What is the advantage of a society using a fuedal system both politically and economically...

oh, you're a troll.

Lost

Not him, but hes not wrong(what is the Great Divergence). Well aside from the muslim wuz science n shit.

>People talk how fuedalism was terrible but is it worse than Communism?
Yes, you'd much rather live in a Communist society than a feudal one. There's a reason why the Reds beat the Whites even though basically the entire western world was allied with the status quo.

Feudalism is what you get when your society is literally too poor to support any but the smallest cities, and everyone lives as legally indentured servants to a rural landlord in exchange for basic living needs.

The advantage of feudalism is that it's extremely difficult to conquer a feudal state, it's decentralized enough that individual lords or alliances of them can keep up the fight even when the central bureaucracy can't, plus your entire country is so impoverished that it simply isn't cost effective for a foreign power to conquer and hold it. That's not really much of an "advantage" though, more of a silver lining for living in a society too poor to be worth the effort to conquer.

The disadvantages is that your government is really just a private collection of landlords who blatantly rig the economy to keep themselves sequestered at the very top, who actively work to stifle economic development because it would threaten their base of power by allowing cities with a powerful intellgensia to grow and start to question why the only permissible society is one where backwoods rednecks have absolute indisputable authority over the entire working population

what did he mean by this

>and everyone lives as legally indentured servants to a rural landlord
But they don't.

>The disadvantages is that your government is really just a private collection of landlords who blatantly rig the economy to keep themselves sequestered at the very top, who actively work to stifle economic development because it would threaten their base of power by allowing cities with a powerful intellgensia to grow and start to question why the only permissible society is one where backwoods rednecks have absolute indisputable authority over the entire working population

Which is why Germany was full of free cities, and the Hungarian crown invited Germans ot settle and create more of them.

No, wait, Bela did that because they brought better technology to improve the economoy, and later turned to it was a way of improving his nations ability to defeat the mongols.

>The advantage of feudalism is that it's extremely difficult to conquer a feudal state, it's decentralized enough that individual lords or alliances of them can keep up the fight even when the central bureaucracy can't,

You have absolutely no idea how war works, do you?

How long do you think it took the Normans to conquer the saxons, user?

Feudalism a method of arranging labor. Nobody woke up one day and though "let's all become a feudal state!" they become that way because the government got in over its head and in its crumbling condition can no longer maintain the public safety net, so people flood into the countryside selling their labor in exchange for basic living needs like food and shelter, leaving only tiny cities populated mostly by skilled tradesmen and bureaucrats.

The defining feature of feudalistic states is that the serfs are legally obligated to provide their manor lords with labor. That means in a strictly lawful sense, the manor lord owns their labor, verses a slave where the person themselves is the lawful property of their lord, verses Capitalism where free men sell their labor to whomever they want in exchange for a wage.

>Which is why Germany was full of free cities...
What you are describing is Germany in the Early Modern Era, well after feudalism had declined in the west and was replaced by a state which, while still heavily decentralized, was not a true feudal state but one in the process of transitioning into capitalism.

>You have absolutely no idea how war works, do you?
Why do you think Napoleon had so much trouble in Russia? Or why Romans weren't able to steamroll the Sassanid Persians even though they captured and sacked its capital multiple times?

War is a racket. It's rich people spending the lives of working people in order to enrich themselves at the public trough. If the economic incentive for war is not there, nobody has any reason to fight it. When people get hopped up on bullshit and forget this simple, basic truth about organized violence, they let themselves get suckered into highly cost-ineffective wars which ruin their country financially.

>Normans to conquer the saxons
It took William the Conqueror quite some time to fully cement his hold on power, and only after an exceptionally ruthless campaign of suppression against the indigenous landed aristocracy.

And being that it took place before the concept of nationalism, their government was a collection of wealthy families plotting against one another for supreme authority, which creates exactly these sort of military shit-shows which would make you not want to live in a feudal state

>Why do you think Napoleon had so much trouble in Russia?
It's a sparsely populated shithole with terrible roads, poor forage, and a very low population density mixed with a fucking brutal winter.

Hitler had the same fuckign issues, are we going to claim feudalism caused that as well?

>took quite some time
William was wearing the crown in two months.

Subsequent revolts were consistently put down within a year of starting and were NEVER the sort of continuous resistance you imply. The loss of the king and his huscarls broke the saxons and caused a near immediate surrender.

And there's:
>plus your entire country is so impoverished that it simply isn't cost effective for a foreign power to conquer and hold it.
Yes, that's why William lost money on england.

>why Romans weren't able to steamroll the Sassanid Persians even though they captured and sacked its capital multiple times?
Becuase they couldn't project enough power to do so, or hold it. The terrain in the area is fucking awful.

Do you know why the armenians were so important, user?
They were important because ONE FUCKING PRINCELING, with a shitty stone tower and a dozen men, could completely and utterly close a pass and hold it indefinitely. The larger passes were nothing more than ambushes waiting to happen. Any other route means you cede initiative entirely to the sassanids, as they will ALWAYS hold the advantage in cavalry, and they were entirely willing to use scorched earth tactics to fuck your army over.

