What kind of system does feudalism mean?

Feudalism appeared in the Western Zhou Dynasty in China and the Middle Ages in Western Europe. This is a social system based on the hierarchical enfeoffment of the aristocratic ruling class and the possession of land, farmers (or serfs) and other wealth. Its basic forms are feudal hierarchy and manor system. Farmers (or serfs) cultivated the land products of most landlords and paid them to feudal owners. Superstructure is mainly a feudal country characterized by hierarchy. The dominant ideology is to maintain the feudal system and feudal hierarchy and carry forward traditional morality as its main content. Under the feudal system, the basic social classes were feudal lords and peasants (or serfs).

Second, the characteristics of the feudal system:

Under the feudal system, the feudal ownership of land is the basis for feudal owners to rule other classes. The feudal lords oppressed other classes by means of land rent and usury by mastering the land as a factor of production. At the same time, the forms of feudal land ownership are different, such as contract lease and rent payment, but its essence is still an oppressive relationship, and it is the essence of class society that the feudal system will not be changed.

In Chinese mainland for nearly half a century, many people blindly believe that in the Marxist view of history, social forms develop linearly, namely primitive society, slave society, feudal system, capitalist society and finally capitalist society. After accepting the universal principles of Marxism, the history of China must follow the prescription blindly, so it must be the feudal system after Qin Dynasty until the demise of Qing Dynasty. In the feudal society called more than two thousand years, all kinds of backward, decadent and reactionary systems and ideas, habits and even characters are feudal systems, feudal ideas, feudal warlords, feudal superstitions, feudal ignorance, feudal bureaucrats, feudal literati, feudal ethics and so on, all of which belong to the definition of feudalism and are completely out of the direction indicated by the original intention of feudalism.

It's like making a mold first, whether you are suitable or not, and forcing it into it. So China had the theory of "feudal system". After putting it in, it was found that the mold was not suitable for China, so it was redefined.

This view is not accurate, because the "feudal system" in Marxism is actually defined from the perspective of production relations, and this definition has more universal value. The generalization of feudalism is contrary to Marx's feudal principles. Western historians believe that there were two typical and standard feudal societies or regimes in the world. Europe and Japan in the Middle Ages were contrary to China's unified dynasty. Some western sinologists also believe that China had a feudal society in the Zhou Dynasty and a quasi-feudal society in the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties. In a word, feudalism and unification are two completely different social forms. The feudal concept in a broad sense completely confuses unification with feudalism, and brings the autocratic imperial power of unification into the feudal category. Therefore, it is against the purpose to explain feudalism and monarchy together in textbooks.

Marx and Engels' theory of social forms and stages of social development is not the result of the influence of "classical evolution", and there is no contradiction or inconsistency between single line and multi-line. It is the basic theoretical task of historical science to reveal the essence and laws in the process of historical development scientifically. It is not convincing to take historical materialism as the standard to judge the social and historical stage by the nature of productive forces and relations of production, economic base and superstructure, but Bloch's summary of the personality characteristics of the feudal system in western Europe as the standard, thus denying the existence of China's feudal society. It can be seen from the historical facts that the historical stage of China feudal society is undeniable. You can read the articles of Comrade Liu, Liu and Liu.

Third, the social essence of the feudal system:

What fundamentally shook feudal rule was the destruction of its relations of production. Peasant uprising and bourgeois revolution are both class struggles aimed at changing feudal land ownership (and thus changing the whole feudal system). One of the most typical is the basic production relationship of capitalism-wage labor.

The earliest capitalism was born in Italy with developed commodity economy at that time, such as Florence and Venice.

The natural economy representing capitalism is a commodity economy with commodity exchange and commodity production as its core. Because the purpose of production has changed from single satisfaction to providing products to the society, this determines that the relations of production will be different from the original feudal system. Due to the development of commodity economy, the original natural economy was impacted and began to disintegrate. Farmers and craftsmen began to lose the means of production and become the proletariat, and then factory owners, that is, the earliest bourgeoisie, signed employment agreements with them, formed new production relations and hired labor.

With the disintegration of the capitalist economy to the original feudal natural economy, the increasingly powerful bourgeoisie has the ability to eliminate all factors that are contrary to the development of capitalism, such as the ideas of "divine right of nature" and "three cardinal guides and five permanents", and the production structure such as male ploughing and female weaving, and finally overthrow the feudal system and establish a capitalist country.

Four, the disadvantages of the feudal system:

1, autocratic imperial power is easy to form tyranny and corruption, which is a factor that hinders historical development.

2. Ideologically, he is unique, which stifles his thoughts.

3. At the end of centralized society, it hindered the budding development of emerging modern relations of production.

Centralization often leads to the concentration of power on the emperor alone, resulting in absolute monarchy. Because the emperor has supreme power, autocracy often leads to division and chaos, resulting in the autocratic power of eunuchs and consorts. The so-called extreme monarchy means that the imperial power is regarded as the source of all political power, and the authority of the emperor is pushed to an extreme level in a one-sided and extreme way, and officials are turned into private slaves of the emperor.

On the political level, from the perspective of master and slave, a strict political personal attachment relationship between officials and servants was established. In political operation, we should try our best to replace the independent personality of officials with the personal personality of autocratic emperors, replace the right and wrong of officials with the right and wrong of emperors, replace the interests of the country with the interests of emperors, and take the will of emperors as the core of policies and laws. The rule of law, as people usually say, can only be a necessary supplement to the rule of man by autocratic monarchs. As for the bureaucratic system characterized by bureaucrats, it is a huge and rigorous administrative machine under the monarchy.