history

The question of whether feudalism exists is kind of separate from Marxist consideration. It’s closer to a debate on taxonomy within the biological sciences, where people can’t quite agree if two organisms ought to be considered in the same taxonomical family or if they’re really different. It’s not entirely trivial though, as these groupings can reflect in the minds of the researchers and cause them to perceive things less objectively.

It is true, we should not have a rigid view of feudalism e.g. that there is always a pyramidal political structure between serf and monarch, knights, courts, yada yada. This is irrelevant to feudalism as Marx considered it economically as a system of production relations.

In feudal societies, production was small-scale and largely agrarian. All property rights and political power emanated from a monarch or limited set of rulers. The small-scale and distributed nature of production required a degree of freedom and autonomy for the producers, the serfs, as opposed to slave-based systems of production. Serfs had legal rights, and the people in different parts of the political structure had obligations as such.

As Marx analyzed feudalism, he realized that the contradictions of feudal society eventually lead to its upheaval as it produces an independently wealthy merchant class that eventually attains sufficient political power to emancipate itself from the limitations of the feudal mode of production. This is essentially what happened throughout Europe. And of course the rest is well known — Marx concluded from this that capitalism has a similarly limited lifespan due to the contradiction between wage labor and capital. The fact that so-called feudal societies in Asia had different political peculiarities from those in Europe does not change the basic underlying relations of production as Marx analyzed them.