How to Avoid the Great Reset to Serfdom | by Jared A. Brock | Aug, 2022 – Surviving Tomorrow

Feudalism is rapidly on the rise. We must stop anti-human multinational corporations before it’s too late

Feudalism was awful.

While British elites try to romanticize serfdom as a genteel relationship between a genteel lord-of-the-land and his cheery peasant farmers, in reality, it was economic exploitation and slavery on an industrial scale that still enriches the British aristocracy and the “royal” Windsor family to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Serfs were legally tied to the land, worked from sunrise to sunset six days a week, ate like malnourished dogs, and died early and painful deaths while their land-lorders lived lives of luxury and excess in massive manor homes and castles.

Feudalism existed for one reason: Because the elites owned all the property and assets, and the serfs had to stay alive somehow. This allowed the rich to suppress wages to the point of subsistence, ensuring a fat profit margin despite not doing any of the actual work of building civilization.

Which is precisely why modern multinational corporations have started pushing the world back into feudalism.

Humans seldom learn from history. If we’d just crack open a history book, we’d see that serfdom has a cycle:

1. Democracy, freedom, and wealth for the masses
2. Growing inequality, suppressed wages, unaffordable housing
3. An oligarchy of elites takes over the government
4. The rich plunge the working class into feudalism
5. Populist backlash leads to dictatorship
6. A war leads to a socioeconomic reset

It happened in Athens.

It happened in Rome.

It happened to France.

It’s happening to America and Britain as we speak.

Whenever a government sides with rich creditors instead of the contributor class, democracies descend into dictatorships.

America and Britain are sadly well into stage #4: Where the rich plunge the working class back into feudalism.

Oligarchs have long ago taken over the government — as Chris Hedges said, you cannot vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. They are now wielding their corporations to strip the masses of their assets via inflation, wage suppression, and outbidding them for anything of value including trailer parks, in order to leave them assetless and wholly dependent on the property monopolizers for overpriced shelter, work, food, energy, and life.

How?

By not letting you buy stuff.

It’s called the subscription serfdom model: Corporations are financializing products to the point that items like mattresses and couches are unaffordable to the majority except on a monthly rental plan. In other words, they want to own the means of production and the products themselves.

Keeping on our current trajectory, you really will own nothing by 2050.

There’s only one way that nations like Egypt and Babylon and Israel and Athens temporarily avoided spiraling into feudalism:

They declared a debt jubilee.

It was basic math: If the poor were completely debt-trapped and the rich monopolized everything, it would obviously crush the economy and destroy the nation.

So every time a new ruler came to power, he wiped out the debts, resetting the system so the former debtors could stop wasting their lives paying rent/usury/interest, and instead buy stuff, which created jobs, which created civilization.

We’ve only seen one modern debt jubilee, and it was a stunning success: Germany after World War II. Having learned the post-WWI lessons of what happens when you debt-trap a nation (AKA the reason the Nazis came to power), the 1953 London Debt Accords save the Allies extend a debt jubilee to Germany. Dubbed “the German miracle,” it allowed Germans to spend money instead of wasting it on interest payments to the wealthy. This generated jobs, which generated more spending, which allowed the nation to rapidly rebuild into a European powerhouse.

Isn’t it kind of embarrassing that the defeated nation (Germany) recovered quicker than the victor (Britain)?

That’s what happens when you care about the poor more than the rich.

Rome, which so idolized Athens, didn’t learn its lessons and sided with creditors — they decided that slavery, poverty, inflation, and prostitution were preferable to widespread wealth, wellbeing, and freedom.

Sadly, America has modeled itself on Rome — everything from the federal architecture to the senate and the obsession with stars and eagles — and will almost certainly suffer an identical fate.

There is only one way to forever break free from the serfdom cycle.

If you want to avoid the slavery of feudalism, you have to avoid oligarchy.

If you want to avoid oligarchy, you have to avoid wealth inequality.

The instant remedy that our idiotic generation will resist until it is far too late, but posterity will see it as so glaringly obvious that they will curse our bones for being so unfathomably stupid:

In the face of Serfdom 2.0, humanity will inevitably have to ban rent-seeking and corporate profit-making from all human necessities.

