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The alternatives are around for thousand of years (religions, etc.). Capitalism for 200 years and might be on its way out in a lot of run down places.
by louithethrid 9y ago
The alternatives are around for thousand of years (religions, etc.). Capitalism for 200 years and might be on its way out in a lot of run down places.
- weberc2 9y agoReligions are categorically different than economic systems, and capitalism is as old as the idea of private property (prehistoric), not simply 200 years old.
- jessaustin 9y agoThere are a lot of unexamined assumptions here. Why would we assume that a prehistoric society had any particular system of economic interactions? It's not as if they wrote something we can read. In those cases in which tombs or whatever were left behind that we can examine, it typically seems that relatively rare "kings" were buried with all of the gold and other shiny rocks, and sometimes with some servants or wives for the afterlife who seem to have been ritualisticly killed for that purpose. Was that "capitalism"? Maybe!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- weberc2 9y agoWe know that there were merchants and people bartered to exchange goods and services. The first written records in many societies are often ledgers of royal wealth transactions. Every prominent historian believes that capitalism is the original economic system.
- jessaustin 9y ago"Royal wealth transactions", the foundation of capitalism! They must have competed for serfs and slaves in a voluntary market!
- weberc2 9y agoSo you're upset that the Assyrian peasantry didn't invent accounting?