bit of research, and then you could have your embroidering noblewomen being praised for "being every bit as good as (region)" ...though if it's in an historical setting the noblewomen wouldn't necessarily be expected to make a living at such embroidery, because as people head toward the later centuries. If it's an English woman and she's making lace, "That's even better than what I've seen the merchants bring from the lacemakers of Alsace! With your skills, we could make a gift of such fine lace to the King & Queen! That would surely raise our standing in the royal court..."

As for cheesemaking, the dairy was THE woman's domain, and men were NOT allowed into it. Women might not have known about microbes and germs, but they DID know that cleanliness was an absolute must for the dairy room. There's a wonderful series online, Tudor Monastic Farm, and I'll share a link to where the scenes with the dairy first begins, located here: https://youtu.be/fhZv2iYuWVE?t=1068

The series has a couple of archaeologists (the gents) and a domestic skills researcher (Ruth Goodman) doing historical re-enactment based upon the archaeology, writings, and theories about how things actually happened back then--and the Tudor era is right in your ballpark in the 16th century (1500s CE). You might want to watch the whole series for inspiration.

Even if it is about what farmers went through in a year, not nobles, a lot of what happened on a farm was still very important to the nobility, because that was a part of their livelihoods, too. Nobles didn't always just sit around in the cities looking pretty. (In fact, cities were often a bit...anti-noble...especially prior to the era of the Black plague, because of that whole freed men not land serfs status thing.) The sitting in cities looking pretty thing was much more later period. (1700s, 1800s.)

A competent noblewoman was expected to be able to oversee, hire, and possibly even train various servants on the estate / in the manor house / castle, as well as visit the various tenanted farms (like the Tudor Monastery Farm, taking the place of the monastery's oversight). While the lord of the castle might do more of the visiting, if he was away handling matters of politics, warfare, etc, perhaps taking his adult sons, and he might have a seneschal to oversee properties he didn't live upon, his lady wife was often expected to take up the burdens of the nobility's leadership (such as it was) and see to things herself--in an overseer's capacity, if not necessarily putting her own shoulder to the wheel of the stuck wagon.

If you have a character that tries to disparage women by saying, "What did you do while I was off saving our lands from invasion, literally risking life and limb in battle?" you could have your women reply, "Making sure you still had a home to come back to, and food on your table, and clothes on your back! Money in your coffers, the taxes paid on time and in full so the king didn't take our lands from us in payment instead! Everything you see here that is still here while you were gone, is still here because I made sure it would be! You would have nothing without me, and you know it! Have the grace to admit it, and stop yelling at me."

On the other hand, if the husband/father/brother isn't a douchebag*, then he/they can notice "However did you convince Farmer Attewell to fix that hedgerow? I nagged him for weeks before leaving for the city!"

"It turns out it's very hard to do a full day's labor far from the house if your wife is too ill to mind the children, so I sent the Widow Thrushberry off to the Attewell's farm to tend the house and children, along with Maisy, the hen girl to help as well, since the hens weren't laying until this last week. And since the blacksmith wasn't too busy either, I paid his two strapping sons to make a pair of bill hooks for pleaching, and sent them out to help Attewell with the hedge laying, so they'd know how to wield what they make, and thus give it some thought as to how to make them better, the next time."

"You paid the blacksmiths sons? With what money? Not the seed money for ensuring all the farmers can do their plantings?"

"Not the seed money, no. Since you didn't take me to the city, I didn't need to buy embroidered trim from Mistress Speckleton to cover the worn spots to make my gown look newer...though if you made any profit off your time in the city, I should very much like that trim for a gift some day soon."

"I shall see to it tomorrow. You have done well, my wife--far better than I. The Attewell's bull will no longer be a risk for wandering the roads--I'll see to it the linen weavers make you some fine linen for new clothes as well. I was never so blessed as the day we wed, though I could not know my great fortune for years to come--I should have you solve all the problems around here, my lady wife! You'll have me right-handed to the king some day!"

"You deal better with the merchants than I do, so I'll be pleased, my lord husband, if you'll continue to do so--else we'd be right-hand to the king, but absolute paupers for it."

