What Is Capitalism? – Journal of Cogency

By the end of this piece I will have given a clear definition of capitalism as an ideology. To do this, I need to move forward in three stages: first, the registers of capital; second, the concept of primary value; and third, the concept of complex and primary ideologies.

(Note: The use of certain terms, most especially community and society, are likely to be changed in a revision so that they better line up with the uses of those terms in other works I’ve done. The usage is consistent in this version but it may be confusing if using this in relation with another article discussing related topics.)

The Registers of Capitalism

One of the problems of understanding capitalism is that it has a variety of registers or different meanings which in some way overlap. Often, when we talk about capitalism, we are trying to convey multiple registers at once, but not everyone always means “capitalism” in the same registers even when communicating. Ideological capitalism is only one register. I’ve identified seven so far; it’s possible there are more but I think this is more than enough to illustrate possible misunderstandings.

1. Capitalism as mode of production

The basic definition of capitalism as a mode of production is “corporate industry for commerce”. Broken down, this refers to commodity production (industry) undertaken by distinct interests (corporates) for the purpose of being traded (commerce). As a total mode of production, this describes a number of interrelations, some of which I will discuss shortly. I describe it first not because it is necessarily the most fundamental but because it is the most obvious: when one is talking about capitalism at all, it is assumed that one is at least talking about the capitalist mode of production.

This mode of production definition is not fundamental in two senses. Firstly, though the “mode of production” understanding is often strongly implied, it is often not the sense that this that “capitalism” is being mainly used in, as the main register is usually profit-seeking or capital ownership; these are obvious as in being the main intended register, whereas the “mode of production” definition is obvious in the sense of being an expected implication. By analogy, if a ball is thrown and we expect it to fall, the fact that thrown objects fall is the main register and the law of gravity is the “mode of production” definition.

One thing that must be made clear here is that the capitalist mode of production is not the same thing as wage labor. Wage labor is an example of a system of value extraction (what I have previously referred to as a work-value relation). Though wage labor is strongly associated with the capitalist mode of production, this mode of production can theoretically exist along with any of the possible systems: market labor, corvee, tenurage, wage labor, and chattel labor.

Market labor is the production of commodities by free association (or by self-directed work) and in exchange for the exchange value of those commodities.
Corvee is production by non-chattel subjects at the direction of the sovereign, by decree, without expectation of direct payment but with the expectation that required labor will not hinder independent upkeep.
Tenurage is production by exaction of rents on the non-chattel tenants of a territory. Production is primarily distributed by the stipulation of rent terms.
Wage labor is production by the provision of wages to non-chattel workers in exchange for labor done by the workers.
Chattel labor is production by use of non-people called chattels, which are beings for whom independent flourishing is considered unimportant and who are, therefore, utter dependents. The primary means by which people become eligible to be employed as the workers in chattel labor is the legitimization of abuse of the being, emphasizing that flourishing and even existence are non-essential for the chattel.

Again, none of these systems of value extraction are defining of the capitalist mode of production. We will revisit these ideas in the next section.

2. Capitalism as a production epoch

In Marxite theory, the term “mode of production” has two main meanings. The first sense is what I just discussed in the previous section. The second sense is referring to the historical period in which that mode of production predominates. To make these senses easier to discuss, we can call these periods “production epochs”. Marx laid out four valid production epochs: the tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist epochs. Obviously, Marx envisaged a particular mode of production for each epoch, but I feel that this is both misleading and incomplete. It is misleading because it suggests that other types of production are not widespread in a given period, though in actuality all forms of value-extraction have existed in every epoch, just in different proportions. It is incomplete because Marx relied exclusively upon the labor theory of value. While I can’t prove this, it’s my guess that Marx’s development along this line was chiefly polemical. Marx clearly realized that values are in fact subjective — how could multiple values exist for a single item without multiple perspectives? — but the focus on labor allowed the exploitation inherent in capitalist production itself to be highlighted. Previous formulations like labor-rent-profit allowed industrialists to hide behind the idea of rent-seekers being truly at fault. Marxite theory helped to dispel these lies.

