In this thread I would like to discuss the pros and cons of a socialist America. For the purposes of the discussion I will define a set of parameters for this hypothetical socialist America. For simplicity assume that there are no other changes, at least at the start of socialism. I will now give a minimal set of rule changes required change our economy from what it is now to a fairly (but far from completely) socialistic one.

The major change needed is this: there is no stock market and no investor-owned corporations. Self-employed people would have the same situation as today. Proprietorships (small businesses with owner-operators plus their employees) would be unchanged as would be ordinary partnerships. All corporations would be employee-owned, however. That is, in order to obtain a government-issued corporate charter (and gain limited liability protection) a business has to be entirely employee-owned through a government-approved mechanism.

Economies of scale being what they are, there would still be many corporations, so for simplicity I will assume the same corporations as now. And they would work largely as they do now except they would not have shares that trade on a capital market. Instead they would have shares residing in individual employees 401(k)-like accounts or as treasury stock. The value of a share of stock is stipulated by law to be the stock's book value, and so this identity replaces the stock market as the mechanism through which equity is valued. Each employee would receive a fraction of their salary/wage as stock rather than money, transferred from the treasury account to their 401K account. This fraction would be the same for all employees of a particular corporation (this is mandated in the charter). Unlike current 401ks, the dividends from the shares would be paid out immediately (in the employees’ paycheck); it cannot be reinvested into the 401k.

When an employee leaves employment his shares are transferred back into the treasury stock and he receives cash which it deposited into an IRA-type account, in which they can be invested in a variety of non-stock financial products.

Under this system, older, long-time employees doing the same job as their younger co-workers would receive much larger incomes even though their salaries would be the same. This creates two constituencies in the employee/owner population, one with as more owner/pro-management mindset and one with an employee/anti-management mindset. Both would share common goals of wanting to keep the company in business and doing well, but they would disagree on the details of how to do this. Given this tension there would likely still be labor unions who would represent younger and lower-paid workers who collectively would own a small portion of the company’s stock.

There are issues with foreign-owned corporations. I would guess that a tariff would be needed to discourage foreign businesses from selling directly to US consumers and instead form some sort of employee-owed US "contractual subsidiary" or partner with employee-owned US companies in order to access the US market. This would necessarily affect how the foreign firms interacted with the US marketplace. For example, I would see much less enthusiasm for job outsourcing on the part of employee-owned firms.

In fact, if the US had employee-owned corporations it is likely that some other nations would have gone this route too. Their foreign-owned companies would be able to do business directly in the US as their charters would be consistent with US law.

This should provide sufficient detail to give a sense of how this type of socialist economy would operate. What pros and cons can you imagine?

My question would be how the transition would occur. The Fifth Amendment includes "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." I kind of like where you are going, but how do you get there from here?

Originally Posted by B Butler

My question would be how the transition would occur. The Fifth Amendment includes "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." I kind of like where you are going, but how do you get there from here?

Terms of a bailout? Corporations are goverment creations anyways, I have no objection to maintaining limited liability companies under something like this.

I think such a shift could only have happened in the last saeculum.

~Chas'88

Originally Posted by Chas'88

I think such a shift could only have happened in the last saeculum.

~Chas'88

I don't think that that is necessarily a thing. The bailouts in particular have set a nice precedent, particularly when asset markets go all screwy and we're back at square one. It also helps that we're in the process of withdrawing from global hegemony, rather than ascending into it.

This proposal wouldn't address the fundamental problems created by natural monopolies. Infrastructure needs to be publicly owned and maintained. If the power company is still a private enterprise, there's zero competition factors which encourage them to improve.

Money supply would still be a problem. If money supply is still corporately run through a Federal Reserve System, you will still have a constant devaluation of currency, which will more and more constantly create destructive bubbles without a way to burst them through the*public investment system.

The investment style retirement systems would suffer the same problems as today, and would find themselves dependant on population distribution. Every hiccup, every bump and every shift in population distribution would send shockwaves through your dividends, making retirement risky, plus the inability to cash your socks out in public sales more or less makes them worthless.

Paying older employees significantly more than younger ones just because they're old is problematic and unjust. It's problematic because start up costs in establishing yourself as an adult are higher than what it takes to maintain one's self. Even if you get rid of the stupid everybody goes to college thing, the process of acquiring security deposits, then down payments, then enough money to afford needs for young children actually means younger people should be making more money. It's hard enough to get these things without handing cash over to older employees just because they're older.

