The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

by Jason Hickel

We tend to assume that the emergence of capitalism was a natural and inevitable process – as though its basic logic has always existed in human society and gradually matured into the Industrial Revolution. But the historical evidence suggests a very different story. The emergence of capitalism required violence and mass impoverishment, both at home and abroad – a process that left vast swathes of people dispossessed (in the case of English peasants) or enslaved (in the case of Africans and indigenous Americans). Even in England, people didn’t welcome this new system with open arms. On the contrary, they protested and rebelled against it, for it violated long-standing cultural expectations about people’s basic rights to habitation, to the means of subsistence, to the means of life. The

So, Marx was wrong about history's eventuality