Bret Devereaux

...land. But try to graze your herds on that unowned land, or hunt game there, and you're likely to get a violent response from the local nomads. *Individuals* didn't own the land - but the group sure did - and it will violently protect it from outsiders. end.

Lol Jesus man. This is an essay! Who taught you how to Twitter. There are like 27 things I would have to get into here in order to make satisfactory response. Why would you do this to me?

Short version: historical processes like enclosure and accumulation of capital, along with a comprehensive form of private property, produce social relations which are structured in qualitatively distinct ways, and which do not emerge everywhere that money is exchanged for goods.

But far more importantly, you are a monster and you must be stopped

So, uh, 1) I am self-taught at twittering, and therefore very bad at it. I am generally bad at social media. Or social anything (as you well know!). But second: I think your short version is essentially what I carved out as 'the modern form of this thing.' and that's fair.

I guess my caution is that a lot of modern theory about that comes from a time when it was assumed that the ancient world emphatically did not have institutions that looked like early modern capitalism. Your Polanyi/Weber/Marx, etc. But...

...we now know that many similar institutions did exist in the ancient world - this is the modernist/primitavist debate in the ancient economy, and it's fair to say the modernists have largely won. And I don't get the impression that the theories have been revised to reflect...

...that their ancient basis - which esp. for Marx and Polanyi is quite important! - have functionally collapsed. In that context, I think it is possible to argue that early modern capitalism is just one form of a very common, largely non-contingent form of human organization.