At 02:33 AM 05/13/2000 -0700, you wrote:
>On Fri, 12 May 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> > very often of a seasonal nature. If you read Juliette Schor's "The
> > Overworked American", you will discover that the average peasant worked
> > half as many hours as the average proletarian during the rise of the
> > industrial revolution. That is the reason resistance to the Enclosure Acts
> > and bans on hunting was so fierce.
>
>But didn't this have to do with limited food sources and chronic disease
>and malnutrition? Peasant societies couldn't sustain year-round work
>efforts simply because most folks were hungry most of the time (no
>refrigeration, few reserves, salt was a luxury, etc.), right?
it has a lot to do with the fact that agricultural is by its very nature
seasonal. Schor specifically refers to the change from the peasant
agriculture of the European Middle Ages to capitalism. During the Middle
Ages, many of the Catholic Church's saints days were actually celebrated
-- except during planting and harvest time -- so that work hours per year
rose with the transition to capitalism. (I think it's a good idea to avoid
the myth of unilineal and no-downside progress. There is also a lot of
evidence that living standards fell with the transition from hunting and
gathering to farming. But of course, it's mixed.)
Most pre-capitalist societies had high death rates rather than lots of
chronic diseases, as I understand it. Those who survived the infant phase
are tough critters, who lived about "3 score and 10" if they survived waves
of plagues. Also, there are a lot of ways to keep reserves besides using
salt, such as smoking meat.
As others have noted, the standard of living of peasants also depends on
the rate of exploitation by the lords, the state, the Church, etc.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
