"Actual sea-battles were rare, and even then were fought close to shore.
Ships were roped together in lines to face an enemy fleet and showers of
arrows and missiles would have been exchanged. Each side then resorted
to hand-to-hand fighting as they attempted to board their opponents'
ships. The warriors in the prow were specially selected for this task.
The aim was not to destroy enemy craft, but to capture them if possible,
as they represented a considerable investment in time, resources and
labour."
BBC
This description of the Vikings not destroying enemy ships due to their value made me recall Toffler's theories on Transience and the Throw-Away Society:
"Anti-materialists tend to deride the importance of "things." Yet things
are highly significant, not merely because of their functional utility,
but also because of their psychological impact. We develop relationships
with things. Things affect our sense of continuity or discontinuity.
They play a role in the structure of situations and the foreshortening
of our relationships with things accelerates the pace of life."
Future Shock, Chapter 4
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There is another interesting correlation to the Vikings of yesterday and the disposable goods economy of today. In the days of the Vikings, a built ship was an investment in time and labor. Obviously, capturing a well-built ship was part of the investment in war. To them, it was less labor intensive and thus "cheaper" to capture a ship someone else had built than to spend time finding resources and materials, and building their own. But, labor does not exist in a vacuum. Labor was being expended, but it is the Vikings who eventually profit from it, not the original laborers. Much in the same way the disposable goods economy works now. Laborers build disposable goods to earn a paycheck to buy disposable goods. The margin of profit is then consumed by upper management. Meanwhile, they find new ways to make their products more disposable thus ensuring a higher profit margin. (That's what they get paid for after all.) This results in the enslavement of laborers to menial work and a consumer existence. Who are the Vikings now? Is it too much of a pun to say the Vikings were capitalists because they capitalized on the labor of others?
ReplyDeleteIt does open a whole can of worms. We outsource labor for cheap goods we don't even need. Have you ever been into a dollar store? Who needs half that shit? I wonder if the Vikings would have destroyed dollar stores...would they have been able to loot a dollar store and come away with anything of value?
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