This was also featured in the current edition of the Economist. One significant implication is that capitalism is shown to be much more than an ideology - a choice of 'systems' - rather a mode of operation continuous with biological evolution. This news is therefore something that hyperstitionists should welcome.

Tachi - Possibly, but an alternative angle might be to question the identification of capitalism with commerce - after all, it seems unlikely Cro-Magnons were 'accumulating' in an industrial sense (converting commercial surplus into productive investment) - but maybe i'm being too quick on this?
Certainly, the unsustainablity of the (Braudel-style) 'pro-market anticapitalist' line is highly intriguing, with all the former partisans of this diagonal I'm aware of now neatly divided into allies of (rabidly antimarket) soc.i.alistic French intellectuals on the one hand and ("screw the critique of capital") pro-US supply-siders on the other ...

Globalization topic partly key to this, since (it seems) you can't oppose it without adopting an antimarket position, or support it without adopting a pro-capital one ...

OK Nick, agree perhaps wrong to identify capitalism with commerce, per se, but I do see this as a trajectory with several significant breaks: clearly there is a break from primates not enaged in commerce to those enaged in commerce, and separately a break from commerce into Capitalism. When I used the word 'capitalism' previously I was perhaps referring to the whole trajectory; I am amazed at the extent to which Capitalism, as distinguished from mere trading, has its its roots in pre-history and in a time when political organization was probably not distinguished from ecomomic organization as it has become.

As for the globalization debate, I don't see why someone can't be for globalization in principle but have misgivings about the way business is run and the way governments politicize globalizing trade. What makes you think that people must be either pro- or anti-globalization? And isn't it one thing to be pro- or anti-capital and pro- or anti-market?

Tachi - agree with your points in last para - but question remains, why is this (entirely plausible) virtual position not occupied? IMHO answer based on the 'Age of Khattak' - 'either for us or for our enemies' is the order of the Aeon ...