A story of landlessness

There was a young man, just entering adulthood. His father died in an accident while working. His mother had already died years ago of an illness.

They weren’t rich parents, so the young man wasn’t expecting to inherit much. It turned out that his father was in debt, so he inherited nothing at all.

He knew a local landlord, not much older than himself, who owned large estate. He approached the landlord, saying, “Sir, you have inherited plenty of land, and some of it is barely used; I have none. Please let me use a portion of it. I’ll build my own house on it, and grow my own food.”

The class servitude of landless workers

In my previous article, I defined class servitude as a situation where a class of people largely serve the interests of another class of people. This happens not because no individual can improve their situation, but because (in the case of at least some members of the class) when they do improve their situation, they indirectly make life harder for other members of the class. So each individual in the class can and does improve their productivity to make their lives better, but because everyone does so, no-one is much better off, and their extra work benefits other people.

This article argues that landless workers can be subject to class servitude.

Class servitude

Slavery is bad for all sorts of reasons. The most extreme form of slavery is chattel slavery, where one person is considered to be the property of another, and the master can do anything they want with or to the slave.

I want to concentrate on one particular feature of slavery that appears in other contexts. Because it doesn’t involve the full horror of chattel slavery, I’m going to use a different word to distinguish it: servitude.