I'm not a historian by any means, and Wood's book The Origin of Capitalism was my first on the subject. For those unaware, it's basically a book on the history of capitalism. Also I'm a curious college dropout wondering if this is something I want to study when I return to school (a few years from now).

Ellen Wood, apparently, is a Marxist historian. Now, I'm pretty left wing as it is and I'm aware that it's very easy to have my biases confirmed when what I read aligns with my beliefs, so I wanted to ask you guys if she has any criticism.

I asked /r/communism101 some questions here, which left me still confused but with some reading material. Hopefully you guys can help me out too.

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Some things I learned/My summary of the book is below. Please critique it?

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What capitalism actually is. The private ownership of the means of production integrated into a market such that everything from the land to the worker's labor itself is on the market. This manifests as the trio of the landowner, the capitalist who must pay rent to the landowner, and the worker's who sell their labor to the capitalist. The landowner owns the wealth of the land including the labor of the workers and the processes that make the products.

In feudalism, according to Wood, the land was not on the market, so the serfs didn't have to worry about any foreclosures. To me, I interpreted this as meaning that the serfs owned the means of production, i.e., their land and labor, and that this could have easily went straight into socialism, the worker's control of the means of production. But some people say that capitalism is a stage in history on the way to socialism, which I think is bullshit. I don't see why feudalism could not have gone straight to socialism. Saying that capitalism is a necessary path on the way to socialism seems deterministic. Why does humanity need to go in this linear path? Plus it's degrading to those who were oppressed for centuries to say that they were a necessary sacrifice for those in the future. To me, capitalism makes it even harder to go into socialism since capitalism gets rid of the workers (or serfs) owning the means of production and concentrates wealth and power. In feudalism, yes, some lords owned the serf's land but because it wasn't on the market the lords only really owned it in name while the serfs did everything on the land how they wanted, not how the lord wanted. So because serfs collectively owned the land they would have had a strong community that could have laid the foundation for potential organizing to smash the feudal lord and replace it with something democratic, like a representative democracy, republic, or socialist-anarchism like anarchist Spain (I read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia right before Wood, so I was really primed for this topic).

What is a serf anyway? It's someone who is "tied to the land." What does that mean? It's a disphemism (opposite of euphemism) for the serfs owning their own land and labor. Unlike today when a landlord or bank owns my home, back then I would have had my own land since it was never on the market in the first place.

Feudal lords took wealth and power from the serfs not through economic means but through political means, imposing taxes and stealing. The rich and powerful of today, however, take wealth and power from workers through economic means, as capitalism does it's thing.

Let's see what else... Capitalism was not invented. It just sort of happened in 15th century England in the rural countryside -- NOT the economic centers of 16th to 18th century Europe of Flanders, Paris, or Florentine. Booming mercantilism was not the precedent of capitalism and did not evolve into capitalism. There was no private ownership of the means of production in the big market cities. It in fact was the unusually high concentration of land ownership in 15th century England that resulted in land owners putting prices on their land and selling land on the market.

With capitalists and landowners now controlling worker's labor they could, for the first time, make the productivity increase specifically for getting more wealth.

That's a key difference between feudalism and capitalism. In feudalism the lord took wealth through stealing from the serfs, irrelevant to the market. In capitalism the landowner wants to compete on the market so instead of just taking from his workers he also makes them work more efficiently to make a better product that will bring in more profit.

With landowners making their workers more efficient (through technology, forced labor, etc.), the commons (non-capitalist parts) of countryside England couldn't make their products compete with the capitalists parts. So since the commons people couldn't sell their products they started losing their means of living, and they sold their land and their labor to the capitalists to survive. There's a great quote Wood uses, "If capitalism is about freedom then why are there market forces?" It's the capitalist market that forced the commons people to sell their land and labor to the capitalist. And so capitalism is inherently infectious as it out-competes the commons, the people who don't need to make their land as productive as possible.

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Thank you very much, I'm excited to learn as much as I can about this topic! Any book suggestions on what to read next would be very appreciated!