#mini essay

Let's do the overview. After the fall of the Roman Empire, all of Europe was a feudal hell for 1300 years and then the French invented democracy. Or was there something in between that?

First of all, the transition to feudalism took a long time (and "feudalism" was a much more diverse system than it is usually given credit for being). When those various barbarian kings marched into West Rome, they generally came in with a, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss," attitude, maintaining Roman administrative systems to the degree that it was possible.

All the same, declining literacy and state capacity over the next three hundred years forced these European kings ruling hastily renamed Roman provinces new and original kingdoms to innovate, with the broad strokes system that was adopted in much of Western Europe involving heavy decentralization and, in many cases, the disappearance of states entirely (by states I mean entities with "monopolies on legitimized use of force in a defined geographical area"). Much of Europe became the tiny backyards of barons with private armies consisting of six guys and a horse, with kings having to rely on small lords to supply them an army piecemeal rather than the state possessing an army of its own. As such, the monopoly on violence was replaced with a free market of violence, and the next few centuries, while relatively (but not entirely) free of big, ugly wars like those fought by the Romans or later Early Modern Europeans, was kind of a blurry mess of thousands of very small wars that nonetheless added up to a rather violent and unequal period in history.

Was there any reprieve? The first safe havens from feudal barbarism that are usually brought up are the various merchant republics, like Venice, Genoa or Novgorod. These were, generally, oligarchies, where (as you might guess) merchants possessed all or most of the power. They tended to be small and located in areas that saw a lot of trade: usually having access to some important port or trade route. There was little or no hereditary nobility here, but if you're reading this you might think they're a little… you know, bourgeois. Is there anything better?

There are, in fact, a few attested examples of peasant republics. These were not necessarily democracies in the modern sense, or even states; the name speaks to a, for the time, unusual lack of aristocratic and ecclesiastical power. I'd like to discuss a few in particular. I think they are a fascinating piece of history, and while none were ideologically socialist, I think a lot of them still achieved socialist aims by accident (and we will also discuss why this happened).

The word has been used in many contexts. The Swedish region of Jämtland is said to have been a peasant republic during the medieval period, though details are scarce. In Scandinavia in general (and especially Iceland), things have been seen as democratic institutions, but these structures usually existed alongside a traditional aristocracy. Sure, both jarls (nobles) and karls (freemen) could vote in the thing, but there was still a jarl-karl distinction, not to mention thralls (slaves), who did not vote.

I'm mainly going to talk about German peasant republics here. They went a bit farther, with some explicitly, even intentionally, lacking any kind of aristocracy at all.

The North German Bauernrepubliken (which are where the English term "peasant republic" comes from) saw their heyday between 1100 and 1300 AD, and could be found on the North Sea coastline, from the modern day Netherlands to modern day Denmark. For some reason, Dithmarschen, in modern Schleswig-Holstein, appears to be the most famous. It was the one that lasted the longest: it was conquered and subjected to feudalism only in 1559.

It was not the only one, though. Major peasant republics in Northern Germany included Butjadingen, Stadland, Stedingen, Land Wursten, and Land Hadeln in addition to Dithmarschen. These existed alongside more urban merchant republics in the same region, like the city-states of Hamburg and Bremen.

Further west, much of Frisia (the Northern Netherlands and Northwest Germany) was subject to the "Frisian Freedom", a large and anarchic network of tiny peasant republics and rural communes with virtually no central authority at all, persisting mainly from around 1100 to the mid-to-late 1400s, though a probably fictitious account alleges that the Frisians were granted their prided freedom by Charlemagne himself already in the 800s.

These peasant republics, from Frisia to Dithmarschen, all had a few things in common. The first is that the majority of the men were freeholding farmers. That is, historically speaking, utterly bizarre. The average person in a medieval society was, statistically, either a maidservant with very few rights, or a landless farmhand with only a few more rights than her. Owning a small plot insufficient to feed yourself with (and having to rent land from a lord or work the lord's land or some similar deal to supplement it) already put you in the top 50% of men, and owning enough land to actually feed your family without really owing anything to anyone else? Why, you were practically the BMW-driving dentist of the middle ages! Yet in the Peasant republic, tenant farmers and landless farmhands were rare (it was probably not uncommon for a son whose work was not needed at home to take employment with a neighbor, but being a married man without land was highly unusual).

