ComradeRat

For most of human history, the community raised the children and biological parents had no special powers or responsibility (or ownership). The people most involved in raising kids would be—shockingly—not be ones the community thinks is bad at raising children

Then the family was invented and class society following that

I choose to believe!

thanks comrade

Yeah its very bleak. Im the only masker in my org (and even in 2021 when i joined, everyone was chomping at the bit to start antimasking), and taking precautions means im left out of a lot of the social and community building stuff unless I'm willing to sit masked in a superspreader dinner

I cant stop organizing bc id feed even worse about myself, but fuck its depressing when even communists are just fine with ableism.and eugenics and will swallow propanda whole and endorse the liberal line of covid being over. Me and my family is just acceptable losses to them

I get that you take the book on the face value, but i would greatly appreciate that you start your wall of text from that.

And evidently the extent of your engagement with the book is "the opposite of what the book says must be true" and "the fantastic neolithic shire must fit into the square peg of the rural class structure of the 1920s USSR" which is the laziest possible critique. Like if you're gonna say "the book is lies (except for what I think is true) and what I say is really what happened in it" just go write ur own fanfic lol

Or yknow, go study history before 1300 instead of mechanically shoving all societies into the same square bourgeois hole

They rallied their family clients against the class traitors.

The wealthy farmers supported by saruman are hardly class-traitors; they are supporting their wealthy class interests against the interests of the poorer farmers

We were certainly told it was like that, coincidentally in PoV of the instigators. And by "coup" i mean declaring fealty to Reunited Kindgom which i imagine wouldn't be very popular since hobbits were pretty xenophobic, again it's the kulaks and their clients.

The real coup was Lotho's takeover and then Saruman's takeover from him. Fealty to the reunited kingdom is one of the parts of the book i'm not fond of, but again that isn't a coup, that is the results of a mass peasant uprising against a coup. And you've gone within these two sentences from "the book is unreliable we can't trust it" to "the book says hobbits are xenophobic so this must be true."

That's a literal good tsar syndrome plus swerve, Frodo remains stellar exemplar, his henchmen less so, but the evil dudes are conveniently dying by their own hands or in legit battle.

Idk what 'good tsar syndrome' or 'swerve' mean. Frodo has no henchmen. Saruman dying by wormtongue's hand is convenient, but then wormtongue is killed by all the hobbits nearby (against frodo's will, so much for henchmen). Idk why you take issue with the idea that the enemy survivors of the battle were let go? That's pretty common in battle, especially before the intensification of warfare that happens with the rise of the state and bourgeois society.

Yes yes just as orcs, elves, dwarves, ents, etc. This is the age of men! Even fucking Howard written this trope better.

Idk who Howard is or why you think he's written it better. Tolkien, for his part, doesn't portray this as an unambiguously good thing (see e.g. how quickly aragorns kingdom falls into typical feudalism in the appendix as an example), but again he is locked into this ending by his own premise of "the story takes place in the prehistoric past."

Swerve

Still don't know what swerve means, saruman still sucks and evidently is no more historically progressive than british rule in india; the hobbits native productive forces were destroyed and confiscated to maximise exports to the imperial core

The family connections of being a serf lol

No one had a more attentive audience than old Ham Gamgee, commonly known as the Gaffer. He held forth at The Ivy Bush, a small inn on the Bywater road; and he spoke with some authority, for he had tended the garden at Bag End for forty years, and had helped old Holman in the same job before that. Now that he was himself growing old and stiff in the joints, the job was mainly carried on by his youngest son, Sam Gamgee. ... ‘I know nothing about jools. Mr. Bilbo is free with his money, and there seems no lack of it; but I know of no tunnel-making. I saw Mr. Bilbo when he came back, a matter of sixty years ago, when I was a lad. I’d not long come ***prentice ***to old Holman (him being my dad’s cousin), but he had me up at Bag End helping him to keep folks from trampling and trapessing all over the garden while the sale was on.

