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Comment on Extinction-Level Capitalismparent

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Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.

The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.

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