While it will probably stabilize incomes within an industry, it will still create a hierarchy between industries, which will make income disparity almost a caste system. If people are shareholders in the company only by virtue of their employment, jobs will be encouraged to only hire like minds and people they know will tow the party line. Even if they realize that they've heading in the wrong direction, hiring heretics won't be an option because your board of employees will undercut your heretics at every turn, especially if shares, and therefore votes are concentrated to favor older employees.

This also doesn't favor the creation of new employee owned organizations. If a sole proprietor can't sell shares to go big time, why would you open things up to let your employees get a piece of your pie?

In all I'm fair of being off the capitalist course, but this will just lead to something more hierarchical, less sustainable and more toxic.

I know that I will stir up a hornets' nest when I discuss the Marxist dialectic, but in this time such is necessary. Whatever faults Karl Marx as a historian and as a prophet, he has a near monopoly on predicting the ultimate future of economics. Most notably, it is what happens after the potential achievement of human need.

Basically, feudalism gives way to capitalism, and capitalism fails due to its inability to meet human needs. Socialism (as government ownership and operation of productive industry) ensues, dispossesses the capitalists, and dedicates what had been profits that capitalists largely dedicate to self-indulgence to investment in productivity, and shares the bounty of industrial productivity more equitably after a proletarian revolution. The proletariat would turn on its capitalist masters because it had no stake in the system -- nothing to gain from further increases in productivity because capitalists would always speed up production. As Marx put it, workers would unite because they had nothing to lose but their chains.

After one big scare following the abject failure of a plutocratic order (the Bolshevik Revolution), capitalists decided to make a consumer market out of the proletariat. Workers who might otherwise follow some Marxist demagogues and do in the remaining countries what they allegedly did in the Soviet Union might be satiated with cars, housing better than the disease-ridden fire-trap slums, radios, and nice clothes. Such worked for nearly a century in most of the advanced industrial world, failing only in countries just getting exposure to capitalism and in countries occupied by the Soviet Union.

Call the idea of the proletariat having a stake in capitalism "modern capitalism". But what happens when overproduction becomes the norm? Labor can plummet in marketable value (using a term from the generational theory, it may be labor that "the Great Devaluation" hits this time. If such devaluation continues, then wages can be driven back to subsistence levels despite extreme productivity that plutocrats enforce with brutality. Such could make a proletarian revolution a possibility. Of course, privileged elites can panic and turn to horrific repression of working people as under fascist and Nazi regimes.

What Marx calls communism reflects the reality that productivity is so high that people hardly need to toil. Consumer needs and desires are easily met, and what people have is good enough that they need no more. (Clutter is a bad thing). Ownership and bureaucratic power become irrelevant. Scarcity might still exist for precious gems, metals, and antiques; real estate of high desirability for its appearance (let us say a house with an ocean view) can;t be made in adequate quantities for all human desire.

Note that this Communism is hardly the fraud of Marxist-Leninist regimes that achieved 'socialism' only to allow a bureaucratic elite to arise and become as nasty exploiters as aristocrats, financiers, and tycoons.

.

Pbrower,

Entirely possible. The West is certainly well into late phase capitalism. How this Crisis gets resolved will certainly be interesting.

Kepi, there's room for both. There is room for shareholders in a publicly held enterprise. You could have a mix of large, utility style institutions of one form or another alongside scrappy local businesses. Particularly if you have a guaranteed basic income or something, if such should prove feasible, freeing people to pursue their own enterprises.

Mikebert's example had disallowed public stock investing, so I'm going by that rule. I have my own ideas about the establishment of a socialist framework, but this is to critique the rules of his game.

Originally Posted by B Butler

My question would be how the transition would occur. The Fifth Amendment includes "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." I kind of like where you are going, but how do you get there from here?

I am not proposing it. I am saying assuming it exists, and asking what are its pros and cons.

As for how you would implement it, you would disincorporate existing corporations and allow them to reapply when they meet the new requirements. In the meantime, anyone who owns shares will be liable for anything the company does. I imagine many folks would want to sell their shares. The newly disincorporated firms would likely do a LBO to take these shares back.

