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beatrice_otter) wrote2018-02-25 07:33 pm
beatrice_otter) wrote2018-02-25 07:33 pm
Entry tags:
How to worldbuild: Labor relations, economics, and theocracy
Over on the Yultide discord (which, by the way, goes year-round, and so does the hippo pool, if you need help finding a beta) raininshadows asked for help with economic/labor worldbuilding, and since worldbuilding is my jam, I ended up writing a LOT of stuff, which I have cleaned up and presented here. (I sometimes write stories as an excuse to share my worldbuilding with people. I'm the person sitting in the theater going "wait, that makes NO SENSE." Unless I am busy, I will pretty much always be up for infodumping about worldbuilding. I may not know anything about what canon you're looking at, but I can usually at least give some pointers about things to think about, feel free to ask.) (Well. I don't really like dystopias, but aside from that.)
Before I begin, if SFFnal worldbuilding is something you want to build chops in long-term, the best thing to do is to read social histories from all over the world (i.e. the stuff that focuses on ordinary people, not Great Men) and watch for both overall patterns and interesting details that you can crib from. The more you know about "how different groups of people have thought, acted, and handled things over long periods of time" the greater your toolkit is.
When I want to do worldbuilding, especially with fanfic where I'm taking existing canon and extending it, I always start by asking a lot of questions about the world of the text and thinking about possible ways to answer those questions, and everything flows from there. Figuring out what questions to ask (and what the range of possible answers are) is easier the more you know about how various cultures handle such questions today and how they've handled them in the past and how things changed over time, which is where studying history comes in, but even with a relatively limited knowlege base, asking questions and coming up with a variety of answers to the questions is probably going to yield interesting results.
Rain wanted to know about how to build a realistic worker safety history, and especially how to do that in a theocratic society. I'm going to start with worker safety, and branch out into the larger economic picture and the eternal tug of war between classes, and then finish up with some things to think about when dealing with a theocracy.
In US/UK modern labor history, major disasters prompt safety regulations and industry change, which lasts generally only as long as those regulations are being actively enforced. But this does not hold true of all times and places. The smaller the scale is, the closer the economic powers that set the rules are to the effects of those rules. The US/UK pattern of "disregard for safety, major disaster, regulations to prevent it, regulations being ignored" is a product of having large-scale enough projects that the people setting the rules (and profiting off of cutting corners) don't have much direct contact with the people living and dying by those rules.
When most of your economic output is, say, one little shop with a manager and a crew of four or five and everyone knows everyone else and has for their whole lives, things are different. It's not that you can't have horrible jerks who don't care if their people die as managers/owners in a small-scale buisiness world, but it's easier to be that sort of a jerk when you don't have to look the family of the person you got killed in the eye. (And also, asthe_rck pointed out, when everybody in the community knows you and you know everybody and you're a small-scale enterprise, if you get people killed through stupidity and/or cutting corners, it's generally hard to find replacements. When you're the only employer around, it's easier to make people desperate enough to take jobs with terrible injury and death rates.)
With worker safety, there are three intersecting interests: economic interests (how the economy in general functions, and specifically the interests of the people with economic power, whether those are CEOs or nobles or whatever), labor interests (the people working) and governmental interests (which may or may not coincide with those of the economic powers).
I would look at those three groups and ask yourself these questions about each of them: what do they want out of this? What social structures affect them, and what social structures do they affect? What power do they have, and how do they understand that power? What are the official limits of that power, and what are the unofficial checks and balances between the groups?
Also, with industrialization came lots of social disruption and change. Pre-"industrialization", you had industries and communities that were inherited across generations, with lots of social cohesion to them. And if the people on the bottom didn't like what was going on, they not only had a) a very firm idea of how things should be (and possibly generational memories of how it had been in the past) but also b) the kind of social bonds that made organizing an uprising or other protest relatively easy.
That's medieval and early-modern Western Europe in a nutshell. Princes/lords/whoever would try to tip the scales in their favor, and once they got greedy past a certain point, there would be an uprising/rebellion/riot/whatever that would scare them into being reasonable. A generation or two goes by, they start getting greedy fingers again, lather, rinse, repeat.
With people moving to factories in large cities, and moving constantly, that sort of organizing became harder because while you may trust someone you've known all your life (and whose family you all know, and whom you know has just as much riding on it as you do) enough to risk your life with them, it's a lot harder to build that kind of trust in someone you've only known for six months or so.