And more importantly, rome never held the city for any length of time. They couldn't, as they were too far from reinforcement or resupply.

Taking an empires capital doesn't guarantee it falls except in shitty video games. This simple fact is the literal reason Hannibal didn't bother trying to take Rome when he had the chance.

Its neither better nor worse. It was simply the most effective system in the time and places it was in effect.

Technology and industry did not come about until after the protestant revolution and the end of feudalism.

Arguably this was related to Christians cherry picking around the usury rules so modern capitalism could start proper.

Also technology allows for the centralization of authority which removes the ability to have independent nobles.

What good is a castle if the king can just bring some cannons?

>It's a sparsely populated shithole with terrible roads, poor forage, and a very low population density mixed with a fucking brutal winter.
which is exactly the sort of places where you get feudal states, and why Russian feudalism held on for as long as it did. They have a way of mutating once society expands beyond a certain complexity and people grow tired of being ruled by a committee of wealthy farmers.

>Hitler had the same fuckign issues, are we going to claim feudalism caused that as well?
No, Hitler's issue was severely underestimating the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union and their ability to raise and equip fresh soldiers. The winter sure wasn't helping, but it was German arrogance and lack of intelligence gathering which is why they got their ass kicked, where a generation earlier in WWI they steamrolled Russia

>William was wearing the crown in two months.
Politics in those days was a game of backing the right family member. William had a reasonably legitimate claim to the English throne.

>Yes, that's why William lost money on england.
Poorfags conquering other poorfags. Western Europe would not be relevant politically or economically until the 15th and 16th centuries

>Becuase they couldn't project enough power to do so, or hold it. The terrain in the area is fucking awful.
And yet the Hellenic successor states had no problem occupying Achaemenid Persia, because it was fary more centralized and wealthy

>Taking an empires capital doesn't guarantee it falls except in shitty video games. This simple fact is the literal reason Hannibal didn't bother trying to take Rome when he had the chance.
It does when your economy is so developed and complex that it can't function without its permanent power base. And the reason why Hannibal never took Rome was because sieges were brutal even for the besieger, and his army would have starved because he couldn't readily re-supply due to Rome's domination of the sea.

Name three significant technological innovations during the feudal age within Europe.

heavy plow, 3 field crop rotation, vertical windmills

This was a time when 90%+ of the population were farmers, technology wasn't like what we are familiar with but it was very important for progress.

>which is exactly the sort of places where you get feudal states
Now explain why china had long feudal periods.

>The winter sure wasn't helping, but it was German arrogance and lack of intelligence gathering which is why they got their ass kicked
Yes, i'm sure the fact that they literally couldn't move supplies forward to the point where men were fighting in summer uniforms year round, with constant fuel shortages wasn't the primary factor.

>Western Europe would not be relevant politically or economically until the 15th and 16th centuries
And yet Egypt was, despite being another feudal state.

>And yet the Hellenic successor states had no problem occupying Achaemenid Persia, because it was fary more centralized and wealthy
Because they literally moved their populations east, you absolute faggot.

Blast furnaces.

>Now explain why china had long feudal periods.
>"The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity"

Centralized states have this problem where over the course of about 250 years their government gets taken over by conservatives which stifle reform and throttles the economy in the interest of propping up the corrupt status quo financing them, and occasionally the decline is so steep that the central bureaucracy crumbles and regional property-owners become politically ascendant.

>Yes, i'm sure the fact that they literally couldn't move supplies forward to the point where men were fighting in summer uniforms year round, with constant fuel shortages wasn't the primary factor.
Yes, those were factors, but they were also factors in WWI, which the Germans won. The principle flaw of Operation Barbarossa was poor intelligence gathering.
youtube.com/watch?v=A_3R-Rkn_98&t=244s

>And yet Egypt was, despite being another feudal state.
Egypt was something slightly different: a hydraulic despotism. The central bureaucracy monopolized trade along the Nile and could throttle disobedient provinces by throttling river trade. Like China it swung through periods of centralization and periods of decentralization because it too, started out as a hydraulic despotism.

>Because they literally moved their populations east, you absolute faggot.
Feeling salty, are we? There's no reason we can't keep this discussion civilized.

And no, there was no mass movement of Hellenes to the east: the Ptolemaics and the Seleucids were Greek ruling dynasties which integrated into their regional cultures.

>And no, there was no mass movement of Hellenes to the east:
Yeah, aside from 2/3rds of the Macedonians, along with the various colonists from the city states.

Limited manpower due to massive migration east was a major factor in the inability of macedon to deal with rome.

>Yeah, aside from 2/3rds of the Macedonians, along with the various colonists from the city states.
citation needed, and even still you're talking about a drop in the bucket demographically.

Contrary to popular misconception, ethnographic make-up of Europe and MENA haven't changed a whole lot since antiquity. "Rape-babies" is a meme and gross over-exaggeration.

