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@TruthSandwich @futurebird
Feudalism was terrible, but at the time it was better than everything else that had been tried. That does not mean it'd have been valid to conclude "maybe it's not so terrible".

I don't actually think it's very interesting whether or not people think socialism or communism can work.

I think it's more interesting why people think capitalism can survive, and why they think capitalism is somehow unique in not having failure mode that will eventually end it.

@vidar @TruthSandwich@qoto.org @futurebird What do you mean, better than everything else that had been tried? There were systems of free labor in medieval Europe contemporary with serfdom. There were so many peasants fleeing to cities with free labor that there were rules for how long lords had to fetch the peasants back (a year and a day). There were peripheral regions that never quite adopted manorialism and it was fine; Russia only went manorial as the Early Modern tsardom was reestablishing serfdom.

@Alon @TruthSandwich @futurebird

If you want an argument for why capitalism is better than anything before it that I fully agree with, read chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto. Marx was a massive fanboy of capitalism..

He just expected it to eventually give way to something else, like every preceding system.

Alon

@vidar @TruthSandwich@qoto.org @futurebird Yeah, and he was wrong. Historiography marches on, and at this point historians don't even like talking about feudalism as a thing that existed. There were a lot of coexisting different systems in medieval Europe and while manorialism was the most common, it was deeply parasitic on revenue generated by urban market economies.