so we have this issue that emerges kind of immediately um from this reconceptualization of of the experience of this specific moment in time of ancient uh Greek democracy um the Democratic thought was largely absent from the you know Middle Ages the the fifth through the 14th centuries so I mean I guess it's a tradition in the sense that it was reconceptualized hundreds of years thousands of years after it happened but I don't know how much of a tradition you can establish that now what is consistent and that is referenced in passing which is very interesting to me there is a reference to federici in our textbook and how Federici's that's an excellent book caliban and the witch it's the emergence of witch hunts in the enlightenment period in Europe as a strategy of making sure that women move away from places such as medicine and house Midwifery and services that they provided women in public into the private by accusing them of Witchcraft in Europe and in the new world through the colonial development process and so what this was was taking people in the political economy and and governing governing those those private Market transactions as public goods which we just love to do today and so the idea here is that Democratic thought was was largely silent in this period but what was consistent in this period and goes back to that earlier period is slave revolts uh these people who are told that they're not people are constantly fighting being told they're not people um so why it is that we establish the direct lineage between ancient Greek thought and the present in terms of the consistency of rule rather than the consistency of efforts to overthrow unjust rule is a deeper political question which is the blind spot of uh liberalism um and so um this ascendancy of Christianity and class relations and feudalism um is also about the the idea of the good citizen the ideal type of who a citizen is is is converted into who are the True Believers of the church right and you can understand how this would immediately lead to things like Crusades because True Believers means then that those who are not Believers need to be converted and those who are True Believers then this moves Beyond um and it is a very a historical reading of of democracy ancient Athenian democracy was clearly just those people who acted in the public space and the public good the transformation of citizens to Believers then justifies all sorts of social surveillance mechanisms to make sure are you actually being good are you being good outside of the political realm into the person around are we tracking and monitoring and surveilling in confessionals and all the rest of it making sure that we have established these mechanisms of of control this this way in which we do things and so this is the shift from the public as a public space that you act in when you get together to vote on things to a notion of citizenship tied to religiousness that is about self um and the self-actualization of those things what we would call today I've got a bunch of stupid tick tocks here uh about manifesting right the idea that we internalize these these public Notions and then we we should conform to those public Notions Even in our private Realms right and so this is a fundamental kind of reorganization of society now the key aspect for us here is that it's particularly in the feudal period what this means is that we've really solidified hierarchy so in the past hierarchy was just clearly status you were a citizen or not but in this era we established that no no no there's really rigid hierarchies in relation to your Conformity with the church and your status within the church and your ability to to do this and so we have this idea that there are you know landowners and serfs these these former slaves as response to the slaver okay we'll we'll transform you into something else and so this we could just very easily do this history as a history of slavertism as well so here is this idea of how manifesting or how the internalization then of what we are supposed to be doing as good people kind of just reflection report that it may not have been manifestation have been luck and whiteness so she's talking about she's making fun of the idea that those who get to manifest their ideas into reality are not just doing so innocently they're doing it because they reflect power and hierarchy right and so the structures that we have emerge in this Enlightenment Renaissance period are the structures that emerge for those who have the capacity and power to do so because these structures are very rigid now this is the point that I think moving away from the conflict the political understanding of democratic ideals to this kind of linear a historical abstract framework misses the key Insight that we talked about last time of liberalism as a revolutionary and so what it then it produces this facile version of liberalism that I barely recognize which is like we do this because it's inherently good not these are Concepts and ideals that were fought for against hierarchical structures of authority it it's a I guess we would call it a wiggish reading of History it it uses is a very specific partisan political understanding of history in order to characterize how history happened here I'll do my scare quotes how history happened and so the idea then of these entrenched systems is a hierarchy then reproduce so the old system people were rebelling constantly against this system is the internalization to make sure that you are there because you are sinful and because you don't believe well enough and so you come to me and show me how much you've believed and how good you've been in order for me to Grant you greater hierarchy or status in the afterlife not even in this life so the idea of property owning religious hierarchies is linked last time this constant oppression produces constant opposition and a lot of this is about resources it's about fights of resources these peasants these feudal surfs are constantly trying to reap the benefit of these resources back to the Robin Hood discussion and those in positions of authority and power are the ones who are likely to try to extract those through taxation theft ownership and assertions of private property so a lot of these fights are just about fights about the comments um about the idea of Forest Lakes while wild pastures and are all ways in which peasants were able to make for themselves grow their own food get their own fish do their own things and yet systems of authority and oppression are constantly saying give me your fish give me your food give me access to your things why so that I can have more things and more things and it reproduces a highly unequal Society based on these ideas of religious Notions about where things should be and so it is interesting I mean peasant studies are still a thing the journal peasant studies is a great journal the Via campancia is a very active outlive peasant movement and with millions of people that basically throughout the global South is arguing for food sovereignty to this day they're still fighting about we should have access to be able to feed ourselves and that shouldn't be done through a system a capitalist system whereby some people are going to get Returns on their investment for our thing that we need to live right and so we're still kind of caught in these systems we just have more sophisticated ways of dealing with them today and so this is the