On Sun, 8 Feb 2004, Eubulides wrote:
> The absence-of-feudalism argument has come under attack for a while...
> we now have a maldistribution of wealth every bit as absurd as the
> feudalism we claim to have abolished with the founding of the republic.
A maldistribution of wealth, certainly. What we don't have is the the consciousness of class that went with it.
These attacks miss the point of the feudalism argument. It's not that it handed down exploitation. It's that it handed down a consciousness of exploitation, a conviction that it had always been, and would always be, a condition of society. And along with that, a vast repetoire of visible and audible signs of class separation that were immediately recognizable, that didn't have to be deduced.
What feudalism handed down was centuries of class consciousness.
Michael