>Limited manpower due to massive migration east was a major factor in the inability of macedon to deal with rome.
No, their chronic manpower problems were the same all over the Hellenic world, even in places which weren't actively exporting colonists like Sparta: Greeks had a very jealous, xenophobic citizenship model where the only way to make a new citizen was for two previously existing citizens to have a baby, and most of the work being done in society was done by permanent second class citizens. This made it so that a Greek city-state could be crippled militarily for an entire generation if they suffered a single hard defeat, because it was so difficult for them to replace fallen soldiers. That's why Greek warfare was heavily ritualized and "genteel", they were trying to minimize casualties and be content with incremental profit-fueled conquest.

Romans had a system of tiered citizenship which was constantly bringing new peoples under the Roman hegemony, and yesterday's defeated and enslaved barbarians were today's servants and freedmen, and tomorrow's citizens and legionaries. Plus they had this attitude where wars were fought to be won, not fought for glory or profit, so not only were they demographically capable of weathering brutal military losses, they were politically and socially capable of weathering them, as well.

>windmills
The windwheel of the Greek engineer Heron of Alexandria in the first century is the earliest known instance of using a wind-driven wheel to power a machine

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill#Windmills_in_antiquity

>heavy plow
The Romans achieved the heavy wheeled mouldboard plough in the late 3rd and 4th century AD, when archaeological evidence appears, inter alia, in Roman Britain.[

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough#History

>No, their chronic manpower problems were the same all over the Hellenic world,
Macedon literally hit a point of being able to levy less than 30, 000 men, as a DIRECT RESULT of the populace moving east. This isn't even vaguely debatable. Every single diadochi encouraged immigration, and then built their armies around Hellenic settlers. The same fucking armies they used to control the area and rule the locals.

>you're talking about a drop in the bucket demographically.
Doesn't fucking matter. All that matters is the presence of a military manpower pool in the local area that will allow you to exert control and thus rule.

Something Rome didn't have, and something Alexander and his successors actively cultivated because they knew it was a prerequisite to controlling the places they'd conquered.

>Greeks had a very jealous, xenophobic citizenship model where the only way to make a new citizen was for two previously existing citizens to have a baby

More importantly, hellenic manpower became limited because their population literally spread over and area stretching from Gaul to India, and then proceeded to engage in constant large scale warfare, not because of citizenship issues.

Citizenship by inheritance worked fucking fine for growing their populations beofre this.

More importantly:
>Romans had a system of tiered citizenship which was constantly bringing new peoples under the Roman hegemony, and yesterday's defeated and enslaved barbarians were today's servants and freedmen, and tomorrow's citizens and legionaries
Fucking. Wrong. Not until after the social war, and even then, it would be centuries before people outside of Italy received citizenship en masse.

Citizenship in the republic was a matter of birth, full stop.

>Plus they had this attitude where wars were fought to be won, not fought for glory or profit,
Yes, that's why they sacked epirus at the end of the third macedonian war.

Are there any parties or movements that want to change back to feudalism from capitalism? It's the superior economic system afterall.

Communism is objectively more effective. There are still communist nations. There are no feudal ones.

>Every single diadochi encouraged immigration, and then built their armies around Hellenic settlers.
Which they lorded over as a tiny, privileged minority, the ancient version of Rhodesia. And like Rhodesia their societies were fundamentally unstable, and de-Hellenization was quite thorough when people began turning on their Greek overlords

>All that matters is the presence of a military manpower pool in the local area that will allow you to exert control and thus rule.
what matters is that one bad military defeat and your manpower pool is crippled for a generation, because you keep driving away citizens without making new ones. Even Spartans had this problem, and they did not engage in wide spread immigration. Romans never had this problem despite continuously expanding to a vastly larger state than any Hellenic one.

>Something Rome didn't have, and something Alexander and his successors actively cultivated because they knew it was a prerequisite to controlling the places they'd conquered.
Rome brought the rule of law to its citizens and build a vastly more durable society, which maintained its Roman identity for centuries, in some cases to this day. Romans didn't care which culture or ethnicity you were, as long as you paid your taxes and kept the peace, even a Jew like Saul of Tarsus.

>Citizenship by inheritance worked fucking fine
Greek city states were suffering from population issues long before large scale Hellenization, which is why early hoplite warfare was basically a shoving match between two blocks of infantry that was strictly moderated by heralds. When a side began to clearly lose they'd raise their spears in surrender, and the opposing city would take them prisoner and ransom them back to their families. They did this because population growth was simply too slow for them to weather excessive casualties so they had heavily ritualized warfare, even the Hellenic city-states which weren't shipping colonists overseas

Feudalism is about spreading the military burden out in an effective manner that doesn't bankrupt the central authority. You give a bunch of people rights and force them to retain armies for your use.. and more often than that, theirs. It's only real advantage is that a feudal state can levy a lot more soldiers than almost any other type until levy en mass in the Napoleonic Era. It has no economic benefits.