It's clearly referred to as a job with an apprenticeship and there's no indication of serfdom or slavery. Again, you are transplanting economic categories from one time and place to another instead of engaging with the text. There are issues with the shire (it is in the beginning stages of forming class society), but there's no indication that slavery or serfdom is one of them (until, yknow, saruman comes around lol)

Yes because obviously the bucolic idyll portrayed in the book is completely divorced from any material reality.

Not really. The 1870s stuff (umbrellas, rsvp letters, post offices, money) is where it's divorced from material reality, but the social system (aristocracy without coercive powers), agrarian focus, familial landownership, lack of industry, etc are all fairly decent representations of agrarian tribal societies as they start to differentiate from primitive communism (as you can see in, yknow, Engels or more recent anthropological or historical investigations)

Tolkien wasnt a comrade, but he was extremely opposed to both the british and american empires. He'd hate what these companies have associated his lore with

No I really cant imagine how the series about short brown farmers (read the description of hobbits in ch1 of the hobbit!) help create a multispecies coalition to destroy the armies of industrial europe before they do more ecocide and genocide gets latched onto by reactionaries

Like ffs in the hobbit its suggested that modern society is goblin society! This is right before the down to goblin town song everyone knows!!!! In lotr, orcs do the whole modern european army thing with numbers, reports, orders, etc, and everyone just latches onto the whip song from the movie and the (reactionary) descriptions and depictions of their appearance.

Also afaik the support for franco thing ammounts to one letter where he is upset about anticlericalism. Reactionary yes, but if we're basing his views on his letters he spends far more time complaining about the british and american empires than any other (and suggests the soviets to be better than either),

The shire is a confusing place where the logic makes no sense bc most of its lore was established before tolkien knew his satire of modern rural english polite society would be going into his fairy tale.

In lotr he tries to salvage it a bit with the chapters showing the shire outside of hobbiton, and the whole very clearly premodern social systems, but that just makes the rural victorian aesthetics (rsvp letters! umbrellas!) stand out more and beg for explanation.

Saruman is 100% spiritually british and imo we should applaud tolkien for rejecting (both in lotr and in his letters) the propaganda of britain/imperial powers having the right to rule the colonies to spread civilisation

Samwise isnt a hereditary gardener (see my reply to polandisastateofmind), but hereditary professions are actually pretty common historically

They (Merry and Pippin, the sons of the aristocratic Tooks and Brandybucks) actually rallied the poor farmers (e.g. the Gamgees and the Cottons) and the middle farmers (e.g. the Maggots) against the kulaks (whatshisface from the southfarthing and the Sackville-Baginses) backed by an invading industrial power (Saruman)

Any "coup" was really the traditional authorities being restored to power by a lower and middle peasant uprising bc it is a fairy tale written by a medievalist who wishes capitalism and industrialism never came about. Principally bc tolkien hated the destruction both have wrought on the natural world and on humans. (And to his credit, he was consistent enough in his hatred for modernity to oppose the whole british imperial project, despise the spread of the english language, refer to british soldiers as orcs, and in The Hobbit imply modern europeans are goblins.)

Idk what you mean by lynching, the book is very explicit that the only deaths were in the battle (+Grima and Saruman), that all who surrendered were let go and that Frodo is constantly trying to get the hobbits to be LESS violent

The Hobbits faded bc hobbits dont exist in 1900s and Tolkien is writing a fairy tale that takes place in the past. Also the "progressive" rule of Saruman was literally an ecocidal human supremacist dictatorship where the only growth industries were policing and exports to the imperial core down south (which, quite explicitly, does not happen under Aragorns kingdom)

Also to reply to your other comment here, the Gamgees arent "slaves", as Sam's father recalls (literally the first conversation in the book!) it is a job he got via family connections. In the Shire, gardening is skilled labour. Hamfast is literally called "Master Hamfast" by Bilbo and respected by all for his knowledge of gardening.

Lastly wrt your point about the aristocratic families having power, the books are actually quite explicit that those families have no real coercive power (the only military the shire has is the entire shire raised, there is no coercive apparatus separate from the whole people). In all but aesthetics (which, bc of the hobbit, are locked into a weird mix of neolithic britain and 1870s england), the hobbits are a tribal society only shortly removed from primitive communism / kinship economy

I hate how real this is