That's why the labor movement changed from a very amorphous "there when you need it, not bothered with when times are good" into a formal unionized structure, because then you can trust the institution and build loyalty to the institution rather than to "Bob my neighbor and fellow worker."
So ask yourself how often people move around, and how much of the labor force is going into the same trades their parents did in the same places their parents did. If a lot of them are, you probably don't need many formal permanent structures devoted to labor rights. If they're moving around a lot though, or not doing generational labor patterns, you probably need some sort of union-like struture if you want them to have decent labor rights--especially if the governance and economy are both large enough and stratified enough that the people making and enforcing the rules don't have to look the people the rules are enforced on in the eye.
Also, what kinds of economic ideologies do people have? Remember that capitalism and communism and socialism aren't actually the only possible economic systems, even though they've been dominant for the last few centuries. There's also mercantilism and actually quite a number of agrarian economic systems, depending on your technological level.
What political ideologies do they have? Divine right? noblesse oblige? of the people, by the people, for the people? paternalism? What do people think the ideal society looks like, and is that different for the people at the top than it is for the people at the bottom?
Do people think social climbing/improving your station is a good thing or a bad thing?
Also, how allied are the economic powers and the social powers and the political powers? Are they one and the same, or are they different? Where are the rifts between them, and where are the alliances? Does the oveerall authority favor the average joe or the economic/social powers? Or both, in different ways? Or neither?
Example: usually, you think nobles and kings ally together to oppress the downtrodden peasants, right?
Except who do you think poses the greatest danger to the nobles and kings? That's right, the nobles! While the great monarchies eventually fell to ordinary people who didn't want them any more, to any individual king the greatest danger was usually the nobles.
So if the king needed the nobles for something--money, or knights, or whatnot--he would support them against the peasants. On the other hand, if he could possibly get away with it, the king would support the peasants over the nobles. The Vasa dynasty in Sweden was (in its early days) great at this, breaking the power of the nobles and elevating the powers of the peasants.
And then you have Louis XIV of France who gave the nobles lots of ceremonial powers and transferred as much of the actual powers as he could to himself and his bureaucracy, taking power away from both the nobles and the peasants at the same time.
In democratic nations, the tighter the campaign finance laws are, the less power the government gives to the economic elite. If they're loose enough (as in modern America) the economic elite can basically buy themselves all the politicians they want, and the laws favor them. If, on the other hand, campaign finance laws are very tight, politicians are more likely to listen to the needs and desires of large social movements and organizations.
Also, what other organizations are going to have a stake in this, and what are they going to think and do? Is there a powerful organized religion, or smaller disorganized religious groups? What about guilds, professional societies, city councils? What about granges and community groups and schools? If society as a whole is a pyramid scheme, does the hierarchy of the religious groups mirror that, or not? If the religious leaders come mostly from the economic leader class, their interests are probably going to be aligned, but not always directly.
Rain is worldbuilding a theocracy. In a theocracy, every group is going to have at least a veneer of religious thought. But that doesn't mean that every group a) agrees with the interpretation of the religious leaders and b) takes the religious veneer all that seriously. If you look at medieval Europe, for example, every trade guild and social organization had their own patron saint and religious language in the charter but there was a HUGE variety in how the interpreted it. And some of them took it very seriously, but some of them only paid lip service to it. So: what ways can the religious and spiritual ideology be manipulated in service of oppression? What wasy can the religious and spiritual ideology be manipulated in the service of liberation? I guarantee you people will be distorting it both ways, in a theocracy. Every possible interest group will have a way to turn religious things to their own advantage, because the stakes are so high. (This is why theocracies tend, over time, to the distortion of the core beliefs that started them.)
In a theocracy, everyone is going to frame their position in terms of theology, but 9 times out of 10 that theology is mostly a veneer over "this is what I want to happen, how do I pull something from the religious traditions/texts to support my argument." It doesn't ACTUALLY mean that people are faithful, just that "scriptural citations" or whatever religious thing is the form the debatae takes.
And there is going to be conflict (both within the religious hierarchy and between the religious hierarcy and the rest of the community) between the people who genuinely are faithful to the spirit of the religion and its ethical and social justice dimensions, and the ones who may also be faithful in their own way but think that "I believe and live out X, and I am a good faithful adherent to my religion, therefore the religion/deity/whatever must conform to the way I think the world should be." And most people are going to fall somewhere in the middle.
