When we get 3days work week and 4 days of „time for my stuff” we can go back to discussing that.

The ruling class will happily soak up all spare productive capacity - and as the amount of work necessary to keep someone clothed, sheltered, and fed went down, that spare productive capacity grows, and more of it flows upwards.

Landlord was lending land to peasents - rich peasents, because bottom cast did not even have a chance to talk to landlord.

For the land peasents got, they had to work for the landlord specific number of days in a week. For some time it was 1-2-3-4-5 days per week. Most common was 3 days.

Thing is - the peasent was not obligated to do that work himself. He could have sent a son, family member or even hire someone.

That way it was super easy to keep his agreement with the landlord while mostly focus on his own farm.

Who had it terrible were bottom, poor peasents that worked for other peasents.

They did not have their own land and were at mercy of their “master peasents”.

They most likely had to work whole week or 5-6 days.

They were more of a slave than a peasent tbh, but its a hard disregarded truth.

Current middle class in our times could be translated to “master peasents” back in time. Slave peasents would be the slave-wage ppl.

When I discuss or compare medival peasents to current corporation workers I always compare master peasents to corposlaves.

And master peasents had it super better than corposlaves do now.

To claim that an impoverished serf working land "had 4 days off a week" is nonsense. They worked hard af for all sunlight hours for some seasons, and had plenty of leisure in times like the winter. On average, maybe that's 4 days off, but let's not pretend that working the land is not back breaking work. It's not leisure. If you really think some 40 hour wfh coding job is harder work than farming for your life, then there's no law saying you can't buy some land and go off grid. You're welcome to subsist. Hell you could land a few million subs on youtube airing the experience, that category is all the rage these days

Well.. noone said that. If you mind reading the comment again.

But its true that peasents had a lot more time to work on their own stuff than on what master told them to do.

Either way most peasents worked for higher tier peasent because landlord often has hubdreds of hectars of land.

But in the past 4 decades, I'll remind you that around 800,000,000 Chinese (that's eight hundred million people) were lifted above the global poverty line and were able to stop subsistence farming. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

So to say that global inequality is getting worse, when billion+ have been lifted out of abject poverty in that time, it's not correct to me. Things were worse 40 years ago when billion+ more humans were below the global poverty line, even if today billionaires are even richer than the middle class.

Imagine you live in a neighbourhood of 50 people. Everyone starts earning more, that's absolute income increase. Then imagine your richer neighbours income has increased 100x faster than anyone else, that's income inequality.