Marx famously believed that capitalism is actually not at all different from feudalism.

The big distinction between neoliberal capitalism and pre-colonial feudalism tends to revolve around trade/travel liberties. You're always "free to choose" who you buy from and "free to leave" if you don't like your employer. In frontier-era and industrial-era America, this worked out relatively well. Settlers came pouring in from the Old World, driving out the Natives and rapidly funneling into the agricultural and factory economies. As transit costs fell, the rate of migration surged and even the old slave-import system became redundant to the sheer volume of Irish/Eastern Europeans/Asians who "volunteered" to take shit-tier jobs simply to escape the famine and war abroad. In fact, one of the driving oppositional beliefs to slavery stemmed from the theory that black people were artificially constructing the white migrant labor force and denying them economic opportunities.

You could slap "Freedom" on the American billboard and people would buy it simply because it was more appealing to believe we're all here by choice than to recognize that we're all just refugees fleeing one monster by rushing into the cave of another.

In terms of real quality of life, Marx rightly surmised that - over the long term - no material difference could be found. But in terms of propaganda, capitalism is a strictly superior system. The perception of a laisse-faire economy served to reduce the chronic military struggles that ravaged Europe while preserving the aristocracy that benefits from distribution of wealth. Save for the Civil War, we have not seen the kind of Napoleonic/WW-era periods of capital immolation which plagued Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. The durability of the United States as a political unit and the reach of trans-continental corporate bureaucracies seem to form a virtuous (viscous?) cycle.

This is something Marx failed to predict in his initial theories, and one Piketty explores in his more recent works.