Since the dawn of settled life, inequality has almost always been leveled out by violence and disasters—such as the plague, war, or revolution. The !Kung San of the Kalahari took a different path: for millennia, they have prevented the emergence of inequality through social technology. Whether modern democracies can also curb the rule of elites without violent upheavals is the pressing question of our time.

The economic history of capitalist societies can be traced in a simple narrative that lies beyond the actual history books. The balloon of capital concentration grows larger and larger; elites seize power and amass wealth. Eventually, it bursts. In Europe, we may be facing another cycle of this destructive sequence of prosperity, domination, poverty, and violence. Yet this vicious cycle is not a law of nature and is no older than a few generations—and thus may be stoppable.

Reducing inequality is one of the most difficult political undertakings of all. To do so, elites would have to be persuaded to relinquish wealth and influence. They rarely do so voluntarily. The greatest equalizers in history were not speakers in the Bundestag, but the plague flea, the French revolutionary, or the Allied bomber fleet. In times of peace, the wealthy are almost always politically and propagandistically successful, even within democratic regimes. In Germany, the wealthy achieve their political goals with ease. They have family offices, think tanks, and foundations at their disposal to advance their interests. Not infrequently, they help shape the very language in which people think and speak. The rich sit at the table where decisions are made, while low-income earners are left outside and know the feast only by hearsay.

From Gatherer to Subject

Against the backdrop of modern humans’ 300,000-year history, the chronicle of modern inequality is shorter than one might think. As anthropologist James Suzman describes, we live far from a Garden of Eden. The !Kung San, also observed by his colleague Richard Borchay Lee, spent barely three hours a day hunting or gathering. The !Kung San know little of domination and have developed superior social technologies over the centuries. These ensure that would-be autocrats prefer to rule alone, in the vastness of the Namibian and Botswanan deserts, rather than pose as wannabe leaders or members of greedy elites. The !Kung San recognize personal property but not private ownership of the means of production. They are radically anti-meritocratic. Those who achieve much receive less rather than ever more recognition. Although they are the formal guardians of their territories, during periods of drought these are not defended against other !Kung San but, paradoxically, declared places of hospitality. Through a kinship system based on names, not blood, they build intimate connections with those who are strangers to us. The latter is a remarkably elegant mechanism, for through a cultural trick, everyone is potentially connected to everyone else. The San level themselves out—not always without violence, but without catastrophes, without wars, without revolutions, without pandemics—simply because their social mechanisms prevent the formation of elites. The foundation for such techniques was laid hundreds of thousands of years ago within the genus Homo, as our great ape ancestors lived in strict dominance hierarchies. At some point over the course of the last one to two million years, early humans reversed these hierarchies.

A coalition of the many collectively kept dictators in check. They bequeathed to later humans a capacity that researchers understand as an interplay of genes and culture. Unlike many other animals, humans can organize themselves into groups without submitting to a ruler, a head of the family, a king, or an elite. They are capable of living largely freely.

Modern research on inequality can be divided into two distinct periods of study. The first is the long pre-industrial phase since the transition to a sedentary lifestyle around 10,000 years ago—from the first Neolithic villages through the early advanced civilizations to the agrarian empires of the early modern period. Quantitative analysis of this period was made possible by the archaeological application of the Gini coefficient to proxies such as house and land sizes or grave goods, supplemented by tax and census data once writing became available. The second epoch is that of industrial capitalism and later the modern nation-state. It is barely 250 years old.

In the pre-industrial era, leveling—that is, the elimination of inequality—almost always occurred through plagues or the collapse of states and empires. With industrialization in England and the spread of the nation-state, this pattern shifted and history accelerated. Since then, elites have been rapidly disempowered during shocks, and the causes of these shocks have changed. The capitalist era has so far been characterized by gigantic wars involving unprecedented mass mobilization and bloody revolutions. Japan and Germany leveled the playing field particularly thoroughly after World War II. Fortunes were destroyed, and the mobilization of large segments of the population for the war forced the state into a position of increased obligation toward its citizens. The close and comparatively fair relationship between the state and its citizens that emerged in this way persisted for many years into the postwar period. Historian Walter Scheidel himself attributes the social mechanisms of the postwar consensus primarily to the mobilizations of the world wars, rather than to the trade unions.

