We grew up in the ‘affluent society’ of 1950s and 1960s. As children and then as young adults we rarely heard the word ‘capitalism’. It was the Cold War, and speaking about capitalism, although not strictly taboo, was hardly a popular pastime. The term smelled of extremist ideology; it connoted communist rhetoric; it conjured up bygone debates and obsolete ideas.

As a theoretical concept, capitalism seemed hopelessly unscientific. It was a remnant from a different era, from a time when people, haunted by ‘scarcity’, still viewed society through the hazy spectacles of political economy. The new social sciences – and particularly the science of economics – boasted far better and more precise categories.

These categories were grouped under a new buzzword: ‘modernization’. Talk of modernization opened all the right doors. It invited American aid, it paved the road to development and it helped academic promotion. The word ‘capitalism’ became redundant, if not counterproductive. Gradually, it vanished from the lexicon.

But beginning in the early 1990s a strange thing happened: capitalism staged a remarkable comeback. Suddenly, social scientists and post-scientists alike wanted to talk of nothing else. The capitalist world, capitalist markets, capitalist governance, capitalist culture, capitalist institutions, capitalist wars, capitalism and race, capitalism and gender, capitalism and libido – no matter where you turn, you cannot escape the C-word.

Debate over capitalism is everywhere. The newspapers, radio, television and the internet overflow with talk of neoliberal globalization and crisis, imperialism and post-colonialism, financialization and government intervention. Experts preach the gospel of capitalist productivity, while alterglobalization protestors blame the IMF and transnational companies for [page 2] many of our social ills. Some view capitalist growth as a magic bullet; for others it spells ecological disaster. Some celebrate the deregulation of the capitalist state and the fall of Keynesianism; others mourn the decline of the welfare state and the rise of zapping labour. Many interpret the new wars of the twenty-first century as serving capitalist interests and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a backlash against Western liberalism. For some, capitalism means the end of history, for others a source of conflict and an engine of change. No aspect of capitalism seems to escape debate.

Or perhaps we should say almost no aspect. Almost, because something really important is missing. In all the commotion, we seem to have lost sight of the concept that matters most: capital itself. Capital is the central institution of capitalism – and yet, surprisingly, we do not have a satisfactory theory to explain it. In fact, we do not know precisely what capital is. And worse still, there is little or no discussion on what this omission means or how it can be rectified.

The issue is crucial. Without a clear concept of capital, we cannot hope to understand how capital operates, why it accumulates or how it drives the capitalist order. Until we understand capital, we are destined to misconceive our political institutions, misjudge our alternatives and have trouble imagining the way to a better future. In short, in order to debate capitalism we first need to debate capital itself. [1]