...As you can see, there are ways to show the value of women's work, either through combatting disrespect or showing (ideally but not necessarily mutual) respect.

If it's an actual historical setting, there's only so much a writer can do to nudge things towards better equity and better equality between the genders, before it starts straining the readers' credulity too much. But if it's a created world, there's quite a lot more flexibility. In a created world, there's more room to include in your culture acceptance of women who are big and strong, women who can fight, women who can do "traditionally male" tasks...and you can also show more gender-equity by having men doing "traditionally female" tasks, too.

For example, if you have a noblewoman trying to teach her daughter how to run the manor's dairy, but the daughter is mad for combat and insists upon training with sword and bow, etc, that's one way...but you can also have a son who is absolutely interested in the complex methods of making cheese, brewing beer, and who absolutely loves doing embroidery. And if both children are in the same family, the parents can have one of those brief eye-contact moments, roll their eyes, sigh, shrug...and the father takes the daughter under his wing, the mother takes the son under hers, and they go on with that arrangement instead of "the more traditional one."

[catboystigmata-archive]

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

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[twocubes]

Wow, that apple pi is great. Who is John Galt?

A Spectre is haunting multinational capitalism--the spectre of free information. All the powers of ``globalism'' have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade Organization, the United States Congress and the European Commission.

Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose talk of ``intellectual property'' was nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? But it is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our views in the face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own.

Owners and Creators

Throughout the world the movement for free information announces the arrival of a new social structure, born of the transformation of bourgeois industrial society by the digital technology of its own invention.

The history of all hitherto existing societies reveals a history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, bourgeois and proletarian, imperialist and subaltern, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that has often ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The industrial society that sprouted from the worldwide expansion of European power ushering in modernity did not do away with class antagonisms. It but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. But the epoch of the bourgeoisie simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole seemed divided into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

But revolution did not by and large occur, and the ``dictatorship of the proletariat,'' where it arose or claimed to arise, proved incapable of instituting freedom. Instead, capitalism was enabled by technology to secure for itself a measure of consent. The modern laborer in the advanced societies rose with the progress of industry, rather than sinking deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. Pauperism did not develop more rapidly than population and wealth. Rationalized industry in the Fordist style turned industrial workers not into a pauperized proletariat, but rather into mass consumers of mass production. Civilizing the proletariat became part of the self-protective program of the bourgeoisie.

In this way, universal education and an end to the industrial exploitation of children became no longer the despised program of the proletarian revolutionary, but the standard of bourgeois social morality. With universal education, workers became literate in the media that could stimulate them to additional consumption. The development of sound recording, telephony, moving pictures, and radio and television broadcasting changed the workers' relationship to bourgeois culture, even as it profoundly altered the culture itself.

Music, for example, throughout previous human history was an acutely perishable non-commodity, a social process, occurring in a place and at a time, consumed where it was made, by people who were indistinctly differentiated as consumers and as makers. After the adoption of recording, music was a non-persishable commodity that could be moved long distances and was necessarily alienated from those who made it. Music became, as an article of consumption, an opportunity for its new ``owners'' to direct additional consumption, to create wants on the part of the new mass consuming class, and to drive its demand in directions profitable to ownership. So too with the entirely new medium of the moving picture, which within decades reoriented the nature of human cognition, capturing a substantial fraction of every worker's day for the reception of messages ordering additional consumption. Tens of thousands of such advertisements passed before the eyes of each child every year, reducing to a new form of serfdom the children liberated from tending a productive machine: they were now compulsorily enlisted in tending the machinery of consumption.

Thus the conditions of bourgeois society were made less narrow, better able to comprise the wealth created by them. Thus was cured the absurd epidemic of recurrent over-production. No longer was there too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

But the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.

With the adoption of digital technology, the system of mass consumer production supported by mass consumer culture gave birth to new social conditions out of which a new structure of class antagonism precipitates.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt its culture and its principles of intellectual ownership; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. But the very instruments of its communication and acculturation establish the modes of resistance which are turned against itself.