The Effect of Capitalism

In both eras, inequality and elite rule resurged following a leveling shock. This raises the question of whether injustice and domination were already prevalent to a comparable extent even before capitalism. Is capitalism perhaps merely a continuation of the market economy by other means? Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens that the agricultural revolution itself was the greatest fraud in human history. James Suzman notes in his highly readable book Affluence without Abundance: “Agriculture was far more productive than hunting and gathering and enabled rapid population growth. It also led to occasional surpluses, and with these surpluses came hierarchies and tribute systems. Hierarchies and tribute systems, in turn, fueled the urge to gather more resources, to expand, and to conquer.” Findings such as those from Dickson Mounds support such theories. There, over 800 indigenous skeletons dating from approximately 950 to 1300 CE were excavated. It was precisely during this time period that the local population made the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle—which characterizes 96% of Homo sapiens’ history—to intensive maize cultivation.

According to research by Goodman, Lallo, and Armelagos, a comparison of skeletons before and after this transition reveals a significant increase in dental enamel defects, iron-deficiency anemia, bone lesions, and degenerative spinal disorders among the agricultural population. At the same time, population density grew, and visible social stratification emerged. Some graves were significantly more elaborately furnished than others. These and other findings suggest that domination and brutal exploitation existed even before capitalism. Is capitalism, as the cause of inequality, therefore primarily a feverish dream of Marxist ideologues?

Not entirely. The difference between capitalist and non-capitalist agricultural societies lies primarily in the pace of exploitation. In the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire collapsed; from the 6th to the 8th century, the plague spread. The result was a low Gini coefficient. A concentration of wealth comparable to that of the Roman Empire was not achieved again in Europe for centuries. It was not until between 1000 and 1300 AD that Europe entered a new phase of economic growth. This growth did not exactly serve as a pillar of social justice, for by the mid-14th century, Europe had regressed to the unequal levels of the Roman Empire. Such a development of high inequality, however, took centuries, not decades.

Scorched Earth

In capitalist societies, the shock dividend was regularly exhausted within a few decades. The population had benefited from it during the almost socialist years following World War II. Starting in the 1950s, the economy boomed, and many workers believed they were on the road to success. They drove to Lake Garda, planted vegetable gardens, and bought homes and German cars. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared history over. But the elites just had to be patient. Among Germans born between 1962 and 1966, 81 percent earned more than their parents, adjusted for inflation. Among those born between 1984 and 1988, only 59 percent did.

With prosperity, awareness of capitalism’s crisis-prone nature was almost completely lost. When stagflation and the oil crisis stalled the economy in the 1970s, the theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman found a wide audience. They promised a way out through less government, freer markets, and lower taxes on capital—an approach akin to trying to pull oneself out of a swamp by one’s own hair.

The political class that came to power in Germany in the 1990s had found the social market economy as a gift, rather than having fought for it themselves or understood its disastrous origins. Weimar, hyperinflation, and procyclical austerity were, at best, school subjects they had memorized. It was precisely this generation that abolished the wealth tax in 1997, passed Agenda 2010 and the Hartz reforms, and privatized the postal service, Telekom, and the railways. Alliance 90/The Greens, an up-and-coming, supposedly left-wing party, did indeed come from a tradition of systemic critique, but shifted its criticism from the economy to ecology, identity, and civil rights. It became blind to historical reality. This was evident as late as 2024 when Renate Künast accused the outgoing federal executive board of the Green Youth of seeking to build a “class-based socialism” and of being unrealistic. The vocabulary that had once allowed the danger of wealth concentration to be named at all had been lost between Godesberg and 1989. Neoliberalism created a scorched-earth policy because it eradicated knowledge of the dangers of exploitation itself.

