Yes, I wish this was a metal song, too.
This is the theory of a theory, a pre-theory. Capitalism is not simply an economic system or mode of production, it is a method of establishing domination: a technology of authority. It is the more or less direct successor of divine kingship. When the European revolutions of the 19th century had destroyed divine kingship, at a point when Europe had more or less dominated the world, this discredited divine kingship forever. Without divine kingship, a government must serve its society, and this logic always means that the wealth of a state will eventually be distributed among the common people. Capitalism as an ideology functions to justify the authority of those who wanted to stop that from happening over the common people by granting social privilege to the holders of capital over non-holders of capital.
Rather than seeing Marx’s modes of production as successive stages, they should instead be seen as simply different models that production can take, and the “capitalist period” is the one where the capitalist mode became predominant. There shouldn’t be any progression of modes as such. Further, the identification of capitalism-as-ideology with capitalism-as-Produktionsweise is an error. Capitalism-as-ideology could have existed without capitalism-as-Produktionsweise, though the former would likely (and probably did) induce the latter. As should be clear from the long history of wage labor, merchants, and banks in the world, the latter does not create the former spontaneously. Capital accumulation also does not spawn capitalism-as-ideology.
I need to do a document search and likely some data analysis to support this, but my hunch is that capitalism as an ideology only became popular after the success of communism. It was only after it became clear to many anti-socialists that even the republican governments they had set up would not be enough to stop revolutions that a new logic needed to be created. It’s an Alinskyan backlash. You can see capitalism as a response to a long liberalism, or you can see the movement as liberalism (from the French Revolution), republicanism, communism, capitalism. Each one takes from the former (as the Revolution undoubtedly took from the attempts at rationalization in the Ancien Regime) and uses elements from it to attack it and take its place.
Capitalism promises that anyone can climb the ladder, that there are actually no barriers because capital can pass into any hand, capital does not discriminate. It obscures the fact that the people in power have structured the economy so that they are guaranteed to never lose their capital, and they have structured the state to protect them against attempts to deprive them of capital. The existence of market capital does not necessitate capitalism-as-ideology. The only real alternative, however, is an ideology where the government of a country must serve all the people in that country. That’s why we live in capitalist countries instead of countries that have capital.
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