Cooked up and served to the American wage earner just as in the late 19th century, Belated Feudalism was as distasteful to the members of the modern Third Estate working class American as it had been to the former 1789 French peasant By JIll Starr

Labor Relations as Belated Feudalism in Late 19^th America

American labor relations in the late 19^th century possessed the anachronistic elements formerly constituting the medieval feudal societies of Europe. These feudal elements were never devoid from the historical chronicles of American labor development immediately prior and post to the American Civil War. Americanized and modernized, late 19^th century feudalism sustained its malignant existence by both feeding and breeding itself like a deadly cancer off the drudgery, exhaustion, and labor of the massive population of American wage earners. Belated Feudalism of retardant 19^th century America was an exact replication of Louis XVI oppressive feudal regime that was both stale and dismantled by the French Revolution in 1789 AD. Cooked up and served to the American wage earner in the late 19^th century, it was as distasteful to the members of the modern Third Estate working class American as it had been to the former 1789 French peasant.

The primary difference however was that American proletariat only had to be forced fed the vile substance for a short time before acquiring a taste for it and finally swallowing it in its entirely. The 19^th century American feudal recipe of it called for the identical ingredients used in the original concoction created by Louis 16^ths Estates General. However, there was a slight variation in the instructions on how to mix the Americanized late 19^th century feudalism ingredients. The three essential ingredients comprising the former French feudal recipe underwent a metaphorical transfiguration in order to protect the morally corrupted members of American’s foremost and coveted national country club. Exclusively for members of the wealthy American Aristocracy, the club’s name is commonly referred to as The United States government. Transfiguration of these modernized feudal elements possessed the magical quality of being efficient enough to mystify many scholars of American political and economic development. Some scholars of American history have been entirely incapable of transcending the false misconception that as time passed on, so did the obsolete socially oppressive forms of slave and feudal regimes of the former 18^th century. This was inevitably never the case.

The identical French 18^th century feudal constituents were almost equivalent to those Americanized late 19^th century versions of it. A major variance to French 18^th century feudalism was that the Americanized versions of it refurbished the labels of the persons, places, and institutions comprising the late 19^th century Estates General. The members of the First Estate substituted positions with those of the Second Estate. Predicating their existence was only capable through applying the same underhanded methods previously used by their former prototypes in 18^th Europe. Maintaining both their eminence and presence in government was accomplishable by penetrating the refashioned more modern government infrastructures of their evolving time. The refashioned Americanized First Estate was composed of the elite members of the Executive, Judicial, and American Congress and their patronizing political party machinery. The enormous burden of supporting the weight of these massive political mechanisms was given to the American wage earner to carry; an extremely taxing duty in which the American proletariat toiled and labored endlessly over sixteen hours each day. The Second Estate was now the American Clergy and Churches.

Their clothing was a bit different however. The former religious garb worn by both the Anglican Churches of England and the Catholic Churches of Europe had changed outfits. Modishly refashioned in new secularized decor, the churches in late 19^th century feudal America were styled in the same clothing that their predecessors had been. Raped by the bourgeois of their hand-made ornate dress, they were then forcibly clothed in the crude attire of newly constructed office buildings, colleges, and bars. Combinations of five elements produced the wealth necessary for both Europe in the 18^th century and American in the 19^th century to begin their Enclosure Movements. Britain and America had both gained a great preponderance of wealth owing to their success in the businesses: Slave trading, colonialism, imperialism, inter-state commerce, and war. This had a devastating effect on the cottagers and even more so on the poorer peasants who were dependent on support from their village brethren to survive. Customary law and village communal ties had allowed many of these peasants to survive by using the Commons.

Enclosures of the Commons consequently forced all members of the Third Estate (i.e. artisans and peasants) out of the countryside and into the factories of the filthy cities to earn a living. The final blow to communal interwoven village life came after it was chopped to pieces by hit-men. Commons farmlands previously lived on by the peasants and artisans, was being expediently transformed into investment opportunities by commercial interests and transformed into railroads, industrial factories and the like. Consequently, this caused both depersonalization and greater social stratification between the Aristocracy, bourgeois, and peasants in modern American 19^th century feudalism. Wild Capitalism in both Great Britain and the United States followed. Absolute Monarchs declined during this epoch. Remaining increasingly in the background, they directly opposed the ideas of a free market society. Their absence owing to their conservative sentiments in regards to what the modern day Jacksonians referred to as progress (i.e. Popular Politics and free markets). Thus the Aristocracy was swept away in the winds of the American Civil War; similar to the manner in which the Aristocracy were swept away in the 18^th century European Civil Wars and Revolutions.

By staying on their Aristocratic landed Castles in the south, they failed to resist the industrial progress which inevitably destroyed them just as it had Louis XVI. One class was blown away as a new one entered. Winds blew in new actors for the center stage of Popular and Third Estate (i.e. people pleasing politics). The Hobbesian struggles for power and wealth between the land owning Aristocracy and the commercial industrial interests collided. In late 19^th century America the large conservative property owning Aristocracy made every effort to both dissent and subvert the commercial minded and land hungry investors. Like an old photo extracted directly out of world history one can clearly see in what manner the Civil War was instigated. The commercial classes of avaricious bourgeois unendingly toiled in order to infiltrate the southern landed Aristocracy in order to create roads, trade routes, and industrial complexes. Greatly contrasting these northern bourgeois economic ideals was the southern landed Aristocracy. The latter preferred to continue living in their retardant quasi-feudal regime based on inhuman forms of slave labor.

