Good question. Not sure if I have a great answer but I have some thoughts.

I see the temptation to say that we’re heading back into – or are already back in – feudalism. The ruling class is decadent. Landlords rule like tyrants, deciding whether you are welcome in a city, whether you can have kids or pets, whether you can afford to eat. Employers are the same. It’s bleak. But this decadence, tyranny, and impoverishment is not just a feature of feudalism but of class society.

Libs find this abstraction hard to understand because for a brief period, in some few parts of the world, the living standards of the working class increased. We might argue over whether the workers in the ‘international community’ are proletariat or labour aristocracy, etc, but if they live off a wage, ‘working class’ is sufficient, here. For working class libs, capitalism remains the hopeful vision of enlightenment luminaries.

They have some evidence to back it up, as well, as the promises began to be fulfilled from the 50s. Sure, I’d say it only lasted till the 70s, if that, but when has reality ever stopped the libs from exercising their imagination to resolve contradictions in their worldview? Now they’re seeing what Marxists always saw. They have two options: this is capitalism; or this is feudalism. Libs lack the framework to understand both as class society – by definition they don’t do class analysis (otherwise they’d be Marxists). As they can’t criticise capitalism or see its flaws, it must be feudalism.

(If it’s not this, we might also hear that, ‘No, no, this is crony capitalism or corporatism’, as if capitalism has yet to be tried – funny how generous libs can be when it comes to capitalist ‘experiments’, but never with socialist ones.)

That brings us to text recommendations. One difficulty is that much of what’s out there compares feudalism with capitalism or looks at the internal dynamics of capitalism and looks at how it has developed into late-stage i.e. monopoly finance capitalism. You may have to look at comparisons between feudalism and early capitalism, then early and late capitalism.

Maybe Cockshott, Muad’s suggestion, gives that expansive view. Otherwise, while I can’t say for certain because it’s only been collecting dust on my shelf, Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times could have the answer you’re looking for, although you may need to read the second one, too, to really get into the ‘finance capitalism’ and the future-looking part of his thesis: Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century.

There are articles map the transition, e.g.: Astarita, ‘Karl Marx and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’. (I’ve not read this but this journal is good.)

I quite liked Wallerstein’s Historical Capitalism, which looks a little at the transition and emphasises that it was not a clean swap – not feudalism one day, capitalism the next, but a slow-ish transformation. That’s partly why the feudal aristocracy is still with us and still in control in some countries; they merged with the rising capitalists. That’s why so many US bourgeois have aristocratic heritage.

Hinds and Hirst (1975) wrote Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production as a corrective to the lack of a systematic treatment of the subject in Marx/ists’ work. They followed this up with ‘an auto-critique’, Mode of Production and Social Formation: An Auto-Critique of Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. In the earlier book, there are chapters on: primitive communism, the ‘ancient mode of production’, slavery, the ‘“Asiatic” mode of production’, feudalism, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View also touches on this subject. IIRC, it’s more historical (as in not modern) than you might be looking for.

As for comparing these works with imperialism, you have Lenin’s Imperialism. Although it’s prescient, it’s a little dated. You might have more fun with someone like Christophers. His Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy and Who Pays for It? could be what you’re looking for. I only know the outline from a talk he gave, which I think is summarised in ‘Class, Assets and Work in Rentier Capitalism’ (open access) if you want a flavour of his work. At the least, you’ll see from this that rent =/= feudalism.

I enjoyed his other book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. In fact, that one could be perfect for you as it shows that the enclosure never stopped, but also that it’s clearly capitalists, not ‘feudal lords’ who are doing the enclosure today.

And if you’re thinking, ‘omg, redtea, all that is so last year Eurocentric’, you could try Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. It came highly rated to me as a book that maps out the key debates in this area (of which the above texts are some examples), and argues that if we truly want to understand where modern capitalism comes from, we can’t just look at the transition from European feudalism. We also need to understand the rest of the world – ‘Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the Asian colonies and bourgeois revolutions’.

I think the confusion about “feudalism is rent” stems from a lack of understanding about what capitalism is and what feudalism is. Feudalism is a very different mode of production: serfs were tied to their lords, but lords also had duties towards their serfs. This essay talks about what changed from feudalism to capitalism, which is something everyone in the 19th century was very aware of. Today, feudalism is so long ago that we have a hard time even conceiving of something that isn’t capitalism. (And so we come up with bizarre, indefensible definitions like “feudalism is when rent.”)

Marx lays out in Capital that rent, profits and interest are all crystallized surplus-value, i.e., all of them are capital:

Capital, therefore, is not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over labour. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent) it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labour. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people’s unpaid labour. (Capital Vol 1)

This point is really important to him, as he tells Engels:

The best points in my book are: 1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter; 2. the treatment of surplus-value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc. This will be made clear in the second volume especially.

Something novel about Marx’s books is that they look at capital from labour’s perspective, which I wrote about here. There are scenarios in which the difference between rent and interest and profit are meaningful. But for the sake of the liberation of workers from the oppression of capital, they are all the same:

In fact, the form of interest and profit of enterprise assumed by the two parts of profit, i.e., of surplus-value, expresses no relation to labour, because this relation exists only between labour and profit, or rather the surplus-value as a sum, a whole, the unity of these two parts. The proportion in which the profit is divided, and the different legal titles by which this division is sanctioned, are based on the assumption that profit is already in existence. If, therefore, the capitalist is the owner of the capital on which he operates, he pockets the whole profit, or surplus-value. It is absolutely immaterial to the labourer whether the capitalist does this, or whether he has to pay a part of it to a third person as its legal proprietor. (Capital vol 3)

Good vid from paul cockshott on feudal economics. It’s from his book how the world works

I’d like to read the discussion this generates…

Have you read Roderic Day’s thoughts on the subject? Idk about books beyond the classic Capital.