Digital technology transforms the bourgeois economy. The dominant goods in the system of production--the articles of cultural consumption that are both commodities sold and instructions to the worker on what and how to buy--along with all other forms of culture and knowledge now have zero marginal cost. Anyone and everyone may have the benefit of all works of culture: music, art, literature, technical information, science, and every other form of knowledge. Barriers of social inequality and geographic isolation dissolve. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of people. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual people become common property. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer's apprentice, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

With this change, man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility--reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge--at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude. If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar's own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve. But the bourgeois system of ownership demands that knowledge and culture be rationed by the ability to pay. Alternative traditional forms, made newly viable by the technology of interconnection, comprising voluntary associations of those who create and those who support, must be forced into unequal competition with ownership's overwhelmingly powerful systems of mass communication. Those systems of mass communication are in turn based on the appropriation of the people's common rights in the electromagnetic spectrum. Throughout the digital society the classes of knowledge workers--artists, musicians, writers, students, technologists and others trying to gain in their conditions of life by copying and modifying information--are radicalized by the conflict between what they know is possible and what the ideology of the bourgeois compels them to accept. Out of that discordance arises the consciousness of a new class, and with its rise to self-consciousness the fall of ownership begins.

The advance of digital society, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the creators, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. Creators of knowledge, technology, and culture discover that they no longer require the structure of production based on ownership and the structure of distribution based on coercion of payment. Association, and its anarchist model of propertyless production, makes possible the creation of free software, through which creators gain control of the technology of further production.[1] The network itself, freed of the control of broadcasters and other bandwidth owners, becomes the locus of a new system of distribution, based on association among peers without hierarchical control, which replaces the coercive system of distribution for all music, video, and other soft goods. Universities, libraries, and related institutions become allies of the new class, interpreting their historic role as distributors of knowledge to require them to offer increasingly complete access to the knowledge in their stewardship to all people, freely. The liberation of information from the control of ownership liberates the worker from his imposed role as custodian of the machine. Free information allows the worker to invest her time not in the consumption of bourgeois culture, with its increasingly urgent invitations to sterile consumption, but in the cultivation of her mind and her skills. Increasingly aware of her powers of creation, she ceases to be a passive participant in the systems of production and consumption in which bourgeois society entrapped her.

But the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ``natural superiors,'' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ``cash payment.'' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. And in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Against the forthcoming profound liberation of the working classes, whose access to knowledge and information power now transcends their previous narrow role as consumers of mass culture, the system of bourgeois ownership therefore necessarily contends to its very last. With its preferred instrument of Free Trade, ownership attempts to bring about the very crisis of over-production it once feared. Desperate to entrap the creators in their role as waged consumers, bourgeois ownership attempts to turn material deprivation in some parts of the globe into a source of cheap goods with which to bribe back into cultural passivity not the barbarians, but its own most prized possession--the educated technological laborers of the most advanced societies.

At this stage the workers and creators still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole globe, and remain broken up by their mutual competition. Now and then the creators are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers and creators of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern knowledge workers, thanks to the network, achieve in a few years.

Freedom and Creation

Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons--the digital working class--the creators. Possessed of skills and knowledges that create both social and exchange value, resisting reduction to the status of commodity, capable collectively of producing all the technologies of freedom, such workmen cannot be reduced to appendages of the machine. Where once bonds of ignorance and geographical isolation tied the proletarian to the industrial army in which he formed an indistinguishable and disposable component, creators collectively wielding control over the network of human communications retain their individuality, and offer the value of their intellectual labor through a variety of arrangements more favorable to their welfare, and to their freedom, than the system of bourgeois ownership ever conceded them.

But in precise proportion to the success of the creators in establishing the genuinely free economy, the bourgeoisie must reinforce the structure of coercive production and distribution concealed within its supposed preference for ``free markets'' and ``free trade.'' Though ultimately prepared to defend by force arrangements that depend on force, however masked, the bourgeoisie at first attempts the reimposition of coercion through its preferred instrument of compulsion, the institutions of its law. Like the ancien régime in France, which believed that feudal property could be maintained by conservative force of law despite the modernization of society, the owners of bourgeois culture expect their law of property to provide a magic bulwark against the forces they have themselves released.

