The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Capitalism, on the other hand, involved constant reinvestment, turning one’s wealth into an engine for creating ever more wealth, increasing production, expanding operations, and so forth. But imagine, Weber suggested, being the very first person in one’s community to act this way. To do so would have meant defying all social expectations, to be utterly despised by almost all your neighbours – who would, increasingly, also become your employees. Anyone capable of acting in such a defiantly single-minded manner, Weber observed, would ‘have to be some sort of hero’. This, he said, is the reason why it took a Puritanical strain of Christianity, like Calvinism, to make capitalism possible. Puritans not only believed almost anything they could spend their profits on was sinful; but also, joining a Puritan congregation meant one had a moral community whose support would allow one to endure the hostility of one’s hell-bound neighbours. Obviously, none of this was true in an eighteenth-century Yurok village. Aboriginal Californians did not hire one another as wage labourers, lend money at interest, or invest the profits of commercial ventures to expand production. There were no ‘capitalists’ in the literal sense. What there was, however, was a remarkable cultural emphasis on private property.