A few other notable features were that inheritance norms favored equal division of property among sons, rather than the eldest son getting the lion's share, preventing land accumulation; that there were no noble titles; that the main decisionmakers/adjudicators were elected democratically by all freeholding men; that these regions were not rich enough to be particularly desirable for outside conquerors; that dense swampland made it very hard for foreign armies to enter or control these territories; that virtually every man owned a pike and that they therefore had a disproportionate ability to mobilize militias (in the medieval period, it was often strictly forbidden for peasants to arm themselves without the permission of a noble); and that property was difficult to privatize.

I want to dwell on that last one, because I think it's especially interesting to socialists. The peasant's republics were not in the regular business of redistributing wealth, but they were (even if not intentionally) in the business of property norms that make wealth accumulation and "snowballing" your way into aristocracy very difficult (which is very socialist: social liberals and paternalist conservatives talk wealth redistribution, socialists talk private property).

The property in question is the dike. Northern Germany is a marshy place, and the main form of agriculture is centered on the koog, a tract of land enclosed by dikes. Koog is in fact a German word that descends from Low German spoken in these peasant republic marshes: the Dithmarschian term was koch and the Frisian word was kuch.

Generally, the way that any aristocracy or elite forms is by restricting access to resources everyone needs (this is called exclusion and the economics term for how easy a resource is to exclude is called excludability). If the lord owns the ox (an expensive, high-maintenance animal), and everyone needs the ox to plow the field, then the lord can rent the ox out. The ox is excludable because if you don't pay up, you don't get to borrow it.

An example of a non-excludable form of property is intellectual property, which is why piracy is fun for the whole family. It is hard to restrict access to non-buyers, since copying is basically free and infinitely repeatable.

Guess what? The dikes in a koog are also non-excludable! That feels like a nonsense sentence, but it isn't.

The dikes run through everyone's property, and cannot reasonably be maintained by one lone guy with a lot of money (or food). Instead, they become a common responsibility and a common liability. Everyone is held responsible for the parts of the dike running through his property, making sure it is clear after every storm. If you shirk your duties, it is obvious to everyone else that someone is not pulling their weight, it is obvious who is not pulling their weight (just walk along the dike until you find on whose property the unmaintained part is), and everyone gets screwed if they don't deal with you (because you're not just flooding your own farm, but everyone else's farm, too). Therefore, you help with your part of the dike, or the others will send the elected judge after you.

Basically, by geographical happenstance, the North Germans ended up with forms of property that are very difficult to centralize and with homelands that were very difficult to rule by outsiders (at least until gunpowder warfare came along, at which point most of the peasant republics sadly disappeared).

Not all of them fell to outside conquest. A few eventually did, despite resistance, gain nobles. In Frisia, certain powerful families eventually started emerging, seeking to dominate the region, but coalitions generally rose up against them before they became unstoppable, and in a few cases outside powers even intervened to "restore Frisian Freedom." This was especially true for the Hanseatic League, an alliance of Merchant Republic city-states (including the aforementioned neighbors Bremen and Hamburg) and trading companies that dotted Northern Germany and the Baltic (Dithmarschen was actually a member of the Hanse, too, despite being a peasant republic).

I like that image: merchant republics supporting peasant republics (the Hanse were particularly keen on not having to pay taxes and tariffs to lords in the region, and probably saw the emergence of feudalism in the area as a threat to profits, so it wasn't pure charity). Eventually, various chieftains still succeeded in becoming the nobility of the region, first in practice, and then in name, too, even in spite of vigilant resistance both from within and without. That's a development worth studying closer, in my opinion, but I want these posts to be an overview, so I encourage you to do your own research and read up on your own. Why not ask your local librarian if they have anything on peasant republics? I already deleted a part about a bunch of eventual noble families and how they emerged and feuded with each other in East Frisia, but it was too much of a tangent and this post is already long.

As a final note, something that is usually left out in the mythologized history of the peasant republics is the role of the clergy. While there were not nobles in these regions, there certainly were priests, and they tended to wield real power, being the only people who could read and write. Even if every freeholding man was entitled to participate in the assemblies, these assemblies needed people to write things down (like laws and agreements). This gave the clergy a lot of power, even if indirectly. In some regions, the clergy were more or less the leaders of the area, and some alleged peasant republics further south were even formally on church land, usually renting it from the church at a favorable rate (compared to what the deal would have looked like if they had to negotiate with a feudal lord). This is an aspect that is often overshadowed because most of the people telling this story tend to like the whole "peasants versus nobles" thing and find the continued existence of clergy to be a bit awkward. All the same, I want to tell real history, and not legends.