This led the north and the south on a collision course culminating in the American Civil War. Subsequently, the American Civil War had done exactly what the British Civil War had; expanded both the British Parliament and American Popular political arena. In each case political mechanisms were greased by patronage, bribery, and corruption. Government seating was filling quite quickly with bourgeois hungry for power, wealth and vainglory. These new political machines and people pleasing politicians astutely rose to political power by tempering the peasant revolts. There was no Robespierre in the American Revolution as was in France. Substituting his role was the interwoven political parties and labor unions. Collaborating, they collectively bargained with each other in order to temper the masses. On one hand the modern day ruling American Oligarchy was unable to gain wealth if workers were in jails or on strike due to the harsh common laws imposed on them. Laws passed made vagrancy illegal. Wage earners in mid to late 19^th century America necessitated traveling to seek work but these laws restricted their movement.

Vagrancy laws chained the worked to his/her slave master employer in a manner the former slaves were chained to their masters land by law in the south prior to the American Civil War. On the other hand, the labor unions acted in a slithery way promoting political party agenda. Curtailing either a communist or socialist revolution in America was accomplished by the ruling classes (i.e. modern day nobles). In order to expand their political power they granted small crumbs from their majestic tables to the mobbing peasants to temper their complaints and to keep them working. The labor unions were given monetary kickbacks to promote political party agenda to their union members. Political parties won by offering the highest wages, best living conditions, and equal civil liberties and equal rights to the union members who reciprocally showed their patronage by giving their vote come elections day. The Civil War in America and those formerly in Europe in the 18^th century permanently murdered any further attempts for the Aristocracy to return to power. Henceforth, the cities turned into filthy diseased pits of hell in which crowded American wage earners lived. No longer did former social patterns of paternalism, slavery, and inequality exist in late 19^th America. By the year 1891 AD the United States of America expediently was resembled the current contemporary American landscape recognizable today.

Integrated into American Belated Feudalism were the meaner types. Laws previously enacted in order to promote the interests of the exclusive club of privy high ranking government and wealthy commercial elitists forcing American proletariats to work over 16 hours a day were not repealed until post the Civil War. Modern day despotic monarchs found it most difficult to tolerate the stench of their own property (i.e. factories and tenement buildings). Members of both Estates in 19^th century feudal America did share a few tenacious bonds. A high mortality rate due to the diseased crowded cities that they both spent time in together. Disease prematurely stole many lives of persons in the both Medieval Ages (i.e. Bubonic Plague) and also on a much lesser scale in America’s versions of 19^th century belated feudalism. Disease on both occasions was unleashed by trade, commerce, and the struggle for power and for wealth amid men. This paper could not be complete without assessing the majestic contribution made by those members of both the Second Estate and Third Estate who collaborated.

This collaboration was similar to former despot Prince Klemens von Metternich in his efforts to preserve the hierarchical society of the Absolute Monarchies of Europe in his Secret Memorandum to Tsar Aleksander I, 1820. The Protestant Work Ethic astutely posited by Weber clearly shows itself true. The members of the Second Estate in American belated feudalism in the late 19^th century heavily promoted the idea that heaven [God will only help those who help themselves]. Religious ideals served to motivate men and women of the Third Estate into believing that if they were good little proles suffering the life of slaves in filthy hell hole factories in this life, when they die God would reward them in the next life with a nice fat piece of Apple Pie in the Sky. One might see the charitable acts contributed to the poverty stricken peasants by the Aristocracy of 18^th Europe much more humanitarian than the during American 19^th feudalism. Completing a full systemic retardation of the entire meaning of liberalism, the American Revolution, and the United States Constitution was vulgarizing the Judicial system of 19^th century feudal American.

National institution of uniformed police and the National Guard in order to subjugate the Third Estate constructed a new slave society. The masters continued to be the First Estate, the Second Estate became obsolete, and the Third Estate remain slaves, but more free. This act was the zenith of both repudiating and aborting the entire meaning of what the United States of America stood for (i.e. Liberty). Exemplary of the liberal failure in America is the legacy that after the Civil War, both white and black were enslaved to their new masters, the employer. The labor movement to reform remedy this evil did however ameliorate a great deal of the disease. Though no American politician really wanted to lose any power or wealth, and since that wealth depended upon the American wage earner, a collective bargaining method became an acceptable solution to both groups who became involved in a dialectic relationship in which one was the master, but yet dependent upon the slave. Slave masters of the 19^th century American feudal regime feared neither God nor men, they did use God and his supposed earthly representatives on earth to convince the working class American that by behaving himself and conforming to the norms of the wealthier classes, that he would one day might one day get a piece of that bourgeois pie (either on earth on in the sky).

An enemy to labor and materialism was also perceived as a threat to the Protestant principles and was subject to either informal or formalized sanction by the community or the state. By the late 19^th century, the former watch and ward community policing systems were fully gone. After the American Civil War American feudal reality remained. However new common laws ameliorated much of the discontent of the modern day Third Estate American prole. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal rights, and Selective Incorporation of the Bill of Rights and new Constitutional Amendments into state law, America is without question a more equal and reasonable place to live in today than formerly. How long the United States Constitution will continually bind the American people in national unity is another story entirely. With the former employment laws concerning vagrancy and work repealed, the American wage earner can learn from his former brethren that he indeed can make a difference in promoting his agenda in a collective voice to the political parties and in his vote.

Miss Jill Starr