As to how to repay the LBO loan there are two ways. If their employees are willing to go employee-owned, then they create treasury shares whose value equals the LBO debt and start collecting X% of employee salaries in exchange for treasury shares. They use this money to pay down the LBO debt. The LBO was originally invented with this purpose in mind.

If the employees are not willing the company’s management would break the company into smaller pieces and sell them to people interested in owning a small business. The would use the proceeds to repay the LBO debt.

In other words if the employees are willing to be owners, they will go that way (because it preserves the firm’s advantages of scale). If not they break up into a collection of smaller proprietorships. The former is what socialist would want, the latter is what libertarians would want.

Originally Posted by Kepi

This proposal wouldn't address the fundamental problems created by natural monopolies. Infrastructure needs to be publicly owned and maintained. If the power company is still a private enterprise, there's zero competition factors which encourage them to improve.

This same problem exists currently. I fail to see how under this socialist scheme it would be worse.

Money supply would still be a problem. If money supply is still corporately run through a Federal Reserve System,

But an employee-owned corporation.

you will still have a constant devaluation of currency,

Whay exactly is the problem with the 3% inflation rate we have averaged since 1933?

which will more and more constantly create destructive bubbles

We had inflationary policy for half a century without destructive bubbles. Whether we have destructive bubbles is a choice. You want to avoid bubbles? Raise taxes on the rich. You don’t want to raise taxes on the rich? Then accept occasional bubbles. I think it is clear which choice we have made since 1986 and which choice we had made over 1933-1980.

Paying older employees significantly more than younger ones just because they're old is problematic and unjust.

They aren’t paid any more. They are paid exactly the same salary as younger folks if they do the same job. They get more income because they have accumulated more shares in their 401K and the dividends from those shares gives then additional income. Dividends are the benefits one obtains for ownership.

I’l be more specific. A newly started worker has zero shares in his account and so gets zero dividends. He earns a salary of S dollars per month and receives 80% of that in his paycheck. The other 20% is used to buy shares that go into his 401K.

A 30-year man has paid 20% of 30 years worth of salary to buy shares. He now owns shares worth six times his salary. Assuming a 4% dividend, he receives dividend income equal to 24% of S. Each month he gets paid 80% of S as his wage (just like the younger worker) plus his dividends (24% of S). As the younger worker accumulates shares in his 401K he will get more and more dividend. Thius will look like getting raises simply for getting older. It actual is the return he receives from past investments of salary in company stock. In other words the worker is gains the fruits of capital because he owns the means of production (which is the definition of socialism),

If a sole proprietor can't sell shares to go big time, why would you open things up to let your employees get a piece of your pie?

You don’t. You sell your pie through a LBO to the new employee-owned corporation.

I remember reading what started out as a really interesting science fiction series, the Jump 225 cycle by David Louis Edelman. While the series tapered off into mediocrity as the author started writing outside of his area of competence, some of the initial worldbuilding was quite neat (the series started off as a fictionalization of the Dotcom bubble, which the author had participated in as a programmer). The reason I bring it up was that one of the core concepts in the beginning was the bifurcation of economic institutions between "memecorps (large scale, heavily regulated cooperatives and utilities) and "fiefcorps", which were innately time limited corporate entities. A founder would have an idea, bring on some extra personnel under a master-apprentice thing, pursue the idea, and then everybody cashes out or fails within a few years. Sort of a tech start-up on steroids. While the exact format would need to be a little bit more fleshed out, what I thought was interesting was the idea of a society that had large scale implementation of the idea that some things should be focused on stability and equity, and some things on pure competition, with the best winning and the rest disappearing.

I dunno. Food for thought.

SithCorp. It would be more honest.

Take it up with the author.

Only Restorationism can equalize and establish fair class lines in america. The replacement of the current elite with a meritocratic elite is to ensure that the bulk of the populace has access to the american dream, the reformation of the education system supervised by the military is to provide new cohorts with practical knowledge of the outside world and knowledge of emergency situation skills. The creation of a communal-entrepreneural economy is to encourage inventiveness and competitiveness in a fluid world economic system. The vassalization of latin america and the pacification of the middle east is to ensure the security of the america, in latin america it is to ensure that those nations do not fall into the wrong hands and to utilize the manpower and economies to the defense of the free world. In the middle east the goal is to eliminate the danger posed to civilization by the islamist forces, this would require a preverbial cleansing fire in order to eliminate the terrorist bacillius. This will be followed by the establishment of military regions in the mideast and the economic reorganization of the mideast in order to create a civilizational reconcilliation as well as a fulcrum for the shoring up and reforming of the world economy. This will be heavily assisted by american, anglophone, latin american, indian, african, and israeli settlers as well as immigrants from elsewhere and reformed arab populations to create a new powerhouse in that region.

