producing-classes

Updated: May 18, 2025

This means something incomparably harsher than the socialistic tyranny of early Greek society: it means religious communism doubled with a military despotism of the most terrible kind. The individual did not legally exist, except for punishment; and from the whole of the producing-classes, whether serfs or freemen, the most servile submission was ruthlessly exacted.

Lafcadio Hearn - Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation