It occurs to me that when someone says that #capitalism is just "human nature", they are actually saying that indigenous people all over the world are or were less than human.

Something that is an inevitable result of human nature should have arisen independently in many times and places, if all these peoples were human.

But what we see is that it arose from a relatively very small subset of people in a certain region at a particular time.

It had to be exported to the rest of the world and implemented *against great resistance*.

If capitalism is human nature this should not have been necessary. It would have been eagerly embraced. So obviously these other people must be more like domesticated animals that must be managed for their own good.

@RD4Anarchy

Ellen Woods has a great line in “The Origin of Capitalism” about how lots of historians treat capitalism as a thing that doesn’t need to be explained. It’s always *imminent,* just waiting to happen as soon as obstacles are removed.