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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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feudalisms biggest enemy was capitalism. it perfected slavery and organized everyone willingly in exchange for stable trade of goods and services that they otherwise would not have access to. it lead to the industrial revolution, and its fast growth quickly convinced formerly feudal countries (like japan, as an example) to modernize their technological standards, as welll as their economies, so they could participate in that same system. out of fear of being left behind.
obviously capitalism has its flaws, its a horrible system with an expiration date that seems to be only a few short decades away now. and ironically its likely going to be surpassed by techno feudalism, or if a miracle happens, some form of democratic socialism.
Yes you can see this culturally in the old stereotypes about “old money” versus “new money.”
Rich family with a hereditarily passed down fortune, lands, and control = old money = feudalism.
Entrepreneur who came from nothing but tok advantage of emerging economies to become wealthy overnight = new money = capitalism.
Old money hates new money because capitalism dethroned feudalism.
I wouldn't say that feudalism "perfected" slavery. It can be argued that chattel slavery a few centuries later made it more effective.
However, feudalism did well in controlling the food surplus and paying the military at a time when the organizational ability to control wide swaths of land had diminished. Mentioning Japan as an outlier in time, feudalism also brought a lot of political stability by locking down society.
However, as you noted, capitalism was the enemy of feudalism. Capitalism could organize itself in ways that feudalism never could and made capital investments both easier and more lucrative.
In Europe, what ended feudalism wasn't so much a counteracting -ism, but the bubonic plague, which in the first wave wiped out nearly a third of the population, so many people that the remaining peasants' labor was suddenly worth a lot more, giving them much more bargaining power for better wages and working conditions.
See https://chronodigest.com/how-the-black-death-broke-feudalism/
So, you're saying we need a deadly virus that kills a massive chunk of the population? I'll see what I can do.
No, I'm not saying anything about what we need, just providing some historical context around what brought feudalism to an end -- and replaced it with capitalism.
Please don't. Just wash yourself weekly at least please.
DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
Christian feudalism imagined Islam as it's enemy (first thing that popped into my mind, I'm not an expert)
Until you started seeing reformations where the enemy became other kinds of Christianity.
Realistically it's Judaism not Islam.. Islam believes in Jesus, Judaism calls him a false prophet entirely.
Increasing literacy
And showers. Just saying.
Anarchism. It sounds scary and dangerous and insane, because you've been taught to casually believe it is so you shut down your brain about it and back away slowly, but it is the worst enemy of any structure that elevates one person above another. Feudalism certainly included.
It's really about equality, and the abolishment of artificial hierarchy and leadership. But it doesn't sound so scary like that. And the powers that be (which are all on top of said hierarchies) would prefer that you not be too interested in that.
I'm not personally an anarchist per-se, but I do believe it contains some valuable ideas and it deserves a lot more serious consideration and conversation than it gets. (cue: people immediately dogpiling about how bad and stupid it is despite never having studied it at all or been interested in it in any serious way)
Eat the rich, and shit anarchy. It may not solve the world's problems, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't an improvement. Except for the rich, obviously. At this point, fuck them. Crooks, sociopaths, and pedophiles, the lot of them as far as I'm concerned..
Yeah I think if we are like really lucky we get a few awful years of corptocracy collapse as AGI and ASI create post scarcity and we end up with a kind of solar punk anarchy
Plague
It was capitalism but it wasn't as much an opposing force as a subsuming force. There was a strong class contradiction between the landed aristocracy and industrial bourgeoisie that often did lead to revolution most notably in the case of France. The urbanization of the labor force was detrimental to the productive capacity of the landed aristocracy and therefore their economic power/relevance. They protected their position through heavy taxation and regulation of business (regulating the parts that affected them not so much the common people) but the pressures created by the advancment of the means of production necessitated a change of the ruling class's relation to production in that the ruling class must become the industrial bourgeoisie because the economic control they wielded became greater than that of the royalty/aristocracy. As a result the revolutions spawned from the class conflict functioned primarily as a handing over of the keys of power. This is not to say that the conflict between the feudal and capitalist systems was not the primary contradiction of the time but rather to insist no other system transition was feasible under these conditions. I would not call capitalism the enemy of feudalism, rather it was a evolutionary growth of the ruling class in response to changing conditions that sometimes required violent revolution to be accomplished fully.
I hope this is coherent, I was interrupted like 5 times while writing and lost my train of thought. If any clarification or expansion on a detail is needed please ask
coherent! so what you're saying is crown turnt to coin (which in my subcontinent, funnilly enough, are named crowns)
greatly appreciate your effort to write this down, also welcome any further comments for me and others to indulge in =)
There wasn't really any challenge to it because of the absolute nature of the states control and the concept of human rights not really being a thing at that point to n history. The most powerful oppositional forces to the feudal lords were mainly the clergy originally, although they had many shared interests, and eventually the mercent class who was cosmopolitan and traveled and grew up in better circumstances.
Under feudalism around 20% of the population was considered nobility and the rest were peasents, serfs, or coloni. Nobles generally owned all the land and businesses and sometimes had political rights or fiefdoms which were like property that could be passed down.
Medieval societies often used torture, execution, and abuse as well as religious brainwashing to control their subjects. The nobility also guarded knowledge about war and currency and other things, like reading to oppress the subjects who worked the land.
Taxes were generally low. Around 20-25% of their crop. The rights of serfs varied from region to region.
Really the biggest adversary to feudalism was other feudal lords, then the clergy, and at times conspiracies of finance and empires. The feudal kingdoms often aided each other in giving asylum to war criminals or relieving each other from riots, or trying to install friendly nobles in neighboring areas. They often intervened to put back into place other monarchies when they were overthrown.
I don't think there was an -ism that fits this bill. Feudalism's end boss was enlightenment thinking and it had to play the level for a century before it could say it had beat it, at least feudalism in a traditional sense.
Carnival.
elaborate? :o
It was a ritual of social inversion (a fool was crowned king, the ruling class was mocked and identities were concealed, religious and social rules were relaxed, etc.)
There are differing views, but one theory is that it served as a reminder to both lords and commoners that the social order could be overthrown if the lords became too oppressive.
long live jesters jokers clowns !
The Enlightenment & liberalism.
That moral & political philosophy claiming individuals have inherent liberties & are fundamentally equal, government exists for the people, authority is legitimate only when it protects those inherent liberties—the entire point of that was to reject as illegitimate any system of authority of unequal, exclusive power & privileges such as divine right to rule & exclusive hereditary privileges associated with feudalism.
This isn't my area at all but I thought that the traditional picture involved feudalism eroding due to technological development empowering the merchant and industrial classes. In both cases, the serfs or peons didn't get much of a say, but it wasn't really an ideological conflict, more of a natural economic shift.
Capitalism, socialism and communism share the same enemy, greed and leaders without morale.
Instead of downvoting, give me examples where it didn't work out that way 😂