Bret Devereaux

It seems to me there are fundamentally three options: 1) privately owned and thus distributed by individual interactions (which we call 'markets' - seriously, that's all markets are), 2) state-owned and thus distributed through political power, or...

3) Collectively owned by the community. The last system has *never* been scaled up above very small group sizes, despite repeated attempts. The reasons for those issues have been studied exhaustively and don't bear repeating. I don't see a fourth potential distribution system.

There are, of course, hybrid systems - but the three core systems remain the basis of them; for large societies, that drops to just two. I think you can talk about *our current form* of capitalism as deeply contingent...

...but capitalism *generally* - private ownership, profit motives, market interactions, that's a system that springs up independently in multiple non-connected sophisticated cultures.

I'd say, honestly *most* of what has happened in the study of ancient economies in the past 30 years has been recognizing that private ownership was a bigger slice of a wide range of economies - even into the bronze age - than we used to think.

If capitalism is 'private ownership of capital for profit' then we increasingly have evidence for it - in a limited sense - before the invention of coinage; in a sense, before money!

Given that wide scope, I'd go ahead and suggest that "This is mine and I will use it to maximize my self-benefit" (=private ownership of capital for profit) is, in fact, a nearly universal feature of agrarian societies, with the proviso that it exists in uneasy balance...

...with the alternate system, "this belongs to the state" (which often just meant "this belongs to the king who will use it to maximize *his* self-benefit" since if the history of modern economic systems has shown us anything, it is that state control != community control.)