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Communes w/ no real government or class structure
Yeah, that's what upper-class Hobbits like the Bagginses want you to think.
With a literal servant class that does all the actual work, no less.
The reality is there isn't a "left" in Tolkien, even under the original definition from the French Revolution, it's monarchism all the way down because at the end of the day he was a pretty firm monarchist making a pseudo-Catholic fantasy setting.
Sorry, missed that part of the book and movies. When do we meet the servant class that works for the Baggins' and the other ruling class Hobbits?
Sam is Frodo's gardener despite Frodo having no job. Neither did Bilbo have a job and Baggins were referred to as aristocracy along with Brandybucks and Tooks.
And I believe Frodo became mayor of either Hobbiton or the entire Shire before he left for the Grey Havens at the end of ROTK. Could be misremembering, though
I bet the Hobbits were involved in dealing pipeweed to destabilize low-income Gondorian communities
I think hobbits actually accelerated the start of war with their pipeweed dealings with Saruman. It's easy to manipulate a man after you got him hooked
We might be moving out of CIA territory and into The Protocols of the Elders of the Shire territory...
Just as with the Ferengi in Star Trek, actual Humanity aligns far more with Orcs than it does in universe humanity.
Don’t you slander the ferengi like that! Their economic system is mega fucked, but it is at least honest about that and consistent.
They have a specific code of (business) conduct they for the most part always adhere to, and no ferengi will cry foul when someone else fucks them over as long as it’s done according to the rules.
And as Quark points out in that one episode, we did and do a bunch of barbaric things the ferengi never did because they wouldn’t go that far, like slavery and genocide.
The Ferengi totally do slavery, they just lie to themselves about indentured servitude and jobs that pay less than a living wage being not-slavery.
That's the fun mental trick slavers have used since slavery has existed:
"Slavery can't be bad if you don't consider the class of people you enslave to be people at all."
that's not really slavery, since the feeeemales aren't/weren't allowed to work outside of the household
on the one side it was meant as a "but that's different" parodie, but there are some differences between slavery in history and the way ferengi treat freeeemales
Hobbits
Hobbits lived in feudalism, Baggins was aristocracy.
Stop trying to make anarcho-tolkienism or anarcho-feudalism happen, it's not happening. And political compass memes are horrible intrinsically.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/tolkiens-feudal-socialism
Hobbits lived in feudalism
Feudalism is when free individuals elect a central magistrate with little real power beyond conflict resolution, and the more free individuals there are, the more feudal it is.
Hear me out. Dwarves are actually communists and not serfs in an absolute primogeniture monarchy. Here is how and why: Once the dwarven guilds/unions had distributed the wealth produced by dwarven labour evenly among the dwarves, they realized they were already in a post scarcity utopia. Now, they started diggy digging just for fun and named one person king as a joke so they had an excuse to forge exquisite regalia, coins and other stuff. At some point they just started putting it in a hole so they could make space for new creations.
In England, that word was used as a polite honorific, a forerunner to "mister" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_(form_of_address)
Yes, it's common in most English speaking countries, but Samwise is literally an employee of the Shire Baggins.
The Gamgees are of a lower social class than the Baggins. Samwise' father, The Old Gaffer, also worked at Bag End. Frodo has generational wealth, not just from Bilbos adventure with the Dragon, but his Mother was well-to-do also. Bilbo and Frodo had servants, groundskeepers, and housekeepers. That doesn't even include the party staff they hired on.
He also calls himself "your Sam", and Frodo is called his master even when the narrator is speaking:
he had stuck to his master all the way; that was what he had chiefly come for, and he would still stick to him. His master would not go to Mordor alone.
It’s still used (even in the US) by older people for boys not yet of age. My grandma, who died in 2009 and would have been 103 this April, would send me birthday cards addressed to “Master [root_beer]” when I was a kid.
Even conservatives are like "damn, I could get me some of that social anarchy/libertarianism.
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Definitely “elves”. As an east coast educated elitist snob, I do believe I know what’s best for those orcs and dwarves in the red states