I say that because I want to be clear when I am actually disagreeing with Marxite ideas: this is not one of those times. Rather, I bring up the labor theory of value because while it is useful, it will not apply to what I am developing here. Many have intimated that it is wrong to view economics as separate from politics. I don’t think “depoliticized economics” is useless but it is vital to remember that it is depoliticized. However, while I am talking about economics here, my primary topic is politics. With that understood, we have to see value as being both political and economic; the labor theory of value simply isn’t adequate to the task. Rather than relying on theory that try to determine the quantity of value, I am going to look at the source of value in a society, a concept I call the value-body. In brief, the value-body can be seen as the justification by which things have value in a society. Value itself initially comes out of benefit: when a person is benefitted by something, that person assigns value to that thing. The value-body allows for some society-wide understanding of valuation, what I will call primary value. Capital is one such value-body.

I’ll return to primary value later. In the context of production epochs, what is important is the value-body. Instead of the Marxite pairing of one mode of production to one epoch, I believe that each epoch is better understood as a time when a certain combination of a value-body and a mode of value-extraction by the state are both predominant. Using this definition, the four production epochs can be laid out like this:

the tribal epoch combined the local value-body with the free labor (that is, market labor) mode of value-extraction;
the ancient epoch combined the remit (or sacral) value-body with corvee value-extraction;
the feudal epoch combined the remit value-body with tenurage value-extraction;
and the capitalist epoch combined the capital value-body with wage labor value-extraction.

Now, in actuality, chattel labor forms the bulk of value extraction throughout history, using both non-human and human chattels. By definition, however, chattels are depersonalized and, as such, are not reflected in the progression of epochs because these epochs don’t mark production as such, they mark production as social relations. For example, we still experience tenurage in the form of housing rents and corvee in the form of taxation, but both of these come as demands for money with the expectation that people are working wage-earning jobs, and the state’s benefitting relies on the society’s organization around wage labor. Slavery of humans is now restricted to occluded places such as prisons and plantations and mines which remain remote through media silence and blackout. I believe that the production epoch as a whole determines types of less-than-free labor more than the other way around: compare Roman slavery to European serfdom of the Middle Ages to the chattel slavery of the European colonial period.

3. Capitalism as profit-seeking

This sense of capitalism as being based only on profit is often seen as one of its fatal flaws. Separated from the other registers, however, profit-seeking is not the end of society. Greed has to be checked but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to seek profit (which is to say economic gain) at all. I think we can see the proper role of profit by contrasting the desire of society as a whole with that of specific interests. Interests are entities which are created by 1 or more people and which act more-or-less as one unit in relation to other entities. The clearest example for modern people is a business. The business is not, despite how often we talk, made up of people; this is to say that things which concern the business may be of no concern to many individuals who are connected with the business. The people remain as part of society while partaking of the interest. The interest, for its part, reckons what counts as its gains and its losses very narrowly, and therefore constructs profit in part by choosing what results achieved by the connected individuals belong to the business and what results belong to the individuals themselves. This is important because the goal of society is its own welfare while the goal of interests is their own profit, which is then filtered out to the individuals who partake in it. Interests, as the result and mechanism of concerted effort, are how much of the value available to a society is realized, so the profit of interests can be essential for individuals to meet their needs, thus providing for social welfare. At the same time, there is a clear danger here of interests hoarding value, something which can be detrimental to society as a whole.

4. Capitalism as engagement with capital

This is capitalism in the sense of studying capital or in being involved in capital systems like financing. It is capitalism as a global system, capitalism as fiat currency, and so on. This is usually the sense meant when people describe financial analysts or writers like Adam Smith as capitalists.

5. Capitalism as holding capital

This may be the original meaning of capitalism, or at least “capitalist” may have at first meant “person who holds capital”. This sense doesn’t need much more elaboration. If I was better organized I might have put this at another spot on the list, but not first or last.

