Comparing 500 century Italy and 19th century Russia is kind of idiotic. Other then that we use the same general word, the political systems are really not that

Comparing 500 century Italy and 19th century Russia is kind of idiotic. Other then that we use the same general word, the political systems are really not that similar. I dislike how people use feudalism as a vague catchall for everything that came before British Capitalism. This is just one of those idioitc theory Marx came up with that has no basis in reality. His theories were not even correct for Britain and he had extremely limited knowlage about the world. But he still was arrogant enough to believe he could deduce 'general laws of history' based on these extremely limited examples from British history (that weren't even correct or complete). But no matter how wrong Marx are, we now must forever pull out the 'feudalism' card anytime somebody dislikes something. Despite historians not even agreeing on what 'feudalism' actually means. European medievalists generally talk about feudalism in a narrow way of how lords would agree to contracts with knights. Global historians tend to use feudalism more as a catch all land ownership by the nobility. > Serfs were effectively slaves Serfs were not one thing. The thing we call 'serfs' had many meanings that changed over 100s of years and was different in each region and depended on that countries specific context. The laws around serfdom were constantly shifting. And beyond the actual laws, we know that very often the real world didn't actually reflect the laws. Making any general statements about serfs simply doesn't make sense. Just as it doesn't make sense to talk about slaves as one thing.