But were they socialist?

Well, kind of, and also kind of not. They're probably the most socialist of anything we've discussed so far, even to the point of having an ideological commitment to egalitarianism (but they were not feminists, for example, so not exactly perfect egalitarians). They are, in my opinion, at the very least worthy of being called proto-socialists, unlike some other cases in this series.

Obviously, we need to look at the humans in the beginning in comparison to the "stiffs" in Hadestown. Both wear warm tones, but only the living humans wear reds. These reds aren't even particularly vibrant in comparison to the red of Orpheus' bandana, Hades' vest, and Persephone's hints in her flower motifs, and the carnation. However, they are there.

These humans are the most obvious indication that red means life. Eurydice is a human in the crowd at the beginning of the play. Thus, she has a similar red in her jacket to the ensemble. That jacket is then taken from her in a storm, the storm that leaves her hungry and cold. When she goes to Hadestown, she is deprived of her red—even the carnation, which Hermes later returns to Orpheus. She was alive. She is now dead. She had red; now she only has brown.

Orpheus' throat, which, according to most experts on singing and human anatomy, is where his voice comes from. His voice brings life back to a cold world in the form of that carnation, which he gives to Eurydice as a symbol of his love. Here is where life and love intersect.

Hades also wears red, but only on the back of his silver vest. (Silver represents the static, inhuman nature of the gods, but that's a different mini essay.) He literally has turned his back on life as the king of the underworld and "Hadestown." He figuratively has turned his back on life as he refuses to love his wife, a goddess of life (spring/summer), the way she needs to be loved.

And yes, Persephone mostly wears green... then black. (With these colors she visually becomes the only god in the musical who gets on the level of mankind and the one who most seeks change, but this is, again, a different essay.) However, in her green look, the flowers on her bag have red in their center. The feathers in her hair that are arranged to look like flowers have red, too. When she comes late to Earth in the summer, she brings with her wine in that bag, to drown out the pain of her winters. Of death.

With the feathers as flowers in her hair, she plays the role of the goddess of spring here. However, those flowers are feathers, just like the brown feather in Eurydice's hair. She wants to bring life back to the world but becomes trapped by Hades. She cannot heal the world from winter with so little time. She cannot bring life to the world if she's a songbird in a gilded cage.

It is only when Orpheus sings the song of Persephone and Hades' love, the love that allowed the summer to exist, that new life can form. When Orpheus sings that song directly to Hades, the carnation springs again. That flower is given to Persephone, who gives it to Hades in turn. Then, the flower is placed on Hades' heart. He is able to let a sliver of love and life back into his heart.

It’s not quite controversial to say that dubstep (and wider electronic music) has very little real-world imagery as part of its aesthetic. some people may say that it’s part of the appeal of dubstep. It’s an escape to a world where the emotions derived from the music are the norm. The emotions in question usually being reckless hedonism or some other shallow form of joy or anger. I really wish this wasn’t the case. It doesn’t even have to be the case. part of the reason dubstep is most strongly associated with emotional shallowness in its lack of real visual identity.

I feel that most other genres of music are grounded in there ability to be replicated in a live setting. Rock, hiphop, pop, and country all have live precedent and thus a human connection between listeners and artists

Electronic music however, has always been mediated by some sort of machine. Be it the computer or DJ mixer, there is always something in the way of personifying the music.

However, evil players and droisoning are cracks in the code, and don't make themselves obvious. Good players can help detect these but are also fallible. The application is faulty and there's a time limit to figure out how.

You have to investigate claims and go beyond the surface level to map out how each one actually works mechanically in relation to every other to find where the functional vs nonfunctional vs malicious code is.

There's almost a programming language that everyone learns both to debug and obfuscate, the ability to parse this language being called "world building".

The different demon types in Sects and Violets especially read as a programmer having to account for multiple different types of threats as she cuts down the possibilities.

Ken Cheng at clockers con spoke of "The storyteller and to an extent the Evil team are deciding on the puzzle that the good team will have to solve. So if you're evil and have the fun of the whole group in mind, consider what puzzle you're putting out and if it's fun to solve against" (paraphrased)