Any serious conversation about socialism has to start with something very basic systems that replace an old order cannot survive by copying it. Feudal rulers could not just rebrand themselves and hope to compete in a world shaped by industry and markets. The productive forces had already moved on. In the same way it makes little sense to claim we are building something beyond capitalism while keeping markets competition profit logic and wage dependence at the center of everything. Calling it market socialism or state capitalism does not magically turn it into a new mode of production. If the underlying structure of accumulation and market compulsion stays intact then what you have is capitalism with new management. Socialism has to mean a real transformation in how production is organized and how surplus is distributed otherwise it is just nostalgia dressed up as innovation and history is not kind to systems that refuse to evolve beyond their time.
Understanding the transition from feudalism to capitalism requires examining how each system organizes production, class relations, and the extraction of surplus. The feudal mode of production was structured around landownership, hereditary hierarchy, and obligations enforced through direct social and political coercion. In contrast, the capitalist mode of production is based on private ownership of capital, wage labor, and market exchange as the central mechanism of economic coordination. By comparing these two systems, we can see not only how economic structures changed, but also how power, freedom, and class relations were fundamentally reorganized in the shift from medieval to modern society.
Here are the core characteristics of the feudal mode of production:
>1. Land is the central means of productionWealth doesn’t primarily come from trade or industry, it comes from land. Whoever controls land controls power.
>2. Lords own the land, peasants work itThe ruling class (lords, nobles) legally controls the land. Peasants (often serfs) work that land to survive.
>3. Surplus is extracted through extra-economic coercionThis is key. The lord doesn’t pay wages. Instead, peasants are obligated to give part of their harvest, labor time, or services. This obligation is enforced by tradition, law, and force, not by a labor contract like in capitalism.
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