Has any capitalist state fell back to feudalism? Reading Marx I get the sense that once a change in the mode of production happens it does not reverse and this is what we see from the most developed areas entering capitalism. If this is the case then failed AES states didn't actually change their mode of production and the possibility that socialism just as every other change in the MoP can still only come from the most advanced areas of society.
30 posts and 3 image replies omitted.>>2886524Those Italian city-states did not have a Capitalist Mode of Production, which starts with a restructuring of agricultural lands. They were only proto-capitalist in the sense of being dominated by merchant capital. But merchant capital has existed and has played major roles in society since the earliest societies recorded in history.
one could argue that we are in a state of feudalism right now. everything is owned by a few huge corporations that don't really have any competition, consumer agency is pretty much non-existent, we don't really buy goods or services anymore we just pay rent for access to them and the rent is constantly going up and we have nowhere else to go to find a better deal, and the same goes for our jobs that we rely on for everything, our employers dole out the minimum amount of money they can get away with paying us for our work and we cannot form unions or have any kind of leverage because our employers are hyperwealthy multinationals who can hire scabs from anywhere in the world to replace us, and now even conjure up non-human scabs to replace us spun up by some even bigger and more evil tech corporation.
>>2885942I think with that level centralization and state direction of economy its closer to an Asiatic mode of production than feudalism. Think the Qin dynasty.
The American South had feudalism until mechanized cotton picking machines. Not all the feudal lords were white, some were black. The white land lords (referred to as "the man", this is where this idiom comes from) would cheat sharecroppers of their labor, often extracting 90-95% of profit through exploiting illiteracy, innumeracy, and exacting political violence against organizers. The black feudal landlords sometimes did the opposite, funding schools and paying sharecroppers half profits. However, when these sharecroppers got their payments (all at once for the whole year,) often they would just buy a car a drive off to a city up north or out west somewhere.
Afghanistan