Hunter-gatherer societies started settling down with the invention of agriculture, and force began being used to grant ownership of the land to the strongest.
These societies began coalescing and creating the first cities, and these landowners expaned their power to take over as Kings and less powerful ones as the nobility.
With the use of that might, people belonging to other realms were forced to work as slaves.
Slavery became widespread (in western countries) and needed constant war to get more slaves as the economy grew, because less slaves = more labor needed to expand.
Expanding in that way is unsustainable and leads to stagnation or overextension, such as what happened to the Roman Empire. It was in a deep crisis when it collapsed in the 5th century and its slave based economy was becoming obsolete.
This system was replaced by armed nobles dividing the land and its subjects between themselves, giving them a small piece of land and protection in exchange of forced loyalty, taxes and the ability to be forced to fight for the lord of the land. An attractive proposition in times of societal collapse like Europe had.
Eventually, this rule of noble families started losing its power as improvements in technology and colonization gave inner city artisans a growing amount of influence and wealth from the ability to produce things increasingly fast and easier.
Peasants started moving into cities and leaving the lord’s lands. This process accelerated drastically with the invention of the steam engine and the nobility began being seen as obsolete and parasitic. The revolutions of the late 18th century made this decline permanent. The remaining nobles were forced to either join the bourgeois and become businessmen with fancy titles, fade away into obscurity or fight back and have their country become a Target of capitalism.
Capitalism, the new system, is based on producing more and more, faster and faster. Because you need to outdo the competition to not go bankrupt, and the competition needs to do the same. You need to lower costs and increase profits. You have to produce cheaper so you fight to keep wages low and working conditions poor, extract resources in ways that are cheap (even if damaging the environment), find more places to sell your goods to (even if they don’t want you to), drive your competition out of business, etc. Especially as new businesses are founded and join the same race to the bottom against you, making it faster.
It’s not even that they necessary want to do this stuff. It’s just the ones that “blink” and chicken out of doing one of these things is more likely to fail at doing business, go bankrupt, stagnate, exist as a niche only, etc.
It’s the issue of “You have 10€ in your wallet. The product from the place workers are treated well and does everything by the book costs 15€ and the one where they dump trash in a ditch out back and don’t clean the floors is 7€, which one do you buy?”
Hunter-gatherer societies started settling down with the invention of agriculture, and force began being used to grant ownership of the land to the strongest.
These societies began coalescing and creating the first cities, and these landowners expaned their power to take over as Kings and less powerful ones as the nobility.
With the use of that might, people belonging to other realms were forced to work as slaves.
Slavery became widespread (in western countries) and needed constant war to get more slaves as the economy grew, because less slaves = more labor needed to expand.
Expanding in that way is unsustainable and leads to stagnation or overextension, such as what happened to the Roman Empire. It was in a deep crisis when it collapsed in the 5th century and its slave based economy was becoming obsolete.
This system was replaced by armed nobles dividing the land and its subjects between themselves, giving them a small piece of land and protection in exchange of forced loyalty, taxes and the ability to be forced to fight for the lord of the land. An attractive proposition in times of societal collapse like Europe had.
Eventually, this rule of noble families started losing its power as improvements in technology and colonization gave inner city artisans a growing amount of influence and wealth from the ability to produce things increasingly fast and easier.
Peasants started moving into cities and leaving the lord’s lands. This process accelerated drastically with the invention of the steam engine and the nobility began being seen as obsolete and parasitic. The revolutions of the late 18th century made this decline permanent. The remaining nobles were forced to either join the bourgeois and become businessmen with fancy titles, fade away into obscurity or fight back and have their country become a Target of capitalism.
Capitalism, the new system, is based on producing more and more, faster and faster. Because you need to outdo the competition to not go bankrupt, and the competition needs to do the same. You need to lower costs and increase profits. You have to produce cheaper so you fight to keep wages low and working conditions poor, extract resources in ways that are cheap (even if damaging the environment), find more places to sell your goods to (even if they don’t want you to), drive your competition out of business, etc. Especially as new businesses are founded and join the same race to the bottom against you, making it faster.
It’s not even that they necessary want to do this stuff. It’s just the ones that “blink” and chicken out of doing one of these things is more likely to fail at doing business, go bankrupt, stagnate, exist as a niche only, etc.
It’s the issue of “You have 10€ in your wallet. The product from the place workers are treated well and does everything by the book costs 15€ and the one where they dump trash in a ditch out back and don’t clean the floors is 7€, which one do you buy?”