6. Capitalism as total financialization

The logic of capitalism insists that everything is for sale. I think we have seen more of this as time goes on: the continued enclosure of the commons, the inevitability of insurance, the ever-multiplying and endlessly-arcane financial instruments that don’t just represent commodities but represent the right to sell commodities that are not yet owned at a specific time in the future and for a preferred price. I learned about this line of work late in my reading but I think the power theory of value as put forth by economists Bichler and Nitzan will be a great resource in investigating this register of capitalism.

7. Capitalism as international free markets

The idea of the free flow of capitalism is key for our current capitalist order. It should be understood, though, that this is not a central part of an essentially capitalist worldview.

8. Capitalism as ideology

Of all the registers of capitalism, this is the one which is most responsible for the repressive elements of the capitalist world today. The key tenet of ideological capitalism is that possession of capital should determine an individual’s importance to the society. This is not a profit ideology, it is a wealth ideology. Possession of capital becomes equivalent to controlling primary value; as we’ll see shortly, this is not just about having the ability to buy. Capitalism is also not a positive or expressed ideology, it is a negative ideology. What I mean by this is that it is not argued for in a cohesive way, it is evidenced by choices which are made that ensure the capitalist worldview is catered to. Capitalism is most coherent in the field of economics, but, in our de-economized politics, capitalism is most closely associated with liberalism. In fact, in Europe, it can be said that the rise of liberalism forced the development of ideological capitalism in particular.

Two aspects of liberalism which challenged the old (sacral) order were individual sovereignty and nondiscrimination. I use the term “sovereign” differently in different contexts, despite my best efforts; here, what I mean by “individual sovereignty” is that a person’s chief political identification should be as an individual rather than as a member of a group. This aspect is a dangerous illusion. It is appealing because it presents a total lack of restriction while masking the total abandonment of responsibility. No one can live alone; the idea of a happy solitary life is a fantasy. Nondiscrimination, on the other hand, is an ideal. The essential barrier to break was between aristocrat and non-aristocrat, but this principle also provided the logic for the end to serfdom, Jewish emancipation, the end of slavery, Black emancipation, women’s’ emancipation, and more. Discrimination exists but we can strive to end it, strive for nondiscrimination. Individual sovereignty cannot even be really approached.

In Europe, the rise of liberalism happened alongside the rise of another idea: nationalism. It would be incorrect to say that early liberal thinkers did not understand the need for community. Most early nationalists were liberals and vice versa. Still, the individualist goals of liberalism contradict the collectivist goals of nationalism, so I find it more useful to view these as separate ideologies which can be held together. This coincidence is important because nationalism clearly introduced an alternative value-body: the national community. This led to the creation of modern political socialism, and it is in this context that ideological capitalism first emerged. Capitalism, defined in large part by the capital value-body, was a way to avoid socialism. I will explain more about these value-bodies in the next section.

Primary Value

The first step in defining primary value is to understand this notion of political-and-economic value. This sense of value is best expressed by the benefit-value relation: if something provides a benefit to someone, that one will value that thing. For example, if you step on a box so that you can see higher, the benefit is the new perspective you have and the value is how you appreciate that perspective. This is fundamental value: the value ascribed to something based on one’s own experience of it. If we assume a simple exchange between person A with stuff Y and person B with stuff Z, A and B will discuss and set up some kind of equivalence based on each person’s fundamental valuation of each type of stuff; this constructs exchange value. Such exchange values are useful and only become moreso as more people agree to them, their own fundamental valuations influencing the overall network of exchange values. When this becomes general as part of a cohesive society, this network of values becomes the society’s value-body. Should this occur natural, it forms the most basic kind of value-body: the societal value-body (or societas).

A value-body appears to present a valuation separate from one’s own. I want to note here that these values carry no obligation; if societas values Z highly, person A might still value Z at far less. Whenever people make decisions about value, they can use any available means or codes to do so. However, the virtual of a value-body is that it is accepted as a valid determiner of value by the society as a whole; so, for many exchanges and other decisions, the valuation through the value-body is adhered to at least to some degree. This allows complex calculations of value to be made without the effort of continual negotiations.

An essential point in understanding political-economic value is that value does not exist in things, value is applied to things, and these things can be actions as well as objects. If a society ascribes a value to a kind of food, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the food could be traded for an “equivalent” value of money; the person who has it might not be willing to trade it for whatever reason. In the same way, for a society to value an action like voting is not saying that the act can be expressed in currency, only that the society wants people to vote and feels that voting is however important. The value-body therefore doesn’t only set a standard for economic exchange, it also provides the moral, ethical, and political context for the actions its members take.

Primary value is the value which is applied by the value-body to things & actions in the society. This name comes from the fact that many values in society are derived from this. For example, if a value-body values person A highly, any valuation made by person A will be more persuasive than it would otherwise have been. This is also the type of value that appears miraculated, as if it appeared out of nowhere. Put another way, the state’s ability to create value (such as capital) out of nothing cannot take place unless the state controls its value-body. Primary value can be reflected both economically (as in Marxite price and exchange value) as well as politically (in state commands, cultural imperatives, and so on).

For a value-body to be valid, it must be able to encompass all production in a society. For a value-body to be coherent, it should present three basic elements: a mediant, a value-justification, and a currency. The mediant is the entity or process that controls the applying of value. The value-justification is the generally understood reasoning which the mediant uses to determine how value will be applied. The currency is the devolved form of the value-body; in other words, value as experienced by members of the society. I believe that humans have so far experienced four value-bodies: the society value-body (societas), the remit value-body, the capital value-body, and the community value-body. So far, we’ve talked mostly about societas, but it’s the community value-body which is most important for us here. To that effect, I’m going to discuss it as the second-value-body and then I will return to it after explaining the others.

The society value-body is mediated (or interpreted) by society itself in a spontaneous way, as I’ve previously described. The amount of value that something possesses can be called “demand,” as in “That object is in demand”. The level of demand that something possesses is justified by (or based on) the exchange values of all members of society. This is the most basic kind of value-body that a society can have, usually prevailing before any conscious cohesion exists between the members. This sort of value-body is not only prehistoric, it is likely pre-tribal, as I will elaborate on.

In most cases, even societies we would consider very primitive, it is actually the community value-body which is in use. The difference is that the community is self-aware while the society is not. To be pretentious (I’m still trying to memorize these), community is emic but society is not-emic, though both are etic. That is to say, the community is self-aware; not in terms of being alive, rather that the members of a community recognize themselves as part of that community. The society value-body is something observed from outside, it is not thought of consciously by those “partaking” of it. The construction of community out of society is an example of “overcoding” as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari: the elements remain but their relationship is changed.

The mediant of the community value-body is the community center or forum. This can take a variety of forms and I won’t detail them here. The forum is the means by which the community makes decisions. Said another way, the decisions of the forum are expected to be respected by every member as if the member had made that decision themselves. The value-justification used by the forum is the community’s welfare, and the currency of this value-body is priority. A community’s forum assigns value to things by the priority it gives them, and it justifies its assignments by how much the thing in question affects community welfare.

The sacral (or divine) value-body overcodes the community value-body when the authority of the forum is overtaken by a sacral ruler (for example, a divinely-appointed king). Such a value-body has the ruler (or thearch) as its mediant and the ruler’s remit (or dominion) is its currency; everything is on behalf of the ruler, in the ruler’s name, and so on. The value-justification here is providence, a limitless source of benefit which is the ruler’s privilege to administer. Unlike the society and community value-bodies, the sacral value-body has the appearance of overabundance: it promises more value than can be provided. Value-bodies which appear overabundant are more attractive to potential adherents than other value-bodies. I’ll return to the concept of overabundance shortly. First, let’s finish the list of value-bodies.

