What do you see as the difference between "unbridled capitalism" and feudalism?

Wallerstein argues that the current world system started with you guys. I am not about to lecture a Dutchman on Dutch history so you tell me - what set the Dutch East India Company apart from Spain under Isabella and Ferdinand? Tell me about the Dutch Republic - what were the social structures in place that set it apart from monarchy?

Here's something I've concluded that I don't like - Capitalism supports the Pareto Principle. There will be wealth concentration. Enclosure was the principle process by which feudal England became capitalist England, be a rich asshole and kick people off their ancestral homelands. The US followed suit, of course, with added genocide. In a capitalist system, those with the gold make the rules. What separates capitalist tyranny from feudal tyranny, however, is upward mobility. If the capitalists do not balance out their desire to be Isabel dos Santos with their fear of becoming Isabel dos Santos, the collectivists will strike it all down. But if you can keep them griping about how unfair it is but also give them an opportunity to rise a little higher than their peers, they will shut the fuck up.

However, social democracy and in particular wealth redistribution through serious taxation creates the much more preferable social order whereby there's a less rich top x%, but the rest of us plebs has enough of a social safety net that innovation can come from a much larger portion of the society.

Innovation definitely increases in direct proportion to social mobility. Societal well-being does, too. But wealth continues to concentrate, and as the wealthy grow more and more detached from the proletariat they favor their own ends over societal stability more and more. Wealth corrupts, absolute wealth corrupts absolutely. The gilded age led directly to the depression which led directly to populism. Germany, Italy and Japan elected fascists, America elected a socialist (at least by modern definition). Socialism (at least by modern definition) won, and the pendulum swung the other way. Then Thatcher and Reagan took the reigns and it was all fuckin' over for socialism. Then we ended up with Trump and Johnson. What happens next?

Which is beneficial for all of us, and also for capitalism in the long run, but isn't a system that has the evolutionary strength to survive against populism and fascism as the past decades have shown.

Capitalism can be populist and fascist. Has been. Fascist Germany had a whole bunch of familiar corporations in it. Every day I get a new email from Judd Legum about how AT&T is overthrowing democracy. But as wealth protection hits high gear, innovation chokes off and the clever go somewhere they can leverage their cleverness, at least in a world of open borders. Just look at the science that fled Nazi Germany. Look at the scientists that returned to China under Deng Xiaoping.

I could argue that the postwar social-democratic (pre-Reagan, pre-Thatcher) capitalism is a better version of capitalism that lost to the current strain of short-sighted capitalism,

you wouldn't even need to crack a book

even though it is better, which seems to me to fly in the face of the idea that the most powerful version of capitalism will win out.

That's not what I said. What I said was

Going back to synthesis, I would argue that an inherent characteristic of "capitalism" is the societal gyration between the needs of the shareholders and the needs of the stakeholders.