When we discuss “capitalism today”, we need first of all to distinguish between the actual politico-economic regime and the ideology that frames it: “capitalism”, since the post-WWII period, has been both a self-nomination of the “Western” system, and the frame in which it has been criticized from the Left. This had full sense during the Cold War, when “capitalism” was actually a notion correlative to “socialism”, but curiously it survived, even in spite of the emergence of its conceptual double: the “neoliberalism”. After the crisis of 2008, there was a resurgence of the notion from the critical side: now almost all the intelligentsia, except perhaps for most economists and political scientists, criticizes “capitalism”, or “late capitalism”, with a varied degree of tolerating it nevertheless (Lowrey 2017). But do we really deal with “capitalism”? Part of its definition is the regime of private property and its accumulation, in a monetary or quasi-monetary form. We imagine the class of “capitalists” (the “bourgeoisie”) who control trade, production and the resources, reproduce “inequality” in their own favor, and thus possess both social and political power.  All of this contrasts with “socialism”, where this power belongs to the state bureaucracy, is used to redistribute wealth more or less equally, and to run the economy in a rational and planned way.

What is most questionable in this understanding is the economistic emphasis which depicts the social and political life as dependent “in the last instance” on the interests and activity of the bourgeois class and on the logic of the money flows. The neoliberal idea of “globalization” served to exaggerate this understanding by emphasizing the dependence of state politics on the financial markets, global value chains, and, last not least, on the interests of the ultra-rich “oligarchs”, even though in some versions capitalism also appears as an uncanny impersonal rule of “capital”. Now all of this is very dubious.

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