The capital value-body is an alternative to the sacral value-body as an overcoding of the community value-body. Where the sacral body takes the entire authority of the forum, the capital body configures the forum’s value-assigning function in terms of depoliticized economics. In other words, value in the capital body is determined by the market (or commerce) as mediant, as if the market existed separately from the community that it is in. The currency of capital is money, the converse of which is price. Capital’s value-justification is profit, or more properly interest or fructification. As I’m using the term “interest” for something specific and different elsewhere in this piece, I am going to use “profit” most often to talk about this, but it is important to understand that I am not talking about simple gains from trade, I am talking about exponential increases in value, the kind which is only achieved through financial instruments and contractual agreements. It’s through this untethered method of accounting that capital gains the appearance of overabundance which allows it to win out over the community value-body.

We finish with the community body (or communitas) again. Returning is important because it must be re-emphasized that societas remains a presence underneath all value-bodies and that communitas is the closest that a self-aware community can come to societas. In societies where the sacral or capital value-bodies failed, communities reverted to the use of communitas. This is what occurred with the discrediting of the divine right of kings in Europe during the Revolutionary Era, ending the widespread use of the sacral body. Before the capital value-body arose, communitas served as the basis of value, supporting the rise first of liberalism-nationalism and then of its competing successors: communism & fascism. I hope to expand on these historical developments in the future, but for now we just need the general shape. There is a reason why there may be no new “big ideas” in politics: we are more likely to revert to communitas than to discover yet another possible value-body.

To understand the appearance of overabundance, we should first understand that assigning primary value is subtractive. For a society to assign value, it must take that value from itself (from its central stock, let’s say) and put it into the thing to be valued. Numerically, we can say that the total value of any value-body is 1 and applications of value are fractions of that. When the society applies value, it may be that some corporate applies some of its value to some object so that the relative values of each remain stable do not change relative to the society, or it may be that the forum itself applies the value, or some person does, or so on. Regardless, no application of value changes the total value available to the society. Primary value also does not increase by the society gaining rights over new objects, gaining new resources, acquiring profits, or anything else. This does not mean that such gains do not benefit the society (or members therein), but if such gains are given more value, then the value assigned to everything else will alter in turn. Primary value is always 1. It should be understood as a measure of centrality and importance to the society, and therefore any primary value applied is a portion of a constant whole.

The appearance of overabundance gives rise to the fantasy of unconditional personal advancement. This fantasy basically states that it is possible to gain unlimited personal success without affecting others in the society. Again, overabundance is the best way to illustrate it. In terms of this analysis, overabundance is the possibility of primary value being greater than 1. It is the idea that value greater than what is natural to a society can be realized. There are two overabundant-seeming value-bodies: the sacral and the capital. In the sacral body, overabundance is primarily seen in the lack of limits on political power, especially that of the ruler. In the capital body, the appearance over overabundance is economic, expressed in the indefinite possibilities of financial capitalization. In both cases, the fantasy is that one can independently gain value in their society without affecting the value of others. For sacral rule this is reflected in the myth of land-wealth, justifying conquest and expanding remit. For capital, this is the myth that wealth does not rely upon poverty. In both cases, total primary value is never raised above 1; gains in some value are always compensated by shifts in value elsewhere in the society.

Complex & Primary Ideology

The question of ideology is often disliked by people who study politics and relationships philosophically because ideology is seen as messy and imprecise. It seems to not be able to explain fractures in parties where both sides claim to be following the same idea. For that reason, the tendency has been to ignore ideology in favor of observable context. The basic problem with this that observable context also fails to completely account for why people do what they do, and it has not proven to be more successful than a focus on ideology in predicting individual behavior. The tendency persists because, again, it is more straightforward than looking at ideology in the sense of being easier to state definitively; obviously, no one can prove what another “truly believes”.

When I look at ideology, I am not attempting to give a full explanation of a person’s decisions. Instead, I want to treat ideology as an aspect of the larger context, and especially as a part of context that is applicable to different situations. We cannot know how choices are made but this goes both ways: while we may never understand someone’s true belief, we equally can never decide which of the seemingly-objective facts of context have which level of influence over a taken decision. I will therefore use ideology as a way to understand the less-objective parts of one’s motivations, elements which can be as significant as material conditions (or even moreso) in determining decisions. To do this, we will ironically need to become more precise in an understanding of ideology so that our terms are not ambiguous.