Eighty years after World War II, the Gini coefficient for wealth in Germany stands at 0.82. A coefficient of 1 would be the maximum and would mean that one person owns everything and everyone else nothing. Behind this campaign against the majority of the population lies the formula r > g. Historically, income from capital has almost always been greater than that from labor. Those who already possess capital generate further capital gains. Stocks, bonds, and derivatives are extremely mobile and can be scaled at will. In capitalism, elites need only a small head start—or must fight to secure one. Then, theoretically, they need only wait. Capitalism functions less on the basis of merit and more according to a law of gravity. Those who get a head start go further. This gravitational pull even extends to economic growth. Growth, too, has little equalizing effect, as organized elites use every growth spurt to secure their economic power.

Nor is the concept of the rule of law automatically a great help. It can protect personal property, social rights, and home ownership just as much as it protects foundation assets and means of production. Over the past forty years, the U.S. legal system has expanded property rights over financial assets and corporate shares far more significantly than labor, housing, or social rights. This leads to total inequality. Agrarian societies, due to their low surpluses, reached only a limited peak of inequality. From then on, inequality stagnated at a high level until a catastrophe reduced it. Capitalist empires, on the other hand, have no known natural upper limit. Their productivity grows, their surpluses grow, and unless the top rates of wealth and income taxes are dramatic—as in postwar Japan—wealth disparities simply continue to grow.

In 1914, on the eve of World War I, the phase of highest wealth concentration Europe had ever experienced came to an end. In England, the richest decile owned 92 percent of total wealth. Paradoxically, this is a state in which the market economy itself threatens to sink into the quagmire of poverty. In the long term, poverty is bad for the domestic economy. It weakens domestic consumption, social stability, and human capital. Without exports, imperialism, or the conquest of nature, the body, or the expansion of capitalism into another sphere, nothing works anymore.

Yet impoverishment also has its limits. Elites who depend on human labor must generally offer their subjects a subsistence minimum. According to their exploitative logic, receding tooth enamel as in Dickson Mounds or even smaller skeletons and enslavement are tolerable to a certain extent. Dead farmers, however, yield no harvest. When the subjects were no longer able or simply no longer willing to perform their labor, a minimum level of food or healthcare appeared as if by magic, ensuring that the powerful could continue to skim off the surplus. Today, one can observe how the subsistence level in America is once again approaching that of pre-modern societies. Healthcare is poor, infant mortality is rising, and homelessness and makeshift housing are becoming acute problems.

The number of “working poor”—those who work themselves into poverty—is rising. This miserable subsistence level reveals the epic problem that the automation of labor, as planned by the American elites, could one day create. To this day, it remains rather doubtful whether it will replace human labor on a large scale. But that is not the point: every surge in productivity and growth makes techno-feudalists more powerful.

The Necessity of Social Technologies

The history of sedentarism has seen countless phases of leveling and the formation of elites, and in a certain sense reads like a single catastrophic chronicle of these events. One may, however, doubt whether the bond of freedom has been severed forever for humanity since the advent of sedentarism. The mere existence of aggressive leveling techniques that permeate the entire social life of the !Kung San is, in itself, a key piece of evidence. If the !Kung San were a historical special case that could in no way be applied to modern societies, the strokes of genius in their social technology would all be meaningless. If their group size were limited to small societies, they would not need the social technology of kinship by name, which enables cooperation across small groups. And if the danger of individuals accumulating wealth did not fundamentally exist among hunter-gatherers, they would not have had to establish a culture of mockery and sharing. The !Kung San, however, are less a blueprint and more part of a compelling argument that demonstrates the possibility of lasting human freedom from exploitation. This suggests that modern societies require not only the will but also social technologies that draw upon a more creative and powerful cultural mosaic of tools.

Thanks to the generous postwar consensus, generations of Westerners have hardly had to grapple with the problem of inequality. Rising income and wealth inequality coefficients now show just how rapidly the concentration of wealth is advancing. Will things be different this time? Will democracies succeed in thwarting the hydrology of money—and thus the rule of elites—without bloody upheavals? It would be a megaproject and unique in modern history since the emergence of capitalism. To permanently free ourselves from elite rule and unequal distribution, we must tap into our vast potential for innovation. Yet so far, this potential has been channeled into the conquest of ever-new capitalist spheres. Theoretically, however, people of the technological age could also turn the hierarchy of their organizations upside down. It would be an engineering feat similar to that once achieved by the ancestors of today’s !Kung San.