I don't think that peasant economy was exploitative in the same way capitalism is. Peasants were largely farmers who grew food and provided the landowner with a percentage of their crop. They were integral to human survival and as far as I know the percentage taken by landowners was not comparable to the wealth extracted from workers today.
Almost. We are proletarians working under late-stage Capitalism, where markets have largely coalesced into monopolist syndicates and cartels, and competition is rapidly dying out. The conditions are ripe for siezure, public ownership, and central planning, ie Socialism.