I view ideologies as coming in two registers: complex ideologies and primary ideologies. In general, when people talk about ideologies they are talking about complex ideologies, by which I mean ideologies which have positions on multiple different & distinct issues. For example, an American liberal is someone who believes in liberalism (chiefly meaning political individualism) but also in the welfare state, free & open elections, rejection of prejudice, meritocracy, and other positions that aren’t necessary to hold together. Discussing complex ideologies is difficult because of this possible variety, since it is not possible to know (from use of the label) which of the possibly-implied positions are being included at any one time. Obviously, these positions do inform the choices that a person takes, but complex ideologies do not give us the ability to analyze at a glance.

One way to deal with this is to see each complex ideology as a collection of primary ideologies. A primary ideology is a single position on a single subject. By looking at these primary ideologies, we can get a better idea of how each position would affect the holder’s behavior. What I am now going to do is low out the possible primary ideologies for the most basic issues of political grouping, to better highlight how this scheme can be useful. The issues I will deal with are: primary value, primary identity, primary participation, state responsibility, and final intent. As I talk about these primary ideologies, mentally add the word “primary” before each (“primary capitalism”, “primary monarchism”, etc.) to highlight that we are not talking about the common meanings of these terms, we’re just faced with balancing vocabulary against ease of understanding; hopefully my choices make my point clear. After looking over these primary ideologies, we’ll return to see how they can be used to explore complex ideologies.

Ideologies of Primary Value

Primary ideologies concerning primary value effectively support one-or-another value-body to be used by the society. This ideology can be observed in the ways that a society determines its political preferences. If a policy is enacted, the questions to ask are “who enacted it?”, “who made it possible for them to enact it?”, and “why was it enacted?”

Anarchism: associated with the society value-body, this primary ideology advocates the removal of an explicit mediant from the process of applying value.
Communitism (or communalism): associated with the community value-body, this advocates the application of value based on community priority.
Sacralism: associated with the sacral value-body, this promotes a reliance on divine providence as a source of primary value.
Capitalism: associated with the capital value-body, this advocates reliance on commercial & financial capital as the expression of primary value, implying that such value should be understood as depoliticized.

Ideologies of Primary Identity

In the modern age we are likely to use the word “identity” in terms of categories like gender, color-race, ethnicity, religion, language community, and so on, and the promotion of these may be primary ideologies, but they don’t relate to primary identity in the abstract political sense I am talking in here. What I mean by “primary identity” is the ideal fundamental political unit that should exist in the society. This is not about the various kinds that such units may appear in, it is about the general organization of these units.

Totalitarianism: this ideology believes that the primary identity of each person should be as a member of the state-society in the sense of being a limb or a cell in the state organism, with one’s personal desires considered irrelevant.
Absolutism: each person’s primary identity is as a direct subject of the ruler and/or state. This differs from totalitarianism in that the possibility of independent thought and action is maintained under absolutism, but it shares the idea that there should be only one large primary identity group under the state.
Corporatism (or interestism): each person should chiefly be associated with an interest, which is to say a group within the society whose goal is to gain increase.
Collectivism: each person should primarily identify with a non-interest group such as a local community, an ethnic group, a religious tendency, etc. This differs from corporatism in that non-interest groups do not seek increase but instead seek upkeep (or maintenance). This is a fundamental difference in how these groups interact with the society as a whole.
Liberalism (or personism): each person’s primary identity should be to themselves as an individual. This ideology existing separately should not lead you to believe that individuals are not considered under other ideologies of primary identity. Rather, a collectivist society would treat individuals through their collective — either as a method of identity or as an operation using institutions associated with the collective — while a liberal/personist society would specifically ignore collective experiences in favor of treating people as individuals.

Ideologies of Primary Participation

The ideologies in this category are chiefly concerned with who is meant to participate in making government decisions. Of course, governments do take in the opinions of those who aren’t primary participants, but it is the participants who can claim credit & bear responsibility for government actions.

