For example, about your proposals for ‘overcoming capitalism’ through what you call ‘participatory socialism’. It would be wrong to think that these are just conceptual issues with no other importance: they determine very political consequences. Since 2014, and again after this book, I can’t shake the same sense of astonishment that you haven’t read Marx, at least not his economic work – you admitted as much in an interview with the New Republic in 2015 – you don’t have the concept of capital, but you continue putting ‘Capital’ in big letters on the covers of your books. But it’s still an achievement that’s about a century and a half old. You see now that ownership carries with it issues of power. Being capital is not a substantial property of things. On the other hand, the same bread oven in an industrial bakery is capital. For example, the bread oven at the cooperative bakery in Montreuil is not capital, because it is inserted into cooperative and non-wage social relations. It is being held in the social relations of capitalism that makes a machine into capital, which it by no means is by itself. Being ‘capital’ is not a substantial quality. It is all this that makes a machine capital. A social relation which consists of three things: 1) the separation of the workers from the means of production, that is, from ownership in the strict sense but also: 2) the separation of the workers from the products of production and finally, and perhaps most important: 3) the profit-making vocation of ownership, i.e., the use of means of production and labour-power with a view to profitable accumulation, indefinite valorization. There are not a dozen ways out of this impasse, there is only one, which Marx gave us, since it is only Marx who gave us the concept of capital and capitalism, by defining capital as a social relation. Your definition is circular because you define capitalism by a term that is itself already capitalist. For ‘large-scale industry’ is the capitalist form of production (Capital Volume I, Chapter 15). By failing to make clear what this ‘extension’ consists of, your definition becomes a circular one. Here is the definition you give: capitalism is ‘the extension of ownership into the age of large-scale industry and international finance’.

Midas was not a capitalist Louis XIV was not a capitalist - and they were hardly poor! When you consider the successive historical instantiations of ‘ownership’ you let yourself be trapped in a false nominal continuity that condemns you to a defective ‘definition’ of capitalism.

You stick with ‘ownership’, but ownership is not capital.

What is surprising is that you still don’t have the concept of this. Capital and ideology? So let’s proceed in that order, starting with ‘capital’.

Piketty ideology and capital