Jesus Christ, it's back. Join the military, you goober!! Don't miss out on the chance to be a member of the "meritocratic elite"!

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Pbrower,

Entirely possible. The West is certainly well into late phase capitalism. How this Crisis gets resolved will certainly be interesting.

Congratulations. You just got off my Ignore List once this post goes through.

"Late phase capitalism" suggests that something follows. Marxism-Leninism is off the table because the conditions that usually precede a proletarian revolution do not exist. A return to early-capitalist conditions that Karl Marx understood to be capitalism is impossible even in the aftermath of nuclear war (which would probably put survivors and their successors back in the Stone Age). Maintaining the economic norms that we now have requires the freezing of technology, something unlikely barring the imposition of technology that 'freezes' existing technology or restores some earlier level of technology at some earlier level.

We might be able to live with the economic conditions of the 1950s (which would probably be an improvement) with advanced technologies that make life less demanding of toil in the workplace or at work. Basic needs remain comparatively low-tech, which explains why we get no contemporary bargains by the standards of the 1950s for food, housing, transportation, heating fuels, clothing, and furniture. Any real reductions in consumer cost in any of those results from new efficiencies in manufacturing or the supply chain. But on all else -- most of the high-tech stuff has improved by doing better with lesser amounts of material and less work. Progress has implied that people who used to need to work 80 hours a week just to avoid hunger due to the primitive methods of agriculture have seen the hours necessary for survival go to 70, 60, 50, 45, and 40. The 40-hour week results from the electrification of production lines in the 1920s that created its own crisis of overproduction. Now we need no longer do so much work to meet basic needs. So what is much of our work? It could be office politics in much white-collar work. It could be the extension of retail and restaurant hours in case someone wants to buy a hamburger or towels at 2AM. It could be the purchase of schlock, but eventually people will catch on to the worthlessness of Precious Moments figurines. It could of course be pure exploitation with higher profits going to economic elites who then participate in conspicuous consumption.

I have seen a video of a very clever device -- a narrow screen the thickness of a mirror can substitute for a window, and through the 'window' one could choose a location One could live in Kansas City and look out onto the Golden Gate Bridge and approach the fake bay window and get a view that changes based on where one stands with respect to the window, giving a very realistic image. That is right -- Kansas City, quite possibly from an apartment with no genuine window in some apartment that has rooms or suites with no outside access, a solution for a need for cheap housing. The view could also be from an aquarium or even outer space. I suppose that if one preferred instead to see an auto graveyard or a feed lot for cattle one or a street scene of Michigan Avenue in Detroit (Ugh! That street of depravity would make me choose the auto graveyard or the feed lot!) could see that, too. It could resemble a box at a stadium, theater, or concert hall. Performances and events would largely be pay-per-view, of course. But you could hear the Berlin Philharmonic in concert and see it live from a farmhouse in Iowa.

A variant allows one to simulate a journey, whether by foot, car, boat, or aircraft. Want to take a trek up Mount Everest? You could simulate the view without exposure to the cold, thin atmosphere, and of course danger. Want to see what going down the ski slope looks like? You would never break a bone -- and you would expend no gasoline or pay any tickets to get there.

...there's room for both. There is room for shareholders in a publicly held enterprise. You could have a mix of large, utility style institutions of one form or another alongside scrappy local businesses. Particularly if you have a guaranteed basic income or something, if such should prove feasible, freeing people to pursue their own enterprises.

Extreme economic ideologies satisfy few people. There will be the state enterprises -- perhaps the giant banks and other financial institutions should they go belly-up a second time because the same sorts of people in charge ten years ago are still in charge. There will be public schools and ideally competition between them. There will be giant publicly-held enterprises because such is the only way possible to do things on an economic scale (like refining petroleum and manufacturing automobiles). There will be giant retailers like Wal*Mart that in return for a complete absence of customer service offer low prices -- and smaller retailers that offer more specialized advice from salespeople who actually know the product. We will most likely end up with a very mixed economy.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Jesus Christ, it's back. Join the military, you goober!! Don't miss out on the chance to be a member of the "meritocratic elite"!