Please feel free to comment and ask questions!
raininshadows asked for help with economic/labor worldbuilding, and since worldbuilding is my jam, I ended up writing a LOT of stuff, which I have cleaned up and presented here. (I sometimes write stories as an excuse to share my worldbuilding with people. I'm the person sitting in the theater going "wait, that makes NO SENSE." Unless I am busy, I will pretty much always be up for infodumping about worldbuilding. I may not know anything about what canon you're looking at, but I can usually at least give some pointers about things to think about, feel free to ask.) (Well. I don't really like dystopias, but aside from that.)Before I begin, if SFFnal worldbuilding is something you want to build chops in long-term, the best thing to do is to read social histories from all over the world (i.e. the stuff that focuses on ordinary people, not Great Men) and watch for both overall patterns and interesting details that you can crib from. The more you know about "how different groups of people have thought, acted, and handled things over long periods of time" the greater your toolkit is.
When I want to do worldbuilding, especially with fanfic where I'm taking existing canon and extending it, I always start by asking a lot of questions about the world of the text and thinking about possible ways to answer those questions, and everything flows from there. Figuring out what questions to ask (and what the range of possible answers are) is easier the more you know about how various cultures handle such questions today and how they've handled them in the past and how things changed over time, which is where studying history comes in, but even with a relatively limited knowlege base, asking questions and coming up with a variety of answers to the questions is probably going to yield interesting results.
Rain wanted to know about how to build a realistic worker safety history, and especially how to do that in a theocratic society. I'm going to start with worker safety, and branch out into the larger economic picture and the eternal tug of war between classes, and then finish up with some things to think about when dealing with a theocracy.
In US/UK modern labor history, major disasters prompt safety regulations and industry change, which lasts generally only as long as those regulations are being actively enforced. But this does not hold true of all times and places. The smaller the scale is, the closer the economic powers that set the rules are to the effects of those rules. The US/UK pattern of "disregard for safety, major disaster, regulations to prevent it, regulations being ignored" is a product of having large-scale enough projects that the people setting the rules (and profiting off of cutting corners) don't have much direct contact with the people living and dying by those rules.
When most of your economic output is, say, one little shop with a manager and a crew of four or five and everyone knows everyone else and has for their whole lives, things are different. It's not that you can't have horrible jerks who don't care if their people die as managers/owners in a small-scale buisiness world, but it's easier to be that sort of a jerk when you don't have to look the family of the person you got killed in the eye. (And also, as
the_rck pointed out, when everybody in the community knows you and you know everybody and you're a small-scale enterprise, if you get people killed through stupidity and/or cutting corners, it's generally hard to find replacements. When you're the only employer around, it's easier to make people desperate enough to take jobs with terrible injury and death rates.)With worker safety, there are three intersecting interests: economic interests (how the economy in general functions, and specifically the interests of the people with economic power, whether those are CEOs or nobles or whatever), labor interests (the people working) and governmental interests (which may or may not coincide with those of the economic powers).
I would look at those three groups and ask yourself these questions about each of them: what do they want out of this? What social structures affect them, and what social structures do they affect? What power do they have, and how do they understand that power? What are the official limits of that power, and what are the unofficial checks and balances between the groups?
Also, with industrialization came lots of social disruption and change. Pre-"industrialization", you had industries and communities that were inherited across generations, with lots of social cohesion to them. And if the people on the bottom didn't like what was going on, they not only had a) a very firm idea of how things should be (and possibly generational memories of how it had been in the past) but also b) the kind of social bonds that made organizing an uprising or other protest relatively easy.
That's medieval and early-modern Western Europe in a nutshell. Princes/lords/whoever would try to tip the scales in their favor, and once they got greedy past a certain point, there would be an uprising/rebellion/riot/whatever that would scare them into being reasonable. A generation or two goes by, they start getting greedy fingers again, lather, rinse, repeat.
With people moving to factories in large cities, and moving constantly, that sort of organizing became harder because while you may trust someone you've known all your life (and whose family you all know, and whom you know has just as much riding on it as you do) enough to risk your life with them, it's a lot harder to build that kind of trust in someone you've only known for six months or so.