Monarchism: seeks to establish participation of only a single interest, a situation also called monocracy.
Oligarchism: seeks to establish oligocracy, which is when multiple distinct and non-systematized interests participate in government. In this schema, a military junta is an example of monocracy, not oligocracy, because the separate units or military branches are brought together. A better example of oligocracy is the power sharing that existed in the European Middle Ages between feudal kings and the Catholic Church.
Republicanism: seeks to establish aristocracy, which is when primary participation is limited to a certain non-interest segment of society, either through direct statue (“only X people can participate”) or through significant requirement (“all people who do/can X can participate”).
Demarchism: seeks to establish democracy (i.e. primary democracy), which is when participation is open to the whole society.

Ideologies of State Responsibility

“State responsibility” refers to the primary target of state efforts in governance. There are really only two ideologies in this category.

Conservatism: the state’s primary responsibility is to preserve the social order as-it-is.
Populism: the state’s responsibility is to provide for the people’s welfare.

Ideologies of Final Intent

These ideologies are related to the ideologies of state responsibility but aren’t identical with them. They represent the ultimate goal of state action.

Statism: the belief that the state’s ultimate goal is the preservation of the state. This is related to primary conservatism, but a state could conceivably see immediate populism as the path to ultimate statism.
Societalism: the belief that the state’s ultimate goal is the attention to the needs of society via its members. This idea is associated with populism but a state could view conservatism as a path to societalism; it can be argued that this was the belief of the Soviet Union.

Complex Ideologies

The primary ideologies that I just discussed are not ideology as we usually think of it. If I say that someone is a liberal, I don’t only mean that they are individualist, there are other elements making up the idea of “a liberal”. Normally, when we talk about ideology we are talking about complex ideologies: in other words, ideologies made up of other ideologies. At the most fundamental level, we have two kinds of primary ideologies: basic primary ideologies (which are all those previously discussed) and non-basic primary ideologies (or secondary ideologies). The difference is that the basic primaries emerge out of an abstract and generic society; they make no assumptions about the type of society they are in and can be located in all societies. Secondary ideologies are specific to situations. Environmentalism (or pro-environmentalism) is, for instance, what I would call a secondary ideology because it requires the society to have a natural environment. While on Earth, all societies do have this, but we can imagine a society existing in an entirely alien way that doesn’t have a natural environment; for them, being pro-environmentalist has no meaning. Attitudes about race, class, occupation, gender, and so on are also secondary as they only become significant if the thing they refer to exists. Despite being secondary, these ideologies remain primary (non-complex) as they do not contain other ideologies. For example, while scientific consensus states that the wealthy do most of the damage to the natural environment, it is not impossible for a person to believe in primary pro-environmentalism and primary pro-wealthism at the same time. It may seem strange but it can be justified by belief in new technologies, shifting blame to others, and so on. Complex ideologies are, at their core, collections of primary plus secondary ideologies. For a complex ideology to be orthodox, it cannot have more than one primary ideology in any category.

I’m now going to lay out six complex ideologies in terms of their basic primary ideologies. My point here is not to show all possible combinations, I merely want to demonstrate how complex ideologies can be broken down into primary ideologies. I am going to present these ideologies as being orthodox for ease of explanation. Also, I must note that these definitions are up for debate; again, my purpose here isn’t to define but to demonstrate how these concepts can be utilized.

The two major American political parties — the Democrats and Republicans — are both staunchly capitalist as regards primary value. Democrats are more often called “liberals” and Republicans are called “conservatives”, but both parties are liberal as regards primary identity and conservative in terms of state responsibility, which is to say that they see individual welfare as being more important than any group welfare as well as viewing the way to support that welfare as being to protect the social order. They differ on the other ideological categories. Democrats are demarchist as regards primary participation and societalist in terms of final intent: all should participate in a government whose goal is to benefit the people. Republicans are (unsurprisingly but just coincidentally) republican for primary participation and statist for final intent: only certain types of people (wealthy people primarily) should participate in government and the goal of government should be the preservation of the state.

