Скачать или смотреть How Society Worked Before Capitalism

Capitalism is often presented as natural, inevitable, and efficient.
History tells a very different story.

For centuries, societies functioned without wage labor, absolute private property, or self-regulating markets. Land was governed by custom. Labor was embedded in social obligation. Survival did not depend on selling one’s time by the hour.

This video explores how capitalism actually emerged — not through peaceful evolution, but through enclosure, dispossession, colonialism, and coercion.
Peasants were stripped of common lands. Indigenous societies were displaced. Human beings were transformed into labor commodities.

Drawing on historians and political economists like Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and Silvia Federici, this essay reconstructs the violent processes that created the modern economic system.

Understanding this history does not prescribe a future.
But it dismantles the myth that capitalism is inevitable — or natural.

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📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Primary Academic Sources
• Karl Polanyi — The Great Transformation (1944)
• Karl Marx — Capital, Volume I (1867), chapters on primitive accumulation
• E.P. Thompson — The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
• Silvia Federici — Caliban and the Witch (2004)
• Michael Perelman — The Invention of Capitalism (2000)

Additional Works
• Peter Linebaugh — Stop, Thief!
• Ellen Meiksins Wood — The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism
• Gilbert Slater — The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields

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