It seems substantially more similar than different. Serfs work land they dont own in return for payment. What am i missing?
EDIT - thanks everyone for the answers
Feudalism had social bonds, bonds to the land, responsibilities. The lord had a right to the peasant’s labour, but a responsibility to protect his subjects. The serf had a right to work his land, but a responsibility to give some portion of the output to the lord. As shitty as it might have been, peasants had a home and a piece of land. However, the mode of production wasn’t very efficient, and the society wasn’t “free”.
Capitalism is freedom run rampant. There are no social bonds, no responsibilities between human beings. The freedom to seek profit is the only driving factor. You work a job temporarily, live in a rented place, never talk to your neighbours. Most people have no ties to the land, no ties to each other, because we are all in a constant state of flux, churned in the rapids of capital’s need for constant profit, constant growth. And god knows nobody has a responsibility to protect us from the capitalists.
Thats interesting. I never really thought of feudalism as more communal for some reason.
Part 9 of Marx's Value, Price, and Profit (note: much shorter and less intimidating than Capital) discusses the distinctions between capitalism, feudalism, and slavery.
I've pasted the full text of that section below:
We must now return to the expression, “value, or price of labour.” We have seen that, in fact, it is only the value of the labouring power, measured by the values of commodities necessary for its maintenance. But since the workman receives his wages after his labour is performed, and knows, moreover, that what he actually gives to the capitalist is his labour, the value or price of his labouring power necessarily appears to him as the price or value of his labour itself. If the price of his labouring power is three shillings, in which six hours of labour are realized, and if he works twelve hours, he necessarily considers these three shillings as the value or price of twelve hours of labour, although these twelve hours of labour realize themselves in a value of six shillings. A double consequence flows from this.
Firstly. The value or price of the labouring power takes the semblance of the price or value of labour itself, although, strictly speaking, value and price of labour are senseless terms.
Secondly. Although one part only of the workman's daily labour is paid, while the other part is unpaid, and while that unpaid or surplus labour constitutes exactly the fund out of which surplus value or profit is formed, it seems as if the aggregate labour was paid labour.
This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing.
Take, on the other hand, the peasant serf, such as he, I might say, until yesterday existed in the whole of East of Europe. This peasant worked, for example, three days for himself on his own field or the field allotted to him, and the three subsequent days he performed compulsory and gratuitous labour on the estate of his lord. Here, then, the paid and unpaid parts of labour were sensibly separated, separated in time and space; and our Liberals overflowed with moral indignation at the preposterous notion of making a man work for nothing.
In point of fact, however, whether a man works three days of the week for himself on his own field and three days for nothing on the estate of his lord, or whether he works in the factory or the workshop six hours daily for himself and six for his employer, comes to the same, although in the latter case the paid and unpaid portions of labour are inseparably mixed up with each other, and the nature of the whole transaction is completely masked by the intervention of a contract and the pay received at the end of the week. The gratuitous labour appears to be voluntarily given in the one instance, and to be compulsory in the other. That makes all the difference.
In using the word “value of labour,” I shall only use it as a popular slang term for “value of labouring power."
To summarize the argument:
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At first glance, the capitalist appears to fully compensate the wage-worker for their labor output, but if that were the case, the capitalist (on average) couldn’t make a profit! (Marx is working from what appears to be a Ricardian model which implicitly assumes perfectly competitive markets with long-run equilibrium commodity prices throughout this text, so the effects of oligopoly and imperialism on commodity prices aren’t considered). The reality is that the average capitalist is only required to pay a wage equal to a subsistence wage, the value corresponding to and which is needed to sustain an average worker’s labor-power (the term Marx uses in place of what bourgie economists might call human capital).
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Under a slave system, the kayfabe and reality are inverted: the slave doesn’t receive any explicit compensation for their labor from the master; but the reality is that the slave must implicitly receive compensation from the master, in the form of paying for the slave’s living costs.
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Feudalism by comparison is a more transparent and naked form of surplus-value extraction. There’s a clear and explicit spatial and temporal distinction between the labor-time a serf does on their own land to feed themself, and the labor-time done on the lord’s land whose fruits go to the lord.
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In all cases, the member of the exploited class renders a quantity of labor y=s+w, where s is the surplus gained by the exploiter and w is the exploited person’s compensation, bounded below by the minimum living cost/subsistence wage c. The capitalist pretends that the wage w equals the total output y (when in reality c<=w<y), claiming their profit comes from somewhere else; the slave’s master pretends that w=0 when w=c always holds; and the lord explicitly designates w and s separately.
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man that's really interesting. the value form makes sense. so the "positive" from changing to capitalism is the bounty capitalism creates. and some of the things lost were the security of the land and the help of the guilds?