American libertarianism is often considered close to Republicans in ideology, especially on social (secondary) issues, but they do have some core differences. Like the Republicans (and Democrats), they are capitalists regarding primary value and liberals regarding primary identity. In terms of participation they are demarchist and in terms of final intent societalist, but unlike the major parties, they are populist as regards state responsibility. This doesn’t quite make them antagonists to Republicans as their policies can still be linked but their ultimate ideal society is different than what Republicans work towards.

Western politics today sets itself in opposition to two ideologies: communism and fascism. The major remaining communist power is China which is frequently referred to as “state capitalist”. In my estimation, the modern iteration of Socialism with Chinese characteristics is that it is communitist as regards primary value, collectivist in terms of primary identity, republican in terms of primary participation, conservative in terms of state responsibility, and societalist regarding final intent. I characterize Chinese socialism as republican because while participation in government is theoretically open to all, both because all adults can vote in elections and because all have the opportunity to join the Communist Party of China. Nevertheless, membership in the Party is required to truly participate in government, meaning that only a segment of society is chiefly responsible for running the government. Also, while China does use capitalism in some of its registers, the state demonstrates enough political control over capitalists to imply that primary value in China lies not in capital but in the community value-body.

No current government is explicitly fascist. For this reason, I will refer to the arch-fascist country from history for our example, this of course being Nazi Germany. Nazi ideology was communitist in terms of primary value, totalitarian in terms of primary identity, monarchist for primary participation, conservative in state responsibility, and statist in final intent. Like Marxist-Leninist states (which includes China), Nazi Germany was a one-party state. Unlike them, the Nazis conceived of their party as the instrument of their leader. The Nazi government was not functionally electoral or representative. While such claims are made about communist states like China and the defunct Soviet Union, these states made continuous use of public government institutions; this was not true of the Nazi government. The totalitarian nature of nazi thought should not be controversial to assert, nor should its statist intentions. Though the nazis have been accused of being nothing more than the thugs of German capitalists, this does not mean that capitalism was their store of primary value. The nazis based their applications of value on “national will”, which is to say the purported desire of the national community.

The final complex ideology I will address is Peronism, the political program of the late Argentine leader Juan Peron. His ideas can be considered a kind of “Third Way” but are distinct from similar ideologies like that of the American libertarians. In my estimation, Peronism’s ideology of primary value is capitalism, it is corporatist in primary identity, demarchist regarding primary participation, populist for state responsibility, and societalist in final intent. I am not a scholar on Peronism and I understand that the term is not clearly defined, so this should be understood as my perception of Peronism from what I have read, not as any kind of defining statement on what Peronism is. I do want to highlight corporatism, however, which is strongly associated with labor unionism. A society based around such unions is corporatist because, ideally, it is these unions which will come into the possession of the means of production. A group which is organized around production must be an interest.

Ideological Capitalism

What is the point of all this? The point is to be able to come to some sort of understanding of what capitalism means so we can understand the political implications and effects it has. We tend to be presented with capitalism as only partly political because it is so strongly associated with money. Because China has businesses with hierarchical organization that make great profits, people refer to Chinese socialism as state capitalist. Opposition to capitalism is not seen as valid of those who oppose it want to use a system involving money in any way.

Political opposition to capitalism is, above everything, opposition to ideological capitalism. While it is true that the other registers of capitalism may lead to capitalism-as-ideology, taking that specific idea on remains a choice. As states like China, Cuba, and Vietnam demonstrate, it is possible to place controls on capitalist production and wealth accumulation to serve the interests of the community rather than the interests of the holders of capitalism. It is also important to understand primary ideological capitalism, the capitalism of primary value, as being an argument for how influence and importance should be determined, as well as being only a piece of more complex ideologies. This helps explain both why it is rarely argued for as a political position and why it has become part of so many other complex ideologies. Historically, capitalism’s role has been as an alternative to the communitist nationalisms that emerged in the Revolutionary Era. I have attempted here to show all the basic moves that capitalism makes.