Capitalism is an economic system.
It’s a way to organize the production of
goods and services.
Up until the rise of capitalism, the idea
that there’s gonna be some group of people
who are utterly destitute, who cannot find
any way of surviving except by asking to work
for somebody else, didn’t really exist.
In most human history when you woke up you
were around the land to which you had access,
to which you had rights, on which you produced
your own goods.
The longest the most stable form of social
organization has been small bands –
hunter-gatherer societies.
And they were fundamentally egalitarian.
They shared everything. There wasn’t private ownership of land or anything like that.
Those lasted tens of thousands of years.
Then, you get settled agriculture.
Settled agriculture starts out again without
rank, without a lot of hierarchy.
That lasts a few thousand years.
Then the rise of classes.
That starts up with Ancient Greece, Ancient
Rome.
Some groups of people who do all the work
and others who live off the labor of the people
who are working.
The main way in which elites subsist in Rome
is on the backs of slaves.
Then, that morphs into what we now know as
feudalism.
And feudalism is a society in which you have
semi-slavery and the surplus-appropriating
class in this system is landlords.
As long as peasants were willing to give you
rent in feudalism, you couldn’t kick them 
off.
Basically for capitalism to develop, what
you needed to have was a shift from joint
control over land to a system in which one
group claims exclusive rights.
That happened in the 1500s, primarily in England.
There was essentially a fight between peasants
and landlords, and in that fight, landlords said,
“Not only are we gonna have the right
to claim some rent on the land,
we're taking over the whole thing.”
And that was the first time this had happened.
It spread in two ways.
One was through the barrel of the gun.
England became a colonial power, and when
it went into the rest of the world, slowly
and surely they created markets everywhere
they went and made those markets more and
more central to people’s lives.
But the second way it spread was, elites in
other countries saw that this little backwater called
England, which is a tiny little island, between
1600 and 1800 became the most powerful state
on earth.
Countries like France and Spain found themselves
reeling against the power of England.
So they understood that the only way they
were gonna survive is if they did the same
thing in their countries that England did.
So capitalism is just one way of organizing
human society.
Who says it has to be the last one?
