User:FormalDude/Capitalism and genocide

Some academics have argued that there is a connection between capitalism and genocide. These academics argue that capitalism is the cause of several genocides throughout history, including the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade.

Academic views
According to sociologist James V. Fenelon, "Genocide accompanied every phase of world capitalism, including twentieth century forms that arose in Europe." Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro et al. list the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy as "liberal or free-market democracies" that genocide has occurred under.

According to anthropologist Jason Hickel, capitalism requires the accumulation of excess wealth in the hands of economic elites for the purpose of large scale investment, continuous growth and expansion, and enormous amounts of cheap labor. As such, there was never and could never have been a gradual or peaceful transition to capitalism, and that "organized violence, mass impoverishment, and the destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies" ushered in the capitalist era. Its emergence was fueled by immiseration and extreme violence, including indigenous genocide, artificial scarcity and famines, and mass slavery, that accompanied enclosure and colonization, with colonized peoples becoming enslaved workers producing products that were then processed by European peasants, dispossessed by enclosure, who filled the factories in desperation as exploited cheap labor. Hickel adds "the first few hundred years of capitalism generated misery to a degree unknown in the pre-capitalist era."