That's why the labor movement changed from a very amorphous "there when you need it, not bothered with when times are good" into a formal unionized structure, because then you can trust the institution and build loyalty to the institution rather than to "Bob my neighbor and fellow worker."
So ask yourself how often people move around, and how much of the labor force is going into the same trades their parents did in the same places their parents did. If a lot of them are, you probably don't need many formal permanent structures devoted to labor rights. If they're moving around a lot though, or not doing generational labor patterns, you probably need some sort of union-like struture if you want them to have decent labor rights--especially if the governance and economy are both large enough and stratified enough that the people making and enforcing the rules don't have to look the people the rules are enforced on in the eye.
Also, what kinds of economic ideologies do people have? Remember that capitalism and communism and socialism aren't actually the only possible economic systems, even though they've been dominant for the last few centuries. There's also mercantilism and actually quite a number of agrarian economic systems, depending on your technological level.
What political ideologies do they have? Divine right? noblesse oblige? of the people, by the people, for the people? paternalism? What do people think the ideal society looks like, and is that different for the people at the top than it is for the people at the bottom?
Do people think social climbing/improving your station is a good thing or a bad thing?
Also, how allied are the economic powers and the social powers and the political powers? Are they one and the same, or are they different? Where are the rifts between them, and where are the alliances? Does the oveerall authority favor the average joe or the economic/social powers? Or both, in different ways? Or neither?
Example: usually, you think nobles and kings ally together to oppress the downtrodden peasants, right?
Except who do you think poses the greatest danger to the nobles and kings? That's right, the nobles! While the great monarchies eventually fell to ordinary people who didn't want them any more, to any individual king the greatest danger was usually the nobles.
So if the king needed the nobles for something--money, or knights, or whatnot--he would support them against the peasants. On the other hand, if he could possibly get away with it, the king would support the peasants over the nobles. The Vasa dynasty in Sweden was (in its early days) great at this, breaking the power of the nobles and elevating the powers of the peasants.
And then you have Louis XIV of France who gave the nobles lots of ceremonial powers and transferred as much of the actual powers as he could to himself and his bureaucracy, taking power away from both the nobles and the peasants at the same time.
In democratic nations, the tighter the campaign finance laws are, the less power the government gives to the economic elite. If they're loose enough (as in modern America) the economic elite can basically buy themselves all the politicians they want, and the laws favor them. If, on the other hand, campaign finance laws are very tight, politicians are more likely to listen to the needs and desires of large social movements and organizations.
Also, what other organizations are going to have a stake in this, and what are they going to think and do? Is there a powerful organized religion, or smaller disorganized religious groups? What about guilds, professional societies, city councils? What about granges and community groups and schools? If society as a whole is a pyramid scheme, does the hierarchy of the religious groups mirror that, or not? If the religious leaders come mostly from the economic leader class, their interests are probably going to be aligned, but not always directly.
Rain is worldbuilding a theocracy. In a theocracy, every group is going to have at least a veneer of religious thought. But that doesn't mean that every group a) agrees with the interpretation of the religious leaders and b) takes the religious veneer all that seriously. If you look at medieval Europe, for example, every trade guild and social organization had their own patron saint and religious language in the charter but there was a HUGE variety in how the interpreted it. And some of them took it very seriously, but some of them only paid lip service to it. So: what ways can the religious and spiritual ideology be manipulated in service of oppression? What wasy can the religious and spiritual ideology be manipulated in the service of liberation? I guarantee you people will be distorting it both ways, in a theocracy. Every possible interest group will have a way to turn religious things to their own advantage, because the stakes are so high. (This is why theocracies tend, over time, to the distortion of the core beliefs that started them.)
In a theocracy, everyone is going to frame their position in terms of theology, but 9 times out of 10 that theology is mostly a veneer over "this is what I want to happen, how do I pull something from the religious traditions/texts to support my argument." It doesn't ACTUALLY mean that people are faithful, just that "scriptural citations" or whatever religious thing is the form the debatae takes.
And there is going to be conflict (both within the religious hierarchy and between the religious hierarcy and the rest of the community) between the people who genuinely are faithful to the spirit of the religion and its ethical and social justice dimensions, and the ones who may also be faithful in their own way but think that "I believe and live out X, and I am a good faithful adherent to my religion, therefore the religion/deity/whatever must conform to the way I think the world should be." And most people are going to fall somewhere in the middle.
Please feel free to comment and ask questions!