Yes, you too can see this instead of "Only Restorationism..." drivel:


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Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Pbrower,

Entirely possible. The West is certainly well into late phase capitalism. How this Crisis gets resolved will certainly be interesting.

I've never understood this assumption, shared by both more-educated conservatives and genuine leftists alike (only American-type liberals, ironically, picture capitalism as something enduring and which consequentially must be ameliorated).

Capitalism as the dominant mode of production in America has not even, well, dominated for fully two centuries. Whither the assumption that it's going anywhere anytime soon? The farthest back one can possibly date the final eclipse of the feudal order in America is 1865; I go back and forth whether one ought to take 1865 or 1896 as the 'start-date' for a fully-developed capitalist order completely independent of the social framework of feudalism/mercantilism.

If we look at the previous modes of production, we see each lasted in turn many thousands of years. It's impossible to say "this is when x replaced y" in sociological terms, but, ignoring the proto-feudalist latifundia in the late Roman Empire, we may very well date Feudalism Proper as having existed in some form or fashion from the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 to the abolition of serfdom in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth - and, occasionally, even the early twentieth(!) - century.

I share the basically Marxist view that capitalism will some day pass from the historical playing field. But I think it's far more likely we've only really just begun the capitalist era. Capitalism still has a vast amount of work to do: Christianity, that relic of Feudal Europe, has not disappeared. Man has not become completely atomized. "Tradition" still matters to the conservators of capitalism; it will cease to matter when the moorings of feudalism have been completely obliterated.

It may be that the vastly increased rapidity of technological and social change under the thrall of Das Kapital may speed up the process, but I strongly doubt we're in anything but Early Modern Capitalism as of yet. And those seeds which replace it will sprout naturally: we will see forms and functions of its replacement centuries before it is actually replaced, just as modern capitalism had precursors in, for instance, the Florentine Republic.

Hence my belief that the next epoch will be a Megaunraveling in Generational terms. Capitalism is just getting started; feudalism still exists within relatively recent memory; the old bonds must be fully broken - Christianity buried under, familial collectivism disintegrated, Westphalian nation-states replaced by transnational corporations and institutions completely - before anything new can occur.

I'm not really sure why you insist on defining things on terms of absolutes, or why you think Christianity or any other religion will necessarily fade just because you want it to. We already have a mixed economy, here in West, and what the next iteration of it looks like has not been decided yet, and is certainly ripe for speculation.

From the Renaissance to the 20th Century I'd date us being in a long transition period between Capitalism and "Feudalism" as you term it. You can read as early as the play "Everyman" (~1510) of the church warning against the new rising (and mistaken) merchant class and their dependence on money.

Early modern capitalism itself though really emerges as early as the late 1600s/early 1700s. The responsibility of it we can rest on the founding of the joint-stock companies which the British Glorious generation laid down. However I will admit that at the time there was a sense of "we mustn't go completely to the extreme with this idea", as it was assumed that one had to subscribe to "Sentimentalism" in order to keep this economic model in check. Adam Smith, the one who finally put this developing economic model into words also was a big proponent of Sentimentalism (both before and after writing Wealth of Nations). The play "The London Merchant" (1750--it was also one of the most popular plays for 100 years because employers would have it performed for their employees) tells a story of how a London apprentice is misled by his lust for a prostitute to kill his uncle and (horror of horrors) steal from his employer! And she does this all because these people are interfering with her business. The prostitute is seen as pure capitalism without "sentimentality" to keep it in check and is clearly portrayed as the villain, showing how even then capitalism was not seen as something to completely trust.

~Chas'88

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

Yes, you too can see this instead of "Only Restorationism..." drivel:


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Pbrower has always criticized my proposed restorationism as some kind of totalitarian fascism or communism. Restorationism's goal is to revitalize america, american strength and american society, and to unite americans of all creeds and colors around a new society of friends and countrymen. Americans must also take proactive measures in securing safety of the freedom loving nations of the world as well.

I think, if we're talking about a socialist America, we must accept the socialist definition of terms: capitalism, using the Marxist rubric, is above all a social relation. Where the master/slave social relation dominates, one has not capitalism but slavery. And it's entirely possible for two modes of production to co-exist - Nazi Germany was capitalist, but relied increasingly on imported slave labour from Eastern Europe after the Ostplan.

