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Marx and Engels portray capitalism as a revolutionary and inevitable force, and then communism as a further inevitable revolution. Later, when in the reflective-historical mode of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx was much more circumspect about the influences of past traditions, the complexities of class analysis, and the non-inevitability of historical transformations (see Class Theory or Class Analysis? A Reexamination of Marx’s Unfinished Chapter on Class). Anthropology cannot make the mistake of accepting the capitalist fairy tale. We must challenge each part of the fable. “When powerful financiers, politicians, and economists tell billions of humans that they should adopt the market as sole social regulator, anthropologists are well placed to show that what is presented as a logical necessity is actually a choice” (Trouillot, 2003:138).

Moreover, all of these so-called traits–greed, selfishness, altruism, empathy–even as they might be bioculturally reinforced and developed, depend a great deal on context. Someone marked as greedy in one context can be quite altruistic in another.

One reason anthropology knows more about capitalism than any other discipline is that anthropologists have not just studied capitalism from the inside–most anthropology was done with people subjected to capitalism, people who were often forced to provide the labor or coerced into furnishing the raw materials for capitalist dynamism. For much of the world’s population, capitalism has already been–and continues to be–a miserable failure.