The benefits to the 99% are massive:

• When we ban rent-seeking and profit-taking from all human necessities, prices for houses/food/energy will fall drastically.
• Affordable homeownership will be easily accessible to the vast majority of working folk.
• The rich will be slightly less rich, and the working contributor class will retain far more of the wealth they solely create.

Which is exactly why corporatists are financializing human necessities like shelter and heat as fast as possible.

If we want to be extra careful to avoid letting another class of oligarchs rise and force us back into serfdom, we must revolutionize the tax system.

Right now, the bottom 99% not only do all of the work, but they pay a huge percentage of taxes despite not receiving more than a sliver of the wealth they create. Consider: Just eight men monopolize more assets than the bottom 3.6 billion.

How can we forever fix this society-destroying wealth gap?

Well, first, we can abolish nearly all of the 97 taxes paid by the contributor class under the US Tax Code, including income tax, sales tax, payroll tax, property tax, permits, fees, tolls, fines, etc. This will give the bottom 99% more money to spend into the economy, which creates jobs and such.

Then, in order to offset the lost tax revenues and ensure we never again see an oligarch class rise to power and force us all into serfdom, we must:

1. Implement an aggressive annual global net worth tax on those who’ve benefitted most from the civilization workers have created. If billionaires keep evading taxation, the undeclared assets will be subject to automatic forfeiture.
2. Tax rent-seeking out of existence since it’s predatory and anti-contributive.
3. Implement an annual land monopolization fee to keep the rich from hoarding property and resources.
4. Aggressively tax unearned inheritances to send the cultural message that luck shouldn’t win you the privilege of exploiting others and never contributing to the societal system that made your parents rich.

Okay, right-wing extremists, I know what you’re thinking…

No, he’s not.

Communism — government ownership and control of everything — is stupid and dangerous.

Do you know what else is stupid and dangerous?

Letting corporatists do the exact same thing.

And that’s exactly where we’re mathematically headed: Towards a world where a handful of corporatists monopolize the entire planet’s resources and the rest of us struggle and suffer in economic hardship, misery, and destitution.

We’re descending into dictatorial corporate communism, people.

I, like most people — including champagne socialists and armchair communists — love owning things like socks and jeans and a use laptop and a home. But on a finite planet, there simply must be reasonable democratically-decided limits on how much one individual gets to monopolize.

This isn’t to limit people’s freedom — it’s to ensure we all stay free.

Jared A. Brock isn’t a communist — he’s anti-corporatist.

There is plenty that the average person can do to resist the corporatist push toward feudalism:

1. Sell all your stocks. The stock market is just another exploitative way to extract money from the contributor class anyway. Take all that money and re-invest it locally — in yourself, your family, your friends, and your community. Start a sole proprietorship. Or a partnership. Or a co-operative or a not-for-profit or for-benefit or an epic Daman Model business. Start any number of non-exploitative businesses that contribute to society. Make a living, not a killing.
2. Stop spending your money on corporatists. Begin the shift to localize your spending. Instead of chains and corporations, buy from non-exploitative business models.
3. Stop voting for corporatists. No more US Republicans/Democrats, UK Conservatives/Lib Dems/Labour, or CAD Liberals/NDP/Conservatives. Support new democratic parties, and start lobbying (not protesting) for the end of oligarchy by demanding a debt jubilee and democratic taxation.
4. Stand up, sound the alarm, and convince everyone you know to do the same.

Sadly, most people are so lazy and comfortable and short-sighted and selfish to do any of this. Or they’ve already been broken by the system and don’t have the time, energy, or will to fight.

The good news is that even serfdom, slavery, and dictatorships like Rome and future America come to an end.

As novelist G. Michael Hopf put it:

“Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
Weak men create hard times.”

We are entering extremely hard times, my friends.

It will require us to become even stronger people.

Jared A. Brock is an award-winning biographer, PBS documentarian, and the cell-free founder of the popular futurist blog Surviving Tomorrow, where he provides thoughtful people with contrarian perspectives on the corporatist anti-culture. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Guardian, Smithsonian, USA Today, and TIME Magazine, and he has traveled to more than forty countries including North Korea. Join 25,000+ people who follow him on Medium, Twitter, and Substack.