The Servitude Of Our Times
The streets of Oxford are full of vans doing plumbing, roofing, gardening—all jobs that would have been done by the downstairs servants of yore. Men in vests unload commodities from wage-slaves even further off-shore. We think the days of slavery and servitude have passed, but they haven’t. They’ve just stepped out the door. Thanks to the chemical slaves of fossil fuels, we can have the service we’re used to without having to live with the servants.
In Sri Lanka, we literally live with our servants, and look like assholes. If we don’t share a roof we (the respectable rich) build houses for them, employ their extended families, it’s basically a feudal relationship. This seems backwards and people are embarrassed to talk about it. Indeed, there are many abusive feudal relationships that people should be worse than embarrassed about. And yet I increasingly thing that western servitude at a distance is not a qualitative difference but a quantitative one. It’s the same servile relationship, just at a distance where the enserver gives even less fucks.
As I’ve said, tourism is colonial servitude with tips. Can I rub your feet sir, can I scrub the villa, is the curry too hot for you? What the west calls the ‘gig’ economy is really just a distributed servant class. All the…