second Tick Tock I had this isn't the best one I could find there's a good one out there I just couldn't track it down because the search system in Tick Tock is busted like the search system is busted in most social media systems because that's not what they do right they're not designed around that anyways this is the idea that it's a thing that people should have as a kind of right of existence the acts reasonable access to Forest Lakes and wild pastures I'm in an area where there's tons of lakes and they're all in private property they're not utilized in any way you can't fish them you can't swim in them you can't do anything because someone has a title but a literal title like a deed to that property which then allows them to exclude your access to Nature which is weird right because it's nature right and so this idea of the commons versus the private control of the commons is a constant source of tension um so here's one here and this is so these green countries here have a right to roam now there's all sorts of white reasons why we could get into why these countries have a right to roam but like even in the UK look at the difference the enclosure movement really happened in the South and the Scots uh were like screw this uh we don't want any part of this and so these different structures emerged over time about the right to roam in Sweden elements written or the right to row means you can go anywhere in the Swedish Countryside as long as you don't disrupt nature it's one of my favorite things about living in Sweden so today I took a bus from malma to the countryside to go for a hike I remember that one of my first culture shocks when I moved to Sweden was that it was actually possible to take public transit to remote places I say this all the time but the south of Sweden is such a special undiscovered Gem and home to really diverse Landscapes marked over 14 100 kilometers of hiking trails with their signature orange markers which means it's easy for locals and visitors to get outside and explore today Trail markers guided us for over 12 kilometers we wander through quaint Villages and hiked through forests covered in wildflowers and we even stumbled upon this beautiful quarry with turquoise Waters with so much to explore it's no wonder sweets love to spend so much time outside in Sweden so there's a couple interesting things in there it's the idea of one that that you know you've got public access to Nature because we know that we're going to have studies now having access to Green Space is beneficial for for both you know productivity mental health all the rest of it good for kids learning goods for experience we can do all those different ways in which it's important to us but the ability to restrict access to that also would have the inverse consequences so that Urban deserts Urban spaces that are heavily concretized that don't have green space one have more environmental issues and problems they have less access to kind of public space for people to use and then it means that they're not capable of of participating in those spaces London Ontario during the Occupy protests found out quickly that Victoria Square is in fact no that's Church property and there is very little public space where the Occupy protesters could could access so they were allowed to do it for a bit but after a while it was asserted no this is not public space if you come here it's trespassing so in this you know Middle Ages and Italian Republican system we have the king we have the Lords and vassals we have Knights and vassals and Lords so they provide loyalty and military aid and then those Lords and vassals I guess provide food and protection where they're getting that food from seems weird shelter and then the food is coming they're forming the land from the peasants they're getting protection I guess from one another we can have questions about the Sovereign they pay rent in exchange for shelter um you know Grapes of Wrath you can talk about this the emergence of Corporation towns in the U.S where uh they uh you could work for the corporation but you had to live there and you had to get paid in script that the corporation provided in order to buy the goods that you could could uh consume but you could only buy the that script is only useful in the stores owned by the company um and that you would inevitably end up in debt in working in corporation towns which is today if you want to look at the distribution of income in the U.S the bottom uh 20 percentile is has negative income they're actually in debt um in terms of their their total income that's because we've got these systems in place and so I mean this is a famous One talking about capitalism the shift from feudalism to capitalism revolving some changes uh you know we ruled you we fool you we shoot at you we eat for you and we feed all and work for all this so this is like a revolutionary framing of of the rule of the bulk of the people right remember back to the city state it's 300 000 people supporting or 260 000 people supporting 40 000 people right um through systems of governance and control and so feudalism as a socioeconomic system based on the exploitation of subservience of landless peasants is to the property owning aristocracy in the church and so this is maintained through Force we use the role of Faith to say that you've got a position or position this is the idea that you know there's a natural order of things and that there's an inherent sinfulness in humanity and because you're inherently sinful you have to spend your life repenting to the church or providing alms are literally tithe the church give money to the church as as part of the access to Salvation in the afterlife right and so this idea that these fundamental inequalities existed are are based in an idea of nature that this is a natural way to be as if it's not a system of maintenance and control that benefits a small few at the expense event anyway and so this power and authority is derived then from this conflation of power and authority with religious might rather than in the the democratic system of the ancient Athens where it's the idea that your citizenship provides this and so specifically there's this you know especially in 14th century Northern Italy this peasant economy through the use of Commons so what the peasants do is use those common spaces to access resources that they can keep away from those trying to extract them from them we have you know the emergence of city-states and republics um and the elected counselors you know this idea of of Property Owners not just God so what happens over time is just you know commercial relations exist commercial relations provide access to resources outside of a system of you know religious belief and so we get the re-emergence which I think is a radical idea of the idea of using this experiment in ancient Athens as a way to challenge the religious authority of this system that says that we are all embedded in God's Will and therefore you must do God's will and you must give me your resources because God said so um and so the the emergence of Civic republicanism is this this active involvement in the state as good citizenship and good life and so it's called a Renaissance because it's using the ancient Greek ideas of democracy to challenge this this systems of uh rules that are are bound up in feudal relations okay we'll get into that in the next 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