"Capitalism" existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but "Feudalism" also existed into the twentieth. We must be more precise in demarcating where the change in social relations was completed before we can begin to even conjecture about a future transition in social relations - these things are gradual, halting, and reversible past a certain point. I do not believe that anywhere on Earth was predominantly capitalist before the nineteenth century, and we must set our clocks from that point in time.

As a result, if I had to make any hard-and-fast claim about the composition of modern society and its historical trajectory, it would be that (A) we have really only just entered "Capitalism Proper"; (B) Capitalism will be the dominant mode of production for centuries to come; and (C) it will increasingly refine and rarify itself, just as feudalism transformed from the noble-dominated localism of the "Dark Ages" into the era of Absolutism and Divine Right-inspired centralism in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries. It will purify itself, and all relics of feudalism will vanish as it does so.

Originally Posted by Einzige

I've never understood this assumption, shared by both more-educated conservatives and genuine leftists alike (only American-type liberals, ironically, picture capitalism as something enduring and which consequentially must be ameliorated).

Capitalism as the dominant mode of production in America has not even, well, dominated for fully two centuries. Whither the assumption that it's going anywhere anytime soon? The farthest back one can possibly date the final eclipse of the feudal order in America is 1865; I go back and forth whether one ought to take 1865 or 1896 as the 'start-date' for a fully-developed capitalist order completely independent of the social framework of feudalism/mercantilism.

If we look at the previous modes of production, we see each lasted in turn many thousands of years. It's impossible to say "this is when x replaced y" in sociological terms, but, ignoring the proto-feudalist latifundia in the late Roman Empire, we may very well date Feudalism Proper as having existed in some form or fashion from the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 to the abolition of serfdom in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth - and, occasionally, even the early twentieth(!) - century.

I share the basically Marxist view that capitalism will some day pass from the historical playing field. But I think it's far more likely we've only really just begun the capitalist era. Capitalism still has a vast amount of work to do: Christianity, that relic of Feudal Europe, has not disappeared. Man has not become completely atomized. "Tradition" still matters to the conservators of capitalism; it will cease to matter when the moorings of feudalism have been completely obliterated.

It may be that the vastly increased rapidity of technological and social change under the thrall of Das Kapital may speed up the process, but I strongly doubt we're in anything but Early Modern Capitalism as of yet. And those seeds which replace it will sprout naturally: we will see forms and functions of its replacement centuries before it is actually replaced, just as modern capitalism had precursors in, for instance, the Florentine Republic.

Hence my belief that the next epoch will be a Megaunraveling in Generational terms. Capitalism is just getting started; feudalism still exists within relatively recent memory; the old bonds must be fully broken - Christianity buried under, familial collectivism disintegrated, Westphalian nation-states replaced by transnational corporations and institutions completely - before anything new can occur.

Mercantilism should really be considered a separate transitional era between feudalism and capitalism that spanned roughly 1560 AD to 1815 AD. The shift from a mediterranean to an atlantic economy in the late 1500s followed by the protestant victory in the 30 years war in the 1600s essentially killed feudalism. The latifundia existed as early as the gracchi, however it began gradually acquiring feudal characteristics in the 2nd century ad when the romans halted imperial expansion and began replacing slaves with semi-free landed labor.

There are many dates for the end of Feudalism, the earliest being 1347 when the Black Death came in, depleted the peasant population, made peasants a valued commodity, and they started getting up and moving and selling their labor for the best price they could instead of just staying in one place like their ancestors had for centuries. There was a backlash to this in the 1350s, followed by a lot of taxes on the poor to try and return things to the way they had been. However the Peasants grew upset with this and revolted--saying they had no loyalty to their liege lords anymore. They gathered from all over England and then overran London, killed all the lawyers, burned tax records, etc.

The 12 year old boy king Richard II eventually managed to outwit the peasants (killed off the leaders and then proclaimed himself the "leader of the people") and managed to disperse the peasants promising to make changes if they all just went home. They did, and the king did nothing. However the big impact that came out of that was that the liege lords felt that they had no obligations to their peasants, because their peasants felt they had no obligations to their liege lords--so life kinda got worse for the peasants.

As for the master/slave relationship--it's something that's existed FAR longer than feudalism. Go back to the ancient Athenian Democracy--they had slaves. It's a long standing relationship that's not just special to Feudalism.

~Chas'88