At a certain stage in the development of the means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. But ``free competition'' was never more than an aspiration of bourgeois society, which constantly experienced the capitalists' intrinsic preference for monopoly. Bourgeois property exemplified the concept of monopoly, denying at the level of practical arrangements the dogma of freedom bourgeois law inconsistently proclaimed. As, in the new digital society, creators establish genuinely free forms of economic activity, the dogma of bourgeois property comes into active conflict with the dogma of bourgeois freedom. Protecting the ownership of ideas requires the suppression of free technology, which means the suppression of free speech. The power of the State is employed to prohibit free creation. Scientists, artists, engineers and students are prevented from creating or sharing knowledge, on the ground that their ideas imperil the owners' property in the system of cultural production and distribution. It is in the courts of the owners that the creators find their class identity most clearly, and it is there, accordingly, that the conflict begins.

But the law of bourgeois property is not a magic amulet against the consequences of bourgeois technology: the broom of the sorcerer's apprentice will keep sweeping, and the water continues to rise. It is in the domain of technology that the defeat of ownership finally occurs, as the new modes of production and distribution burst the fetters of the outmoded law.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. Knowledge workers cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. Theirs is the revolutionary dedication to freedom: to the abolition of the ownership of ideas, to the free circulation of knowledge, and the restoration of culture as the symbolic commons that all human beings share.

To the owners of culture, we say: You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property in ideas. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population. What they create is immediately appropriated by their employers, who claim the fruit of their intellect through the law of patent, copyright, trade secret and other forms of ``intellectual property.'' Their birthright in the electromagnetic spectrum, which can allow all people to communicate with and learn from one another, freely, at almost inexhaustible capacity for nominal cost, has been taken from them by the bourgeoisie, and is returned to them as articles of consumption--broadcast culture, and telecommunications services--for which they pay dearly. Their creativity finds no outlet: their music, their art, their storytelling is drowned out by the commodities of capitalist culture, amplified by all the power of the oligopoly of ``broadcasting,'' before which they are supposed to remain passive, consuming rather than creating. In short, the property you lament is the proceeds of theft: its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of everyone else. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any such property for the immense majority of society.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property in ideas and culture all creative work will cease, for lack of ``incentive,'' and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, there ought to have been no music, art, technology, or learning before the advent of the bourgeoisie, which alone conceived of subjecting the entirety of knowledge and culture to the cash nexus. Faced with the advent of free production and free technology, with free software, and with the resulting development of free distribution technology, this argument simply denies the visible and unanswerable facts. Fact is subordinated to dogma, in which the arrangements that briefly characterized intellectual production and cultural distribution during the short heyday of the bourgeoisie are said, despite the evidence of both past and present, to be the only structures possible.

Thus we say to the owners: The misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property--historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production--this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

Our theoretical conclusions are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

We, the creators of the free information society, mean to wrest from the bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind. We intend the resumption of the cultural inheritance stolen from us under the guise of ``intellectual property,'' as well as the medium of electromagnetic transportation. We are committed to the struggle for free speech, free knowledge, and free technology. The measures by which we advance that struggle will of course be different in different countries, but the following will be pretty generally applicable:

Abolition of all forms of private property in ideas.

Withdrawal of all exclusive licenses, privileges and rights to use of electromagnetic spectrum. Nullification of all conveyances of permanent title to electromagnetic frequencies.

Development of electromagnetic spectrum infrastructure that implements every person's equal right to communicate.

Common social development of computer programs and all other forms of software, including genetic information, as public goods.

Full respect for freedom of speech, including all forms of technical speech.

Protection for the integrity of creative works.

Free and equal access to all publicly-produced information and all educational material used in all branches of the public education system.

By these and other means, we commit ourselves to the revolution that liberates the human mind. In overthrowing the system of private property in ideas, we bring into existence a truly just society, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

 — Eben Moglen, January 2003, The dotCommunist Manifesto